InternationalYerevan's weekend art bazaar
by Gregory Lima
Published: Tuesday November 25, 2008
An artist exhibiting at the Yerevan Vernissage is delivering a framed canvas to the buyer’s taxicab. Elina Melikyan
Yerevan - Circling the statue of Martiros Saryan in its park every weekend, rain or shine, sun or snow, you will find a labyrinth of artworks, a fallen rainbow of colorful paintings on canvas.
Framed and unframed. Visitors to Armenia generally prefer the unframed, rolled up to be put in a suitcase. They frequently buy more than one. But they are far outnumbered by local buyers.
This is Yerevan's Vernissage - the French word in local use for the primped up preview of a commercial art show. And quite an outdoor show it has become over the years. The works on display could fill the interior space of a dozen galleries and still bulge and overflow out onto the streets.
The same word, vernissage, is stretched and also used in Yerevan for the huge centrally located flea-market. Some 25 years ago, artists started the art market around the statue of Saryan. Things got out of control in the early 90s, when somebody also came there with his stamp collection for sale, another with silver heirloom cutlery, and still another who seemed ready to sell the shoes off his own feet in those desperate times. By then it was becoming the recycle bin of Yerevan - where you could buy just about anything at all - anything useful in the home or workshop, new or used, on which a price could be put.
The minister of interior under the republic's first president cleared out the park, eventually letting the flea market resume elsewhere, in the park that leads to Ervand Kochar's fine statue of Vartan Mamigonian. The painters made their way back to Saryan's statue.
In that bazaar, the term vernissage implies putting a shine on something, like cleaning up an old pot for resale. Indeed, that other Vernissage is the place to buy old tools, books, and carpets; for a time you could even buy Soviet factories that had been dismantled in a way that even the nails pulled out were now up for sale. That market will soon lose its place, gentrified, neutered in rationalized new space.
Happily, the market in the Saryan Park, focused solely on painters, will remain.
A hodgepodge of styles
In the labyrinth set up weekends around the statue of Saryan you will still be able to come upon a hodgepodge of styles, some of which you may not have expected. Would you expect someone to be painting in the style of the old Dutch masters in 21st-century Armenia? You will not go away with Rembrandt, but what did you expect in oils for $200?
Perhaps there is less surprise when you encounter a would-be Cézanne in a local version of his sweeping view of Mont Sante-Victoire for which here Ararat or Aragats substitutes. Why not? This is a country of high rock and sweeping vistas and Cézanne's positive influence touched every major figure in Armenian art from Saryan himself through Kochar to Arshile Gorky. More surprising is a line of paintings this week whose washed-out dreamscapes suggest Paul Gauguin's questions when he named his mural "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"
With the collapse of the Soviet Union came the liberation of local Armenian art from the strictures that had inhibited experimentation. Everything was now possible. Cubism that had breathed its last gasp fifty years ago in the West was rediscovered. More interesting was a brief revival of the lost revolutionary Russian styles of the lovely Goncharova, Tatlin, Kandinsky, Malevich, and even Rodchenko. But in the absence of authoritative critical expertise outside the academies, the market, whatever there was of it in the desperate early economic conditions of the new republic, became the arbiter of survival. The market, without independent, uncompromised expertise, is not good enough in itself as a guide to excellence.
In the interval several excellent galleries sprang up to augment the museum scene, and knowledgeable exhibition organizers began to create challenges for thematic new work to be exhibited in group shows that have served as a promising new social critique. Opportunities have begun to open up for young curators. The best contemporary artists, for the most part, have been well recognized.
No love for Yerevan's galleries
But at the Vernissage this late November afternoon, talking to the artists who were exhibiting in the chilly autumn air, it would be difficult to discern any love for Yerevan's art galleries. According to Arthur Hovhannisian, a graduate art student who will soon qualify as an art teacher, a problem these artists find with the major galleries is that they demand an exclusive contract with various terms and conditions. One of the least conditions is that they typically inhibit private sale - specifically that their artists do not exhibit here.
Here, however, he implied, is where an artist with the right stuff can make a living. He doesn't need a gallery's tenuous connections to deeper pockets in Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, or New York.
That called for a closer look at what he had to offer. I liked it. For a change, these were paintings about the subject rather than about the artist's own sensibilities. His was a style that offered philosophical clarity. As a teacher I could imagine him instructing his students in Orwell's dictum: "To see what is in front of your nose needs constant struggle." As an artist his essays in objective clarity were encouraging.
Across from him was a painter who barely exhibited at all. He was an accomplished artist for hire. It seemed to me that an artist working directly to the taste of his patron is an idea whose time has definitely come again in the new wide world where people have personal trainers, chefs, and interior decorators. He offered three examples of his work, each well executed: a portrait, a still life, and a landscape. He will make what you want to your specifications to fit your space, use colors to harmonize with your décor, and even put the number of stars you may want in your own starry sky, as your personal Van Gogh. He also was affordably priced. He would do an oil portrait guaranteed to look like you for $200 to $300.
