Gagik Aroutounian—Kiss the Ground

 

Elliot Baker, 2014

 

Gagik Aroutiunian, 2014

 

Kiss the Ground is a five-part exhibition series that examines and celebrates contemporary Armenian art at a particular moment in history, organized to coincide with the centennial memorialization of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The first exhibition in the series showcases the art of Armenian-born, Chicago-based Gagik Aroutiunian. The exhibit includes a small but focused selection of Aroutiunian’s multi-media assemblage sculptures, paintings, installation art and video projections, all informed by the history of his family and the aftereffects of a culture nearly brought to extinction. 

 

In 1980 Aroutiunian “escaped the Soviet Bloc…and while traveling in Canada…asked for political asylum.”³ By 1991, he had earned two degrees in visual art, concentrating on painting and sculptural media. For the past two decades, Aroutiunian has explored themes of memory and identity through the imagery of family, loss and displacement. When asked what the audience should know about his work, the artist explains:

 

 

In conversation, Aroutiunian generously shares his memories and history—the stories of his family that he experienced himself, or that he remembers hearing in his youth and now keeps alive for his family to carry forward. In his art, however, Aroutiunian’s stories are not legible in a narrative or visual sense. Rather, the attitudes and feelings of what has been endured are made visible through Aroutiunian’s use of materials. The objects and images Aroutiunian assembles are routinely disembodied from their context and seemingly strewn haphazardly in proximity to each other. His sculptures and paintings are frequently made up of small bits, assembled into larger structures and incorporating found and ersatz fragments alongside the artist’s own fabrications. Sculptural presence is important for Aroutiunian because of its capacity to reveal physical proof of existence. His work with the immaterial processes of light, film and projection, on the other hand, exposes the contrasting impermanence of thought, feeling and memory.

 

Most everything Aroutiunian employs in his imagery is broken or separated in some way. Photographs are printed—the backgrounds often removed and cut away—and adhered onto various surfaces, then coated with resin, and precariously balanced on other materials or beneath water. Metal is cut, bent, fabricated, given a patina and welded into conglomerate networks. Stone is cut, carved and grooved, then stacked in such a way that images, objects and structures can be lodged in the resulting fissures—much in the same way seedlings find fertile ground in rock crevices. When Aroutiunian exhibits his sculptures that incorporate battery-powered lights, the gallery is instructed “not to replace the bulbs or power sources when they fail.” Fleeting phenomena, such as waves, illumination, reflections and refractions, play key roles in his work; the artist respects the natural life cycle of his materials and his exhibits are intended to outlast these individual elements. Look now and remember well.

 

In the physical works, images of people among broken or fragmented surroundings stare back at the viewer, often in unsettling and wavering manners; the projected works, on the other hand, are distinctly depopulated. There is great intention in Aroutiunian’s isolation and placement of things; viewers are encouraged to wonder about the selection, placement and combinations he creates. As he describes in his artist’s statement (see bottom of webpage):

By exploring contrasts, Aroutiunian juxtaposes particular sets of artistic interests, pitting one material/quality against another—the opaque with the transparent, the permanent with the ephemeral. What is concrete is at odds with what is only essence.

 

In his paintings, Aroutiunian incorporates paint in much the same way as he uses light phenomena—for its transient properties. Gestures, calligraphic mark-making and the canons of Abstract Expressionism are ideal vehicles to govern emotional impetus. Where his raw feelings and emotional wounds collide and mingle, the artist’s feelings as he paints homages to family members shifts from painting to painting as memories merge with the novelty of a given moment. While the paintings share a similarity of combination—the central placement of photographs surrounded by a frame of painted gestures—the astute eye will notice few repeating motifs. The artist has painted over two hundred paintings revisiting each family member—a visual registry and diary.

 

Similarly, Aroutiunian’s sculptures reimagine family over and over again. While the primary elements of his sculptures are made up of fragments of raw materials assembled with the artist’s personal rules of transience, it is important to take note of the recognizable objects sparsely populating his sculpted works. In his 1996 work To My Mother—Between Two Stones, for example, the artist embeds a shoe form-keeper among welded bits of metal. Thoroughly subsumed in the fabric of the work, the shoe reference is easily overlooked. But to catch a glimpse of it is to call to mind the desire to keep worn things as new as possible. Such ideation of “shoes” recalls similar objects and associations—pedestrian exodus, for example, or the memories every person has of receiving help to put on their shoes as a child, or even the metaphorical concept of putting oneself in another’s shoes. With such everyday utilitarian objects, associations abound and any viewer may find personal meaning. What stories and memories are conjured by such inclusions?

 

Aroutiunian’s projections and sculptures that incorporate time-based media take advantage of the inherent nature of film—the succession of stills that make up a moving picture. In considering how Aroutiunian constructs his filmic work, it is helpful to think of film-stills-in-succession in the same way the artist builds up his sculptures and paintings—one piece at a time. In his 1998 multi-media sculpture Artsakh (Wings), the pieced footage, looped by the monitor at the bottom of the work, shows an Armenian landscape with a collapsed high-voltage transmission tower⁵—connectivity is rendered obsolete.

 

The high-definition projection House of Memories is a work of stunning visual and aural complexity. Though it is simple in its premise—a visual juxtaposition between analog and digital systems of memory decay—it is perhaps challenging for viewers to immediately recognize the correlative imagery of a decaying house and broken electronic circuitry. The imagery reveals itself slowly. Human memory fails, but so do the machines we make to remember for us. During his 2004 trip to his childhood home, Aroutiunian, flooded with personal memories, filmed his journey around the decaying building. Once he returned to the United States, he assembled broken bits of computers, phones and touch screens into the forms of house silhouettes, using the same principles as stained glass to create cohesive sculptures. House of Memories is an amalgam of film footage of two distinct kinds of memory. Both projected film and windows transmit light, and it is this transmission the artist was interested in juxtaposing. While apprehending the imagery of the film, viewers have to contend with issues of attraction and repulsion, reinforced by the ethereal light and sound show. The accompanying soundtrack to House of Memories provides the exhibition’s aural ambience. The soundtrack—a work in its own right—is a collaged audio mix with snippets of Chopin’s Nocturne #1, Haydn’s Piano Sonata #s 53 & 56, and a Bach Partita, each intermittently interrupted by snippets of two Armenian a cappella lullabies, Nani Bala [Grandmother’s Baby] and Tikranakerti Orortsayin [Tikranakerti⁶ Lullaby]. As the Western and Middle Eastern musical styles shift abruptly back and forth, appropriately contrasting visual imagery shifts too: images of the artist’s childhood home in Armenia, which is desolated beyond repair, are juxtaposed with close-up photographs from his House of Memories sculptural series—sculptures of composed circuitry taken from electronic devices associated with memory: cameras, printers, computers, phones, scanners.⁷ Aroutiunian has provided a statement specific to House of Memories, which can be found in the Artist’s Statements section (see below).

 

Bird, the final work in the exhibition, is a multimedia installation that leaves a lasting impression and illustrates the weight not only of Aroutiunian’s burden, but also that of the Armenian people in general. In this deceptively simple piece, a film projection on a wall, of a bird in flight, is interrupted by a birdcage, which is both illuminated by the projection and casts a shadow on the wall behind. Viewers can move around the cage, which is situated in the middle of the room and raised up into the air by a thin, welded pedestal frame. Viewers cast shadows upon the wall when they are behind the cage. The bird image, which occupies the center of the screen for much of the film loop, flies inside the centered cage shadow. Every once in a while, the bird flies outside the shadowy confines. Art critic Philip E. Bishop beautifully describes the intellectual exercise:

 

 

Bishop’s reference to Plato’s cave, in this instance, takes on the weight of a hundred years of sadness, turmoil and pain on the scale of an entire population. But it is also important to recognize that the bird never escapes the parameters of the projected light. Aroutiunian’s exercise, which keeps the bird always in the frame of the projection, teaches us an important lesson. The cage is only an illusion, and the bird is still confined. Indeed, the bird experiences moments of freedom, but in the end, it is still imprisoned by a larger, more illusive, but still confining space. Bird exposes the elephant in the room: How can the Armenians know of anything else when all they know is still uncorroborated history? Aroutiunian’s juxtapositions raise simple but penetrating questions: why the unusual coupling of materials? Why combine traditions from different cultures? What is lost or missing? Why remember? Why, in some sense, are Armenians not free?

 

Armenians, and the world as a whole, did not have a word to describe the systematic “destruction of some one million Christian Armenians under the auspices of the Ottoman government in 1915-16.”⁹ Henry Morgenthau—the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-16—called it “the murder of a nation.”¹⁰ Without the word genocide at the world’s disposal, however, international law at the time regarded “crimes against humanity” as “crimes committed by one state against the citizens of another.”¹¹ Therefore, “Armenians, as Ottoman subjects, were excluded from this category” because at that time “no international convention existed to cover crimes perpetrated by a state against its own people.”¹² Turkey takes that fact as their high ground. But as one Turkish historian has pointed out, “The failure of the official Turkish state approach is its insistence that this immense crime was a justifiable act of state necessity, which therefore allows the country to avoid taking any moral stance on it.”¹³

 

It is not surprising, then, to find that many Armenians, like Aroutiunian, keep the memories of their families alive through the telling of their stories or through the creation of art to remember them by. Decades after the massacres, the term genocide was coined in no small part to describe what had occurred in 1915. Although Aroutiunian did not directly experience the Armenian Genocide, he absorbed the stories of his family and neighbors and lived under its shadows during a time when the Armenian Genocide was referred to as “the Forgotten Genocide.”¹⁴ Unlike his parents, Aroutiunian grew up learning about the concept of genocide, and the term was available to him in reference to the experience of the Armenian people. Aroutiunian’s work, within such a context, primarily deals with the effects of the history and unrest his generation has lived.

 

 

 

Talât Paşa, June 30, 1915

 

The recent history of Armenia, specifically that of the last one hundred years, is a story that is not at rest. Modern Turkey is the legal, official and cultural successor of the Ottoman Empire, which consisted of many cultural groups including Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. Armenians continuously existed in Eastern Anatolia (Asia Minor) for around 3000 years, until 1915.¹⁶ In that year, the Armenian population, along with the Assyrians and Greeks, found themselves driven out of the region. In his book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Turkish author Taner Akçam, describes why:

 

 

The removal of Armenian people from Turkish regions resulted not only in the deaths of millions of Armenians,¹⁸ but also led to the destruction and loss of countless properties, the decimation of art and artifacts, and the severe reduction of the Armenians’ historic homeland. The stances of most Armenians and Turks today, towards the events of a century ago, appear to be largely irreconcilable. Armenians want Turkey to admit to the crimes of genocide. Turkey, however, disputes the events of 1915 and rejects that they should be classified as acts of genocide.

 

In 1915, the word “genocide” did not exist. On the other hand, there were several key phrases that raised ideas about inhumanity and injustice throughout the written history of democracy. For example, in 1814 the phrase “principles of natural justice” is used in the Treaty of Paris and the phrase “principles of humanity and justice” is used in the Treaty of Ghent.¹⁹ In 1815, the Declaration of the Powers on the Abolition of the Slave Trade included the phrase “principles of humanity and universal morality” as justification for ending the slave trade.²⁰ In 1860, the National Convention of the American Republican Party issued the statement “…We brand the recent re-opening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity.”²¹ In 1890, the phrase “crime against humanity” was used to describe the treatment of Africans in the Congo Free State, under King Leopold II of Belgium.²² And during World War I, on May 24, 1915, the Allies, Britain, France and the Russian Empire jointly issued a statement “explicitly announcing, for the first time,”²³ the commission of “crimes…against humanity…”²⁴in response to the Armenian massacres. After World War I an international war crimes commission attempted to establish a tribunal to try “violations of the laws of humanity,” but the phrase “laws of humanity” was deemed too “imprecise and insufficiently developed” by the US representative and the concept was not pursued.²⁵

 

While many people worked to recognize the horrors that the Armenian people endured, it took the Armenian massacres along with the scale and magnitude of the First and Second World Wars combined before the world powers realized the urgent need to define wholesale aggression toward a specific people as a “crime against humanity.” 

 

Genocide as a concept and a word was first penned in 1943²⁶—two years before the end of World War II and three years before the first General Assembly of the United Nations. The word genocide—from the Greek genos (family, tribe, or race), coupled with a Latin suffix -cide (killing)²⁷—was coined by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 of his relatives to the Holocaust.²⁸ Lemkin studied the Armenian massacres closely while formulating his concept and while working on his proposal to United Nations about genocide, which recommended establishing the protection of basic human rights under international law.²⁹ The term appeared in print for the first time in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in 1944.³⁰ In 1946, the United Nations adopted a resolution affirming that genocide was a crime under international law.³¹ In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which legally defined the crime of genocide for the first time.³² 

 

In 1965, while Armenia was under Soviet control, hundreds of thousands of Armenian people observed the 50^th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan—the capital of Armenia today. Despite being a “taboo subject,” and in order to subdue political unrest in what became a “turning point for the Armenians,” the Soviet Government agreed to build a Genocide Memorial, which was completed by 1967.³³ Another measure of justice came for Armenia when, in 1991, it finally achieved recognition as an independent republic.

 

Today, one of the oldest of world cultures and the first Christian nation³⁴ continues its struggle for justice for the victims of the Genocide, while the term genocide continues to inspire research and debate. A notable development in the history of defining the word is Samantha Power’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which “explores America’s understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century from the Armenian genocide to the ‘ethnic cleansings’ of the Kosovo War.”³⁵ By 2006, several countries had gone on record to recognize the Armenian Genocide—France, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others—and Armenia, France, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland³⁶ worked to adopt laws against the denial of the Armenian Genocide, sparking much debate.

 

While the Kiss the Ground series was designed to raise up into consciousness the atrocities and sobering realities the Armenian people have endured, visitors to the gallery will notice that overt imagery of genocide is not present in the first exhibition—a fact which also raises an important question: What is the subtopic of this first exhibit, this first view of a yearlong exploration?

 

 

Gagik Aroutiunian makes art to remember. As he points out:

 

Thankfully, the Armenian people did not perish after the horrors perpetrated against them a hundred years ago. But that was hardly consolation when Aroutiunian was a child growing up on Armenian-inhabited soil. At that time, Armenia couldn’t possibly foresee its own promise to become a country in its own right. Thus, while global powers continue to work, debate and define the events of nearly a century ago, Armenian families and artists alike have figured many ways to memorialize their stories. Today, much has occurred that is positive and affirming for the Armenians, but much more is yet needed. The work on display in Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground, then, is an embodiment of the artist’s homeland aspirations. It is, as the artist has said, through the build up of bits and pieces that memory sustains what has been lost. In turn, the true place and people endure.

 

Todd Bartel

Gallery Director, Curator

Thompson Gallery

 

 

____________________

 

1. Elliot Baker, The Past Is Not Past—A Drama, 2014, p. 17

2. Gagik Aroutiunian, quoted from an interview by the gallery director, August 29, 2014

3. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014

4. Aroutiunian Interview, August 29, 2014

5. Aroutiunian Interview, September, 9, 2014

6. In an interview with Aroutiunian, the artist explains: Tigranakert is the name of city that was founded by Tigran the Great, King of Armenia in the first century. This his King fought against Rome, as the new capital of his kingdom. Nowadays that city which went through many transformations throughout centuries under different empires—Rome, Byzantium, Arabs and Turks—never lost its strong Armenian component and its unique customs specific to the Armenians of that city until it was ended in 1915. In modern days it is known under the name Diyarbakir in Turkey with an overwhelming Kurdish population. No Armenians exist there (maybe there are a few Islamized hidden ones?), but recently, with efforts of a very progressive Kurdish Mayor of the city, the Armenian church—supposedly the biggest church in the Middle East—was renovated. Email, August 31, 2014

7. Aroutiunian, About House of Memories, 2014, catalog p. 147 (Also, see below.)

8.Philip E. Bishop, ‘Displacement’ Exhibition Evokes Simple Imagery that Speaks Volumes, Special to the Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL, March 5, 2009

9. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide (Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians), Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, p. 1

10. Henry Morgenthau, The Murder of a Nation, Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, Inc., New York, NY, 1974

11. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Holt and Company, LLC, New York, NY, 2006, p. 2-3

12. Akçam, p. 3

13. Akçam, p. 9

14. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014

15.Akçam, p. 6

16. Thomas F. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck Eds., Treasures in Heaven—Armenian Illuminated manuscripts, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 5.
NOTE: Mathews, points out: “The origin and early history of the Armenian people remain obscure and controversial because of the near absence of archaeological evidence, and because Armenians did not find their own voice until the creation of a native alphabet in the early fifth century A.D., a millennium after their presumed arrival on the [Anatolian] plateau. As a result of this paucity of direct evidence, and the confused, fragmentary, and often contradictory testimonies of foreign authors, the most that can be said with reasonable certainty is that the Armenoi, an Indo-European speaking group, seem to have filtered gradually into the plateau from the southwest during the seventh to sixth centuries B.C.; their presence is attested there in the late sixth century by both the Greek historian Herodotus and the Bisutun inscription of the Persian king Darius the Great (521-486).”

17. Akçam, p. 8

18. Akçam notes: In line with the argument of necessity, the state claims that the destruction of the Armenians was not the deliberate policy of either the government or the party but ta series of isolated events that occurred, without intention and in the course of harsh wartime conditions, during a :normal” deportation. It remains, however, extremely difficult to explain how 300,000-600,000 people ( the numbers variously cited in official Turkish sources) died within a year—1915—as a result of disease, random attacks, and general wartime conditions while raising no alarm among the central authorities. p. 9

19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#cite_note-3, 9/3/14

20. Ibid. note-4, 9/3/14

21. Ibid. note-5, 9/3/14

22. Ibid. note-5, 9/3/14

23. Ibid. note-6, 9/3/14

24. “…crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization…”; http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.160/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html, 9/3/14

25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity#cite_note-7, 9/14/14

26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin#cite_note-1, 9/3/14

27. Genocide in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.—”1944 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ix. 79 By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.”

28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide#cite_ref-18, 9/3/14

29. Author not cited, The California Currier, December 8, 2005, http://npfdinfo.blogspot.com/2007/10/raphael-lemkin-discusses-armenian.html, 10/19/14. Note: to view video clip, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzAexRmeZFs

30. Ibid. OED

31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide#Genocide_as_a_crime, 9/3/14

32. Ibid, Genocide_as_a_crime

33. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014

34. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck Eds., p. xiii

35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Problem_from_Hell, 9/3/14

36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_denial#cite_note-rt.com-121, 9/14/14

37. Aroutiunian interview, August 29, 2014

About the work

 

The practice of art is like a magic prism through which artists attempt to view and understand themselves and the surrounding world, and which allows them to share and communicate the discoveries made in the process. 

 

My work is about identity, displacement, and memory. Intertwined with this exploration is a fascination with two different entities: the rough, explicit, material quality of object/matter, and the ever-elusive image/illusion that we dream, envision or imagine. Sculptural processes and materials are manifestations of object/matter. Images, video and light, on the other hand, represent illusion. While the first is a primary means for me to represent identity and its displacement, the second is a way to represent memory and its transience. This juxtaposition is consistently present in my work in one form or another.

 

Many of my pieces integrate photographic images (usually in the form of transfers) as an important component of the piece. I excise images and figures from their original background before placing them in a new, artificially created environment. This artificially created environment in turn heightens the image’s sense of detachment from its setting. However, the process of placing the image in an alien environment also heightens the visual power of the resulting image, freeing it from any pretension of representing reality. The result is a peculiar relationship between the figure and its environment, and the establishment of a new reality.

Gagik Aroutiunian, 2014