When Armenia emerged into independence in 1991, it did not need to construct an identity but to bring one up to date. Always doggedly independent, Armenia has its own language, its own alphabet, and its own Christian church, defending and distinguishing traits, which it did not lose during five hundred years of foreign oppression and indeed, genocide. Its ancient tradition in the arts extends from Urartu in the 9th century BC to the proto-abstract expressionist Arshile Gorky and, today, a generation of artists who are addressing the outside world for an independent Armenia for practically the first time ever. This generation has a new historic mandate: to craft a commentary on Armenian identity that will be true at once to its often insular tradition and to its current movement outward toward world culture. The international showcase of the Venice Biennale, where nations reclaim their identities to one another in visual terms, in which Armenian artist are now participating for the second time, is an important part of this.

One of Sonia Balassanian's video works in the exhibition shows an Armenian man, naked, thin, bearded, his face solemn with concentration, crawling into holes in the earthen floor of an ancient (10th to 13th century) Armenian church. It is the artist Stepan Veranian, whose work is also in the Venice show, and whose oeuvre has featured earthworks. Here performatively activating a found earthwork, he disappears into holes and reappears, sometimes repeatedly descending into them and re-emerging from the same hole, sometime moving from one to another, never looking up and out at the surrounding world. It is as if, representing Armenia, he hides away from the light of history, lost from it, then emerges into it again, is lost from it again, and so on, in an a1legory of a history of foreign intrusion in which true Armenian identity had to hide and nurture itself in the underground chambers of its tradition until the opportunity might arise to emerge again to be partly reshaped under outside influences. In one sense he dives out of the light, deep into the innards of tradition, to hide there, in another sense to nourish himself there, in yet another sense to find himself there—and finally perhaps to shed, or reconsider, that found self when re-emerging.

Today, while no longer hidden behind history, Armenia must find ? way to be simultaneously sheltered in the nurturing hole of its tradition, dark and sacred at once, and in its way intoxicating like the wines anciently aged there, and to be outside of its hole, unprotected, seeing and acting in the light of a larger day. At a mundane level the work is about the need to balance one's homage to the tradition that has constituted one with the extrovert gestures demanded for international communications and multicultural perspectives.

Arman Grigorian destroys his own paintings by scraping the skin of paint off of them in expressive gestural erasures that add an action painting-like overtone—but it is action erasing! The expressiveness of the annihilating gesture aggressively confronts the conceptua1ly safe world represented in the painting underneath. Grigorian takes a picture that is finished or pictoria1ly closed, and opens it, creating great gaps in it where other pictorial and thematic options may inscribe themselves. The process involves a rejection of closure and emic certainty. The implication is that any world view, whether individua1ly contrived as in art or communally derived as in, say, sociopolitical discourse, must be relativized, broken open and rendered obsolete even as it fills the screen with its claims on reality.

Azat Sarkissian's sculptural insta1lation seems not exactly a celebration of the current endpoint of believable representation but a sober acknowledgment of it. As in the destruction of the image in Grigorian's work, Sarkissian seems to imply that with nations shifting their historic identities self-representation as a secure stratum of meaning has become obsolete. Film projectors and tape recorders unspool their ribbons despairingly onto tables. Ancient TV sets stand in useless places where no one would look; a walky-talky is absurdly amplified over speakers, bare light bulbs glare on the concrete floor and shine hiddenly from under furniture. There is a desolation as of a world of machines that no longer work. a generation of communications technology seems to have become obsolete without yet being replaced. There are no humans of human signs except these muted instruments. These half-ruined machines seem to be running the show themselves, and it is not much of ashow, something bigger than the drama seen here is running down, some vast machine of which this area is a cog.

Stepan Veranian's work here focuses on the related theme of boundaries; earth is featured less as a substance than as a medium in which location inscribes itself and which is thus bound up with issues of identity. In his installation earth lies on the floor and upon it lay rectangular pieces of glass. Earthen patches of brown color are painted onto the sheets of glass, which also bear the names of nations participating in the Biennale. There is an implication that the earth as a unifying substrate is more basic than the names of political boundaries upon it. The boundaries are meaningless in comparison to the oneness of the substrate. Lying upon the floor, the earthen-covered sheets of glass seem dusty and underfoot, places one might walk to at length with a sense of raw mountain and desert. As a part of Armenia's present situation the work seems pointedly ambiguous. At a moment when Armenia possesses its own boundaries again, it tends toward a transcendence of them. And indeed as Armenia, emerging into the international scene, transcends its boundaries, so all boundaries are being transcended in a multicultural perception of the reality of the earth. Armenia's ancient identity is a quantum with an inertia that will not go away—but it is asserted as nomadic, self-transcending, as potentially self-canceling, at the same time.

Atom Egoyan shows two short films in the Biennale. One of these, A Portrait of Arshile (four minutes, 1995) records Egoyan's voice with close-up shots of his baby son and other things, as he explains to his son the meaning of his—the son's—name, Arshile. Young Egoyan is named after Arshile Gorky, the proto-abstract expressionist master who moved from Armenia to New York in 1920 and by 1940 had found his way into a momentarily open spot at or near the very center of western art history, pioneering abstract expressionism's transformation of Surrealist automatism. Egoyan's little film completes a sketchy cross-section of Armenian identity, asserting a diasporan point of view. The Armenian Diaspora has gone on for centuries, under pressure of foreign occupations and purges, especially, of course, the Ottoman Genocide of 1915. Shadowed by this dark history, Armenians abroad did not for the most part leave home intentionally, and have attempted to maintain close ties involving participation in Armenian issues from afar. The diasporan factor is considered by right wing of communist parties to represent a tilt toward the West in Armenia’s cultural, and political future. And indeed Egoyan's pointed gesture in the naming of his son does seem to prophesy a westerly direction for the future of Armenian art history, while Gorky' s early suicide—at age 44—points ominously at the difficulties of the situation in the post-Soviet chaos. Egoyan's act of naming his son after Gorky was not just a reference to a certain Armenian identity—say, Armenian artist; for Gorky was an assumed name which Vosdanig Adoian took after his arrival in America. Arshile Egoyan is named, then, not just for a certain Armenian identity, but for an Armenian identity which converted itself in part to a western identity, entered western history, and found itself at the center of a discourse formerly off bounds. Atom Egoyan's own position is partly similar; his work is at this time better known outside Armenia than that of any Armenian artist who stayed home. Honored in various ways in Toronto, New York, Cannes, and Berlin, his films exert their presence in a western internationalist arena. His ability to address a broad, serious, and current audience suggests both the advantages and the lures of leaving the traditional milieu for the international.

The entire exhibition is like a dance of veils about Armenian identity and the theme of identity in general. Look, there is Armenia, it just peeked out of that hole—no, there it is just disappearing as that picture is scraped away—no, there, in the buzzing light of that empty projector—no, there...! Out of the bone heaps of Der Zor, the loneliness of an undesired Diaspora, the isolated fastnesses of Karabagh, Armenia emerges into the present world from behind a dark facade, or from a deep hole where its past lies mute, a face gazing with as much suspicion as hope into an uncertain future.