xelovnebis saerTaSoriso Jurnali - Artisterium

Nathaniel McBride
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ART AND RISK
Guram Tsibakhashvili ‘Playing Boys’, from the series ‘Definitions’, pencil,
aniline, technical photo sensitive paper.
I was in Georgia a little over two weeks, a period that barely qualifies one to speak on any aspect of its visual arts, and least of all to
a readership that is likely to know far more about the subject than I do. In view of this a purely descriptive survey seems pointless,
but a comparison between the British and Georgian art scenes – which also occurred to me - equally so, given that the two are,
or so at least I think, too different to be meaningfully compared. Instead I plan to concentrate on a single theme – of defining
what seems to me conspicuous by its absence in Georgian art - and on a very few artists, beginning with the photographer Guram
Tsibakhashvili (born 1960). For Tsibakhashvili’s work seems somehow representative in that it appears to register most clearly
wider developments in Georgian art over the last two decades, of which I believe three distinct moments can be identified: one of
cautious optimism in the late 1980s (coinciding with the Neo-Expressionism of the Tenth Floor Group), sudden and precipitous
disillusionment in the mid to late 1990s (coinciding with the rise of conceptual art), and gradual accommodation to the new
reality in the early 2000s (where performance rapidly becomes the dominant form). Admittedly not every artist follows this
progression: the work of Mamuka Japharidze (born 1962), for example, might be said to have remained throughout this period
cautiously (or even not so cautiously) optimistic, concerned as it is with themes of transcendence and revelation, while that of
Oleg Timchenko (born 1956) has stayed stubbornly and deeply disillusioned, his sinister, imperious Velasquezian dwarfs bearing
witness to his conviction that art’s greatest works are all in the past, and we are now reduced to parodying them in degraded
idiom of kitsch. But I believe such a progression does provide the pattern of a general trend along which the work of others may
be plotted, and in so doing something of the present situation defined.
Thus Tsibakhashvili’s series Ulysses (1989), which placed photographs of Tbilisi taken on long and apparently aimless wanderings
around the city alongside short excerpts from Joyce’s novel, might be said to represent the moment of cautious optimism. The
oblique and somewhat mysterious relation between the novel’s text and the images of a dilapidated urban landscape produces
a sense of immanent meaning, as if, hidden behind a crumbling everyday reality, some inconceivably new one were waiting to
break out. Joyce’s text is surely as crucial here as the images themselves, drawing as it does unexpected but obviously pertinent
parallels between the colonial capital that was Dublin in 1904 and the one that was Tbilisi in 1989.
His next work, Definitions (1997-8 and 2001), again places images alongside text, but they now signal the destruction of this
optimism and the emergence of a condition of generalized disillusionment. The series is composed mainly of found photographs
taken from an anonymous family album of the 1950s and 60s, from each of which a Barthesian punctum – a key, a hat, a propeller
– has been picked out and its name written beneath the image, followed by its dictionary definition. Thus a lexicographical text
replaces a literary one, substituting for the open resonances and possibilities of Joyce’s novel the closed tautologies of the
dictionary. This closing off of hermeneutic space, which re-routes meaning from image to text and back into image again in a
deadening circularity, stands for the moment when, just as reality seemed poised to transform itself into something utterly new,
it collapsed back into itself with a crushing literalness.
Finally Masks (2004) marks a new departure: the exploration of just one part of this new, disenchanted reality. Here colour
film has replaced black and white, and the textual accompaniment been abandoned; the images no longer stand in need of
commentary for they no longer hide nor obscure anything, rather the hidden element in the picture – the subjects’ faces – is
now contained within the picture itself. Thus the images are no longer searching for nor trying to reveal, as the older series did,