Experimental Education

Migration for Education, Student project, Department of Fine Arts, 2006
The plan-crossword of the Department

The third part of Archive-Practice considers the Armenian Open University, Department of Fine Arts. Since the second part of the 1980s it was one of the spaces in Yerevan which was providing an alternative for the discussions, meetings and realization of different artistic projects, as well as focusing on Armenian contemporary art developments. From the beginning led by the local artists (Samvel and Manvel Baghdasaryans, Ara Gurzadyan) in 1998 it transformed into a more official space, as Department of Fine Arts which continued to provide a unique type of art education.

The current interview with Ruben Arevshatyan¹, who is working at the department as one of the pedagogical team, introduces some observations and changes in the educational field by one project called Changes through Exchanges experimental educational project realized at the department.

Marianna Hovhannisyan
1. Ruben, we have worked together on the experimental educational project Changes through Exchanges (2006, 2007) organized by the Department of Fine Arts at Armenian Open University. For many years already I recall you have been engaged in the Armenian contemporary art scene, working as a curator. I’d like to begin with a question about your practice - what brought you to consider work in the educational field? And what have been challenges to come up with this project?

Ruben Arevshatyan
For me as both practicing artist and curator teaching has been always one of the most effective methods of sharing and reciprocal transmission of knowledge and experience. I belong to the generation of alternative artistic scene of mid-1980s. That generation of artists throughout the whole Soviet Union used to have quite radical confrontations with the art schools, academies, and universities. Self-education was an inseparable parallel process to regular studies, which from one hand was challenging the outdated conservative soviet academic programs and on the other hand it was becoming a constant process of inventing new forms of knowledge accumulation as well as knowledge production. The situation of 1980-90s for the Armenian contemporary at scene was also marked by incredible activity and numerous autonomous initiatives started out by the artists, theoreticians and activists from the very same scene. There were established several large and small institutions for contemporary art which played a significant role not only in the development of local but also regional contemporary art situations. For the period of 1997 till 2004 I used to be the artistic director of Hay Art cultural center that was one of the biggest contemporary art institutions in Armenia. The center was organizing local and international projects focusing not only on the exhibitions but also on the research and educational projects. One of the most important achievements that the center succeeded to have within the period of its activity was breaking up the hermetical specificity of artistic and cultural localized environment that was developing in Armenian cultural and political thinking since the period of 1960s. Since the end of 1990s international joint contemporary art projects in Armenia acquired a regular character that was giving an opportunity to juxtapose different artistic, curatorial and theoretical perspectives and readings developing around the same subject; to reconsider/deconstruct historical models. The projects that I curated and was involved in were mainly focusing on exploration of the alternative modernities, correlation of political, socio-cultural developments with artistic practices.

Since 2004 when HayArt cultural center stopped functioning as a contemporary art center, that in fact coincided with the changes of the general political and socio-cultural situation in the country, I shifted my activity to the Department of Fine Arts of the Armenian Open University where I used to lecture parallel to my practice at HayArt. That department was founded in 1998 by an artists’ initiative belonging to the local alternative scene. Since the very beginning the educational methods of the department differed radically from the prevailing old conservative style and methods in local art schools that was inherited from the soviet period.

The formation of new type of art schools was also an important part of the discourse that developing in the contemporary art scene since the beginning. But the problem became really urgent by the end of 1990s when it became clear that the artistic wave which started to rise since the middle of 1980s started to go down, as the conflict between the students and the professors at the academy also decreased and what is the most important neither the artists, critics or curators from the contemporary art scene were involved in the academic educational structures.

The realization of the fact that it would be difficult to integrate the traditional educational structures and within those frames to reconsider old type educational methodologies and programs led to the formation of new independent art schools. One of those art schools is the Department of Fine Arts at the Armenian Open University (one of the first private universities in Armenia).

The method that I am trying to apply is turning the process of education into a certain process of knowledge production, and what the students are being taught is the capability to overwrite and reread, to construct and deconstruct that knowledge in order not to fall into the orthodoxy and academism as well as to avoid the speculative trap of culturalization and aestheticization. That kind of approach turns education into an active creative process with the involvement of practicing artists, critics and curators from local as well as from the international scenes.

Since 2006 the department has started the realization of experimental educational project called Changes through Exchanges, by the support of Open Society Institute, the main goal of which is the provision of intensive knowledge flow and experience exchange by inviting international artists, theoreticians and curators for workshops and lectures. During those two years we had invited artists and curators from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Russia, Turkey (Vorobyev Victor and Elena, Muratbek Djumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva, Mamuka Tsetskhladze, Beral Madra and Xurban collective group, Dmitri Gutov, Ulan Dzaparov, Alexander Sokolov). Due to those workshops there had already developed several large and small, local and joint international individual artistic and curatorial projects that were already realized or are in the process of development. Besides intensive educational processes those workshops also make possible for students as well as for mentors to be in a real contact to consider, to discuss and to experience various questions that refer the subjects of memory and history, identity and the circumstances that are forming those “identities”. Those are the experiences which perhaps are the most important in sense of perceptional formation.

Changes through Exchanges, experimental educational project, 2007
Left: Workshop by Dmitri Gutov
Right:Workshop by Beral Madra and Xurban collective group

The Railway Station, Vahe Budumyan, video, 2006
From the workshop called “Zone of Risk”, 2006

MH
2. In my earlier interview with Nazareth Karoyan he mentioned that “the professor-student relationship, once having more of a subject-object status, is today being reconstructed in terms of the interrelation between two full subjects”. In regard to this how do you build your proposals and relations with the students you used to work at the Department of Fine Arts?

RA
As I have already described, the educational process at the department is much closer to the active creative process with the involvement of both sides – professors and students. It is even difficult to talk about the application of a certain fixed methodology as the active discourse around each separate project draws in all the parties into a position that is active and equal at the same time. The role of the professor sometimes balances in between the positions of moderator, advisor or sometimes even a provocateur. But quite often those positions either spontaneously or deliberately are being shared among different students in the group.

Besides lecturing art history at the department I also run workshops with my students. Those workshops are mainly focused on the reconsiderations of the subjects they had explored during their art history classes through artistic as well as theoretical perspectives. The process of workshop itself is a collaborative research and creative process which involves every participant. One of the projects that is now in the process of development calls “Extra-territory” and its explores the evolution of utopias regarded in the context of post World War II Soviet modernistic architecture, on a concrete example of an abandoned swimming pool in residential community built in early 60s in one of the provincial industrial cities in Armenia.

MH
3. In Armenian contemporary art scene you are one of the professionals who especially tries to relate the local situation and practices with an international one by organizing joint projects and establishing long-term professional contacts. How do you see the connection between the notion of archives and your practice (as well as inputs)?

RA
In the middle of 1990s when the domineering trend in the general artistic and cultural situation in Armenia was vectored towards abroad in search of the markets or institutions that would represent that quite unknown, “exotic” artistic production we started to think about bringing the artists, theoreticians and curators to Armenia. One of the important problems that we were trying to overcome was the isolation as an effect of various factors like Soviet past with its collapse and its subsequences, nationalism, Diaspora that for a long time was being perceived as a cultural mediator, etc. Step by step there started to develop long term professional relations with different international scenes which widened the scope and variety of theoretical and artistic discourses.

One of the discourses that gained particular importance throughout that integration into international artistic networks related to the subject of history, which in turn highlighted the importance of archives. The notion of the archive today is getting more and more extensive. The process of recording and storing due to the various modern technologies grew at an incredible scale. On the other hand the changed attitude towards history where any segment of past could be re-actualized and reinvented up to the nucleus level attaches to “archive” an upgraded notion in the sense of the categorization of the very subjects that are liable to be archived. That approach also imparts to the conception and very process of archiving much more creative specificity that makes possible to construct the past, present or future on the basis of the archived materials that are created or belonging to actuality. In fact it mainly refers to the question of categorization and then the mechanism of launching or providing it for circulation.

Juxtaposition of old and newly formed archives in artistic projects fundamentally restructures the historical models of meta-narratives, displaying all the sides in almost complete ignorance of the situation; a situation which becomes a starting point from where it is possible to build up new knowledge about the past and present.