National Art Gallery

By Shmavon Azatyan

National Art Gallery tells the story of an embittered young art critic, Gerald, who wants to purge the post-Soviet Armenian fine arts from 'badness'. Gerald believes artists should start their career with learning about the classics and then produce works drawn on virtue and tastefulness. Gerald's narrative hinges on his judgmental and censorious voice, as the young art critic tells about the visual arts in post-Soviet Armenia. Although Gerald justifies his penchant for filtering the Armenian fine arts, setting standards, and opening a discussion for art critics to openly express their views on works of art, he blunders into logical fallacy and turns into a fallacious critic. Many artists and art scholars reject his ideas, and this leads to conflict. Disappointed in his pursuit, Gerald finds solace in Ida, a female philologist who is captivated by his stern views on art and becomes his moral support in the effort to create a public space for professional art criticism. But even Ida can't help when a KGB agent forbids Gerald from criticizing his father's paintings.
Frustrated in his endeavours and weary of his platonic relationship with Ida, Gerald is about to give up his quest when he meets Hrach, a painter who is willing to cover his back. Will Gerald's new cohort help him to surmount the blocks and obstructions put in his way by the conservative artists and academics? Is he even on the right path, and is he aware of the high stakes if he loses his battle?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purcell Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781647137434

Shmavon Azatyan

Shmavon Azatyan writes fiction and screenplay, as well as poetry. He holds a PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences from La Trobe University. Shmavon's short stories, essays and poems appear in many countries. Shmavon's research interest resides in narrative, fiction and film, and in the narrativity of space. Shmavon's fiction output appears in New London Writers, (a short story 'Let's Talk' 2012), in Masque&Spectacle, (a short story 'Death Episodes' 2017), Fiction and Non-Fiction anthology 1999-2018, Van Aryan, 2018.

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SHMAVON AZATYAN

National Art Gallery

First published by Purcell Press 2019

Copyright © 2019 by Shmavon Azatyan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Shmavon Azatyan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-64713-743-4

To my mother

Haikuhie Manvelyan

Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

About the Author

Foreword

The Cultural Politics of National Art Gallery

The word nostalgia signifies the yearning for the past, but its Greek roots indicate ache or pain, as well as homecom- ing. For Armenians, who have watched their nation’s borders recede after periods of Byzantine, Persian, Ottoman, and then Russian rule when Armenian land was allocated to Azerbaijan, the nostalgic homecoming is deeply associated with the return and re-establishment of nationhood. For Armenians today, the sense of loss is pervasive. Turkey, to this day, refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide led by the Ottomans in 1915. Then, as recently as spring 2017, Azerbaijan gained more territory during the Four-Day War related to continued border disputes.

Nostalgia for culture and nationhood becomes one of the main themes of National Art Gallery. The characters long for the return of their home nation as they once knew it or once imagined it, while the conflicts over cultural identity play out in the Yerevan art scene of the mid-to-late 1990s.

Gerald, the narrator, is a bitter art critic whose objective is to push art, particularly painting, toward a distinctly Arme- nian, yet evolving, aesthetic influenced by the Soviet Fine Arts School. To do so, he attempts to beat the artists of Yerevan

into submission. For Gerald, the use of language is a violent act. He speaks of using criticism to blow their work to pieces with language grenades. He also imagines women with such delicate constitutions that they are easily bruised not only by vulgar language but simply by the use of slang.

One might see Gerald as another academic brute. He is not a likeable character. He is stubborn, dismissive, and mean. His anger and violent rhetoric are off-putting and might seem unfounded for readers who may not be able to empathize with his ambitions for a national art movement. Indeed, Gerald’s vision may seem as blindly nationalistic as some of the art he despises, and he certainly doesn’t seem to see, or care about, the political nuance of his arguments. He wants to change a democratic evolution of arts to a style that meets his own authoritarian requirements.

In other words, Gerald is perhaps more Soviet than he realizes. In a series of personal conflicts, one artist calls him a spiritual dictator and another brings his KGB son to make veiled threats. Perhaps it takes one former-Soviet citizen to know how to deal with another former-Soviet citizen.

The aesthetic model Gerald demands is rigid, and he is par- ticular about what he considers appropriate artistic influences. He has a sense of patriotism, evidenced by his need to push Armenian painting into the realm of great art, but he is not in- terested in unthinking, uncritical patriotic art. Simply returning to ancient Armenian tropes, the symbols and subjects of epics and legends, is not enough. But while he claims to want a unique Armenian painting with little to no influence from Western post- modern art, he refuses to let go of the Russian influence. He was never a fan of simplistic Soviet propaganda, but he adores the Soviet Fine Arts School.

For Gerald, a good artist is a classically-trained artist who knows how to innovate. At least that’s what he says. Yet, he, the premier Yerevan art critic, can think of no good artists off the top of his head. His vision of a good artist is too particular, and not always connected to art. He imagines someone over the age of 50, a former-Soviet painter who was critically acclaimed in Soviet times. What he imagines is a relic of the past. Gerald simply cannot see good work coming from a young, untrained artist. Implied is the notion that he cannot see good work coming from an Armenian disconnected from the Soviet Union. Perhaps it isn’t even clear to Gerald himself that one of his main arguments is that good Armenian art is always a little bit Russian.

Because no one creates work that fits his vision of fine art, it should be no surprise that he has no allies in the Yerevan art world. Few artists like having demands thrust upon them, but Gerald must inevitably suffer, regardless of his behavior. He suffers because nostalgia is a sort of damnation. One will suffer and ache because the homecoming is never possible. Not even Odysseus gets to return to an unchanged Penelope. As Heraclitus reminds us when he says one can’t step into the same river twice, neither can one step into the same home twice, and Gerald will never step into another Soviet Armenia. Failure to realize that only leads to continued suffering in a futile quest.

But Gerald also suffers alone because his nostalgia, like any nostalgia, is a personal ache. It is the individual engagement with the myth of the past, rooted in personal feeling and memories. We may share the feeling of nostalgia with others, but individual longing is our own and we must feel it alone. Eventually, even the one good painter Gerald hopes to enlist for his cause disappoints him.