InternationalDiscovering the new Cafesjian Center for the Arts
Published: Friday November 27, 2009 in Cafesjian Center for the Arts
Between galleries, a visitor to the Cafesjian Center for the Art may refresh his or her palate with a view of the formal sculpture gardens and the city of Yerevan. Grigor Hakobyan
Yerevan - The first time I came to Armenia was four years ago, in the summer of 2005. In my first few days in Yerevan, I remember being surprised by how modern it was. I think the only pictures I had seen were from my Armenian middle-school textbooks, likely printed in the 80s, if not earlier; and pictures of the dramatic events that made it into the world news.
I was travelling with a friend, and one of the first things we did in the city was to go to the Cascade. We climbed it using both the outside steps and the indoor escalators. I enjoyed being periodically surprised by the slim hare sculptures [by Barry Flanagan] arranged throughout the ascending Cascade, as if while this mysterious project was under construction, full of closed-off rooms and empty spaces, the hares had made the structure their playground, and a place to practice their ballet-like athletics.
This was before the Botero pieces, and before the sculpture zoo that surfaced in the park leading to the Cascade.
Now, four years later, I'm living in Yerevan and the Cascade is no longer a tourist attraction for me; it's a part of the city that I use to give or more likely receive directions on where to go, and sometimes scale if I need to get to the northern part of the city. So, it was exciting for me to see the transformation of the Cascade from an architectural curiosity and city landmark into a center for the arts and an active venue for contemporary art not only from Armenia but from all over the world.
The Tate Modern
In September I was in London and went to the Tate Modern for the first time. There's something about these institutional-type projects whose goal is displaying every popular movement in art of the last 100 or so years that both overwhelms and bores me. These places are truly museums, at least in the sense Robert Smithson uses when he talks about museums as both graveyards and commercial enterprises seeking to sell you a stale identity through which you can build yourself out of someone else's ideas.
Anyway, I tried to rush through the art-history course, going from floor to floor, looking for pieces I hadn't seen before and artists I liked, even if I'd seen them before in a million other museums. But overall I found the rooms cramped and a little claustrophobic; one gallery was given to a sculpture of a giant table and chairs by Robert Therrien, which takes up the entire room. I like this piece. I've seen it before at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles; only there it was in a much bigger, airier room and was in proximity to other similar artists' works that were given a simpler presentation. At the Tate, rather than comparing the size of the table with myself, or normal tables, or the walls, mostly I was thinking about how annoying it must have been to get the sculpture into the room by going up multiple floors, winding its bulky pieces through the previous rooms, and then after all that, giant as it is, it disappears in the clutter of a thousand ideas that follow you in from the surrounding rooms.
A different world
The Cafesjian Center for the Arts, on the other hand, will never have these problems. The space came predefined as colossal. The few galleries that don't have a huge window nearby from which light streams in, with a spectacular view of the city looking out, are the smaller galleries you step into from the outdoor spaces midway up the Cascade. After considering the art in these galleries, forgetting where you are, you step back outside and the whole city opens up to you again, and at your elevation you see the tiny people at the bottom entering the museum, just beginning the same experience.
The layout of the center, taking you up escalators and down elevators to get to your desired gallery, helps to isolate the theme of each room, so that I was able to think about the pieces I saw before me in a quiet setting. One of my favorite galleries is the Sasuntsi Davit Hall, which currently concentrates on the art of Libenský Brychtová, displaying eight of this artist-couple's sculptures. The broad window pulls in natural light and directs it onto these glass sculptures so that their deep shades of color seem to illuminate from within. With their piece the 3V (Victory) Column, after I looked for different ways to make out the three letter Vs in these clear pieces of glass, I positioned myself on all sides of the sculpture, which stands in the middle of the room, and found a thousand perspectives from which to view the other sculptures, the people in the room with me, and my own reflection, while contemplating the connotations of these symbolic pieces.
For me, a small collection is always more interesting than the decade-spanning arrangements of artists' work that are often shown at big venues. With the display of a small collection, I can think about each individual piece and then see how it rhymes with the pieces around me, rather than trying to grasp the long, supposedly coherent narratives that are induced while walking through hall after hall of an artist's career. This is true of the Arshile Gorky gallery, a modest collection which concentrates on his early works and contains sketches for later paintings. Or I could spend an hour or more in Khanjyan Hall reading into Grigor Khanjyan's giant triptych painting, the only painting in the room, and think about Armenia; then turn around and look out the window and remember I'm in the center of Yerevan.
The heart of the city
Khanjyan's painting, which is in the lower center of the Cascade, is placed in its gallery as if seated on the Cascade as a throne; it makes me feel that the Cafesjian Center itself, and the art it contains, is a natural product of the city it's in, in some ways, rather than being a storehouse of the artistic movements that are preferred by the Western world. The experience of the center is part of the experience of this city. Besides the fact that the Cascade will take you from one part of Yerevan to another, walking through the gardens you might also wind up on one of the quiet streets of Yerevan, the ones that hide behind busy Mashtots Avenue or Isahakyan, where we pick up our busses and marshrutkas and fly away, and find that it's worth it to stroll around there too.
