Disintegrating Progress

DisintegRating PRogRess BolshevisM, national MoDeRnisM, anD the eMeRgence of conteMPoRaRY aRt PRactices in aRMenia VArDAn AzAtyAn In The German Ideology, Marx provides an uncanny image of putres- cence of spirit. He writes, “When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances.”1 This image epitomizes my argument concerning the emergence of contemporary art practices in Armenia. The latter can be seen as one of the “new substances” formed by the decomposition of a certain caput mortuum. I propose that this caput mortuum was the Bolshevik project and its cultural policies. Indeed, the highly complex process of dis- integration of this project constituted the very history of art in Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. To understand the genealogy of contemporary art in Armenia, therefore, one has to discuss it in relation to the canonized fi ne art discourse in Armenia, as that discourse constituted the platform against which, and from within which, contemporary art practices emerged. I will only touch upon other artistic discourses (historical avant-gardes, pre-Stalinist revolutionary realism, and Stalinist art) that were eventually suppressed or instrumentalized by the mainstream discourse of national fi ne art. Methodologically, instead of reading the Soviet and post-Soviet art contexts through the lens of current Western theories and discussing them in terms of their similarities and differences with the situations in the West, I propose ArtmArgins 1:1 ArtmArgins 1 Karl Marx, The German Ideology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 33. 62 © 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00004 by guest on 29 September 2021 a close reading of local shifts in Armenian art in order to reveal its logic of disintegrating progress and disclose the ways larger international processes were appropriated locally. Dialectics of class anD nation In 1922 when the Soviet Republic of Armenia was only two years old, artist Hakob Kojoyan produced a watercolor illustrating the life and deeds of David of Sassoun, one of the central and most popular protagonists of the Armenian epic poem Sasna Tsrer (The Daredevils of Sassoun). Kojoyan’s work crystallized the dialectic between class and nation that animated the discourse of National Communism of the first government of Soviet Armenia, whose journal Nork (The New Ones) was illustrated by Kojoyan himself.2 Kojoyan’s watercolor presents different episodes of David’s life in one image divided into composite sections. The picture plane appears as a rectangularly divided centripetal surface whose sections grow larger as they reach the center of the picture. The largest central rectangle is occupied by the image of David the Warrior who, before the background of the shining sun, rushes on horseback to destroy the enemy with his flaming sword. The center of the illustration of the epic poem, thus, is the epicenter of power. And the figure who occupies it is David of Sassoun, the symbol of the Armenian people. Indeed, the visual language and technical means of the work owe much to applied arts and especially folk art. Kojoyan depicts the nar- rative of an epic poem on a small sheet of paper. This turns the latter into a page of an illuminated manuscript executed in a manner that makes it appear as a print. Additionally, the linear ornamentation fram- ing the central rectangles and the stylization of the figures leave the impression of jewelry, the art of which Kojoyan was a master. Finally, the specific rectangular and centripetal structure of the picture plane repeats the organization of a carpet. Just as in Eastern carpets with centric organization the center is often filled with a cosmic symbol of life and/or sun, so the formal structure of the central rectangle occupied by ting Progress David is made to appear as a whirling vortex that moves clockwise.3 A 2 Kojoyan was an active member of the Armenian branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), producing agitation “window posters” parallel to the ones produced by Vladimir Mayakovski and others in Russia. n | Disintegr 3 This is done through the movement of (1) the horse’s crest intertwined with David’s hair A ty and the flow of sparks coming out of the sword, (2) the sword itself, (3) the sparks thrown A off the horse’s rear legs, and (4) the horse’s front legs. Az 63 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00004 by guest on 29 September 2021 The whole work is shaped by two opposite tendencies: the centric architectonic structure and diffused and refined ornamental styliza- tions. The dialectical relationship between the two is at its height in the image of David the Warrior, where the centric structure appears as a revolving ornament. Structurally this represents the dynamic , 1922. Watercolor on paper, on paper, , 1922. Watercolor of the liberation struggle of the Armenian people. According to the first People’s Commissar of Enlightenment of Soviet Armenia, Ashot Hovhannisyan, a friend of Kojoyan’s and the editor in chief of the jour- David of Sassoun nal Nork, “The people are the source of the ‘limitlessness and cosmic vastness’ of the power displayed by David. It was because of this that 4 Hakob Kojoyan. 47 ∞ 61 cm. National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan. he was invincible and victorious.” And there is a certain dialectic at work in this power: “The epos reveals the inner unity of the revolutionary ways of destroying and constructing the world.”5 Kojoyan’s David appears as an embodiment of the devastating power of the struggling 4 Ashot Hovhannisyan, Drvagner hay azatagrakan mtki patmutyan, vol. 1 (Yerevan, Armenia: rgins 1:1 A HSSR GA hratarakchutyun, 1957), 393. All the translations from Armenian and Russian are by the author. rtm A 5 Ibid., 396. 64 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00004 by guest on 29 September 2021 common people that at the same time moves the wheel of history as a constructive force. Thus, Kojoyan’s work visually constructs the revolving image of the Armenian people’s revolutionary struggle. According to Bolshevik theory, the power that fuels this struggle is rooted not only in the very oppression of the popular masses, but in their tight connection to the local conditions of their lives, in their “situatedness.” While admitting that Sasna Tsrer reflects the political aspirations of “Armenian working people” in their struggle against Arab invasion in the tenth century,6 Hovhannisyan argues that in contrast to the political visions of the ruling classes, here the liberators of the Armenians were not to come from outside. Instead, “The heroes of Sassoun symbolize . the collective strength of the Armenian popular masses attached to their soil and homeland, to their moun- tains and castles.”7 The exploited popular masses’ attachment to their soil empowered them in their struggle, which was not against other people, “but against the tyrant personalizing the class that dominates, subjugates and oppresses them, forcing them to wage war against other people.”8 In a Leninist move, Hovhannisyan sees the national liberation struggle as intertwined with class struggle. According to Hovhannisyan, the nation is by definition a historical formation that emerges in the process of what he calls “nation formation.”9 This is first of all shaped by the “common people” and not the bourgeoisie, even though the process itself starts with the emergence of bourgeois social relations. Nation formation is stamped with class antagonisms in which popular masses struggle to become the domi- nant class. When this goal is achieved, according to Hovhannisyan, they define themselves as a “national class, as a nation.”10 The nation, therefore, is the achieved political hegemony of the common people. But again, in a dialectical move, Hovhannisyan stresses that this process itself needs an “all-national” alliance between the popular masses and progressive strata of the bourgeoisie in order to “broaden and reinforce the social bases of the national-political struggle.”11 Quoting Lenin, Hovhannisyan argues that only the “all-national revolution” can ting Progress A 6 Ibid., 392. 7 Ibid., 393. 8 Ibid., 393. 9 Ashot Hovhannisyan, Nalbandyane ev nra zhamanake, vol. 2 (Yerevan, Armenia: Haypethrat, n | Disintegr 1956), 207. A ty 10 Ibid., 208. A 11 Ibid., 210. Az 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ARTM_a_00004 by guest on 29 September 2021 be victorious.12 But, again following Lenin and in yet another dialectical move, Hovhannisyan claims that this term must not mask the need to “study the class struggle in the course of this or that revolution.”13 This is the core of Hovhannisyan’s understanding of the interconnectedness of the national liberation struggle and class struggle, which he illus- trates with another quote from Lenin: “In every bourgeois nationalism of an oppressed nation there is an all-democratic content, and it is this content that we unconditionally defend, while sharply separating it from the striving for national exceptionality.”14 It is as if the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed people is dialectically dissected into an unacceptable nationalist urge for uniqueness and a positive all-democratic content. This kind of sophisticated dialectical approach based on the assumption that any national liberation movement is shaped by class antagonisms allowed the Bolsheviks not to fall into nationalism while defending the ethnic/national aspect of people’s liberation struggles. Indeed, Hovhannisyan, in somewhat reactionary rhetoric, claims that in contrast to the “common people,” the bourgeoisie turned “nation formation” into a deterritorialized process leading to “assimilation—national- ethnic aberration.”15 Standing for the integrity of the people’s national/ ethnic constitution, Hovhannisyan does not fall into ethnic nationalism as he sees the national liberation struggle in terms of its significance for the world revolution of the proletariat.

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