SAMUEL BAGHDASSARIAN AND GAREN ANDREASSIAN

Donald KUSPIT

How strange it must be to be Armenian and to want to make high art! How is it possible to address the Armenian condition and to be internationally credible at the same time? Here is this little pocket of the world, struggling to survive against great economic and social odds, trapped in the barbaric absurdity of a war that seems interminable and unresolvable, with a long history of oppression and tragedy—even an attempted holocaust thrown in—and here are two artists trying to make sense of it for themselves and for the world at large. How is it possible to do this? How can their installations, bespeaking the suffering of Armenia, make sense beyond its borders?

But suffering is widespread and contagious, and their installations speak an empathic international language. When Baghdassarian shows us empty containers that once held telephones, he conveys the failure of communication and understanding that have become a disastrous local and international commonplace. When Andreassian sets up a closed circuit television installation, in which the insignia of the international Red Cross organization repeats itself endlessly, until it seems meaningless and futile—all the more so because it is played off against Malevich's Suprematist image of a triumphant red cross, a spiritual abstraction—he not only states the ironical difference between life and art, between contemporary despair and an ancient tradition of hope, but suggests the tautology of (ethnic) identity Armenia is trapped in. The failure of the international help end the failure of Armenia to help itself become one. Andreassian is playing identity politics, as it has been called—the viewer can "test” his own identity in the closed circuit system, that is, see himself as he presumably is, narcissistically mirror himself in all his matter-of-factness-but he strongly suggests its limitations, that is, the limitations of a received in contrast to an achieved identity. The television machine receives identifies, but it can create no new identity, only confirm that one is trapped in an old identity, which has become peculiarly ahistorical because it mindlessly mirrors itself.

There is a similar air of failure and futility in Baghdassarian’s startling display of tarnished, indeed, blackened musical instruments, equally grand and pathetic, magnificent and muted. These French horns and, gigantic tubes are as much military instruments as any rifle and cannon, and the soldiers who carried them are dead. They themselves are corpses relics of the will to power, carcasses of heroes. They can no longer delude us with their grandeur, no longer trumpet a fame we will never have, no longer encourage us to strut and swagger as though we would never suffer, no longer intoxicate us with their marching sound so that we imagine we are immune to death, no longer call us to beer arms so that we can die forgotten on some obscure field of battle. They have fallen silent forever; they can no longer enthusiastically proclaim the big lie of war. Each contains on abyss, an apocalypse: These ore the horns that the Bible spoke of in the final revelation, the horns announcing the doom that is our punishment for sins we did not know we had committed. They are now soundless and abandoned, absurd and pointless. Dead, they have become peculiarly poignant, and full of the compassion they lacked in their noisy life, Baghdassarian’s piece is a tour de force: an ingenious Triumph of Death, brilliant in its concept, economical in its execution, tight lipped in its tragedy, understated in its melancholy.

His machines that do not work are even more like sullen three-dimensional graffiti on the social landscape. Their dilapidation—they not only have all seen better days, but will never be used of any constructive purpose again is the objective correlative of the despair they convey: the unworkability of the Soviet Union to which Armenia once belonged. Again and again one sees this unworkability in artistic action, so to speak. Abandoned machines litter streets, stuck in obscure corners by Baghdassarian. Similarly, Andreassian's is a street art, as his photographs of graffiti suggest. There is life in this Raw Material, as he calls it, and where there is life there is no doubt hope. But the bleak sites of the graffiti indicate the death and hopelessness that have become a casual part of every day life in Armenia. When Andreassian photographs the classical statues—a perfectly poised god and goddess—in the park in front of the Polytechnic Institute in Yerevan we are startled, because of the contrast with the street sites. Similarly, his photographs of reliefs of children playing are at odds with reality, children are unlikely to have much joy and spontaneity in Armenia.

There is starkness—a brutal upfrontness—to the work of both Baghdassarian and Andreassian that conveys the hardship of daily life in Armenia. Perhaps above all, their installations convey disillusionment: they live in a world in which the harmony and transcendence of the ancient figures in the park seem like sheer fantasy, indeed, stupid myth. Their art can only show a down-to-earth reality. Their conceptual realism, as it might be called, is true to the life and spirit of Armenia. It also shows us the human reality behind the facade of the "new world order" that ex- President Bush proclaimed when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Armenia was of course born from this disintegration, but it has yet to find its own integrity, as the work of Baghdassarian and Andreassian suggest As it shows Armenia is as disintegrated—dilapidated, peculiarly discredited and self-deprecating as the Soviet Union was.

Down-to-earthness is in fact an ironically literal feature of much of their art, Andreassian displays manhole covers, suggesting entry to an underworld. He embeds a philosophical sign—“reality, process, control”—in gravel, as though mocking the very ideas the sign proclaims. He brings it, literally, down to earth. In Vs. Versus, a complicated installation which deals with war, more particularly the fantasized death of his father in battle—Andreassian clearly identifies with him, and thus recognizes the possibility of his own death in the current war—he displays objects on the floor as well as the wall, (The traditional carpet on the wall signals that the site is implicitly his home). Not only do they reek of sweat and suffering, use and abuse, but signal morbid immersion in a world of memory. These are objects that have been excavated from the past as well as the earth. Indeed, they are all memento mori, as his sewing machine, partly covered as though in a winding cloth—it seems emblematic of a dead, and discarded body—makes clear. Presumably a reference to his mother, it also belongs in the earth, and seem to await reburial.

Baghdassarian's most down to earth piece consists in an installation of piles of magnetized iron dust. The magnet within each pile is electrified, and at times turned on, so that the dust stands on end, like hair. The piece is ingeniously erotic—skin sensitive, one might say—and at the same time horrific indeed, one's hair stand on end—one's skin tingles—when one is terrified, traumatized. Of all of Baghdassarian’s installations, this one has the most insidious subtext of fear—of fear from which there seems no recovery, fear which has become so innate it cannot be purged. Fear is implicit in Andreassian’s installation as well—fear of death, fear of everyday brutality, fear aroused by the failure of communication, fear of isolation. In Baghdassarian’s iron dust installation, fear has become literally electric, and so much a part of being as to seem latently libidinous. But the death wish, finally, is reflected in these works, and those of Andreassian, more than any life force. The life force which electric power represents functions ironically in Baghdassarian’s installation. It animates a disintegrated material—the dust to which our bodies will return—creating a kind of St. Vitus dance of death. Indeed one can regard each heap of dust as a cremated body. Baghdassarian seems to be asking what the prophet Ezekiel did: can these ashes live? And he seems to answer: no, except ironically, as a kind of joke or paradox. Dread, rather than a genuine miracle, is the end result of Baghdassarian's instillation, indeed, of all his installations. It will indeed be a miracle if the horns can come alive with music again, if the machines can be reconstructed to function for human welfare again, but Baghdassarian does not believe in miracles, however much he may toy with the idea of them.

Thus, Baghdassarian and Andreassian have created environments of death—relentlessly shown us its ecology, so to speak—rather than of life. But then their art is no more morbid than their particular life-world, and for that matter the world in general. There is a good deal of violence hidden within their barren, bleak installations—indeed, they are in a sense the raw products of violence—but they are no more violent than the world itself. Their installations ore like an aftermath that has just begun—a postscript to the disintegration of the Soviet Union that is a prelude to the disintegration of the world. The Armenia they show is, whether we like it or not, the model for the future horror show which the world can become at one apocalyptic moment.