Vagrich Bakhchanyan. From the collection of Stella Art Foundation
Stella Art Foundation at Mytnaya Street
January 23 - February 28, 2010
Stella
Art Foundation presents an exhibition of the artwork of Vagrich Bakhchanyan, a
classic of the Russian contemporary art, from its own collection. The
exhibition comprises eighty sheets of graphics from the almost infinite array
of works produced by the remarkable artist who passed away in New York on November 12, 2009.
Apart from "stand-alone" pieces, viewers will see two big series created
by Bakhchanyan when he was already in the US: The Naked "Pravda" (Truth) (1974)
and Americans as Seen by a Russian
(1983). All Bakhchanyan's works are being exhibited in Moscow for the first
time.
The
first series (The Naked
"Pravda" (Truth)) was produced
right after the artist's emigration. Here, Bakhchanyan uses cuttings from Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the
Russian Communist Party, combining them with "capitalist" pornographic
images. As a result, the article titles, snatched from context, appear as
direct comments to sexual scenes. The obscenely comical effect is further
amplified by the fact that the official Soviet culture was completely
de-eroticized, therefore any potentially erotic meanings of most circulating
official cliches were simply ignored. By contrast, such interpretations were
blown out and played upon in all the possible ways in the colloquial speech, in
jokes and other specimen of the people's folkloric genius.
Exhibition view at Mytnaya Ulitsa
The
second series (Americans as Seen by
a Russian) reproduces in an enlarged form some fragments of Soviet
caricatures demonstrating "the bared teeth of imperialism". As the
images speak for themselves, they carry no captions. Bakhchanyan employed a
"non-waste" method of
converting propagandist expressions into artistic ones, "working"
here on his viewers' minds solely by form: the line, the contrast of black and white,
the mere scale.
Exhibition view at Mytnaya Ulitsa
Vagrich
Bakhchanyan – a graphics artist, a writer, a book artist and an author of
objects and performances – used to define himself as a "word artist."
Using this language cliche in an utterly ironical manner, he would every time perform his favorite trick of transforming
pompous stupidities into elegant language formulas. In other words, he showed
masterly command of the techniques of discipline called, in the parlance of
contemporary artistic theory, "deconstruction" or "critique of
language". To explain any of Bakhchanyan's tricks would be to kill its
essence, to reduce a miracle of art to a technical banality. This artist used
for his legerdemain his inexhaustible
wit, which, as any wit wont, was based on a spectacular "economy of
means." An imperceptible replacement of a couple of letters in a word, a
change of the context, a "line-up" of text with a picture, reducing
metaphors to their literal meaning – the artist always had an appropriate
device at hand. "What do I do?" he would answer to a question about
his occupation. "I engage in substitution. I replace thoughts, concepts, sometimes
just a single letter."
An
admirer of Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh, Russian poets of the
futurist movement, Bakhchanyan himself became a predecessor and founder of many
literature-based trends in Russian unofficial art. His oeuvre is based on his
wit and his fine feeling of the word. Yet, Bakhchanyan's characteristic humor
is not self-sufficient. His endless puns are a result of experimenting with linguistic
formulas, in particular, with the acoustic nature of the language. Bakhchanyan's
visual works are structured in the same manner: they are based on a system of
substitutions and identifications that generate new meanings and establish
links between accidental forms.
Exhibition view at Mytnaya Ulitsa
Vagrich Bakhchanyan (1938-2009)
was born on May 23, 1938, in Kharkov (Ukraine). In mid-1960s he moved to Moscow.
His first personal exhibition was held in 1968 in Moscow coffee bar "Blue
Bird". In 1967 — 1974, he worked in the 12 Chairs Club, the humor
section of Literaturnaya Gazeta. Bakhchanyan
collages were also published in Znaniye-Sila
and Yunost magazines. In 1974, he
emigrated to the US, where he continued his artistic work in New York, where
his name became associated with sots-art.
In 1977,
Bakhchanyan took part in an exhibition La
Nouva Arte Sovetica - Una Prospettiva Non Ufficiale at the so-called Biennale of Dissent in Venice. In 1979, his
artwork was on view at Artist’s Book exhibition
held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In 1981, he took part in the 16th Sao Paolo Biennial. Works by
Vagrich Bakhchanyan are held by Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswik,
US, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, and other
collections.
Vagrich
Bakhchanyan published a number of books, including: An Autobiography of a 40-Year-Old Author (1981); Visual Diary: 1/1/80 — 12/31/80
(1981); Enthousiasts' Demarche (in
co-authorship with Sergey Dovlatov and Naum Sagalovsky) (1985); Signacs of Fighting on the Face: a
Poitill-Aviv Poem (1986); Not a Day
Without a Line (Annual Report) (1986); Poems
From Different Years (1986); Heaps of
Flies: Daubery (2003); Cherry Hell
and Other Plays (2005).
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