D O C U M E N T / I N T R O D U C T I O N
INTRODUCTION TO ARMAN
GRIGORYAN’S “WHAT IS
HAMASTEGHTSAKAN ART” (1993)
AND NAZARETH KAROYAN’S “WHAT IS
HAMASTEGHTSAKAN ART” (1996)
angELa Harutyunyan
The documents presented here are attempts from within the early
post-Soviet Armenian art scene to defi ne late-1980s artistic prac-
tices that would later be thought to constitute the “primal scene” of
Armenian contemporary art. Published in 1993 et 1996, respectivement,
by artist Arman Grigoryan and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, the two
articles with the same title locate these practices in relation to local and
global cultural discourses in the wake of postmodern and postconcep-
tual developments in art.
The word hamasteghtsakan (համաստեղծական) can be translated
as “collectively created” or as “Conceptual art.” The word is derived
from the Armenian word համաստեղծ (hamasteghts), with the suffi x
ական (akan) turning the word into an adjective.1 In Armenian, le
verbs ստեղծել (steghtsel) and հղանալ (hghanal) both denote “to create.”
1
Համա (hama) is a prefi x with multiple meanings: it means being similar (such as the
Latin prefi x homo), general or overall (synonymous to pan), and fi nally, it denotes
“together” or “collective.” The noun ստեղծ means “conception” or “creation.” Stephan
Malkhasyan’s 1944 dictionary states that the primary meaning of the word is “created
together” and the fi gurative second meaning is “innate” or “naturally born,” whereas
Ashot Suqiasyan’s 1967 dictionary of synonyms mentions only the second, fi gurative
meaning. Stephan Malkhasyans, Hayeren bacatrakan bararan [Dictionary of Armenian],
vol. 3 (Yerevan: ASSR State Publishing House, 1944–45), 28; Ashot Suqiasyan, Hayots
lezvi homanishneri bararan [Dictionary of Synonyms of the Armenian Language] (Yerevan:
ASSR National Science Academy, 1967), 358.
© 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00246
115
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Հղանալ (hghanal) is derived from the noun հղացք (hghatsq), lequel
also translates as “concept.” In hamasteghtsakan, “creation” and
“conception” meet at a semantic level, marking “creation” as being
identical with “Conceptual art”—that is, an art of conception.
The use of hamasteghtsakan as a concept to delineate a set of
artistic practices was never straightforward—at times, it was used
as synonymous with Conceptual art, while at other times it was used
to refer to “postconceptual” or even “postmodern” art. Elsewhere, je
have translated the term as “collectively created,” suggesting a way
of putting together distant and incommensurable realities, images,
and styles.2 However, the semantics of hamasteghtsakan are not of
primary interest here, but rather the cultural context in which the
term circulated.
Karoyan originally proposed hamasteghtsakan as a neologism
in a 1993 exhibition titled Beyond Idiom: Contemporary Crossover
Art in Armenia (the Armenian title read: Subjective Integration:
Hamasteghtsakan Art in Armenia). The exhibition took place at the
newly established American University of Armenia in Yerevan,
symptomatically occupying the building of the Communist Party
Central Committee’s House of Political Enlightenment (Qaghlustun).3
Organized in collaboration with the US-Armenian artist Charlie
Khachadourian, the show brought together post-medium art practices
by the late Soviet generation of artists in the Armenian Soviet Socialist
Republic who were constructing an artistic sphere designed as an alter-
native to both Socialist Realism and the National Modernism of the
1970s.4 In the English title of the exhibition, hamasteghtsakan was arbi-
trarily translated as “crossover,” thus eliding entirely the Armenian
title’s reference to the need for communication and integration with
the outside world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Par contre, le
English title foregrounded the international presentation of a group of
artists whose work extended beyond the familiar idioms of “totalitar-
ian” art.
2
3
4
Angela Harutyunyan and Eric Goodfield, “Theorizing the Politics of Representation in
Contemporary Art in Armenia,” in Culture & Agency: Contemporary Culture and Urban
Changement, éd. Malcolm Miles and Monica Degen (Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press,
2010), 120.
These were institutions for the political education of the party bureaucrats, housing also
large halls and auditoria for public functions such as congresses and conferences.
Vardan Azatyan, “Disintegrating Progress: Bolshevism, National Modernism and the
Emergence of Contemporary Art in Armenia,” ARTMargins 1.1 (2012): 62–87.
3
:
8
s
n
je
g
r
un
m
t
r
un
116
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Karoyan’s short contribution to the exhibition catalog neither refers
to the word hamasteghtsakan nor does it explain it. Replete with avant-
gardist pathos, the text instead performs a postmodern relativization by
mixing “high literary” style with vernacular references:
The new generation strives toward the satellite Crosna similarly to
the Mediterranean sailors who were striving toward the lighthouse
of Alexandria. . . . The new generation identifies with Madonna
and Schwarzenegger with the same passion and enthusiasm as
Ekaterina II fornicating with an entire legion. . . . (Dude, how do I
get to the airport?)5
It may be argued that in this instance, hamasteghtsakan is performative
rather than conceptual, in that it brings together incommensurable
realities and references. From this initial exhibition onward, hamas-
teghtsakan entered into circulation to denote a set of post-medium prac-
tices that were formally, stylistically, ideologically, and aesthetically
distinct from each other—and, in addition, often incoherent—and that
nevertheless came to refer to an alternative cultural sphere in opposi-
tion to official culture.
Karoyan introduced the term hamasteghtsakan in order to retro-
spectively define the practices of late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenian
artists who were part of a cultural movement called the 3rd Floor.
Coming together in 1987 in the context of Mikhail Gorbachev’s pro-
grams of liberalization and reform, glasnost and perestroika, the 3rd
Floor originated when a group of young artists was invited to organize
the annual youth exhibition of the Union of Artists of Soviet Armenia,
a state-sponsored, artist-run institution that commissioned, repre-
sented, and circulated art along official lines. The exhibition took place
not in the designated exhibition spaces of the Union, but in a confer-
ence hall on the Union’s third floor—hence the movement’s name. Le
proposed format did not include a jury, suggesting that anyone could
be an artist. In this way the young artists associated with the 3rd Floor
challenged the conventions of the Union’s youth exhibitions, dont
goal was to provide exhibition opportunities to young artists, provided
that they affirmed and reproduced the inherited styles, techniques, et
compositional rules that excluded anything other than figuration.
5
Nazareth Karoyan, “Preface,” in Beyond Idiom: Contemporary Crossover Art in Armenia
(Yerevan: American University of Armenia, 1993), exhibition catalog.
»
t
r
un
n
un
k
un
s
t
H
g
e
t
s
un
m
un
H
s
je
t
un
H
W
“
o
t
n
o
je
t
c
toi
d
o
r
t
n
je
|
n
un
oui
n
toi
oui
t
toi
r
un
H
117
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
The spatial positioning of the 3rd Floor artists both within the
Union and on its periphery reflected their subsequent structural posi-
tioning as both a kind of “perestroika avant-garde” and as marginal
in relation to the cultural politics of the Soviet artistic establishment.
This ambiguity, bien sûr, was in itself a reflection of the contradictions
inherent in perestroika, as Gorbachev’s efforts at reform were met with
staunch opposition and resistance from within the calcified Soviet
bureaucracy.
The 3rd Floor’s intervention in the 1987 Union of Artists exhibi-
tion included musical performances, happenings, poetry readings,
and even a break dance show, a mix that was to become paradigmatic
for the movement’s lack of both stylistic coherence and a positively
defined, unified aesthetic, politique, or cultural agenda. Entre 1987
et 1994, when the group disintegrated, the 3rd Floor used a broad
variety of references that could accommodate literally any medium,
style, or school: from Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism to Minimal-
ism, objet trouvé, neo-Dada performance, and Conceptual art. Through-
out the six years of the 3rd Floor’s loose association, according to
Karoyan’s calculation, environ 50 artists participated in or
organized events that actively appropriated Western signs and symbols,
often mixing high art with middle- to lowbrow cultural icons, depuis
Joseph Beuys and Black Sabbath to the worship of blue jeans and
Marlboro cigarettes.6 Ideologically, the group combined romantic
liberalism, nationalism, libertarianism, and anarchist dreams of
omnipotence, all of them highly contradictory ideologies that could
nevertheless work hand in hand for as long as they were perceived to
be in opposition to anything that connoted Soviet ideology.7
When in 1993 Karoyan first conceptualized hamasteghtsakan by
applying the term to the 3rd Floor’s incommensurable practices, his
was a retrospective act of naming. By that time, the stark antagonism
between libertarians and anarchists and those who were eager to build
new, now market-driven art institutions in post-Soviet Armenia had
become manifest and paved the way for the disintegration of the
mouvement.
6
7
Vardan Azatyan, “Art Communities, Public Spaces, and Collective Actions in Armenian
Contemporary Art,” in Art, Theory, Post-Socialism, éd. Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles
(Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), 46.
Angela Harutyunyan, The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of
the “Painterly Real” (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 46.
3
:
8
s
n
je
g
r
un
m
t
r
un
118
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
If Karoyan coined the term hamasteghtsakan, it was the move-
ment’s main ideologue, Arman Grigoryan, who presented its first
recorded analysis, during a lecture delivered at the Yerevan State
Institute of Fine Arts in 1993. We offer the text of his address, dans
English for the first time, as our first Document. In his outline of the
problem of hamasteghtsakan art, Grigoryan first establishes the differ-
ence between art as an autonomous sphere of individual creation, sur
the one hand, and culture as a weapon in the hands of the powerful, ou
as mass cultural kitsch, on the other. Then he asks: “Can the contradic-
tion between art and culture, between the individual and society be
resolved? Can humanity reach its age-old ‘city of love’ where the indi-
vidual will be able to discover his potentialities without clashing with
society? Hamasteghtsakan art sees the solution to this question not in
the principle of ‘we know it,’ but in the approach ‘we can do it.’”
In Grigoryan’s view, hamasteghtsakan art is both autonomous and
heteronomous: it is part of culture yet also antagonistic to it, since it
separates the ideals of liberation from the constraints of cultural insti-
tutions and thus contains the seeds of political freedom and social
equality. The autonomy of art is founded, in Grigoryan’s words, upon
“its own logic of development,” and legitimized by the artist’s absolute
right to mix anything and everything. As he writes, “hamasteghtsakan
art once and for all liberates the artwork from the constraints of high
vs. faible, old vs. new, ours vs. theirs, objective vs. subjective, figurative
vs. non-figurative, cheap vs. expensive, accepted vs. unaccepted, aussi
as styles, schools, techniques and technologies,” inviting a world where
“Disney is as great as Leonardo.” In Grigoryan’s view, hamasteghtsakan
art is both “truly democratic” and “totalitarian.” It is through these con-
tradictions that hamasteghtsakan art, characterized by “serious joy,»
stands above culture. En même temps, it understands its mission as
one of creating a truly liberated culture as the ideal of the individual’s
emancipation from the imperatives of the collective.
As opposed to Grigoryan’s mobilization of the term, which defined
it as a kind of all-encompassing creation in art directed against the
repressive mechanisms of culture, Karoyan had deployed the same con-
cept to emphasize the need for cultural communication. It was only
plus tard, in 1996—three years after the collapse of the 3rd Floor move-
ment—that Karoyan, driven by an “author’s responsibility” of saving
hamasteghtsakan from misuse, revisited the term with the aim of con-
ceptualizing it in relation to the art practices of the 3rd Floor. By that
»
t
r
un
n
un
k
un
s
t
H
g
e
t
s
un
m
un
H
s
je
t
un
H
W
“
o
t
n
o
je
t
c
toi
d
o
r
t
n
je
|
n
un
oui
n
toi
oui
t
toi
r
un
H
119
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
temps, the term had already acquired retroactive significance and
his torical value and designated a style, of bringing together incom-
mensurable artistic expressions such as Pop Art and Abstract
Expression ism, art and Minimalism amongst others, that had
characterized the movement.
Karoyan’s 1996 text “What Is Hamasteghtsakan Art,” the second
translated Document in this issue of the journal, reflects his interest
in poststructuralism, especially the work of Roland Barthes and
Jacques Derrida. À l'époque, Karoyan was in the process of abandon-
ing the Hegelian historical and logical framework that he had used to
historicize contemporary art practiced in the early 1990s. Its stylistic
and terminological inconsistencies, including Karoyan’s complex and
ambiguous usage of the poststructuralist jargon that he made opera-
tional in Armenian, make the text especially difficult to translate.
The goal of Karoyan’s analysis was to shift the semantic focus from
“creative” to “collective.” Just as the 3rd Floor sought to abandon the
idea of a single author, Karoyan emphasized the collective aspects of
the 3rd Floor’s exhibition-making practices and stressed their commu-
nicability across time and space—with respect both to the history of
Armenian art and the contemporary globalizing world. Karoyan dis-
cusses contemporary art as information that restores a connection with
the national art of previous epochs after the collapse of the “totalitar-
ian” Soviet system. He argues that it is from the perspective of the con-
tinuity of national culture that historical Armenian art can serve as a
means of communication with the contemporary global context.
Despite the humanist and creational implications of the term,
Karoyan claims that hamasteghtsakan functions as a pointer to the dis-
solution of the self-sufficient modernist subject, and that this dissolu-
tion is no longer taking place in the “us” of Soviet collectivity but in
the multiplicity of postmodern subjectivities. The authorial “I” neither
represents the subject of enunciation, nor does it provide transparent
access to that subject. Plutôt, it always implies the Other, one that is
always already a representation, a culturally coded image and a type of
cultural readymade: “In this case the ready-made image is nothing but
an information image. The material of hamasteghtsakan art is a layer
of this image-information. . . . In the frame of hamasteghtsakan art, le
ritualistic desacralizing strategy of the information-image is the already
de-ideologized reproduction of the method of Soviet anti-propaganda.”
Karoyan’s agenda was to align those artistic practices that at first
3
:
8
s
n
je
g
r
un
m
t
r
un
120
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
opposed Soviet cultural politics but then came to be seen as founda-
tional for the art of post-Soviet Armenia with what he saw as global
postmodernism. This involved a great deal of cultural, linguistic, et
theoretical translation. If, culturally, Karoyan was to make a case for
the specificity of Armenian postmodernism and, at the same time, its
communicability with global trends, linguistically, he needed, for the
first time, to translate poststructuralism into Armenian.8 Of course,
linguistic translation also implied a process of theoretical translation.
Karoyan’s understanding of postmodernism as a kind of fluid commu-
nicability across time and space betrayed his indebtedness to glasnost’s
politics of free and accessible information. En effet, accessibility is
highly romanticized in his article, to the degree that this information
space itself figures as a collage-like dreamworld, a space for “collective
dreaming.”9
It is here that Grigoryan’s and Karoyan’s texts, which bear the
same title, betray deep affinities: they both position art as a space for
such “collective dreaming,” one that is more real than social reality
lui-même. If for Grigoryan the hamasteghtsakan gesture constitutes a
collage-like surface made up of images where all cultural heroes are
granted equal participation, for Karoyan, this surface is a purely textual
interface of transparent and communicable information. Both ulti-
mately reflect the post-Soviet subject’s desire to traverse formerly closed
borders and to be part of a world that it sees as triumphantly liberated.
One could argue that the Other of such a world without borders was a
version of the Soviet Union conceived as a closed and claustrophobic
système. In the post-Soviet conditions of neoliberalization in which both
authors wrote, one could further argue, the ideal that art promised had
already been realized in the capitalist “utopia” of consumer choice and
transparent communication. In this sense, hamasteghtsakan could also
be translated as the “post-Soviet condition.”
8
9
The present translation of Karoyan’s text involved several discussions with the author.
Twenty-three years after writing this text, Karoyan himself was barely able to decipher
some of its passages. While we preserved the complexity and convolutedness of some
parts of the text, we have translated some of its most complex passages liberally and inter-
pretatively in order to render them more transparent for the uninitiated reader.
Vardan Azatyan, “Art Communities, Public Spaces, and Collective Actions in Armenian
Contemporary Art,” in Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles (éd.), Art, Theory, Post-Socialism
(Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), 46.
»
t
r
un
n
un
k
un
s
t
H
g
e
t
s
un
m
un
H
s
je
t
un
H
W
“
o
t
n
o
je
t
c
toi
d
o
r
t
n
je
|
n
un
oui
n
toi
oui
t
toi
r
un
H
121
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
un
r
t
/
/
m
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
je
F
/
/
/
/
8
3
1
1
5
1
9
8
9
1
4
9
un
r
t
/
m
_
un
_
0
0
2
4
6
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
