Introduction

Abstract

This book addresses the discursive and representational field of contemporary art in Armenia in the context of the post-Soviet condition, from the late 1980s through the 1990s up until the early 2000s. Contemporary art, I argue, is what best captures the historical and social contradictions of the period of the so-called ‘transition’, especially if one considers ‘transition’ from the perspective of the former Soviet republics that have been consistently marginalized in Russian- and East European-dominated post-socialist studies. Occupying a sphere distinct from other social and cultural spheres of productive activity and yet inextricably connected to social institutions, contemporary art in Armenia has become a negative mirror for the social: art has been viewed as that which reflects those wishes and desires for emancipation that the social world has been incapable of accommodating in both late Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Contemporary art’s status as a negative mirror is due to its particular historical emergence in transnational (Soviet) and national (post-Soviet) contexts, its peculiar institutionalization in relation to official cultural discourse, and to a prevailing belief in art’s autonomy. Throughout the two decades that encompass the chronological scope of this work, contemporary art has encapsulated the difficult dilemmas of autonomy and social participation, innovation and tradition, progressive political ethos and national identification, the problematic of communication with the world beyond Armenia’s borders, dreams of subjective freedom and the imperative to find an identity in the new circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These are questions that have occupied culture and society at large, in the post-Soviet context and beyond. Yet the contradictions embedded in these questions are best crystallized in contemporary art, because of its peculiar position within the social sphere. This historical study aims at outlining the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist) and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia in post-Soviet conditions from a critical perspective and in ways that point towards the limitations of the aesthetic ...