Lilit Sargsyan
In the panorama of contemporary art in Armenia and the post-socialist cultural space, Henri Elibekian is such a well-known and significant artist that today there is already a felt need to present his work within the broader context of contemporary art. In the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, he emerged immediately and indisputably as a vivid, extraordinary, contradictory, and multifaceted creative personality. Throughout his entire artistic path he has carried the pathos of innovation and inner revolt as his primary driving force.
Henri Elibekian is not only one of the well-known innovative Armenian “Sixties generation” artists (шестидесятник), but also one of the classics of the Armenian avant-garde. He is a landmark phenomenon. H. Elibekian’s creative path—beginning in the years of the “thaw,” living through both the “stagnation” of the 1970s and the “perestroika” of the 1980s—entered the period of “independence,” thus dividing into two historical phases: Soviet and post-Soviet.
Yet H. Elibekian’s creative restlessness does not allow him to adapt to any era or regime. Negation, which was the spirit of the 1960s even beyond the “Iron Curtain,” becomes, for H. Elibekian and his contemporaries, a creed as both a civic and personal stance. “The ‘Sixties’ that have already become classic in our day are a cultural concept—a collective characterization of an approximately two-decade period.”¹ The lives and creative paths of the rebellious Sixties artists, despite different and often opposing visual imaginations, unfolded in resistance to the officialdom of totalitarian culture, and their only weapon was undeniable talent. “Everything was subordinated to the administrative-command system—exhibitions, the press, and their ‘incomparable’ theorists. Naturally, the new ones had to overcome many barriers to bring the voice of their heart and mind to the public. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, new names appeared in the Armenian fine arts firmament; together with Minas they entered exhibitions with new ideas in color-line and plastic form (the artistic rendering of more complex psychological knots in the relationship between reality and the human being, the widening and deepening of the thematic range, the emergence of modern forms, the adoption of new iconographic systems). Alongside freeing themselves from cliché and turning diverse spheres of life into material for depiction, these artists boldly assimilated the rich stylistic traditions of national art and 20th-century fine art,” writes the Sixties art critic P. Haytayan himself.²
The Elibekian phenomenon is exceptional in the sense that he avoided persecution by the totalitarian regime—although he was not only an innovator (as many Sixties artists were), but also one of the few in the Armenian dissident nationalist-liberal milieu of the 1960s whose plastic thinking had points of contact with the Western avant-garde. Extremely diverse, rich, and deep are the roots of his art, drawing both from the national substratum and from contemporary Euro-American conceptions; distinctive too is the historical-cultural context intertwined with the personal that gave rise to this phenomenon. It is the contemporaneity—the properly artistic, communicative, and ideological qualities—that keeps H. Elibekian’s art afloat in the vortex of post-Soviet upheavals.
The 50th anniversary of the artist’s work is not only his jubilee; it is also the anniversary of the Armenian avant-garde. As early as 1993, Susanna Harutyunyan wrote: “And why do our art historians not accept 1956 as the starting point for the emergence of the Armenian avant-garde? Why not restore the ‘broken link of times,’ why not notice the logical chain from 1956, from Elibekian’s first works, toward the works of the new generation of Armenian avant-gardists?”³ The problem of the “broken link of times” is indeed present and urgent in Armenian cultural reality. However, we consider it inopportune to discuss it here. We are interested in this problem from a positive perspective: H. Elibekian’s work reflects it, as a kind of watershed between eras and a crucible of generational creative destinies. In it, various sources, systems, and elements of modern Armenian and world fine art merge.
The Sixties—an era that became a powerful impetus for the development of art in subsequent decades and provided basic orientations—entered our art history under the sign of innovation. This was a turning point. Broadly speaking, the renewal of artistic language in Armenian art proceeded in two directions. The first was a purely painterly line rooted in post-impressionism and subsequent movements, continuing and transforming the Sarian tradition. Those who belonged to the other path set themselves not merely the task of working the painterly surface. This model seeks to overcome the two-dimensionality of the picture, uses volumetric-constructive and spatial solutions, collage technique, the object environment, thus approaching constructive spatialism (конструктивный спасиализм), the aesthetics of the “thingly” and the absurd. H. Elibekian is a vivid representative of this second direction. It is well known that the introducer of plastic transformations and space-time principles into modern Armenian fine art was Yervand Kochar, whose presence and spirit in the Yerevan artistic milieu served as a powerful impetus and guide for many of our contemporary painters. Especially Henri Elibekian, Ruben and Raffi Adalyan, Rudolf Khachatryan and others most consistently continued Kochar’s spirit-related spatial-plastic searches and experiments. The multifaceted nature of H. Elibekian’s work is interesting in that in certain series two principles merge: the planar and the spatial-plastic.
The historical significance of Sixties innovation for Armenian art also lay in rediscovering and continuing the interrupted searches and achievements of early 20th-century Armenian fine art—searches that, after long cultural isolation, had come very close to European innovations and were involved in the global artistic process, but were cut short by socialist realism. H. Elibekian is one of the artists who, through his work, contributed to restoring the broken chain of Armenian art history. Ruben Angaladyan notes that H. Elibekian “…even if he has a counterpart in 20th-century art, it is Georges Hrashali—Georgy Yakulov.”⁴ This comparison not only illuminates a visual similarity in creative temperament and certain methods, but also affirms a line of inheritance. H. Elibekian’s art transmitted the avant-garde tendencies of two giants of the “Armenian–Russian–European” avant-garde—G. Yakulov and Y. Kochar—into the second phase of modernization of mid-20th-century Armenian art. If early 20th-century “big city” artists Yakulov and Kochar revealed, in various ways, the problems of Western urbanism, then at the threshold of the late 20th century H. Elibekian shifts his searches into another domain: the existential problems of contemporary human beings. His search for a new expressive language serves existential reflections—penetrating psychological insight, transgression, and violent emotionality. These manifest as expression, the suggestive power of color-plasticity, colorfulness, plastic metamorphoses, the stripping bare and “dissection” of form-generating corporeality… “Psychoanalysis absorbs me; I rummage through the human being. My thought rushes forward; my work barely catches up with it. I am an ‘expressionist’; I have no time to plan.”⁵ —this is the painter’s broad and concise formulation of his own creative temperament.
In the plastic solutions of the idea of human alienation, H. Elibekian draws on the methods of Y. Kochar⁶ and P. Picasso. Genre experiments and the search for additional dimensions are expressed especially through fissures in volume or pictorial plane, opened cavities, anatomical transformations, cubist fragmentation of planes, and the self-sufficiency of each viewpoint among many. Further transformations of art forms and the search for new dimensions led, as is known, Kochar to “painting in space,” and Elibekian to the creation of a system of “painting + sculpture in time and space.” Later Elibekian supplemented it with action involving a living model, through which the work captures the fourth dimension—time.⁷ Yakulov’s and Elibekian’s spatial-plastic synthesis, unlike Kochar’s, is connected with theatrical design and design more broadly. The impetuous psychological temperament of Yakulov and Elibekian is the trait that drives the artist toward theater: he is the unique “theater’s” playwright, director, performer, and designer all at once. As in real theater, their distinctive spatial-plastic thinking contributes to the creation of a dynamic environment that, in real space, combines diverse object forms, different planes, and viewpoints. Their Tiflis-Armenian roots, intertwined with the innovations of modern European art, formed a universal “actor-Artist” type. In Waves of Happiness, Telman Zurabyan writes with essayistic lightness about “kintoyakanutyun”—a masquerade-theatrical sensibility prevailing in urban secular culture, which in one way or another influenced all Tiflis-Armenian artists.⁸ By theatricality we mean not only stage design or acting proper. Yes, in his time Yakulov, who collaborated with theater innovators V. Meyerhold and A. Tairov, reformed the entire system of stage construction, transforming the passive two-dimensional background into an active component of stage space, a spatial-plastic equivalent of dramaturgy. Elibekian too—repeatedly addressing in his works and theories the legacy and figures of those great directors who inspired him from the very beginning—deeply understood and continued Yakulov’s discoveries in stage design. “Stage painting assumed ‘directorial powers’: it was the ‘optical directing’ of the performance, or a pictorial spatial formula of its idea.”⁹ The seeds of spectator interaction and the principle of the audience’s direct immersion into an artistically formed environment had already been introduced by Yakulov in his authorial interior project for the Pittoresque café (“The Red Rooster,” 1916–17). In Elibekian’s work, outside the theater proper, that principle is developed even more consistently and conceptually as a distinctive philosophy of life and creation—an interactive synthetism expressible by the formula “life as theater and theater as life,” which blurs the boundary between the reality of life and the reality of art. This is also the point of convergence between the creative impulses of the notable Tiflis-Armenian artist S. Parajanov and H. Elibekian, in the sense that the author’s living action is added to the spatial-plastic dimension. Elibekian is known as one of the first Armenian authors of performances and manifestos. In Parajanov’s actual lifestyle—his meetings and leisure with friends, acquaintances, and artists—one sees an improvised, masquerade-theatricalized inclination toward actions formed with handmade objects and unusual clothing, which he realized as a counteraction to the ban on expressing himself in cinema. In Elibekian’s case, this type of theatricalized activity manifests as a “programmatic” creative principle of organizing concepts. Alongside acting as an aesthetic, allegorical, and psychological category in his art, the conceptual inclusion of real objects and the living model is the key that reveals the unique aesthetics of his synthetic works. Painting objects and living models, pairing them with rags like fantastic costumes, creating new “devices” by combining objects symbolizing former everyday life with scraps and waste—this produces an absurd fireworks display. And most importantly, this kind of creativity involves spontaneous audience participation and improvisation. And not only that: when Elibekian performs his performance, he “puts on the clown’s mask.” It saves him the way childishness saves the child who tells the crowd the truth…
The subconscious sources of this life-giving act of animating objects, as we see in the painter’s article “Our Tragicomic Existence…,” lie in childhood memories.¹¹ It was not only a theatrical “fireworks” that amused, delighted, and frightened the child, the false secular glitter suffering from nostalgia for pre-revolutionary life, the awe-inspiring creative bohemia, but also families’ constant fear of possible persecution, searches, arrests. Parajanov sometimes told of this too, and friends and contemporaries recorded it from his words.¹² One’s own fate and biography expressed allegorically in creation, the invisible hovering of ancestral spirit, the country’s history, the mental combination of past and future as a subconscious foundation—these are constantly present in the art of both Elibekian and Parajanov. From childhood memories also arises not only the object world with applied meaning: in Soviet daily life, the presence of old-fashioned, valuable things was legally prosecuted and acquired the meaning of everyday dissent. This explains the attitude toward the object as a sacred aesthetic substance. The reflections of fleeting Tiflis-Armenian luxury appear, perhaps, in Elibekian’s splendid portraits of women, where he adorns ladies with fantastic hats (portraits of his mother—the prototype of “woman”). Meanwhile, in Parajanov’s art they abound (one cannot help recalling the hats he created). Unlike Parajanov, in Elibekian’s works the object almost no longer has an aesthetic significance in itself, although it contributes to creating a certain aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) atmosphere. It is an existential symbol of the absurdity and drudgery of human existence—its oppression and aggression.
As a result of prolonged study and constant relocations among various faculties in Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Kyiv, Elibekian became a student of the painting faculty at the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theatre at a time when he was already an established Artist. Angaladyan writes that Elibekian “…headlong burst into art (not entered, not leapt, but precisely burst in), as into life.”¹³ The years 1956–66 are Elibekian’s early period. His path begins with works that in Armenian art history became heralds of a new language and a new plastic thinking: the 1956 Composition with Brushes and Perfume Ampoules, the 1966 photo-manifesto Dirty Shoes, and the same year’s series Man in Space. The tragedy of the contemporary human being’s conflictual existence in spiritual and social environments is the main theme of Elibekian’s work and also his personal tragedy. In Armenian art grounded in a positive aesthetics of the spiritual and harmonious and a pantheistic worldview (Martiros Saryan and his school), this was an entirely different mindset. The display of mud-smeared shoes was the young artist’s first loud proclamation, in which mud appears as a general allegory of moral degradation and modern destructive civilization—a motif that runs like a red thread through his entire oeuvre. In Man in Space, Elibekian presents briefly and exhaustively his concept of the Human problem, which is substantiated by his recent words: “The contemporary world is eclectic. The contemporary human being, like art, is entirely made of quotations.” In the allegorical presentation of the human environment in that series, he again turns to the chaos of the object world. A characteristic feature of Elibekian’s series is the replacement of the human figure with things and junk, or the complete absence of the figure, as in the 1977 object Seated Man. The motif of disappearance, alienation, and uselessness is also seen in the so-called 1980 series Soft Sculpture, and it will appear repeatedly later as well, for example in his performance designs (“Love the Human Being,” 2001, and others). The mannequin-like forms evoke the miserable remnants of what once was the integrity of the human “body.”
Unlike other modernists, the search for a new language is not an end in itself for Elibekian. He says: “I create contemporary art with a classical essence,” and his experiments are meant to reveal that essence.
Many authors define Elibekian’s use of objects as the first pop art in our art, based on the 1956 Composition with Brushes and Perfume Ampoules (S. Manukyan, P. Haytayan, K. Mikayelyan, S. Harutyunyan, and others; see the bibliography at the end). This historic work—created by an artist still unfamiliar with that Western post-avant-garde direction—has become a legend. Indeed, it is one of the few of his series where the object appears purely as such, and yet, as S. Manukyan believes, “as an allegory” (“life is a crushed ampoule”).¹⁴ This work lacks the artistic density characteristic of Elibekian’s later plastic compositions. Pop art, whose genealogy is conditioned by specific socio-cultural situations in the West, has gone through several phases of development and transformation and is not homogeneous.¹⁵ In Elibekian’s oeuvre it is played out as yet another “quotation.”¹⁶ To characterize pop art in Elibekian’s work, we have to bypass its etymology: of course, the artist was concerned neither with the “popularization” and “massification” of art (in a totalitarian country, the bodies and methods for that were different), nor with opposition to the dominance of abstract painting, but with a tactic of resisting cultural totalitarianism and a search for an as-yet-unknown expressive language. Nevertheless, the artistic intuition of a creator who conceived a number of unprecedented works for his time and place, the measure of his inner freedom, and the force of his talent are evident. Elibekian’s pop art also includes his 1970 graphics, several sheets of which are presented in this book. In the classical paper collage and in the frottage technique favored by pop artists, unlike relief series, the ready-made appears not as a ready object but as a ready image. As Elibekian’s series grow in volume, they gradually become saturated with artistic processing and painting of objects and background. Especially representative in this regard are works from the large series of his Moscow period (1970–71). Here the artist introduces into the composition not only various objects and materials used by humans, but also scarecrows of ragged birds pecking and tearing at each other (“Composition with Bird and Fabric,” 1970; “Endless Vision,” 1971; “Composition with Chair,” 1971; and others).
The motif of the world’s fluidity, the fragility and transience of the living body, expressed through twitching life-forms, and the allegory of the scream are reflected later as well—in the 2003 series of abstract expressive paintings (“The Butterfly’s Scream”). Somewhat beautified and decorative, these works are painted in a tachiste spirit, with broad brushstrokes and paint splashes and drips. This technique is combined with the sharp star-like forms characteristic of Elibekian’s painting. The painter’s upward sweeping of the hand, the recording of the trace of his gesture on the canvas surface, resonates with the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings. “The Butterfly’s Scream” is the human scream, the artist’s scream. Let us also recall Elibekian’s famous 1980s painting series “Scream in Different Registers.”
In this series of reliefs, works made with fragments of Armenian carpet stand out. Elibekian interprets painful themes of national history in his own way. Employing the postmodern tactic of transforming an original context into another, he expands the ethnocultural symbol of the carpet into a symbol of the tragic history of the Armenian people. An extraordinary work from that series is the 1971 “Flying Carpet,” in which “components that in their original state were passive and static, once drawn into an active painterly environment, acquire new meaning and significance: the carpet, with astonishing lightness, enters spatial environment and breaks away from its base, as if leaving the viewer its living trace…”¹⁷ In rhythmic succession the signs of the pattern-archetype replace one another. Forming a moving chain, they are associated with the walking of people. The movement of the carpet is the movement of a deported people; it is their fateful movement through time and space… In the 1983 installation “Window,” the theme of the Armenian Genocide and deportation is likewise embodied in a generalized, non-narrative, extremely powerful way. The sense of walking, of movement, is present here too. Visually one perceives the silhouette of a man—bent under the weight of burdens—stepping beyond the window into another world…
A transition from planar relief series to three-dimensional objects is represented by Elibekian’s famous “Boxes” (1970–73) and the more voluminous works that preceded them (“The Walker,” 1971; “Composition with Hanger,” 1971). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Elibekian’s plastic work changes fundamentally, turning into pure object (“Seated Man,” 1977; “Composition with Suitcase,” 1980; “Cello,” 1980; “Gas Stove,” 1982) and, somewhat later, into installations. Thus, in Elibekian’s plastic art of the 1970s–80s, installations appear—an entirely new form of contemporary art that becomes widespread in Armenian fine art especially in the 1980s–90s.
Installations differ from objects in their multi-part nature, greater synthetism, and the technology of combining different components. If the object, like any single item, is a closed form, then the installation opens outward, forms space, and often includes the viewer as well. The impact of the object is usually brutal, whereas the installation’s code is revealed gradually, sometimes through chains of associations and through visual and linguistic similarities.
The epigraph to the next section of our article could be Elibekian’s words: “Art is the artist’s self-portrait. A self-portrait is the prediction of one’s own fate.”
The genre of portrait—especially self-portrait—gains particular spread and significance in Soviet and Armenian fine art of the 1960s–70s. The rethinking of the artist’s role in Soviet society also changes the emphases in interpreting his image—from typical, generalized features of the artist as a public figure toward the figure of a person who understands and reflects on his spiritual mission and self-sacrifice.
In Elibekian’s oeuvre, self-portraits represent an intermediate form between object and installation (“Target Self-Portrait,” 1975; “Self-Portrait,” 1978; “Self-Portrait with Nails,” 1979). In expressing psychological depth, Elibekian goes farther in these self-portraits than traditional psychological portraiture allows. Here too, painterly means are combined with object-allegories introduced into the canvas texture and—especially interesting—with his own photograph. They materialize the artist’s self-perceptions: as if through dissection he opens his inner world, deep subconscious experiences, and dramatically intensifies the emotional field of the image. Objects often indirectly symbolize tragic realities of the author’s life: target (a characteristic element in many of his works), nails, cross, a doll’s torn body, a toilet lid. After Minas Avetisyan’s pensive, introverted and Ruben Adalyan’s heroic-romantic self-portraits—symbols of their time—Elibekian’s plastic and painterly self-portraits brought to Armenian art an unprecedented, at times shocking confession.
The portrait-installation type, through combining objects and painting, develops further in a series of portraits of famous cultural figures from 1981–87 (P. Picasso, D. Shostakovich, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov, Komitas, N. Gogol, W. Shakespeare, Arshile Gorky).
To be convinced that Elibekian, as one of the best portraitists, is equally powerful in the realm of full sculpture, it suffices to recall the 1975 tuff-stone “Portrait of Mother.”
By the principle of three-dimensionality, we also attribute to full sculpture the metal and metal-concrete constructions. They differ essentially from works made of more classical materials (tuff, terracotta, or wood). The latter, despite a diversity of planes, are monolithic and complete the figure through a centripetal movement. The form of constructions opens outward; it is more discontinuous and, from different viewpoints, even more varied. Constructions and three-dimensional relief series thrust into the viewer’s imagination with a centrifugal expressive outburst, generating unexpected and diverse associations. In this case, the figure is completed in the viewer’s subconscious, not through a simple direct visual impression, but through a “collage-like” perception.
Elibekian’s painting is executed through diverse methods, techniques, and styles. Mastering the technique of classical multilayer painting, he is capable of unpredictable shifts. The fact that Elibekian is presented first and foremost as a painter speaks to his great contribution to the field of contemporary Armenian painting. If we accept the idea of the artist’s contextuality (involvement in a universally regulated artistic process), then unlike his object-based plastic art, his “presentable” painting—featured in respectable albums, catalogs, and museum exhibitions—is quite contextual within Armenian painting of the 1960s–80s. Elibekian’s 1970s painting, already classic with its juicy color-plasticity, is among the brightest pages of modern Armenian painting. However, we wish to focus the reader’s attention on the artist’s early, lesser-known canvases, which—like his early plastic work—immediately provided the conceptual strategy, the core from which later the main styles, the results of his searches and discoveries, would sprout and branch. We refer to the works “City” (1968), “Houses” (1968–71), “Black Circles in Space” (1969–71), and “Composition with an Eye” (1969–72). “Black Circles in Space” is Elibekian’s painterly experiment toward his “painting + sculpture” plastic system, the condensation of his later important discoveries.
At first glance the modest, monochrome “City” is executed in oil and bronze on paper. It is a remarkable work in that it could be attributed to an experienced abstract minimalist imbued with suprematist searches. Close to it is the graphic “Geometric Composition” made a year earlier. Elibekian’s early geometric experiments manifested in these works took a more formed shape in “Houses”… and were reincarnated in another type of geometry—not strictly analytic but flowing and spreading, where color-light saturation also plays an important role. This foundational work produced the formula of Elibekian’s “geometry,” best stated by the artist himself: “I am not Mondrian. At the base of my abstractions (both geometric and expressive—L.S.) lie real forms and physiological impulses. My formula is geometry + expression.” The artist refers to two sources, two principles—H. Matisse and P. Picasso—of which “the first gave color and plasticity,” while the second gave “structure, power, scrutiny.” Inevitably one recalls the Minas–Kochar type opposition that forms an axis of late 20th-century Armenian art, between which Elibekian’s art rises.
The type of geometric urban landscape introduced in “Houses” Elibekian develops later, particularly in the 2005 series. That series begins with a relatively small (48×48) “Landscape,” in which the painter returns to his classical manner: meticulous surface work and a juicy, multilayer technique. The canvas seems inspired by a sense of the landscape’s cosmic scope. Along the curved horizon line, the composition concentrates space simultaneously from the front and from above. For the painter, this is a generalized perception of Armenia through landscape. The other works in the series—fragmented into colored cubes and rectangles—are the result of a gradual dissolution of the first (repr. nos. 123, 124).
If the early compositions “City” and “Houses,” as noted, produced the formula of Elibekian’s geometric landscape, then the contemporaneous “Composition with an Eye” foretells the expressive style most fully manifested in recent years. The merging and interpenetration of geometric and expressive forms—bringing changes also to the handling of the pictorial surface—is a mysterious process continuing for decades. The pictorial surface becomes increasingly immaterial, spreading across the canvas like clouds, its tremulousness recalling butterfly wings (the series of abstract compositions of 2002 and 2003). Elibekian’s painting of recent years is the crystallization of a bright sacred essence—the reverse side of his own screaming pessimism. It is also the manifestation of precious, purely painterly qualities to which he never betrays.
Elibekian’s oeuvre is an eternal clash—polar artistic solutions, eruptions of inner combative impulses. Alongside the painter’s deep sense of color comes a constructive principle; alongside poeticism—powerful expression… “The Ring” is one of the painter’s monumental formula-works. “The Ring” is also an allegory of the perpetual companion of the creative human being—the collision of the divine and the existential—presented through the “acting” of colors and forms.
2005