Armenian

ARTHUR SARKISSIAN: PAINTING TOWARD SYNTHESIS
By Peter Frank

Among the many dialectics pervading the discourse of modern (and especially contemporary – or, if you would, post-modern) art, one of the most persistent is that between the authentic and the mediated. In this dialectic the purpose, the content, the message of art is defined either as real, direct, immediate experience (or the search therefore) or as received, modulated, socially and technically prefigured and predigested comprehension (or the analysis thereof). The argument between these two conditions of perception can seem to swing back and forth, favoring one and then the other. The abstract expressionists in 1950s New York and the neo-expressionists in 1980s Germany, for example, believed art manifested a firsthand account of life, and was to be as forcefully palpable as life itself, while the Pop artists of the 1960s and the appropriationists of the later `80s, both operating in several art centers at once, posited an art that reflected a world of acculturation and manipulation.
Even putting aside questions of interior and exterior critique, however, we can understand these movements, and others, as essays in an ongoing struggle to accept all experience as real and as mediated – that is, that the translation of experience into art is just that, translation, and that all communication, art or otherwise, depends upon the mediation of experience between communicator and recipient. Cognition, you might say, takes place at the mouth of Plato’s cave.
This is the message that underlies Arthur Sarkissian’s oeuvre. In Sarkissian’s paintings what-is-known meets what-is-felt within the bounds of the picture plane. What is “felt” – embodied in Sarkissian’s painterly gestures and rich coloration – maintains its integrity, and what is “known” – concretized in the images Sarkissian finds in mass media and transfers to the heart of his artworks – continues to evince its source in widely disseminated formats such as newspapers and books. But despite this obvious polarity, Sarkissian effects a remarkably easy and unstrained flow between the felt and the known, between raw brushstroke and transferred image. Each element becomes not just a foil, but a partner, for the other. A passage lifted (not literally, as in collage, but photographically, through silkscreen) from an art history textbook or illuminated manuscript or magazine still “reports” its information, but becomes at the same time a factor in a larger composition, enmeshed in painterly incident. Meanwhile, without losing the passion invested in it by Sarkissian’s hand, such painterly incident is ordered into a certain rational structure, one that echoes the lexical coherence that photographic imagery promulgates. Sarkissian’s paintings are at once wholes and sums of parts, and they “talk” to us in several visual languages at once.
Such a polyglot, polysemic art is hardly unique to Sarkissian. We see his style anticipated by Robert Rauschenberg, and before him Kurt Schwitters. We even see its textures and practices, as well as philosophical positions, reflected in the work of such disparate predecessors as Warhol, Cornell, Miro, Malevich, and, of course, Picasso. Among other things, Sarkissian demonstrates that the “collage aesthetic” – the simultaneously disjunctive and conjunctive qualities that uniquely define modern composition – remains one of 20th century art’s most significant and enduring legacies. Indeed, this collage aesthetic provides the perceptual crucible in which the dialectic described above is forged, and it defines the particular visual world in which Sarkissian finds his expression.
Above all, Sarkissian’s is an art of transition, a demonstration of the flow of human experience from the felt to the known, from the intuited to the studied, and back again. What is felt is itself important, and so is what is known – and we must note Sarkissian’s preoccupation with architectural structures, art-historical artifacts, and the visual record of various histories, in particular that of the Armenian people. From one vantage, Sarkissian’s oeuvre can certainly be seen as an examination of the relationship between his cultural heritages, Caucasian and European. It is not the particulars of this relationship, cultural or sociological, that provide the true substance of Sarkissian’s art, however, but its very nature as a relationship, that is, as a moment of transition. Does this ongoing “moment” take place in real time and space, across seas and centuries? Certainly. But more importantly, it takes place metaphysically in Sarkissian’s mind and heart, as well as in those of his fellow Armenians (and for that matter, Georgians, Azeris, and even Russians). Europe may give way to Asia in the Caucasus, but what Sarkissian paints is Europe and Asia giving way to one another in his soul.
The Caucasus has been a region of transition from time immemorial, its peoples subject to the passage of others through their realms, to subjection to foreign rule and foreign modes, to the destruction of cultural patrimony, and even to conflict among themselves. Conversely, however emotionally tied they may be to their rough patch of Eurasian soil, the Armenians have proven themselves adept at wandering, at integrating themselves into – and even making themselves indispensable to – foreign societies without losing their own identity. Transition is a given condition in Armenian consciousness, grasped even by those (like Sarkissian himself) who have never lived outside Armenia. For Armenians, transition is a stable condition, a dependably unceasing process of modulation. As the saying goes, the only constant is change.
The moods that play across Sarkissian’s paintings, with their variegated forms and mixed messages, can change as abruptly as the weather on the steppe. Just as he can transit from manual gesture to photographic document, his imagery can fluctuate in mood from lighthearted and sweet to grave and ominous, from fluid and beautiful to stark and coarse. The shifts between tonalities can be more dramatic than the tonalities themselves. This, again, is no inconsistency, nor even an expression of instability, but a manifestation of the condition(s) of change, a confounding of expectation, a sometimes-virtuosic display of different kinds – not just different levels – of passion. The mediated photographic imagery Sarkissian appropriates, after all, is no less imbued with his passion than are his vigorous, often volcanic passages of abstract brushwork. It is the passion of Sarkissian’s curiosity, his embrace of the world, that prompts him to introduce photographic imagery into his paintings. And, in turn, the abstract painting Sarkissian realizes as the basis of his style is no less reasoned than is his choice of photographs to silkscreen; as volatile as his painting method may seem, its spontaneity, while hardly self-conscious, is formally circumspect. The rightness of a particular passage, its apparent harmony with the rest of the painting, results from a process of consideration as measured as that which undergirds Sarkissian’s use of photo-images. Passionate as his works are, they result from a predetermination of image and gesture. Much rapid decision-making shapes Sarkissian’s tableaux, but blind reckoning and impulsive inclusion figure at best superficially into their making.
Many levels of dialectical opposition thus pertain in Sarkissian’s painting. How it is conceived and how it is fabricated, how it looks and how it “reads,” what it contains and what it means, who it speaks for and how it speaks for him and/or them – all these polarities and more determine the work’s compelling vitality. Elegant and raw, chaotic and lucid, expansive and deliberate, the art of Arthur Sarkissian does not so much resolve a universe of opposites as flourish in its balance.