D O C U M E N T S / I N T R O D U C T I O N

INTRODUCTION TO DAVID KAREYAN’S
“PURE CREATIVITY” AND
HRATCH ARMENAKYAN’S “POST-ART
SITUATION: LOGICAL SYNTAX”

angeLa harutyunyan

Hratch Armenakyan , a member of the conceptual artists’ group ACT,
which operated in Armenia in the mid-1990s, remembered in a recent
interview that the fi rst president of the republic, Levon Ter-Petrossian
(1991–98), would occasionally host artists, musicians, writers, 和
other creative workers and engage them in discussions about the new
order of things pertaining to all spheres of social and cultural develop-
ment.1 These meetings with the highest offi cials of the newly forming
state and its institutions reinforced the belief among artists and intel-
lectuals that it was possible to participate directly in politics. This par-
ticipation was imagined as a form of concrete input that would shape
cultural policies and redefi ne art as an institution capable of offering
alternatives beyond the state’s monopoly on commissioning, represent-
英, and evaluating art production. 此外, the artists were con-
sulted in matters regarding the ideological orientation of the new state
and its larger political, 社会的, and economic programs.

Operating in 1994–96 after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union,

ACT comprised ten young artists in their early twenties. The group
developed affi rmative artistic actions and exhibitions to support the
constitution of the new state based on the principles of liberal democ-

Hratch Armenakyan, interviewed by Vardan Azatyan, 一月 23, 2008.

120

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racy and market capitalism. Its conceptual interventions and actions—
in conventional exhibition spaces, on the street, and in the already
dysfunctional factories—were often formally minimal and austere,
but almost always prescriptive in that they offered a model of political
and aesthetic participation.

A case in point is the 1995 action Art Demonstration that
the group conducted one week after the July 5th referendum, 哪个
approved the first constitution for an independent Armenia. Marching
through the city center of Yerevan from early-20th-century modernist
painter Martiros Saryan’s statue to the Museum of Modern Art, the art-
ists and their supporters carried slogans. Written in both Armenian
and English, the slogans read, “Interventions into Systems,” “World
Integration,” “Expel the Information Monsters from Rationality,”
“Every Small Mistake Can Result in Big Catastrophes,” “Polit-Art,”
“Realization,” “No Art,” “New State, New Art, New Culture,“ 和
“Demythologization,” among others. After reaching their destination,
the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan, the artists hung the banners
on the museum’s walls.2 What was at stake in this and similar interven-
tions was the constitution of a new subjectivity in the context of the
newly independent state. ACT perceived and embraced the ideal citizen
as a disembodied but participating agent plugged into bureaucratic-
administrative, 政治的, 经济的, and cultural structures. 这
subject was to be an informed agent and, 在较小程度上, 一个新的
消费者. Endowed with specific socially inscribed roles and func-
系统蒸发散, he or she would not only contribute to the formation of the state
but would also be capable of being in the forefront of the public sphere.
While ACT’s members rigorously strove to service the state’s
议程, this service was carried out in the sphere of art understood as
an autonomous domain of “pure creativity.” Throughout their short life
as a group, ACT’s young members developed often contradictory, 但
almost always dogmatic and rigid propositions regarding the role of the
artist in the new society, as suggested in published and unpublished

It is noteworthy that the artists insisted on receiving an official permit from the munic-
ipality to conduct the action, which was accompanied by emergency personnel and
police cars, as the law required. For a detailed discussion of ACT’s work in relation to
the contested notion of the public sphere in post-Soviet Armenia, please see Angela
Harutyunyan, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: The Constitutional State and the ACT
Group’s Political Aesthetics of Affirmation in Armenia,” Art and Public Sphere 2 (2012),
即将推出.

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121

文本, personal notebooks, and manifestos. These propositions were sat-
urated with an underlying neopositivism that the artists adopted while
carefully reading and discussing Bertrand Russell’s and especially
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early writings.

ACT’s identification with the newly forming constitutional state
was especially poignant if we examine certain speeches by the repub-
lic’s president at the time. Art historian Vardan Azatyan argues that
ACT, alongside the then president of Armenia, Ter-Petrossian, strove
to demythologize politics and history, constructing a myth of the posi-
tivistic demythologization of art and the figure of the artist. 为了
president, a philologist and historian of the Middle East, politics was
a philological operation that could be solely argued in the domain of
rational language. While ACT frequently used the term “demythologi-
zation” in its slogans and unpublished texts to demystify the figure of
the artist, for Ter-Petrossian, it was a tool to establish the positivist
myth of a constitutional state without “any myths and puzzles.”3

While the politics of the first democratically elected president

of post-Soviet Armenia was informed by philological positivism
(the methodology that informed his scholarly work), ACT formulated
its programs in a way that followed neopositivist trends. Developed in
early-20th-century Vienna and based on the writings of Saint-Simon
and later Auguste Comte, neopositivism appealed to the artists and
to the country’s president alike with its promise to objectively decode
reality.4 In the context of the social and economic transformations in
Armenia in the 1990s, marked as they were by the shifting status of
the intellectual within the new society, the president and ACT sup-
ported and advanced the argument that society should be governed by
an intellectual elite that could discern objective laws and use these to

In his famous article “War or Peace?” of 1997, just two months before his resignation
from presidency, Ter-Petrossian rationally refutes all “myths and puzzles” regarding for-
eign and domestic policy issues on which his opponents were criticizing him. Levon Ter-
Petrossian, Collected Works [in Armenian] (Yerevan: Archive of the First President of
Armenia, 2007), 195. Vardan Azatyan, Image/inings of Armenian Reality. Lecture series
delivered at Utopiana Association, Yerevan, Armenia, 2008.
One of the basic premises of neopositivism was that all knowledge could be coded in a
standardized scientific language, and that all valid and meaningful knowledge was nec-
essarily empirically verifiable. For neopositivists, the social world was governed by natu-
ral laws, and all a social scientist could do was to identify these laws. “Logical Positivism,”
in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (伦敦: 劳特利奇, 1998), CD-ROM ed.

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solve social problems.5 The basic premise of creating a universal scien-
tific language to describe social phenomena, with this description itself
believed to be empirically driven and verifiable, empowered the ACT
artists to reassert the objective impact of their artistic actions during a
time of economic hardship and social chaos. In its reliance on logical
deduction, neopositivism provided them with a doctrine of methodol-
ogical individualism that held that all social phenomena could be
explained as the outcomes of individual behavior. 尽管如此, 甚至
though they had a shared philosophy, many of ACT’s members offered
contradictory recipes for art’s dissolution into larger social structures
or into a broader understanding of creativity.

The two texts presented here in translation illustrate certain
aesthetic and methodological contradictions that two of the group
members—Hratch Armenakyan and David Kareyan—embodied and
propagated. It was the tension between Armenakyan and Kareyan that
defined the group’s practice of “showing together,” while insisting on
one’s individual practice and its philosophy of art, until one of ACT’s
factions abandoned the group in 1995. Both Kareyan and Armenakyan
aim to define what they call the “post-art situation.” However, 如果
Kareyan’s programmatic and somewhat romantic text titled “What Is
Pure Creativity?” lays out a post-art situation for an all-encompassing
creativity, Armenakyan’s “Post-Art Situation: Logical Syntax” of 1995
adopts a language reminiscent of neopositivism to argue that the artist,
like any other social agent and citizen of the new state, has a specifi-
cally assigned role within the larger social machine. Using logical
deduction, Armenakyan argues that the artist’s role is the functional-
ization of the idea. 尽管如此, both positions share a belief that what
is needed in the new and rapidly transforming reality is the artist’s self-
instrumentalization in service to the construction of the new state
in the broadest sense. They voluntarily put aesthetics at the service
政治的.

Given its identification with the state, ACT stood for a version of
positive liberty; 然而, in the post–Cold War era of the triumph of
negative liberty, ACT’s idea of freedom presented a peculiar hybrid
between a positive sense of freedom and its negative opposite. 尽管

Though this argument was originally developed by Saint-Simon, there is no evidence that
the artists and the president referred to him explicitly.

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adopting a functionalist and operationalist rhetoric, ACT never aban-
doned the ideal of radical individualism rooted in the discourses of
classical liberalism, and with it the ideals of negative liberty. 根据
to these ideals, there should be a distinct space for individual freedom
that remains outside of social control. 然而, there was a paradox in
the group’s belief that the idea of negative liberty should be instituted
by the state, through the positive mode of freedom. What seems to be
at stake in both art and politics was a desire to avoid ideological con-
tamination by a bygone age, with modes of thinking and acting that
were supposedly nonideological. This is why the Armenian president
and the young artists of ACT considered liberalism in art and politics
nonideological, while this elimination of ideology was in truth highly
ideological in itself. ACT understood art’s function as assisting the pro-
cess of implementing or imposing the new freedom.

ACT’s voluntary self-instrumentalization on behalf of the state’s
discourses and its simultaneous propagation of radical individualism
was also paradoxical. The extreme self-instrumentalization the group
promoted referred to the Socialist Realist artist’s role as an instrument
for advancing a larger transhistorical ethos, as opposed to the modern-
ist notion of the individual creator. But it also relied on the notion of
self-sufficient methodological individualism and liberal ideals of a free-
speaking subject as an individually participating agent.

This paradox lays at the foundation of yet another paradox,

that of aesthetic autonomy and its simultaneous demise. While in
Armenakyan’s “post-art situation” art’s overprofessionalization would
bring about the ultimate dissolution of art’s autonomy, Kareyan’s “pure
creativity” proposes a foundational aesthetic paradigm that is autono-
mous and yet no longer has clearly defined boundaries. The degree of
self-instrumentalization and the reduction of one’s subjectivity to nar-
rowly confined functions was made explicit in a hand-written note from
early 1994 signed by Vahram Aghasyan: “I see myself as a particle in
the system who examines, discovers, edits, adds and continues. [I am]
someone who possesses alternative, experimental and sanitizing func-
tions.”6 This statement reverberates in a paragraph from Armenakyan’s
文本 (“Post-Art Situation: Logical Syntax”): “The transformations of
ideas throughout time are what guarantee human progress, 和这个
progress is achieved by putting the idea into practice, as well as by the

Vahram Aghasyan, unpublished handwritten note, Mher Azatyan’s archive.

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idea’s materialization and, most importantly, its functionalization.
These operations are carried out by various specialists and speciali-
zations that are particles in the system as a whole and its implemen-
tation and regulation nodes. The thinker, the artist, is thus someone
who reveals and exposes the secrets of reality, who controls and
categorizes them.”7

As opposed to Armenakyan’s version of rigid positivism, Kareyan’s

idea of “pure creativity” provided a philosophy of art to ACT that was
paradoxically based on defining art as an autonomous sphere with its
own internal logic. 最终, the idea was to eliminate the boundaries
of what constitutes art as a historically defined category. For Kareyan,
one of the ways in which pure creativity could be achieved was through
naming the physicality of the medium as a work of art itself. 这是
both a technique and philosophy; as a technique, it allowed Kareyan to
document on a piece of paper the materials he was using for this very
process of documenting. The work of art was thus presented as a lin-
guistically transparent phenomenon. According to the philosophy of art
as developed by Kareyan, the creative process was a calculated opera-
tion of fixing ideas, of framing and displaying them through rational
thought processes.

The imaginary constructed by ACT and Ter-Petrossian—that “real-

ity” was orderly and logical—was a secession from the ever-present
dilemmas of the everyday that included the blockade of Armenia’s two
边界, a humanitarian disaster in the aftermath of an earthquake, A
war with neighboring Azerbaijan, and an economic collapse, 之中
other issues that resulted from the recent cataclysmic social and eco-
nomic transformations the country had undergone. The imaginary of
an already existing rational political and social order had a “reality”
function for the artists’ group of independent Armenia and its first
president. This I call an imaginary realism in both arts and politics; 它
disintegrated when confronted with the actual traumatic conditions of
everyday life and with the problems of daily survival in the face of eco-
nomic hardship, power cuts, cold winters, and the dissolution of the
former Soviet intelligentsia as a privileged class. Perhaps this was the
reason for ACT’s disintegration in 1996 and for the failure of Ter-
Petrossian’s politics, resulting in his resignation in early 1998—two

Hratch Armenakyan, “Post-Art Situation: Logical Syntax” (unpublished, 1995), Nazareth
Karoyan’s archive.

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different but strikingly similar processes. While the group collapsed
in large part because most of the artists could no longer survive in
the harsh economic conditions and had to emigrate to Russia, Ter-
Petrossian resigned due to the insurmountable gap between his own
ideals and the nationalist (“mythological”) sentiments that were afoot
in Armenian society at large.

After Ter-Petrossian left . . . a whole generation of artists, writers,
and activists felt deceived . . . but they were distressed precisely
because they allowed themselves to be deceived; 因为他们
believed [in politics], they started blaming themselves for blurring
the boundaries between art and politics, art and life. And perhaps
this was the reason why many of them, all of them, 弃
激进主义, all kinds of activism.8

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Armenakyan, interview, 一月 23, 2008.
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