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.
