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“Madison Avenue” on an escalator by Gregory Lima YEREVAN – When Yerevan’s new Cafesjian Center for the Arts was still more a diagram than a reality, and taking one escalator after another, moving level by level to the high point over the city while wondering what Gerard Cafesjian was attempting to achieve here, it seemed what he sought was a Madison Avenue on an escalator, a traffic-busy, elegant avenue of top-notch art galleries. The galleries are now open, and with them much more. A popular, open space has been re-created to become attractive as a center to an unusually wide public. It now invites active participation in an expanding variety of the arts at no, or little cost, and at various levels of interest, including just strolling by in the fragrance of the flowers and the sound of the splashing water. The gallery spaces may also serve as lecture halls, becoming, as in the opening days, available for discourse on fresh approaches to the arts, or introductions to cross-cultural celebrities. They also may serve as concert salons and film discussion theaters, while each of the many levels of the Cascade structure offers continued opportunities to grow the size of the sculpture park. When one thinks of creative further use for the many related outdoor spaces, they lend themselves to competition to create winning designs among artists and artisans for bold, experimental, organic compositions with local materials in each level’s own garden, and if there is a need to create further excitement, they can serve as multiple stages for new concepts in performance art. With the opening days came the first of promised formal discourses on art in our times. Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic of the New York Times, holder of one of the most influential and prestigious jobs in the art world, was to give a talk in English. Tickets were quickly sold out and he would talk before a full house. A graceful writer deeply grounded in his chosen subject and with persuasive eloquence at the podium, he talked of meaningful art and its relationship to culture. At the packed Khanjyan Hall, the acoustics needed more tweaking, and comprehension was very difficult for an eager audience mainly of young people with English as a second or third language. Kimmelman bemoaned the fact that he went to Yerevan’s National Art Gallery for two days running and was the only visitor, even though it was the weekend. Yerevantsis, the New York Times chief art critic concluded, are not gallery goers. They were at the new center in the tens of thousands, however. And yet, because of the language and the acoustics, even with so many people present, he was alone again, or almost. It would be a shame to have missed the originality of his perspective. It can be found in his bestselling book, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. Kimmelman in the Khanjyan Gallery started his discourse on his approach to the art of our times with a photographer’s approach to an unremarkable event as he walks a city. The photographer notices something that makes him stop to look more closely. From what he sees, he creates what may be called “an accidental masterpiece,” although this photographer was predisposed to creating masterpieces. With the photograph projected for us to see, he explains that the photographer has noticed a bare wall from which posters have been stripped. The residue of the glue has left smudges and traces on the otherwise blank wall. Before the wall a young child plays with a ball. When the child tosses the ball in the air, the child waits with a happy face, alive with expectation of catching the ball as it descends. He takes the picture when the ball is out of the frame. We see only the wall and the child. The result is an undisputed masterpiece. A beautiful child is looking skyward with great, engaging expectation against a confusing background of abstract shapes that suggests whatever we wish to read into it. It is virtually impossible to see this without a personal reaction, creating your own interpretation of where the child is and what the child is seeing that is making it so happy. The photograph is by Henri Cartier-Bresson and is a treasured classic. Kimmelmann is suggesting that art is where you find it, and you as spectator become participant, helping to define and create it. He suggests art calls for your participation inside the frame of the visible, to which you must engage with your own experience, sensitivity, and imagination. Of necessity it involves “the art of seeing well” both to make art and to enjoy art, and if the skill does not come naturally to you, “fortunately it can be learned.” With a photograph of an earthquake in a small town in Italy, he went on to describe how art belongs to a whole Michael Kimmelman, author of The Accidental Masterpiece, speaking at Khanjyan Hall. Photos: Mkhitar Khachatryan. people and it may be surprising what they value most. This is a town that boasted a genuine Giotto. But with the earthquake, the town flocked with far deeper immediate concern for the work of a local artist with whom their identity was far more intimately expressed and defined. He showed a painting in strong colors with Chagall-like floating figures of a wedded pair above a tree of life. It was done by gypsies, Roma, in Hungary. He found this painting and a similar group of work not only original in its expression of social values but also culturally significant. The Roma have a difficult time all over Europe. They are regarded as outsiders who may not be trusted. They have learned that the way to warmer acceptance, even inclusion, is to show that they have a vivid, well-developed culture that is on a highly civilized level. A people define themselves in the way they live their art and how they bring the values they cherish into their lives. As he went on with his discourse, although he didn’t say so, it emerged that it can help if you have someone to talk to, especially someone with whom you can make connections, sharing and exploring your reactions and thoughts. This came to mind when Kimmelman brought up the reclusive artist Michael Heizer, showing a photograph of what seemed an unremarkable and basically uninteresting trench in a desert landscape. Here, Father Dennis Deese, r., president of St Thomas University and a member of the Cafesjian Family Foundation, in the audience for Michael Kimmelman’s talk. imagination is everything, and you need one the size of the whole American southwest. Heizer, he stated, created a sensation with a new kind of sculpture, a kind of sculpture of absence. The artist called it “negative sculpture,” – the space left behind after digging. The space left after digging a trench or a foxhole may offer artistic possibilities in the way it captures and shapes light, but at this point we may be the grave-diggers of art itself. Upstairs, four levels higher on the escalators, the challenging notion of space and light is brilliantly handled with audacious and technically difficult solutions in the exquisite art of Libenský Brychtová. Using glass as their artistic medium, this husband-andwife team captured light in space in ways that have fundamentally enriched modern sculpture. They have contrived to add to surface definition of form a fresh, luminous inner space. Unlike an empty hole and a ton of hype, or a mere transparency, they have created something entirely new in the art of sculpture. They have found a way to begin to express the soul within darkness, ephemeral, space within space, filled with spectrally expressive forms, responsive to the moment and the season. Returning attention to Kimmelman, he tells us that Michael Heizer, as might be expected, rather rapidly left the empty holes to others. He began spending the next 30 years of his life in a survivalist mode in a remote section of Nevada on a Continued on page C13 m C12 Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture | November 14, 2009
Opening ceremonies of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts in the Special Events Auditorium. From left, Cleo Cafesjian, Karekin II, President Serge Sargsyan, Gerard L. Cafesjian, the interpreter (Artashes Emin), and Bagrat Sargsyan. Photo: Mkhitar Khachatryan. Special Events Auditorium Located at the top level of the Cascade, the Special Events Auditorium offers a spectacular panorama of Yerevan and Mount Ararat beyond. This stunning space, designed with the audiophile in mind, offers the city’s premier venue for listening to the best in classical, jazz, and pop music. In addition, the Auditorium hosts the Center’s First Thursday Wine Tastings as well as lectures and film festivals. Every Sunday afternoon, you can view rare classic films at the Auditorium including present-day blockbusters, documentaries, biographical and art-inspired films. Every Friday and Saturday, the Special Events Auditorium will be featuring live classical, jazz, rock, and pop music. f Composer and jazzman Stepan Shakaryan will be performing at the Special Events Auditorium during the month of November at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts., Photo: German Avagyan. “Madison Avenue” on an escalator n Continued from page C12 vast, private acreage he bought for a pittance, building a monumental earth work with shoveled earth reaching high up from the ground, untold, gargantuan tons of it. It is, at the time of the illustration, an unfinished artwork with private meaning. Kimmelman gives us what he informs us is a rare glimpse of what the artist is up to. Private passions that others may not understand but which demand a lifetime of dedicated labor must earn our respect, sometimes our unabashed awe. Three flights of soaring escalators higher will bring us to Eagle Garden Hall and to one of the most popular galleries. It is called “In the Mind of the Collector.” Among the objects and art works on display in this offthe-mainstream gallery, you find a 28-foot model of a ship created to scale with remarkable veracity and workmanship, also needing the larger part of a lifetime of meticulous labor for a visionary to complete. The ship was built inside a small apartment, needing the full cramped space of two rooms after the wall had been knocked down. The engineer whose vision it was did it only for the love of what he was doing, living with it closer than a wife, night and day, years yielding to decades. Can the creator of this accurate replica of a ship be called an artist? If a man makes an accurate replica of a face in two dimensions it is called a portrait, in three dimensions in the round it is a bust, but if it is a ship he replicates, it is only a model with the status of a toy. This one is no toy. There must be a qualitative difference. It must relate to what constitutes art as a work of the imagination. Art lives in a realm that seeks much more than mere replica. Kimmelman would be able to define it. But he was in the realm of negative sculpture. We are left to ourselves. By some serendipitous turn of events, this was a model of the ship Gerard Cafesjian served on in the Pacific in World War II. It had deep personal meaning, and as such it found a home in the collection. In a sense, the whole enterprise of the Center for the Arts began to resemble the ship as a work of passion with personal meaning. Within the edifice there is art great and small. Kimmelman came and went. We must examine what we have here, up and down these escalators, for ourselves. In doing that and “seeing well”, we make it our own. Making it our own is the priceless legacy the collector offers us on this escalated avenue of artful dreams. f Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture | November 14, 2009 C13
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