Ter-Oganian: Exercises with Arts and Life
Dimitry Topolsky
launched in 1988 with an exhibition mounted in a public toilet in
Rostov-on-Don, the artist’s native city in southern Russia. That show was a
presentation of the Art or Death group of which Ter-Oganian was a founder. By the early 1990s, he found
himself in the center of Moscow’s artistic community. Soon, following great
avant-garde predecessors in a very straightforward way and playing a na�ve
provincial art-lover, Ter-Oganian became a notorious painter with his obsessive
pastiches of modernist masterpieces, from Duchamp and Malevich to Pollock and
Warhol. Those appropriation pieces, however, were anything but another boring
postmodernist trick: they strike and impress with their vitality, intricate
humor and thoughtfulness. My own favorite amongst those paintings is a small
canvas colored throughout in dirty gray and entitled IKB in B/W Version
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>, as if done from a low quality newspaper
reproduction.
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>In his book Avant-Garde and After /
Rethinking Art Now, the
British art historian Brandon Taylor comments on Ter-Oganian’s work Some
Questions of Contemporary Art Restoration: “In this epitaph to conceptual art’s vicissitudes, an object similar
to Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal
of 1917 was smashed and then repaired with glue. Like other projects within the
contemporary Russian avant-garde, Ter-Oganian’s performances present caustic
reflections on the modernist past, though with apparent indifference to the
vagaries of art-world attention.” In 1991 Ter-Oganian organized a non-profit,
artists-run gallery at Tryokhprudny Lane, which quickly became one of the
highlights of the contemporary art scene in Moscow. He curated most of the
shows there—every Thursday opening a new one; he and his fellow artists managed
to present over 90 projects before 1993, when the gallery was closed. One of
the most notable shows held at the Tryokhprudny Gallery was Modest Pupils of
the Great Master, an homage
to Piero Manzoni’s single work Merde d’Artiste
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>. Ter-Oganian invited leading
representatives of the Moscow art world to contribute a work of the appropriate
content for this group show. The exhibition had been presented in a
refrigerator and later donated to the collection of the Moscow Museum of
Contemporary Art where it
is still carefully preserved. His own works of various contents and
forms––paintings, objects, performances––have been widely and successfully
shown at many museum and gallery exhibitions around the world and were the
subject of many publications.
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>At the 1998 opening of a major art show in
Moscow at the Manege Exhibition Hall, Ter-Oganian held a radical iconoclastic
performance called Young Atheist. The artist cut up icons with an axe, inviting the audience to
participate for a few rubles (the icons he chopped were, actually,
mass-produced from a church kiosk). This action was, in some way, a tribute to
the destructive ‘heroism’ of the early avant-gardists or a parody of the Soviet
anti-religion campaigns. But it turned the artist into a political refugee. “An
axe seems to be a Russian sacral tool in general, it is used to cut insoluble
existential, social and ethical knots. From Peter the Great who chopped off his
mistress’ head to punish her participation in a conspiracy, to Rodion
Raskolnikov who proved that he was ‘not a quaking creature but have my own
right’”. In Russian, the word schism refers to the operation of an axe.
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>In a word, Ter-Oganian used a language
comprehensible to everyone, and his message had its effect: in the Manege, a
fight started. The occurrence was reported to the Moscow Government, and
carnage started: the curator of the show was fired and a legal suit was brought
against the artist, who was stigmatized in every possible way by the press, and
threatened by a kind of Lynch law. […] The accusation brought by the Moscow
Public Prosecutor’s Office against Ter-Oganian imputed to him "activities
aiming to rouse religious hostility, accomplished in public" which could
bring a sentence of up to four years in jail. Legally speaking, the accusation
was absurd: Ter-Oganian did not call for a pogrom, did he?“––writes Marina
Koldobskaya, an art critic from St Petersburg.
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>
style=’mso-fareast-language:EN-US’>Though a very spirited man and, as the prefix
‘Ter’ (Father in Armenian) indicates, a descendant from a family of priests,
the artist who replaced the brush with the axe had been taken quite seriously
by the authorities and even many in the art community. This proves again
Wilde’s theory that art is more important than life. Eventually, Avdei
Ter-Oganian fled his native country and has spent the last four years in
Prague. His first solo show in the city of his asylum took place in March 2003
at Display – a new space
for contemporary art in Prague. The exhibition was titled Excercise: Yves
Klein. As David Kulhanek,
the director of the gallery describes it: “An anonymous individual (though it
was Ter-Oganian’s own feet) escaped from the monochrome painting on one of the
gallery walls, leaving International Klein Blue footprints in the space. He was
walking upside down, on the walls and ceilings. After a short while, he made
some IKB faces in a corner of the ceiling. Then his footprints followed towards
the Display exit…”
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