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| I lived in the USSR for 30 years but realized its real existence only after its breakdown. Which means that I did not live in it but rather in my own sensorial world which only God and I were aware of. I still do not understand those conversations about the difference between nations and the Armenians being a nation of worldwide historical importance. Later, after having lived for 7 years in France, I returned to Armenia. The country where I was born and grew up did not exist anymore. I felt like a tourist discovering a new country and new people. Everything had changed; I had changed too, but my constant world was always with me: it followed me everywhere. It turned out that I was born and I had grown up in the Soviet Union, but had never lived in it. I do not know if this phenomenon affects others. I used to wear a Pioneer tie but I was never a Young Pioneer; I used to give bribes while shopping but did not know I was bribing; passing through the main place of the city during a May Day I was just moving from one point to another. Which means that such a country does not exist and that in 1993 I left neither the remains of an imaginary Soviet Union nor the quickly made up Armenian Republic: I left my missed unity with people who wanted to live and communicate with each other in the Armenian way of life, which had been strange to me from earliest childhood. The artist is a special plant: the phenomenon of mimicry does not extend to him. External conditions only accelerate or slow down his growth. For the artist, art is the best way to understand reality because only art preserves the form of an emotional experience in social life. As a sharply perceiving individual, he is a stranger to the collective consciousness, which explains the gap between collective perception and his production: his production is made as a transformation of individual consciousness. As an artist, can I consider myself to be a social singularity? Is there a social border in my consciousness? Why does social communication bring suffering and feelings of unhappiness where there is no culprit? Social frameworks imposed on the artist are less oppressive than ethnic, national and traditional ones. The latter restrict personal freedom in one’s life choices and thinking: they become the police of free self-expression.Carl Andre has noticed: “Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us.” In order to simplify and make it accessible for all, art is turned into culture. Armenians do not manage to make a decision: being between the West and the East, Armenia is like a tree with roots extending towards the East leaves reaching towards the West. Sometimes these leaves fall down and the branches, as the logical continuation of roots, are stripped bare of their true origin. The genetic code contained in blood actively participates in the creative process, defining the temperament and the thermo-chromatic nature of the work. It is the strongest link connecting me as a person and as an artist with Armenia and Armenians. People are constantly looking to belong to a culture, a nation and a homeland, a phenomenon which leads to a total disappearance of the reality of individual existence. As for my own experience, this research led me to discover the real Me, beyond all sociopolitical, national-geographical conventions. Spiritual values have no similar classifications. This is entirely another platform: God and soul. Their communication is beyond social links; they are purely personal relations based on an unconditional love and full devotion. God cannot be Armenian, Jewish, or French. After coming to understand one’s true essence, one cannot continue to have any feelings of national identity. Only at such a level is social reality transformed to perfect personal harmony between people and all existence. The cause of all of our worries is our broken communication with the Absolute; however, one searches for other reasons naively thinking that the material accomplishment will bring the peace to the whole world. Actually, one forgets that envy, avidity, anger, laziness and arrogance destroy every day our universal harmony. Attachment to one’s body is the single force behind all our illusory activity. Thirst for power and glory is the goal of the weak. These are expressed in the accumulation of human labour, in money. In artworks, the artist’s experience and meaning of life are present. That is why artworks are the most expensive objects on earth. On earth, but not in the sky. Before my departure from Armenia the director of the cultural centre where I used to teach told me as a goodbye : «... Leave, it is also a way to preserve the Armenian culture». These words were a great relief. I have often asked myself: did I Achot Achot or did I simply go to live in France? Most likely neither. The reasons were a desire for moral freedom and moral noninterferencewith one’s private life, both of which were always absent in Soviet Armenia and remain so |
in the post-Soviet system. Artas an invisible balsam softens and cures the wounds of the soul. It is not able to carry out administrative, social, or political functions: in so doing it would cease to be art and would be another activity. As spiritual activity, art is directed towards the soul, towards its study, and towards the restoration of love, as its very best quality. What we today call contemporary art is nothing but the carrier of ideology of the state. The contemporary art dictatorship is very similar to the dictatorship of socialist realism expressed through the praise of the socialist system and the cult of personality. Contemporary art does the same, but under pretexts such as the protection of the environment, of nonviolence, of human rights, etc. Institutions finance such projects, but after two or three short years these burst like soap bubbles. Because an artist making such work doesn’t live the life he preaches in the end the result is always: «Consume better, consume more». Such institutions have continued to feed "elites", when there is no necessity for a reinforcement of the ideology of consumption: the products of consumption themselves already accomplish this function.Today one has the impression that the Armenian people, throughout their existence, dreamt only to fill up their stomachs and to drive the smartest cars. Such mentality is very strange to me and it is this which violently pushed me out from this environment which is opposite to the nature of human love. It is difficult and almost impossible to live there where anything subtle and sublime is trodden for the sake of the Armenian way of life and happiness: «I live well because you live badly». «Love your neighbour» is replaced by a more "biblical" «humiliate your neighbour». It was the typical position of a “respectable person” during the Soviet period. It is still the same in this era of wildly developing capitalism. In my own case mimicry did not work either in the homeland or abroad. Society kills personal relations with an ideology of continuous economic development and consumption at the highest level. Finally, man is not necessary to anybody: neither in his homeland nor in a foreign land. He is the one who needs them for the protection of his little personal freedom. Both the homeland and the foreign land are of the same essence: human congestion on mother earth. People move on it and create new states, calling them homelands. But to whom belongs the homeland? If I can easily leave my homeland, do I not belong to it and it does not need me? I think, most likely it is the case that it sends me to foreign lands for its own rescue... All our geographical movements are linked with the search for freedom, which exists only in our personal dictionary. The rest is a matter of history, that misleading science. Freedom and the right to be oneself are inherent to high civilization. In European countries this freedom and this right are present on a platform of moderate or well controllable egotism. In the Armenian child, egotism is cultivated from birth; then, as a teenager, he is sure that he is the best in the world. He who, because of education and an open consciousness does not think like this, accepts a similar protective position: “I am like everybody but slightly better”. One of the important values of a high civilization is compassion. It is a sign of spiritual progress and of a healthy society. Compassion can be reached by disinterested execution of a duty. In the Vedic concept of the perfect society it is said: «The King should sacrifice his personal interests for the sake of family interests, family interests for the sake of state interests, state interests for the sake of his people’s interests and his people’s for the sake of interests of the whole of humanity».Each nation writes its own history and the history of the others, taking into account such values as justice, honor, freedom, love for one’s neighbor... but from a position of national interest, without understanding that such values cannot be national. I have never liked history and never trusted it. From "historical" considerations people have come to hate other people, and have inflated their own vanity and arrogance. The same history justifies violence and revenge, proceeding as always from national interests. History is written by personal ambitions fed by a collective consciousness. With people as well as with animals and plants mimicry is an instinct of self-preservation. I do not require this instinct, it is only an imaginary defense, it is one of the most direct forms of exploitation of man by man. True protection of the person comes from above and is not influenced by social, or ethnic, or personal cataclysms. This is the protection that moves me in time and space. |
