ART AND THE STATE: WHY THE CONVERSATION IS FAILING. INTERVIEW WITH VARDAN AZATYAN
epress.am
06.20.2011 23:16
Art critic and curator Vardan Azatyan left the curatorial team
responsible for Armenia’s Pavilion at the 54th International Art
Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia (the Venice Art Biennial) due
to the lack of a budget for the project. Azatyan said this himself
in an interview with Epress.am.
Why did you leave the curatorial team?
As you know, the Pavilion’s commissioner has two functions: to
appoint curators and to secure a budget. The second function, due
to various reasons, became impossible to ensure – even during the
critical period in implementing the project, about 20 days before the
Pavilion’s official opening. From that point on, the project did not
have a budget, but financial assistance from the commissioner, who,
through local leverage available to him, had to save the project and
with it, his reputation as commissioner.
This put the implementation of the project before unpredictable
risks and our had to enter emergency mode; that is, the curators were
no longer going to supervise the project implementation process at
least to the extent necessary for the project not to fail. And I’m
convinced, the calling of any intellectual (be that an artist or
curator) is to be able to perceive that unacceptable point when his
involvement in a process passes the divide when the vicious social
relations within society become more powerful than the possibilities
of changing them. In this case, the last option in such change is to
resign from one’s own involvement.
Indeed, the project could’ve failed at every step purely due to
time or technical difficulties. The project’s being or not being was
dependent on the companies preparing the works to be exhibited, the
people packaging the works, the workers shipping them, the catalogue
printers and so on and so on. Any … or delay during their work
(circumstances from which no one is ensured) could’ve overthrown
the project. Moreover, let’s say it wouldn’t have been possible to
get the works from the company preparing them since the necessary
invoice wasn’t paid. And in the absence of a budget, this payment
process itself has unpredictable consequences. The project being
partially displayed during the exhibit was one of the consequences
of this uncontrollable and emergency situation: as you know, it was
not possible to display Astghik Melkonyan’s work on the official
opening day.
Could that have been a cause of the problems that arose in Armenia’s
Pavilion?
I think it’s clear from what I’ve said that my resigning [from the
curatorial team] was not the reason for the problems that arose during
the process of implementing the Pavilion, but the move that was made
as a result of the existence of these problems. My curator colleagues
and I worked together in full harmony. In truth, one of the greatest
achievements of this year’s Armenian Pavilion was this: people very
different from one another were able to work together for the greater
good. This fact, in a way, valued also the commissioner, but it seems
he didn’t wholly realize the full importance of this reality.
As a result, it became so that he preferred the option of placing
the project under risk instead of (taking on) the risk of ensuring a
necessary budget. It’s odd, but from what I can judge, as a result,
a much greater expense was made for implementing a project that
was partial and for me unacceptable in terms of the human cost than
that minimum budget which was needed for implementing the project
successfully. I have to say, as a result of the harmonious cooperation
among us three curators, all of our decisions were approved and carried
out with agreement on all sides. It might sound surprising, but in
the absence of a budget, the decision to resign from the project was
approved together. At a regular working meeting with the commissioner,
we gave him a deadline, for ensuring the minimum budget we agreed to,
and we said if there was still no budget by that date, us – the three
of us – would resign from our curatorial duties.
Regretfully, it was only I who stayed true to this decision that
the three of us jointly agreed to. Thus, the decision to resign from
the curatorial team was not my personal decision. But, the truth is
perceived as such that it was a decision I made alone.
How do you assess Armenia’s participation in the festival generally
and compare it to previous years?
I’ve always been of the conviction that the success of national
pavilions is not the success of its representation, no matter how
that is, but first and foremost, it is the possibility of bringing
positive changes to art and cultural policies inside the country. The
latter should be the subject or topic of the conversation that the
pavilion offers to foreign audiences.
The success of any national pavilion depends on whether the given
country, without fears of appearing bad to others, is able to formulate
its internal issues and propose in such a way that their not being
“purely internal” is revealed – this way becoming a subject of overall
dialogue and debate.
We, the curators, conceived our Pavilion particularly from this
view, and the project conception is excellent evidence of this. The
beneficial difference of this year’s project from previous years was
in that fact. The curators hadn’t adopted a so-called sports approach.
Contemporary art is neither football, with its corresponding
diplomacy, nor an ethnographic ensemble, with its success depending
on representation. A discursive and participatory approach was adopted
this year (which was repeatedly stated during the press conference and
in our speeches preceding the start of the project). As one of the
curators, Nazareth Karoyan, often says, “We don’t want to present;
we want to talk.” The project was envisaged in such a way that the
exhibited works were not representative, but were rather a physical
and conceptual platform for dialogue. The project was to include a
number of international conferences on issues of concern to us today.
I particularly want to emphasize that this wasn’t simply a component of
the project, but a constructive aspect of it. As a result of problems
I have noted, it didn’t become possible to successfully implement
even the exhibit part of the project. And I have to say that this
pains me greatly, when I see that my colleagues found themselves in
a situation in which they are forced to see the success of what was
done not in “speaking” but in “presenting.”
What impact did the precedent of state support and involvement in the
organizing of Armenia’s participation in the Venice Biennale have on
the final result and preliminary work? Can this be considered a new
page in relations between the state and contemporary art?
One of the most important features of this year’s Armenian Pavilion
was the state assistance you refer to. Though there has been state
support before, past pavilions and no individual was fully dependent
on local financial resources. In this sense, this year’s pavilion was
a new page for the Republic of Armenia in the Venice Biennale. And
this was the reason that my two colleagues and I became involved in
implementing the project. As you can assume from what I said before,
for none of us was curating the pavilion an end to itself; rather, it
was a means, an opportunity to lay the foundation for local sponsorship
of contemporary art in Armenia, to establish such working relationships
which would be the foundation for consistent and effective activities
in this issue.
It truly pains me that those who were officially responsible for
these changes – the RA Ministry of Culture and the commissioner – for
various reasons, were unable to successfully fulfill their functions.
As a result, the vicious work method common in Armenia was again
employed – based on sacrifice, or as the people say, on the principal
of “tearing the flesh to give.” This testifies to the fact that the
institutionalization of society in Armenia (ministries, establishments,
departments, plenipotentiaries and so on) are essentially fictitious
by nature. Instead of carrying out their direct duties, they act as
symbolic bureaus, which in the name of the “homeland,” in the name
of “the nation’s honor,” are “authorized” to exploit and decimate
the country’s most expensive resource – human energy. If this was
taking place in a disguised or concealed fashion in previous Armenian
pavilions, then the unprecedented significance of this year’s Armenian
Pavilion was these social relations common in Armenia coming to
Yerevan at the contemporary art project level.