What is wrong with modern art, and why is Artour Oshakantsi unique? By Professor H I Pilikian
Classical painting always produced Meaning and Beauty, in contrast to Modern Art which can be meaningless, pointless, and a deliberate act of the conscious cult of the Ugly – Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal (1917) labelled Fountain, which obviously some modernists who love gay lavatory humour consider it to be ... beautiful and inversely exciting.
Oshakantsi’s paintings restore Meaning and true Beauty in the ugly scene of the modernist British art; Damien Hirst’s death-obsessed dead animals, Tracy Emin’s filthy sex-bed, Chris Ofili’s prettified huge elephant-dung droppings... Artour Oshakantsi would surrender his art to none of those stupidities merely to gain recognition at London’s Tate Modern. The New York Metropolitan Museum’s powerful affirmation of his work is acknowledgment enough for him.
Even Oshakantsi’s own Blue Period (reminiscent of Picasso’s Depression-filled Jazz concept) is mixed with lively optimistic life-enhancing Red-and-Pink, and the different tonalities (like musical variations) of the Red Flag texture (Nos. 16-19 Armenia Series, henceforth abbreviated as AS). In Oshakantsi, it all begins with Armenia’s Soviet flag (01 AS) being pierced through with life’s black-and-white Chess-board, forming a cross with a pale pink absent Jesus.
Oshakantsi is a serious major artist in the category of the modern greats, unlike the ridiculous jokers above. Oshakantsi’s paintings are embedded within and narrate the history of his people, a very ancient one – perhaps the very first hominims of the planet – a rich story, infinitely complex, and itself endless.
It is virtually impossible to date precisely Artour Oshakantsi’s oil paintings – and therein hangs a tale – ironically, the date of the purchase of a painting by a client can be regarded as its final seal. Well-aware of Artour’s perfectionism, I have witnessed a painting start as a vague, almost watercolour wash, gradually over time, frequently years, evolve into being an erotic trinity of musical instruments shaped like ‘womanly’ violins, becoming a religious ‘Artouresque’ icon, then a triptych of Birth, Crucifixion and Resurrection (Nos. 18-20, London Series, henceforth abbreviated as LS) all drenched in life-giving blood. Never forget that Artour has grown up, discovered his manhood and defined his self-identity under the Red Flag now dead in the water, but equally ambiguous in its glory days of Stalinist paranoia, for the several hundred million of the multi-ethnic Soviet citizenry nowadays thrown to the blinding winds of Mafia-Capitalism – a new evolutionary form based on scam banking and insurance frauds...
The red texture of Oshakantsi’s triptych-blood is the same, although 18 LS may be the heart you see otherwise of Mother-and-Son (Mary/Jesus) exposed to the faithful for their exclusive delectation within the frame of Catholic iconography – the pictures printed for mass-consumption by the Catholic churches everywhere – inversely and unwittingly erotic; Oshakantsi’s Crucifixion (19 LS) simultaneously symbolizes a massive holy mons veneris...
No painter of my knowledge has rendered Resurrection (20 LS – daringly, the beautiful, nurturing, life-giving breasts of the Holy Mother) as a part and parcel of the theme of Crucifixion – it speaks volumes of Oshakantsi’s ‘Armenian’ national characteristic to reject Tragedy, dejected pessimism and hopelessness, fend for life and Regeneration at all times; the features of a much massacred nation that had the courage of converting first in history to the new revolutionary monotheistic religion of Christianity (in 301 AD) with King-and- Country – an act of immense risk-taking (no modern ... Banker can match!) that guaranteed the Armenian people’s survival as a nation in an ocean of polytheistic pagan cultures, although the heavy price paid for it was incalculable destruction of its millennial old pagan culture.
Kill an Armenian, and his blood (like that of Jesus and Oshakantsi’s paintings) will regenerate, come alive again and bring life with it to the other genocided fellow nations. Approximately 2000 German officers that had commanded the Ottoman Army, and witnessed first-hand the genocide of the Armenians by their military allies during the First World War, later became the hierarchy of the Nazi genociders of the Jews.
The Ottoman Turks were determined to spill all of the blood the Armenians contained, and their descendents in today’s Turkey are shocked that 3 million of their people contain the spilt blood of ... Oshakantsi’s Triptych! Everyday, some new Turks discover that the grannies they knew and loved as children were actually Armenian... terrified of their fascist genociders; they had whispered their true identity only on their deathbeds to their parents.
The Armenian people have sanctified the composer Komitas. German-educated, he was well-known to the German musical circles, who could snatch him out of the Ottoman death-marches – but unfortunately, he had already witnessed the genocide first-hand and lost his mind; Oshakantsi paints him with deep creative ambiguity, eyes shut (blinded? 12 AS). An unbearably tortured soul, Komitas died in a Paris hospice after another decade; Oshakantsi paints him also as a deteriorated skull (13 AS), with smatterings of broken musical notes...
Influences on his work? Most certainly – no man is an island unto himself – Oshakantsi stands on the shoulders of giants like Arshile Gorky, Martiross Sarian, and Minass Avetissian, all classical masters of Armenian Painting.
16 LS, Refugees is a major masterpiece. Oshakantsi is able to transcend – as in all of his paintings, remarkably consistently, always, without an exception – the thematic boundaries of his chosen subject and reach the heights of universalism, then to subtend profundities of its humanism; his religious icons (11 LS, 07 AS, 08 AS, 09 AS) while tackling the theme of the Holy Family, are equilaterally about the holiness of the human family; his Armenian genocide series, mourns the misery and tragedy of all genocides irrespective of skin colour and religion (15 LS has undoubted echoes of Picasso’s Guernica).
The semi comical, because grotesque portrait of the Refugee in 16 AS – definitely another masterpiece – with a cancerous tongue (because of starvation and dehydration in the Syrian desert of Der elZor where the Ottoman death-marches were dispatched), with a cowboy hat or is it ... Mexican, carries not only the famous hooked nose of the Caucasian type (Armenians and Jews alike) but also the ancient ... Sumerians and Assyrians (compare with their mural portraits in the British Museum); this pathetic ridiculous ruin of humanity becomes ALL humanity suffering under and because of imperialist greed for the resources of the genocided nations ... Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Syria turned into rabbles of rock and stone, once peaceful infrastructures of beautiful homes, now exploded into smithereens of biblical Satanic evil.
I know that 16 LS (the original of the iconographic variation of 12 LS, equally a major masterpiece) evolved out of a faded black-and-white photograph of Armenian refugees in a refuge in Aleppo gathered around for a poor-man’s meal from a communal plate placed in the centre. Aleppo (the second city of Syria) was the end station of the Ottoman genocidal trail of 1915, and today, even now this very moment is being bombarded by inhuman arms-dealers to total destruction.
The plate at the foreground of Oshakantsi’s painting is as much the beggar’s plate of the homeless sleeping rough in the streets of London to the greatest shame of the City of London (the international Bankers’ Mile) that boasts several hundred trillion (not million/billion) pounds worth of financial transactions every day of every year. Capitalism does not have to be so totally inhuman, which imperialist mafia-capitalism has become. Surely the State of Singapore could serve as the ideal model for a capitalism with some human decencies.
Here is the link to the images related to the passages above: Click here to view Artour Oshakantsi - A Journey From Armenia To London |
A lay person’s analysis on Artour Oshakantsi ‘A Journey from Armenia to London’ as introduced in Professor Pilikian’s meticulously observed Analysis when writing.
...This takes me back to my 'A' level art...Who was it Duchamp? [Correct me if I am wrong] had a moment of enlightenment when sat in a railway carriage looking out at the view when suddenly it was interrupted by a telegraph pole, he noted the frequency and its foreshortening with each interruption. The pole furthest away were smaller than the preceding , this gave depth and distance to the vista. He counted the frequency and found the gaps almost the same in seconds. But his urinal was a political statement.
I do like Pilikian’s opening gambit on His piece, ‘What is wrong with modern art, and why is Artour Oshakantsi unique?’I hope to publish it very soon!
Now that it is published you too can comment below this post and in your
own words have your say too!
Mean while I would like to add:
I agree, abstract is more ambiguous, unclear and one wonders, ponders even, over the work. But then Art
has a different meaning from one observes to another, as they run their critical eye over each stroke of
the paint brush, shape and form of which ever structure. Be it a painting, sculpture or any installation.
I don't know about you but the images from Armenia are far more reminiscent of
Biblical usage and influence...
It also reminds me of my cousin's work... Sevan Malikyan.
We Armenian's are, I feel embroiled with iconic works and have this in built imagery
of stain glass work - where everything we paint has black lines round it...
At this stage I want to introduce Sevan Malikyan who is also Armenian and a painter his works can be interpreted from scriptures in the Bible and they do remind me of iconic imagery of church stain glass windows of a more modern space built in less exuberant style, reflecting lives of the area in which the Church was build. These modern mammoths in simple white washed walls and simple seating arrangements are just the right backdrop to hang modern works of Art. Is it a church or a modern Gallery! A place to sit watch and ponder or just to sit and contemplate? You choose!
Seta
1 comment:
Dear Mr. Pilikian:
I read your diatribe against modern art. Frankly, I would neither defend the artists you don’t like nor criticize the artist you like. These lines do not concern them. Please feel free to purchase as many paintings of Oshakantsi as you like – and I wish him the best -, and leave all of the works of the artists you apparently don’t like to the museums; you probably can’t afford them anyhow. The problem with your article is that you only express your likes and dislikes, and you don’t hesitate to make your subjective taste in art a standard for artistic judgment.
You start your article with a premise: “Classical painting always produced Meaning and Beauty, in contrast to Modern Art which can be meaningless, pointless and a deliberate act of the conscious cult of the Ugly,” then you attack among other works those of such “jokers” as Marcel Duchamp and Damien Hirst, mentioned as examples of meaningless ugliness. I don’t know what you mean by “classical art” or “modern art” because these are terms that reference specific periods in art history; in your mind however, the term “classical” seems to designate only the art you like (in your view Gorky and Saryan are classical artists) and hence, non-classical or modern would be any art you don’t like. But you don’t stop there, you also attack Tate Modern, the museum as a whole, which in your opinion houses stupidities. You state with a hint of despise: “Artour Oshakantsi would surrender his art to none of those stupidities merely to gain recognition at London’s Tate Modern.” It seems that the grudge you have against Tate Modern is the fact that the Tate curators do not share your opinion that Oshakantsi “is a serious major artist in the category of modern greats” as you claim.
You list Oshakantsi’s artistic references and you mention Picasso’s blue period which is well over a century old, Saryan, who died - artistically speaking - in the mid 1930’s, Gorky, who died in 1948, 65 years ago. You are unable to give any references to contemporaneous artists, probacly because you believe they are all stupid jokers. In order to show the meaningfulness of Ashakantsi’s art, you go on to mention Church iconography, Armenian history, the Ottomans, genocide victims, pessimism versus optimism, that are all concepts extrinsic to the visual arts. An artwork acquires meaning – artistically - when it represents a stance in any given socio-cultural context. A work of art needs its historical justification. You write: “It is impossible to date precisely Artour Oshakantsi’s oil painting,” because they are all works in progress. I have seen many of Oshakantsi’s paintings here and there on the internet. Perhaps you cannot date them precisely, but I can: they all predate his birth.
Anto Patanian
Artist
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