Lilit Sargsyan
Recently, our compatriot, the renowned artist and vivid personality, Armenian Sixties avant-gardist Henry Elibekyan made a “pilgrimage” from Moscow to Yerevan. He was full of determination, armed with inexhaustible creative, physical, and spiritual energy, in order to realize yet another project. Elibekyan not only presented his statement (action), but also—despite the dull mood of Yerevan and the bad weather—managed to organize a gathering imbued with the spirit of “better days.” The warm atmosphere also carried a “programmatic” meaning: the artist’s project was dedicated to Love and Humanism.
An essential feature of the concept was the transformation of his personal studio-laboratory into a gallery, an exhibition space, and a stage situated on the same level as the audience. This project was a search for an exit, the artist’s distinctive response to social and cultural stagnation. After all, the Artist needs air just as much as external life-giving impulses—communication, constant renewal—as well as the means to realize ideas. The studio acquired a ritual-symbolic meaning, becoming a realm of communication and spirituality.
As follows from the exhibition announcement, “the project consisted of four object-installations.” The first object was “Ironing,” the second “Caressing a Human Being” (four parts: a video sequence, a photo sequence, the “Triple Bunk Bed” installation, and vocals), the third object “Formulas on Cuffs” (two parts: the installation “Einstein and His Shirts” and a statement), and the fourth object the statement “Loving Humanity.” This, perhaps, is the project’s “record.” Yet to describe Elibekyan’s works or merely list their titles is tantamount to saying nothing at all. Everything visible here is symbolism and allegory—often born paradoxically in the artist’s imagination and demanding interpretation, which the author undertook with considerable thoroughness.
Visitors to Elibekyan’s exhibition immediately notice, in a recessed niche, something comfortably and neatly arranged, carefully covered with polyethylene film. Here is the iron—the main core-symbol of the concept. It turns out to be an unrecognizable table of an iron wrapped in worn linen and rags. Upon it emerges a female half-face cut from an icon-like poster, from which fleeting erotic symbols can also be discerned… Barely perceptible stylistic associations mentally transport us to the turn of the century, to the “modern” style, expressed through the pink curls of the poster imagery, enveloping whiteness, translucency, delicacy, and mystery—although logically one might expect a less spiritualized and more ornate pop art. Its presence is felt more strongly in other installations, for example, in the “carousel” of rotating shirts, in heaps of staircases covered with photographs, or in another installation where the symbol of the iron is again played out: here is a kind of overturned “bedroom,” with linens pulled from drawers and scattered across the floor. If you look closely, you will see that these are rag scarecrows of human figures, with legs made of transparent bottles and painted faces expressing suffering. They seem either to be falling from the drawers or hanging from them. These rag effigies create a striking impression of real suffering and pain. The unexpected method of their construction is undoubtedly symbolic as well: people are made from trash—literally from nothing, from useless rags. Even the emptiness of the bottle-legs hanging helplessly from the drawers is filled with refuse.
Live mannequin-characters are constant companions in Elibekyan’s work. The motivation for their use lies not only in the search for modernist means of expression and new dimensions of art, but also in the relationship between art and reality.
Like embryos in a womb, two living characters dressed in white crouched inside crates, their faces bandaged. During the performance, they literally ironed one another with an iron that, in this case, functioned as a sadistic instrument.
Thus, the action unfolds around the multi-layered allegory of the iron. In the wordplay “ironing – caressing,” the meaning of “to iron” shifts to that of “to caress.” The semantic and visual sequence—literally coinciding with notions of the “soiled,” the “absurd,” the “empty,” the “torn,” the “shredded,” the “burned”—gives rise to associative sensations that are realized only later. The allegory is revealed.
Undoubtedly, the innovation of avant-garde art lies not only in linguistic transformations—which have brought about a radical turn in the traditional structure of art—but also in its mission to express the extremes of its time. This is what makes it possible to consider the two projects united by Elibekyan as one. We are speaking of the component of this statement dedicated to great physicists. The author deliberately singles out A. Alikhanian, whom he knew personally and who supported the arts. Science, derived from the laws of nature and serving humanity’s well-being, in its development also leads to ecological crises and gives birth to deadly weapons. The abuse of nature and scientific achievements, technologization, alienates people from one another and from nature. Elibekyan’s concept addresses the extreme manifestations of human existence. His vision-images symbolizing humanity are invariably dramatic, fragmented, distorted, absurd. Yet from another perspective, Elibekyan is able to present any idea, any concept in an impressive, unexpected, and unique way—freely combining diverse objects within new contexts. He never forgets the aesthetic quality of a work, even when the “aesthetic” bears a negative sign. Much has been said and written about his artistic talent. Here, “Einstein’s illustrated shirts” hang on a rotating device; invited physicists decorate the author’s and the models’ gowns with formulas. And at that very moment, a new concept is born: to use formulas as new symbolic visual means that have already lost their original meaning, yet are not devoid of a certain aesthetic content.
Although Elibekyan’s art is directly connected to the modernist system of form creation, as the artist himself defines it, his “art carries classical content,” which restrains him from futurist radical aspirations toward constructing the future.