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• 1 2024-03-08T16:53:13-08:00 bibliography 4 plain 2024-04-13T17:19:56-07:00 In my final project, I would like to explore the artistic strategies of Vagrich Bakhchanian, a Kharkiv-born conceptualist of Armenian heritage, who emigrated from the USSR to New York in 1974. Currently, I know almost nothing about him, except the fact that he took an active part in the development of the artistic production of the third wave of Russian (Russophone?) emigration. That is why I have not chosen a specific work for the analysis, but I suppose that I will focus on several of his works, made in the period of 1970s-1980s.

  Bibliography:

  1. Elzbieta Tyszkowska-Kasprzak. "«Вся Ввласть сонетам». Деконструкция языка идеологии в творчестве Вагрича Бахчаняна." Przegląd Rusycystyczny, #152, 2015, pp. 63-73.

  Tyszkowska-Kasprzak explores the language of Bakhchinian's poems, aphorisms, and other verbal genres. According to her, the artist manages to discredit and ridicule the official ideology of the socialist regime through the "collage" technique - the transformation of the official cliché language into puns through the combination of newspeak and propaganda images and slogans. The absurdization of the official discourse allows Bakhchinian to deconstruct the myths and central ideas of the state and thus undermine the socialist regime itself.

  2. Daniil Leiderman. "The Strategy of Shimmering in Moscow Conceptualism." Russian Literature, Volumes 96–98, 2018, pp. 51-76.

  This article focuses on the work of D. Prigov, I. Kabakov, E. Bulatov, and A. Monastyrsky. For Leiderman, the distinction between Moscow Conceptualism and Nonconformism is principal. In opposite to nonconformists, the conceptualist uses the technique of "shimmering" - the balancing between two mutually exclusive discourses (the official one and the avant-garde one) so there is no monosemic consolidation of the authoritative artistic voice. I wonder what Bachchanian's place is on that artist's map.

  3. Margarita Tupitsyn. Moscow Vanguard Art: 1922–1992. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

  The central idea of this book is the exploration of how the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s evolved into the nonconformist, underground, experimentative art of the post-Stalin period. Tupitsyn devotes chapters 6 and 7 to the émigré artists in New York, their attempts to blend into the local art community, and the difficulties they were forced to deal with. Among others, Tupitsyn examines the case of Bakhchanian, whose recognition as an outstanding artist was complicated by the Western Cold War ideology (while the works of the West German artist Hans Haacke, who also criticized the institutional formations in a similar artistic form, became extremely popular).

  4. Mikhail Epstein. "Postmodernism, Communism, and Sots-Art." Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. Berghahn Books, 2016, pp. 51-94.

  Formulating the concept of postmodernism in Soviet and Post-Soviet space, Epstein traces its genealogy in eclectism and fragmentarity of both state ideology (communism) and aesthetic program (an eclectic mix of elements from the classical, romantic, realist, and avant-garde (futurist) legacies in socialist realism). Thus, Sots-Art was a product of the socialist aesthetic and ideological program, and closer to the end of this essay, Epstein claims that this artistic movement became even more mature than the socialist realism itself - the sots-art carried with it the "mystery of the coming carnival death and mock crowning of socialism itself." 

  
  Several sources for general understanding of who V. Bakhchanian was:

  • Interview with Bakhchanian and Co.
  • Movie "Вагрич и чёрный квадрат" 
  • Conversation between Valentin Diakonov and Vagrich Bakhchinian 
  • Interview with Bakhchanian - 80 y.o.