Tatiana Istomina
Art exhibitions, like literary works, come in different genres. Some
resemble lyrical poems or detective stories; others appear as farces or
political treatises. Artist retrospectives most often fall into the
genre of historical fiction. They tend to be presented as a
chronological sequence of works accompanied by a curator’s statements
and a handful of facts, leaving it up to the viewer to come up with a
meaningful story.
Being a historical genre, a retrospective will always give rise to
more than one narrative. Some exhibitions may even suggest several
conflicting stories, daring the viewer to choose one over another. The
Vagrich Bakhchanyan (*) retrospective
at the Zimmerli Museum is one such exhibition. To present the life and
work of the Russian-born artist, whose career began in the 1960s Soviet
Union and ended in post–Cold War America, the curators assembled a
collection of objects and images that include not only Bakhchanyan’s
most radical and intriguing artworks, but many of his less-successful
and essentially unresolved pieces, as well as some of his books,
magazine cover designs, and other ephemera. The abundance of the
material and the convoluted chronology of the installation, with works
grouped thematically as well as sequentially, make for a rich and varied
experience. Even the layout of the exhibition is non-linear: one must
walk through it in a circle, beginning and ending the tour in the first
of its four galleries. The works on view suggest at least two plausible
narratives of Bakhchanyan’s artistic trajectory: the uplifting story of
an artist’s perseverance and creative growth in spite of difficult
circumstances of his life, or the tragic tale of an artist whose talent
never reached its full potential due to the pressures of external
historical and political forces. It’s up to the viewer to choose one of
the two stories, or to come up with an alternative.
Born in 1938 in Kharkov (then Soviet Ukraine), Bakhchanyan was a
high-school dropout, working at a factory while starting his experiments
in art making. He used transfer techniques to collage fragments of
images from magazines and newspapers into abstract compositions — the
kind of imagery that was condemned by the Soviet authorities as
ideologically backward. The first dislocation of his life took place in
the mid-1960s, when a local newspaper initiated a shaming campaign
against him, forcing him to leave Kharkov and move to Moscow. By then
Moscow had become an unofficial capital of Soviet nonconformist art,
where artists like Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, and Andrey Monastyrski
were developing new methods in performance, conceptualism, painterly
abstraction, and other art forms that had been banned by Soviet
authorities. Secluded from the international art scene and working in
self-imposed isolation from official Soviet art institutions, the
nonconformist artists operated within small communities bound by close
friendships and mutual loyalties, inventing artistic codes that were
private and esoteric, yet strove to subvert the official ideology.
Bakhchanyan became an active participant in this scene. He made works
on paper in which appropriated texts and images were combined and
layered using transfer techniques, some utilizing official notices by
Soviet administrators — the terse, usually handwritten flyers that
punctuated the everyday life of Soviet citizens with warnings,
admonitions, and exhortations. One such announcement scribbled on a page
torn out of a logbook reads: “Comrade residents! On Monday the 19th
there won’t be any cold or hot water. We ask you to close the taps and
shut off the heating system in your apartments.” Over top of this
message, Bakhchanyan has layered an image of a peaceful country
landscape. In this and other works, the juxtaposition of random texts
and images was meant to produce a momentary disorientation, a visual and
mental shock caused by two or more layers of signification clashing and
negating one another. The artworks reflect the absurdities and
humiliations of the Soviet life — the tragic contradictions between the
official ideology of socialism and its everyday reality.
In 1974 Bakhchanyan was given permission to leave the country, and he
took his chances moving to New York. A well-respected conceptual artist
with a small but devoted audience in Moscow, at the age of 36 he was
thrown into an unfamiliar culture, where his language, background,
aesthetics, and artistic vocabulary of subtle ironic gestures were
either incomprehensible or of little interest to most people. One of his
works from this period features a clipping from a major Soviet
newspaper with an article titled “A teenager ponders over his future”
and a photograph of a nude in an explicit posture layered on top of it.
The English translation of the title is printed at the bottom of the
piece, suggesting the artist’s ironic reflection on his own future in
the English-speaking culture. In the years that followed, Bakhchanyan
attempted to forge a new identity as a Soviet artist working in the
West. He tried to invent a visual and conceptual language that would be
accessible for international audiences while addressing the themes of
social and political absurdities. For the first time in his career,
Bakhchanyan used the image of Vladimir Lenin, the leader’s face
distorted by cutting out and rearranging parts of the photograph, the
iconic profile disfigured by a cap pulled down over his face. Images of
the leaders were rarely used by nonconformist artists, who tended to
avoid overt references to official ideology, inventing an arsenal of
artful signs and gestures that appeared innocent but had subversive
meanings that could be easily deciphered by sympathetic audiences.
Working in New York, Bakhchanyan had to rely on the widely
recognizable symbols of the Soviet regime — the leaders’ portraits, the
official banner, the color red — using them in conjunction with gestures
and strategies borrowed from the international vocabulary of conceptual
art. To create his “First Russian Propaganda Art Performance” (1978),
he went to the MOMA wearing scores of communist and absurdist slogans
pinned to his clothes. For his 1975 project “Red Week (Diary),” he
picked an everyday object for each day of one week, May 15 through May
21, and painted it a deep red. The exhibition features a hat, a book, an
electric burner, a pair of shorts, and a framed picture, all covered in
thick oil paint, with a date scrawled on top.
A different strand in Bakhchanyan’s practice focused on the passage
of time and the physical and psychological experience of temporality.
The earliest of his time-based projects, “Diary,” was begun in 1979: for
two years Bakhchanyan took a daily photograph of himself with the date
glued on his forehead. The series of mug shots may have been another
step in his search for an artistic identity, this time in the shifting
yet tangible reality of his face. In 1991 Bakhchanyan started drawing
during his phone conversations with friends in New York’s
Russian-speaking community. He continued this practice for 18 years,
filling more than a hundred scrapbooks with gouache-and-ink drawings; 28
of these are presented in the show.
The last and most impressive of Bakhchanyan’s time-based projects,
“One Day Exhibition of One Work,” lasted from 1993 to 2008. Every
morning the artist made a new 8 x 11 drawing and displayed it in his
studio and online. The retrospective includes one annual cycle of the
project: the 365 drawings made between July 28, 2007 and July 27th,
2008. This colorful mosaic of images is among the most appealing parts
of the show. Some images are purely abstract compositions, others
feature human figures and faces, and many include magazine and newspaper
clippings, Russian product labels, and other small traces of daily
life. Unlike most of Bakhchanyan’s works — marked by agonized
self-reflexivity and somewhat forced drollery — these drawings appear
both playful and confident, with an irresistible spontaneous humor.
Bakhchanyan’s late artworks are installed near the entrance to the
exhibition, alongside works created 50 years earlier. Among these, a
single piece stands out: a small gouache drawing measuring 7 x 4,
completed only months before the artist’s death. The image is an overall
pattern of white and blue arabesques on a bright red background, each
shape resembling a dancing figure. Playful and rigorous, delicate and
precise, the drawing presents a powerful and oddly poignant synthesis of
form and color. It hints at another narrative that may help to
interpret Bakhchanyan’s practice: the story of an artist’s lifelong
search for a universal artistic language that would transcend the
limitations of a particular culture, historical period, or personal
background. His late drawings suggest a happy ending to this story.
"Hyperallergic" (hyperallergic.com), January 15, 2016
(*) Vagrich (Vahrich) Bakhchanyan (Վահրիճ Բախչանեան) passed away on November 12, 2009 in New York: "According to Vagrich’s last will, his ashes were scattered high in the Geghama mountains (Armenia), over a stone covered with ancient petroglyphs" (Wikipedia). Some of his works are in the Museum of Modern Art of Yerevan (Note by "Armeniaca").
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