STARS OF DAVID OR THE LATE SOVIET UTOPIAS OF NEW LOCALITY
by Vardan Azatyan
This is David Kareyan's second, posthumous visit to New York. In 2002 he was an artist-in-residence at the State University of New York (SUNY) with the ArtsLink international exchange program that brings artists from Eastern Europe to the non-profit institutions of the United States. At the time, he was represented as a performance, video, and installation artist "exploring politics." Today, he is presented as a painter, an art form he was trained in. After returning to Armenia from New York, he gradually abandoned the new mediums and returned to this traditional artform, convinced that a message with global relevance can be addressed at the traditional and local levels. David called this glocal agenda "new locality." The current exhibition at Atamian Hovsepian Curatorial Practice presents David’s paintings created in 2009. Today David is being exhibited through the efforts of this curatorial initiative that strives to provide a platform for Armenian artists in New York. This can be considered a realization of David's idea of a "new locality." He would have been delighted.
As an artist working in non-traditional art forms, David had a "negative program" to reveal the fundamental contradictions of the human condition in their uttermost intensity, in the hope that art would contribute to the development of a more egalitarian society. The painter David offers glimpses of that new society. In the paintings created by this "positive program" the fundamental contradictions have been cleared, and the hexagonal canvases act as prisms that "in the age of cultural globalization, technical revolutions and biological mutilations" give us the opportunity to see "the possible coexistence of the new and the old, the artificial and the natural." The "new locality," then, provides optical devices for the dream of coexistence. In this sense, David's painting is imbued with a powerful utopian impulse. But what kind of utopia does David present to us?
David saw his paintings against the backdrop of Western painting’s complex and old conversation with technical progress. He considered the connection of painting with technological innovations as a guarantee of both the contemporaneity of art and of social progress. Technologies bring their aesthetics; painting digests it with its physical means and participates in the formation of a better social and moral life. David's paintings are the embodiment of this modernist belief. They filter the "digital animations'' created by computer programs through the autonomy of abstract art, the spontaneity of surrealism, and the industrial aesthetics of pop art, turning the technogenic image into "post-digital" materiality. However, David tried, as best he could, to preserve at the material level of the canvas the quality of the clear, bright, and transparent digital image, activated by the emitting screen light. It is these predominantly white luminous images that, David believed, affirm the possibility of a "bright" future for humanity, especially as he sometimes displayed his hexagons by placing neon light bars parallel to their right and left sides. The lights ripped the canvases from the materiality of the wall and turned them into vivid neo-futuristic visions that were conceived as radiant windows into humanity's democratic future.
David aspired to deliver a grand message with his art, a message that would be contemporary and have global significance and resonance. David's art speaks loudly. As if his voice comes from the centers of large nations, which have experienced and continue experiencing, in full force, the blessings and curses of contemporary technological developments. Armenia is not such a nation. But speaking with a loud voice, rising above local and regional realities, proposing a new locality with a global tone is specific to the local, Armenian cultural identity. Being nonlocal is a local Armenian characteristic. But where did the Armenians get such a cultural agenda?
Armenians inherited this agenda from their church, and consider themselves the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity as a state religion (301 AD). With this global leadership, Armenians endowed themselves with the identity of the sole spiritual leader of the region, especially when, after the political division of Armenia in the 5th century, the problem arose of forming the cultural unity for the nation. This unity had to be confirmed by the new faith brought from the West. For the purpose of spreading this faith the Armenian alphabet was created, and the foundation of a great translation movement was laid. As a result, the Armenian Church canonized translators, who, mainly through translations from Greek, sought to radically change the Armenians and the neighboring people, to "translate" them from a local community into a Christian nation, a nation that would miraculously be purified from its material conditions and ways of life in Western Asia. This delocalizing translation culture was simultaneously an agenda of accepting death with joy and courage, a radical culture of being "translated" from the material existence to the heavenly world by the new Western faith.
​​
David Kareyan, Eukharistia 450 ,1999
Video Performanc
Along the Armenians’ path to modernization, this westernizing translation agenda of the Armenian Church was in part taken over by art. This was especi​​ally true with the Stalinist modernization of the Soviet Union during the Cold War: the West, for the anti-Soviet intelligentsia of Soviet Armenia, easily regained its old status as the spiritual lifeline of the Armenian people and the neighboring nations, traditionally endowed by the Armenian Church. With de-Stalinization, when the Iron Curtain became porous and Western “signs of salvation” penetrated into Armenia as well, anti-Sovietism, specific to late Soviet Armenia, was formed. This anti-Soviet Armenian ideology of the late Soviet period sought to redeem Armenia, through art and politics, from the Soviet system, conceived as regressive and authoritarian, by grafting its modern national identity onto the democratic promises of contemporary Western culture. This progressive movement was, at the same time, positively regressive, since it aimed at regaining its old Christian national identity. And just as the medieval Armenian chroniclers presented Armenia as the first Christian nation in the world, in the late 1980s, during the general process of disintegration of the Soviet Union, Armenians presented their anti-Soviet movement with the radicalism of their church as a democratic movement of global importance that started the disintegration of the Soviet system. In this way, independent Armenia became the political embodiment of the late Soviet Armenian dream of national redemption from the locality imposed by the USSR, a dream I call “national modernism.”
​
David's art, with its non-local locality, can be understood only against the backdrop of the westernizing translation culture of the Armenian Church and its late Soviet Armenian development, "national modernism." In fact, David's "new locality" is one of the most striking developments of the post-Soviet anti-Soviet "national modernism" in independent Armenia, and therefore, the artistic embodiment of the Republic of Armenia in its civilizational ideal. So, why show David today? What is the value of getting in touch with the late Soviet Armenian agenda crystallized in his paintings? Apart from the symptomatic value of this "bright" agenda, which makes Armenia a "dark" zone of fierce regional conflicts and keeps the people of Armenia constantly on the brink of destruction, the exhibition of David's paintings should prompt us to ask questions not only about where his utopian prisms lead us, but also what they want to save us from. David's "positive program" has its own archenemy, against which it stands, and which is subject to radical cleansing precisely at the formal level. Purified, it is present in his paintings, revealing the "black soul" of his white canvases.
David Kareyan, Incomplete As Usual, 2009
Oil on canvas, 83x100cm
David's paintings are rich in different shades of color and are not limited to the use of primary or secondary colors. But in this diversity, David obviously avoids the presence of brown. David almost does not step foot on this part of the color gamut, as if he were afraid to be soiled by the scatological implications of brown, which in David’s view refer to the culture and aesthetics specific to animal husbandry. Born in an Armenian village, but "translated" by the westernizing agenda of the Armenian Church, the artist ultimately called this culture – which was close to him and his early works – Õ¡Õ©Õ¡Ö€Õ¡Õ´Õ¡Õ®Õ¸Ö‚Õ¶Õ¡ÕµÕ«Õ¶ (ataramatsoonayin – literally a mix of manure and yogurt). The latter was fundamentally abject for David, especially when it was placed at the basis of modern Armenian identity by the national narratives that gained momentum with Stalinist nationalism, betraying the Soviet project of modernization of the nations of the USSR. Thus, the atavistic and the authoritarian were entwined. For David, this entwinement became an object of sacred purification, whereas in his performances he had unmasked with the same zeal the tensions between the "manure-and-yogurt culture" and the translation agenda of the Armenian Church. In one of his video performances, for example, David, dressed as an Armenian clergyman, used an ax to smash the severed head of a cow on the table. Now, this same churchman, who went against his local culture, is making paintings that are "windows of hope" to a purified, new locality. From this point of view, David's hexagonal prisms appear as guiding stars, "Stars of David," especially since the hexagon is the core of the hexagram, and David created and presented his paintings so that the edge of the hexagon, not the angle, formed its basis. Naturally, these stars of David with missing wings are displayed in the same way at the Atamian Hovsepian gallery.
​
In David’s hexagonal “guiding stars,” therefore, the brown of the “manure-yogurt culture” and the associated regressive Soviet authoritarianism appear in their purged presence. They are bleached by the democratic promises of the technogenic aesthetics of the victorious side of the Cold War. The westernizing translational zeal inherited from the Armenian Church further radicalized the redemptive agenda of the hexagons. Thus, David's paintings are dazzling artistic expressions of late Soviet consciousness. And if this is the value of David's works, then it would be easy to consider them old and outdated from the onset, unless we notice that this late Soviet consciousness is not a thing of the past like the USSR that has given birth to it. Instead, it has upended the entire world with the war in Ukraine. In the context of raging information warfare and the high stakes involved in political side-taking, it is difficult to notice that for the parties of the conflict, the world is essentially defined by the authority of the US-led West as a progressive leader against regressive authoritarianism. If late-Soviet Putin perceives this as an "existential" threat to Russia, with its traditional culture and imperialist politics, late-Soviet Zelenskyy perceives this as a lifeline to get rid of regressive and authoritarian Russian rule. The ideology of the Russo-Ukrainian war is late-Sovietism. David's hexagons are a good opportunity to aesthetically discover the anatomy of this ideology and, therefore, of our present.
Translated from Armenian by Angela Harutyunyan and Tamar Hovsepian
About Vardan Azatyan
Vardan Azatyan (PhD) is an art historian, theorist, and translator. He teaches at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia, where he became Rector in 2024. His work has appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Springerin, and ARTMargins. He is the author of two books and has translated major works of philosophy into Armenian.