ASPIRATION AS A SEARCH FOR WILL
My own character is incomprehensible even to myself.
-- Antoine Bourdelle
Several years ago she wanted to introduce me to her art. That is how I found myself in the studio of Mariam Hakobyan. That meeting remained in my memory, and it was not erased by the turbulent and arhythmic current of visits to numerous exhibitions and art studios and of meetings with artists around the world.
And during all that time she was engaged in an artistic quest – she contemplated, experienced, and created in Armenia and on the vast territory stretching from China to the heart of Europe and to Arab countries. She perceived these areas as cultural environments, in which fine threads link past with present, and she experienced their traditions and innovations. That is how her artistic world has expanded. On the one hand, this world has been absorbing styles of pre-Columbian American or African cultures, the symbolism of rock carvings of her Armenian homeland, the femininity of plasticity of mannerism, and the contemplative worldview of the ancient Chinese. On the other hand, it has been a dynamic search for new plasticity in the contemporary rhythm of life.
Today, in real life and in the various genres and styles of contemporary art, one finds dynamic development only in those spheres of endeavor where world-cultural eclecticism has been transcended, in both its artistic forms and spiritual emptiness. For it is precisely spirituality and moral values, as the basic components of form creation, that give rise to high artistic ideas.
The international contemporary art scene, however, is amazingly superficial, and the dominant world cultural centers have as yet failed to infuse it with depth or all-embracing breadth, either in its worldview or aesthetic content. Is there an alternative? I think there is—something on which the cultural capitals do not focus—the artistic life of local cultures with rich historical traditions, cultures distinguished by a multiplicity of art forms and reasoned content. Highly interesting today are the cultures of little-studied or ancient nations, particularly those on the periphery, as well as the work of artists on the fringes. Although it is easy to see the artistic success (an allure) of this unsystematic heterogeneity, it is hard to persuade the art business of the true harbingers of the future of art. And the future of art has remained elusive, particularly since the decline of artistic ideas in the 1980s. It is encouraging that the world’s cultural capitals have recently embarked on a systematic search for outstanding individuals and original aesthetic ideas in local cultures. This also pertains to our far-flung region, stretching from Armenia—across Russia, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East, and China—to Indonesia. In this vast historical and cultural expanse the basic vectors can only be the artists of certain national cultures, including Armenian.
In Mariam Hakobyan’s life, her artistic development has coincided with several important events dating from the 1980s. At that time, through her creative will—and her internal conflicts and torments—she began to discover her inner self, as someone obsessed with art and wholly dedicated to sculpture. Let us turn to those events in her personal life and her country’s history.
1. The birth of her daughter, who would become the closest person in her life.
2. The first relief from illnesses that had caused severe pain for several decades.
3. The coming of perestroika in the U.S.S.R., which dramatically altered artistic life and political freedom and which, by the end of the 1980s, determined the way that contemporary art would be perceived and selectively chosen.
4. The sculptor’s first understanding of the transcendental, introducing a spiritual element into her poetic and historical perception.
5. In a rapidly changing world, her sincere and trustful, albeit watchful, nature resulted in the creation of new forms and resolutions, in which thereafter she would give definite preference to moral principles and to the beauty of life, without falling into sentimentality.
But what lies behind the plastic art of this Armenian sculptor? I think that it is primarily the ability to grasp, understand, and organize her own emotional experiences and thoughts, born in ordinary and unremarkable days and evolving into a biography of the artist. Such is the fullness of her life. She is a person of strong character and tenacious will, but not without a woman’s softness and maternal compassion and devotion, so eloquently expressed in the tensely dramatic sculpture “Armenian Spirit” (1989). The credibility of her artistic voice, her sincerity, and her delight in life itself as the greatest miracle lend a unique charm to Mariam herself and her art. She has turned to a new world of eastern philosophy as yet another valuable source of thought. She has become receptive to plastic synthesis. Although Mariam cannot be regarded as a radical experimenter, she is sensitive toward new artistic forms. And this sensitivity emanates from a fullness of life, from a glowing freshness of wonder. Like her beloved Bourdelle, she can say: “Our poor reason is blind, and if it were in my power, I would smile at our ambitious efforts.”
Minor plastic art is her element, her song, in which the small-scale interpretation of form sometimes results in symbolic integrity, other times in romantic or sensual frankness, and in yet other cases in tragedy, although muted. And what about her decorative and multifaceted perception of the world? This quality is especially evident in her recent monumental works—“Let There Be Life” (2002), “Harvest” (2001), and “New Universe” (2004), acquiring philosophical meaning in “The Big Bang, or the Beginning of Time” (2003), and “Calling Distance” (2003). Unfortunately, none of these monumental sculptures were created in Armenia, so we cannot admire and experience their restrained lightness and beauty, nor the artist’s subtle understanding of human nature, linked indissolubly to the natural world and the eternal stars.
Her indisputable success in uniting recognizable images with subtle conceptualization facilitates an individual interpretation of the poetic metaphor of a sculpture. Especially noteworthy are “Requiem” (1989), dedicated to the terrible tragedy of the Armenian nation in the early twentieth century, and two works, inspired by Dante, that arose out of this poetic state of mind: “Gates of Paradise” (1989) and “Gates of Purgatory” (1996). For Mariam, human global tragedy or innermost happiness is above all a mark of silence, a mark of deep penetration into her own world of emotions, where the visual image is born in a dialogue with her contemporaries. Perhaps this explains her perception of Time as a palpable substance in human life that constitutes the very essence of creativity and that plays a vital part in her image-creating quest. It is the fusion of intuition and intellect that produces the compelling force of her best works. Notable examples include “Daughters of the Sun” (1997), or “Genesis” (2000), or “River of Change” (2001), or “Through Time and Space” (2000-2001). These and other works reflect a striving toward the future as a search for an elemental peace and an emotional balance. Her romantic impulse and her rational quest for a world of peace that apparently, although paradoxically, cannot be achieved in real life—these are the main starting points for her creativity and the ultimate goal of her artistic nature.
From whence come her soul, her glance, her obsessive interest in self-knowledge and the flow of time, in which not everything is unambiguous and not everything is objective?
Her country’s independence brought freedom to Mariam as well—her unassuming patriotism bespeaks a sense of history. But for her, freedom did not become an end in itself; rather, she perceived it as a responsibility for the fate of the individual and the nation, for the history of long-suffering Armenia, and above all for her own art.
In her youth, she was drawn to mythologizing sculpture, enraptured by the heroic imagery and the beauty of form and spirit in the works of the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović. His plastic expressiveness is congenial, but in Mariam’s work it is transformed into new forms and a new tonality, with greater lyrical melancholy, solitude, and waiting or yearning. But, along with exuberant feeling, nature has endowed her with a lively imagination and a sensuous quest for variety in artistic form. The lyricism of her decorative mark is evident in such works as “Pandora” (1999), “Rivulet” (1988), and “Sun-Wind” (1989). It is also apparent that rock carvings and occult symbols touch her soul, resonating with her worldview and culminating in an interest in the universe.
Such is Mariam Hakobyan, a contemporary Armenian artist, whose unquestionably interesting artistic path has been gaining in depth and brilliance, as well as attaining a new power of quest and artistic experience. These vectors explain her minor plastic art and her decorative sculpture, as well as the transcendental aspiration of her emotions and thoughts toward the future. And then, in a unique way, poetically in bronze and stone, her restless and lonely soul will revive again through the newly discovered beauty of art.
Rouben Angaladian
Writer and Art Critic
(Translated by Maria Miller)