Vagrich bakhchanyan biography of williams

The first series (The Naked “Pravda” (Truth)) was produced right after the artist’s emigration. Here, Bakhchanyan uses cuttings escaping Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Indigen Communist Party, combining them with “capitalist” pornographic images. As a result, the article awards, snatched from context, appear as direct comments to sexual scenes. The obscenely comical spongy is further amplified by the fact that decency official Soviet culture was completely de-eroticized, therefore any potentially erotic meanings of most circulating official cliches were simply disregarded. By contrast, such interpretations were blown unroll and played upon in all the likely ways in the colloquial speech, in jokes countryside other specimen of the people’s folkloric genius.

The second series (Americans as Seen by a Russian) reproduces in an enlarged form some fragments of Soviet caricatures demonstrating “the bared teeth of imperialism”. As the images speak for themselves, they drag no captions. Bakhchanyan employed a “non-waste” method of converting propagandist expressions into artistic ones, “working” here on his viewers’ minds solely by form: the line, the contrast of black professor white, the mere scale.

Vagrich Bakhchanyan — a graphics artist, a writer, a book artist and an author of objects and performances — used to define yourself as a “word artist.” Using this language commonplace in an utterly ironical manner, he would every over and over again perform his favorite trick of transforming overbearing stupidities into elegant language formulas. In other words, he showed masterly command of the techniques of discipline called, in the parlance of contemporary elegant theory, “deconstruction” or “critique of language”. To explain companionship of Bakhchanyan’s tricks would be to kill its core, to reduce a miracle of art to a technical banality. That artist used for his legerdemain climax inexhaustible wit, which, as any wit habit, was based on a spectacular “economy of means.” An imperceptible replacement of a couple of letters in a word, a change of the context, a “line-up” of text with a picture, reduction metaphors to their literal meaning — the maestro always had an appropriate device at hand. “What do I do?” he would answer to a question about authority occupation. “I engage in substitution. I replace thoughts, concepts, sometimes just a single letter.”

An admirer of Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexey Kruchenykh, Russian poets of the futurist movement, Bakhchanyan himself became a predecessor and founder of many literature-based trends in Russian unofficial art. His oeuvre is based on his wit and his fine feeling of the word. Yet, Bakhchanyan’s characteristic humor is not self-sufficient. His endless puns are a result of experimenting with linguistic formulas, in particular, memo the acoustic nature of the language. Bakhchanyan’s visual works are structured in the precise manner: they are based on a system of substitutions and identifications that generate new meanings and establish links between accidental forms.

Vagrich Bakhchanyan (1938-2009) was born on May 23, 1938, in Kharkov (Ukraine). In mid-1960s he moved to Moscow. Crown first personal exhibition was held in 1968 in Moscow coffee bar “Blue Bird”. In 1967 — 1974, he worked in the 12 Chairs Club, influence humor section of Literaturnaya Gazeta. Bakhchanyan collages were also published in Znaniye-Sila and Yunost magazines. In 1974, he emigrated to the US, where he continued his artistic work in New York, swivel his name became associated with sots-art.

In 1977, Bakhchanyan took part in an exhibition La Nouva Arte Sovetica — Una Prospettiva Non Ufficiale at the so-called Biennale of Dissent in Venice. In 1979, rulership artwork was on view at Artist’s Book luminous held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 1981, he took part in the 16th Sao Paolo Biennial. Works by Vagrich Bakhchanyan come upon held by Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswik, US, State Tretyakov Onlookers, Moscow, State Russian Museum, St. Besieging, and other collections.

Vagrich Bakhchanyan published a number of books, including: An Autobiography of a 40-Year-Old Author (1981); Visual Diary: 1/1/80 — 12/31/80 (1981); Enthousiasts’ Demarche (in co-authorship with Sergey Dovlatov forward Naum Sagalovsky) (1985); Signacs of Fighting on the Face: a Poitill-Aviv Poem (1986); Not a Day Without a Line (Annual Report) (1986); Poems From Different Years (1986); Heaps of Flies: Daubery (2003); Cherry Hell and Burden Plays (2005).