THE WALLS HAVE TONGUES
by Gregory Lima

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F riday October 16, 2009

A visit to Yerevan’s Museum of Modern Art

Yerevan – There is the old adage, Be careful what you say, "the
walls have ears." But at Yerevan’s Museum of Modern Art, the reverse
appears to be true. To this visitor, the walls seemed to talk as if
they had tongues.

The works of art hanging on the walls or placed against them seemed
to be in dialogue with each other and with any visitor who may pass by.

There are any number of stories they can tell. What stories you hear
depends upon the route you take along the walls, and to which art
works among the many you have the time and the inclination to listen.

All are silent until your eyes touch their surface. Then they don’t say
much until you really want to hear them and your eyes go and remain
within the space they command. Once you are inside their space, you
must let your eyes trace their language on your mind, and then you
may live for a while in the world the artist has created just for you.

Minas Avetisian This visitor has a few preferences, and he moves
directly to what he wants you to share. Make a sharp left after the
entrance and start with the walls that hold Minas Avetisian, one of
Armenia’s most beloved artists of the mid-20th century.

In the 1920s, when some of the surviving remnants of Armenia gathered
to lay the foundations for what has become the small, modern Armenian
state, the artists of the time had a critical cultural role. Their
landscape paintings, by decision, were a deliberate way of asserting
cultural claim to the Armenia within view, and to the Armenia
that is alive in the inner eye. No painter achieved this with more
engaging artistry than Martiros Saryan. Stand in your mind inside
his majestic landscapes that embrace the sun, the distant mountains,
and the rolling, fruited plains in the wide, warm expanse that is his
Armenia, and perhaps you may hear the fanfare of breathless brass
and be ready both to cry and to salute. Of the next generation of
artists, no one rose higher in his footsteps than Minas Avetisian,
who graciously took Saryan’s palette and brought it to his village,
where he made an Armenian rural survivor centered new art.

Minas paints with more intensity of color than any other artist of his
generation, and yet he comes across as thoughtful, actually stepping
back from the fires of his passion. His figures have the static
pose, flat planes, and foreshortened perspective that Arshile Gorky
also found emotionally resonant. On the wall is one of his village
landscapes. We see a rooted life that is not lived for the day or
the year; but a life where man and the soil of his fathers are one,
in a manner passed on through generations of birth and tragedy, and
he gathers the colors of this spread of time. He gives us spring and
autumn and the colors of life in between. You must try to deliberately
feel the colors with your eyes. Perhaps you will catch the dancing
beat of the tmbook and the tar.

Minas could run afoul of powers that wanted another kind of art, the
concept of the new man in the Soviet Union. In 1973 his studio somehow
burned down. In the fire, much of his mature work was consumed and lost
forever. Two years later, at the age of 47, in a reported accident,
he was dead.

Hakob Hakobyan Cross the room and move over to the walls occupied by
Hakob Hakobyan.

Here we face a landscape in thin light that makes Minas a warm memory.

It depicts a new world of lost Armenian genius in which, in Hakobyan’s
own words "the farmers have become kolkhoznik, the artisan turned
into a laborer, and the entrepreneur sentenced to exile or death."

Hakob Hakobyan is a repatriate Armenian of the diaspora, born in
Egypt. He moved to Armenia with his family in 1965 at the age of 40,
having already developed a distinguished career as a major new voice
in the graphic arts.

Painted by a man of towering talent, the landscape is called "The
Lonely House." The canvas is bisected by a road empty of traffic. In
the foreground is a cultivated field that appears crippled by the
confusion of the cultivators, related to the house only by proximity.

The house, of modern box design, seems to have no roots in where it
is located, divorced from village or city, set back alone, almost
hidden behind a rise in the land. The saddest stroke of paint in the
composition is the single telephone pole. It has no wire. It tells
of ambition that has not found essential connection, of having a
telephone that does not ring for you, and should you speak into it,
your voice will not be heard. The most encouraging daub of paint is
the warm light in the house. It suggests life continuing, patience,
perhaps as the evening falls, a small light in the darkness, and
maybe the strength to meet the traffic that may come tomorrow.

The landscape gains poignancy by two portraits flanking it on the
wall. One is called the fisherman. The person of the fisherman is
totally absent. All we discern is his jacket hanging on a chair with
the sleeve in a basket, seeming to claim or to offer some fish. Yet,
as much of a conundrum as this may be, we will look more closely at
the other portrait, of the woman, which may be the most compelling
in this whole museum of modern art.

The new woman The portrait of the fisherman may be the man in the
new society while the other is the portrait of the new woman in the
new society.

As a composition, it is exquisitely done. A rectangle of pressed
space boxes her in with invisible constraints. She sits in a clinging,
simple sheath dress, legs crossed. Instead of looking outward to the
world, her face is blanked by the oval mirror she holds. As a woman,
she is seen by us as totally self-absorbed and self-regarding.

Replicating her crossed legs and the angles of her arms is a scissors
with long, slim blades, the finger loops of the scissors repeating
the form of the oval mirror. The design creates rhythms and tension
within the pressing space. The very long blades of the scissors have
an ominous, lethal quality.

She is an enigma you may unravel to your desire. To some men she
may threaten imminent castration. I find her the only one possibly
capable of decisive action in the whole ensemble of paintings on
the walls. If she is self-regarding, she may be the only one who
really knows where she is and who she is. I believe she is thinking
seriously about making some alterations. If she stands up and reveals
her true face, and if she succeeds in doing what she is thinking,
the landscape of the new world will change.

I find it a painting that speaks to us and to the other walls of a
small glimmer of hope.

The new mass man Against these positive thoughts Hakob Hakobyan gives
us the new mass man in a series on a companion wall. When he presents
the fisherman in a portrait that does not contain the person, there
is a possible reference to the Genocide, the absence of the larger
part of the nation. It has been said, "He is the conveyor of the
eternal pain of Armenia. The Genocide is permanently imprinted in
his essence." On this other, companion wall, I believe he talks of a
completed Genocide in the Soviet era by what he called "this monstrous
regime." (See Maria Titizian’s interview, "Meet Hakob Hakobyan:
repatriate, patriot, painter," Armenian Reporter, Feb. 21, 2009.)

He shows modern man hemmed into a regulated herd by his own social
devices and urban constructions. He would know he was being suffocated
if he had a head. In another depiction we discover he also doesn’t
have hands. So reduced, he seems barely capable of helping himself.

Modern man for all his sartorial elegance and fancy conveniences
allows himself to be fundamentally manipulated. He is become a totally
empty suit.

There is a poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda written when he was
in the diplomatic service. He wished to express his personal opinion,
but protocol strictly forbade it. In the protocol in which he had to
operate, you are not so much a person as an instrument of policy, a
tool. So he decided to just send his suit to meetings and receptions
without anything of himself worth mentioning inside it. Even so,
he was found at fault. They didn’t like the way the tie on the empty
shirt was knotted.

These empty suits as the modern way of life were painted when Armenia
was still very much an integral part of the Soviet Union. His remains
a unique voice, contentious, courageous, resonant.

Rudolf Khachatrian "Nevertheless, some of us actually have faces,"
Rudolf Khachatrian seems to call out politely just another step
further on the same wall.

And indeed we see an exquisitely drawn pair of faces prominently
flanking another landscape.

Is this a direct challenge to Hakobyan? What he is showing is
what Hakobyan hoped to find in his repatriation to Soviet Armenia:
cultivated Armenian people of high intelligence and artistic creativity
in a warmly hospitable nation. We exist, he insists. You simply have
to find us.

While there well may be an excess of self-congratulation in this
self-portrait and his depiction of his life and his wife, I was
reminded of some words of my old friend, the Assyrian artist Hannibal
Alkhas: "Nothing is more deeply interesting than the human face."

A largely self-taught master, Khachatrian draws intelligent faces
with remarkable sensitivity, every line, every stroke on his surface
a revelation.

He is said to have never tried to draw what he already felt but to
have feelings emerge from the lines as he drew. Throughout his life
he sought out faces with intellectual heft and artistic sensitivity,
and he drew them so hyper-real that you would not be too surprised
if they were able to walk out of their frames.

The portraits hanging on these walls are full human size with bodies
and hands to make them even more real and alive and among us. The
landscape they occupy is the urban opposite of Hakobyan’s. It suggests
a comfortable, connected, and orderly urban life.

Judging only from the evidence on these walls, he seems too oddly
content with life as he found it for a man who claimed his only
teacher was Ervand Kochar – the Kochar who created a public sculpture
in Yerevan that depicts modern man as someone who breathes in the
offal of congested urban air, has swallowed high rise glass and steel,
and eats concrete.

Emil Kazaz Then glance over to a sculpture by Emil Kazaz. Startled,
you will find the sculpted work the effigy of a woman who has cut
off one of Khachatrian’s sensitively beautiful faces. She stands
triumphant, believing she is worthy of our praise. It is as if the
woman of the Hakobyan portrait, the girl with the scissors, put down
her mirror and made her decision.

Granted, she has put on too much weight, dropped her dress, and
carries a sword, but those are only details. The fact is she got
one of the people who are in charge, comfortable, and connected,
and cut off his head. Has the revolution begun?

Grigor Khanjian Across on the opposite wall we flee to the brilliant
Grigor Khanjian, the itinerant Soviet artist who brings us back to
another kind of face, and to Mexico. The faces have Khachatrian’s
veracity but it is fiesta time, and rather than hearing the powerful,
lyric strings of the philharmonic, someone is strumming a guitar
and we are all now in lamplight, close, and with a smell the color
of avocados.

I believe that it was in the Mexico series that Khanjian rose to his
full stature as an artist and that it marks a dividing line in his
work. It is in Mexico that Khanjian seems to come to terms with his
deeply religious spirituality and it more openly animates his work
then and from that time on.

The untitled portrait of the woman is truly alive with movement and
with song. It is a painting whose invisible guitar is audible, and if
you cannot hear her sing it can only be because you refuse to listen
to the paint.

Khanjian on the Mexico journey seems to walk as if he were with the
early Saryan, but more in the shadows than in the sunshine, while
also discovering and painting masks that speak of exotic scriptures
and can evoke the local ghosts.

>From this land of Diego Rivera and Siqueros he came home and
decided he must also paint on walls. The end of his life will find
him painting the huge fresco triptych that has been completed and
spectacularly restored in Yerevan’s Cascade as an integral part of the
very-soon-to-be-unveiled Cafesjian Center for the Arts. Comfortable
again with faces, we walk on.

Nina Across the way there is sculpture that is as round and fat as
seriously big cannonballs, and our eyes are led to the biggest one
on which are painted two nude, ample-busted, cavorting women in the
round. It has the provocative title – or is it a command? – "Talk."

The way they are painted they may be able to chat with each other,
but as a visitor who may not want to contort his body into a circle,
I choose to talk to the most visible one on top. But carefully. The
one on top is a bit of a flirt. The artist signs herself Nina.

She explains herself in this way: "The images, when one peers at their
faces, exist and simultaneously do not exist. They are present, yes,
each does something, but at the same time they are absent." I take
that to mean they can be something like Hakobyan’s absent people who
at least wear clothes when they are not there. But as these ladies
have no clothes. When "at the same time they are absent," you find
yourself just talking to a nude cannonball.

Ara Aleyan In the mood to search out more sculpture and what it might
say to us, we find the work of Ara Alekyan. He constructs sculpture
of familiar forms out of old metal parts that would otherwise be
rusting in automotive junkyards. He achieves this with the creative
flair of an artist that might otherwise be working not with a torch
but a delicate pencil. But his lines are steel.

There is a form before us that we can recognize as a three-dimensional
fish. Yet it is more than what at first sight is a boned fish lifted
from a diner plate after a hearty meal. This is a fish that has the
magic of an art form. If it could talk of where it came from, it might
disclose it is the almost elusive fish of Hakobyan’s elusive fisherman.

It is beautiful in its own way and tragic. One can believe it can
whip rapidly in the air in which we and this fish breathe, and it is
dangerous in all its sharp, spiked bones, still hunting for prey.

Alekyan’s rhinoceros is not hunting but seems to smell a threat
that excites a wary alertness. It gruffly sniffs the ground before
our feet. Armenian artists have effectively used the rhinoceros in a
grotesque form as lumbering, armor-clad, satiric symbol for war. But
this one for all its wariness seems happy to be just what it is in
this lively museum.

We have seen enough for today, even when we hear many of the very
best artists here clamoring for our attention from the many additional
walls. They will soon get their chance.

A new dialogue

In the coming weeks, an important new dialogue will begin. Armenian
art that has held center stage at home during the 20th and 21st
centuries will soon meet at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts a
huge, permanent exhibition of artists, most from elsewhere in the
world, many in their fields having attained the highest contemporary
international repute. It will provide a fresh opportunity in Armenia
for a new dialogue for the 21st century, for artists and the wide
public alike, and anyone privileged to listen in may find it eloquent.