The Utopia of a Cut-out King: Karen Sargsyan
We agreed to meet in a specific space at the Rijksakademie, which Karen Sargsyan, who was born in 1973 in Jerevan, Armenia, is temporarily using to build a large new installation for the academy’s 2007 Open Ateliers. In the space is a large, round white platform, on which six life-size paper dolls seem to be dancing at the gates of Hades, in strange rite of passage whose origins we do not recognize. These beings all have the same mask-like countenance – so characteristic of Sargsyan’s work. In the middle of the scene, on a pedestal, one figure towers high above all the others. He has been hit square in the chest by several arrows. It is a dramatic spectacle, for although the arrows are of paper, they still seem to have bored right into the ‘flesh’ of their target. And there are other less than cheerful aspects of what at first seems like a clownish carnival procession. Between the figures, as they circle around a central axis, lies a brown, wolflike animal, chewing on a head. Scattered on the floor are more objects, which look like brushes or candles, masks, or just common utensils. What makes the real impression is how human the paper figures seem to us. They have been constructed, like straw dolls, from several layers of paper. All the characters stand frozen in their poses, but we can only imagine it as a fleeting moment. Snap your fingers and they will come to life, step down from their platform and march in procession through the Rijksakademie. ‘I will turn it on,’ says Karen Sargsyan, and the little group comes to life. The platform turns like a carousel, with the sound of Chinese children’s songs in the background. The paper figures are built on ‘skeletons’ of steel wire, letting them gently surge and bob around a central point, flapping their arms and legs. They are now literally in motion, but because of their highly suggestive, dancing poses, it seems an addition that is hardly even necessary. The clothes they flaunt, hanging in layers around their bodies, are frayed, chewed up, eaten away. They might be costumes from long-gone ages, with puffy balloon trousers and sleeves, high rolled collars, head ornaments, frilled skirts, capes and loose, draped pieces of fabric. These, and such accessories as plumes on a hat or a brush in a hand, cause each figure to move quite differently. They parade around as if they had been completely aware of their audience right from the start. If their movements are sometimes contorted, they are always theatrical.
Innocence
Beside the round platform is a rostrum, with a microphone, empty and silent. For whom does it wait? The rostrum reminds me of a speech given by the Italian cabaret performer, Beppe Grillo, in Rome, on the Vaffanculo Day (fuck-off day), which he organized. That day, Grillo managed to mobilize thousands of Italians. His web log attracts hundreds of thousands. ‘Italian Politics held Hostage by a Comedian’, read the newspaper headlines: by Grillo, the poseur, the troublemaker, the ultimate representative of the anti-establishment. The impotence of politics: is that what the out-of-place rostrum implies? Sargsyan does not like to talk about his work. His answers to my questions were short, softly spoken. He preferred to let me do the telling. ‘What story do you see in it?’ he asked me. I mentioned potential connections to the work, rephrased my questions, tried to learn something about his life in Armenia, but for the purposes of our conversation, it seemed that his life only began when he was accepted at the Rijksakademie. He sketched only a summary picture for me of what went before. In Jerevan, where he was born, Karen Sargsyan spent a few weeks at an art school, but could not find his feet. ‘I couldn’t do anything with what they were teaching there. I didn’t think it was interesting. It was no good.’ He subsequently attended a school for sports, then worked teaching sports (he later mentioned that his knowledge of anatomy was very useful) and as a boxer. He came to the Netherlands in 1998 because of political tensions and poor living conditions in Armenia. His sister had already been here for three years. Sargsyan spent his first years in the Netherlands in a centre for asylum seekers, where he again took up drawing and painting. ‘I was mostly doing things at the level of semi-professional art clubs, until somebody advised me to apply to the Rijksakademie.’ Although Armenian folk art does have a tradition in the making of paper dolls, Sargsyan says that he is not referring to traditions or art from Armenia, although he realizes that, in terms of figuration and technical refinement, he must have picked up something from them. Sargsyan is the epitome of the autodidact, someone who follows his feelings in all he does. He does not have a lot of contact with the other artists at the Rijksakademie and is even less inclined to mention the names of artists, writers or musicians (in addition to movement, he has added music to his most recent work) who have inspired him. He found the Chinese children’s songs that provide background music for his most recent sculpture on the internet, where he was looking for something without a copyright. It was just coincidence, but it also reflects the same innocence that he was looking for in the children’s songs. The only fellow artist he mentioned to me was Folkert de Jong: ‘It’s nice that he exists and that I have gotten to know him. Our work is related, but it is also totally different. The way I work is more philosophical. I try to present a certain condition of the soul.’
Theatre Inside Theatre
‘For the king of theatre, King Lear, the world is made up of a life-threatening stairway, with steep wooden steps leading from hell to heaven. For another, it is the other way around, from heaven down to hell. The kingdom of the other old ‘king’ looks like a room just after a party; the empty champagne bottles are still lying around, coloured streamers and flags flutter from the ceiling and here and there are scattered globes of the Earth, casually lying about.’[1] I read this quote in a newspaper, after my conversation with Sargsyan. Kester Freriks was describing two different productions of Shakespeare’s King Lear. But all I could picture in my mind were the sculptures of Sargsyan, his heaven and hell, all those objects strewn around the floor, objects whose bright colours evoke a room where a carnival parade has just passed through. I see his characters as actors in a theatre, in their fairy-tale transcendence to heaven, or their terrible descent into perdition.The reference to theatre is no coincidence. Human Behaviour, with which Sargsyan won the 2007 Thieme Award, is comprised of a group of two figures standing on a round platform, with a kind of viewing box on wheels in front of it. Inside the box is a tiny theatre, with three smaller, ‘dancing’ characters. The whole thing is accompanied by music by Mozart. The installation, Insantation: History of a Sect, Don’t Go Inside, Don’t Touch (2007) was literally constructed as a stage set, as a theatre. Sargsyan’s studio at the Rijksakademie is filled to the brim with paper dolls, large and small. The walls are hung with paper objects. Objects are littered about, apparently randomly, all over the floor. It is a complete paper universe, yet one we are not permitted to enter. Paper poles bearing paper cords bar the entrance, and it is from there that we can watch the performance. Looking closely, we see that this work also includes another material, in addition to paper. It is clay. There are several small artefacts made of clay dispersed around the floor, some of them unrecognizable bric-a-brac, some in the form of a door handle, handcuffs, a hook and so on. They are what remains of the work with which Sargsyan was accepted to the Rijksakademie. He had created small, technically refined sculptures by pressing all kinds of objects and technical paraphernalia into clay, leaving it unfired and building up ‘still lifes’ from the impressions, in a way that objects and beings fuse and melt together. Sargsyan saw and still sees this as a symbolic interpretation of the multilayered complexity of the influence that society exerts on individuals. Each person is a product of his or her social and cultural environment, the philosophy that underlies it, its norms, habits and conventions. This process of forming and being formed found a literal translation in these works in clay.[2] At the Rijksakademie, Sargsyan began searching for a way to express this process as if it were theatre, a grand opera of life. To this end, he experimented with photography, which in 2006, he combined with clay and paper in Rehearsal. We see a photograph of a stage set, built to scale, peopled with paper masks and small figures, between which lie the clay artefacts. From there, the step was quickly made to his ‘real life’ installations with paper characters, including Insantation: History of a Sect, Don’t Go Inside, Don’t Touch. To quote his web log, ‘I look at the influences that affect people the same way that I look at a theatrical production. On the one hand, I want my work to reflect this play or game, but I also want to show the reduction and the purification. My work is not a static image. It shows an active process that expresses this ‘cleaning up’. My installations are a play in which the protagonists try to wipe ‘the factories’ off the playing field, as if the protagonists were holy beings in a theatrical production. This is why the objects made of clay are already reduced, as it were, to archaeological artefacts.’ [3]What would humanity be like if we were capable of extricating ourselves from conditioning, from being bound by environment and society? If such a ‘true’ person were to emerge, how would he look back on previous generations? Sargsyan asks big questions. He explained to me that the large paper dolls in Insantation: History of a Sect, Don’t Go Inside, Don’t Touch represent the gods, the small dolls people. The paper brooms and pail they are bandying about symbolize the process of purification.
Tiny Souls and Hidden Saints
There is a world of ideas underlying Sargsyan’s work, one that is hard to get a grip on, yet very particular. It is a world of good and evil, represented by gods that are not real gods, but beings that represent the pure and the good, and that lead people in a process of purification. There are unmistakable hints of Nietzsche in this process. In his theory of Untermensch und Übermensch, Nietzsche described how 19th-century mankind, thrown off course by decadence and nihilism, needed to undergo a kind of purification, and to that end had to divest himself of religion and moral ideals – which he described as masks of selfishness, power mongering and resentment. Nietzsche wanted to free people, to allow them the ability to independently create their own values. The transcendent, the godlike, can be found in mankind, and mankind is able to transcend itself. For Sargsyan, this existentialist search for the true and good core of humanity is fundamental, and god and man (the large and small figures) are two sides of the same coin.In this sense, both in terms of content and in terms of attention to craftsmanship and handwork, Sargsyan’s work fits into today’s longing for the romantic, for nostalgia. To quote the Christian Nagel Gallery, in the framework of KölnShow 2, ‘Silence, timelessness and fragmented nostalgia characterize the three-dimensional paper installations of Karen Sargsyan. (…) The installations serve as an open podium for ideas that refer to collective memories. The theme of the work is unmistakably the discord between culture and nature. At the same time, the ideal of paradise is far away.’[4] Romanticism in art is characterized by a large measure of individualism, irrationalism and an emphasis on the power of expression, emotion and our relationship to nature. It was romanticism that led to a revival of craftsmanship and folk art. Sargsyan claims not to be interested in styles or trends. Recent art history, modernism, postmodernism and countless schools and theories have all passed him by, and with them a great deal of cynicism and irony. His Armenian background means that for him, it is self-evident that he should seek deeper values in the human condition, for which he reaches back to essential stereotypes and imagination, of the kind stored in our collective memory. His work transcends the sensitivity to fashion that is inherent to nostalgia and the romantic because it casts itself on a broad palette of associations and references. Sargsyan creates almost classical sculptural groups, but overturns the idea of the static monument by using exceedingly fragile materials, such as paper and unfired clay. They are materials that in turn instantly recall the oldest of ways with which human civilization was passed down: paper from the Bible and the clay that formed the earliest images of man.There is a baroque exultation to Sargsyan’s monumentality, but by mixing that with theatrical elements, there are more new associations, this time with the tableau vivant. These ‘living paintings’ were especially popular among the 18th and 19th-century working classes, for festival evenings and political gatherings. Unmoving, costumed people would stand in symbolic arrangements, with props providing a decor. The scenes were arranged behind closed curtains. When everyone was in the right position, the curtains would open and the audience could look, for a maximum of about two minutes. Tableaux vivants often expressed social issues and presented an ideal solution: this is reality, but this is how it should be. This is equally true in Sargsyan’s case, albeit that he makes a conscious masquerade of reality. As he once poignantly phrased it on his web log, ‘The idea behind my work is utopian, and in that sense, it is theatrical as well. This way of working winks an eye at the performance of my work and creates, as it were, a theatre within a theatre.’
Ingrid Commandeur
