Reading between the Armenian lines

What you see from the outside is not always what you get inside Armenian churches.

By BARRY DAVIS
Israeli artist Dor Guez (photo credit: URI GERSHUNI)
Israeli artist Dor Guez
(photo credit: URI GERSHUNI)
These days there seems to be so much information available that we necessarily tend to narrow our investigatory sights and focus on ever more specific fields of knowledge. But, in days of yore, you would often find a university student taking a degree in, say, philosophy, law and anthropology. Back then it was only natural to encompass interfacing areas of study.
The idea of the intermarriage of fields from seemingly highly diverse disciplines comes across in Dor Guez’s new exhibition at the Museum of Islamic Art, “The Sick Man of Europe: The Composer.” The notion that sonic endeavor and topography are natural bedfellows is front and center in the show right from the start. As you enter the initial display space, on the wall in front of you, you see an undulating line that corresponds to a mountainous ridge, which, explains Guez, is reflected in Armenian music.
One of the stars of the exhibition is a feted Armenian composer by the name of Komitas.
“He’s sort of the national composer of Armenia,” explains Guez. “Sort of like Naomi Shemer,” he suggests, referring to the late Israel Prize-winning singer-songwriter. The Armenian was born Soghomon Soghomonian, but took the name Komitas after being ordained as a priest.
He was also musicologist, arranger, singer and choirmaster and was a founding father of Armenian music. He is also recognized as a pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology.
In addition to his academic qualifications Guez, who has a Jewish father and Christian Palestinian mother, has the genes for the curatorship post.
“I have Armenian relatives in the Old City [of Jerusalem] but one of the things I didn’t know, which I discovered while I researched Armenian art and craft, is that when Komitas composed, he related to the topography of Armenia, to the landscape, in a physical sense. The work you hear [at the exhibition] has four climaxes, and the mountain ridge has four peaks. That was a real discovery for me. I was astounded. The whole exhibition examines how the topography of Armenia influenced the Armenians’ artistic expression.”
That comes across in succinct fashion in the exhibition centerpiece, a 10-minute video, masterly crafted by Guez, whose various professional capacities include heading the photography department of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. The video introduces the viewer to some of the historic and natural backdrop to Armenia.
Guez’s deftly designed animation work takes us for a ride along highways and byways of Armenian culture, and features a fascinating radio conversation between Komitas and fellow Armenian composer Grikor Suni. The chat showcases the geographic and cultural divide of contemporary Turkey, which straddles the interface between Europe and Asia and, thus, West and East. That comes across in the work of Komitas and Suni, which each feeding off a very different ethos.
“You have negative space between mountain peaks,” notes Guez, “and you get that in the music, too.” Indeed, as any composer worth his or her salt will tell you, the intervals are just as important as the notes.
The ailing gent in the exhibition title refers to Turkey, as it was dubbed – reportedly by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia – in the middle of the 19th century, while the Ottoman Empire was falling apart at the seams. This is the third individual- related exhibition that Guez has mounted thus far, with each having some artist connotation and addressing the idea of an individual who suffers as a result of some military campaign.
The first installation, “The Painter,” was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and later at the Villa Stuck Museum in Munich, and centers on an Israeli painter- turned-soldier and the damaging effects of the Yom Kippur War on him.
The second slot, “The Architect,” which was displayed in Tel Aviv, Detroit and Buenos Aires, centers on a Turkish architect-turned-soldier who was drafted just prior to World War II.
Architecture also plays a role in “The Composer,” as do the vagaries of Turkish design. The main display area of the exhibition is lined by seven illuminated monochrome church floor plans. The predominantly black-and-white aesthetic offers a dramatic viewing experience and, one would think, a clear-cut idea of what the works in question comprise. But it appears there is a caveat to Armenian architectural endeavor.
“I was amazed when I visited churches in Armenia, to discover that there is a marked difference between the appearance of the exteriors of church and the internal shape. They build a shape within a shape,” Guez explains.
That, it seems, was very much down to survival considerations.
“On the outside the churches looked like typical Ottoman buildings, and that the Armenians were faithful to the empire, but inside they had their own culture, as a Christian community in a Muslim country.”
The contour contrast spilled over into other realms of Armenian art. One of the few areas where the exhibition breaks out of the monochrome context is in a light box that contains a selection of delectably crafted Armenian floor tiles where, typically, light blue is very much in evidence.
“Look at these ceramic works. They also have one shape inside a different shape,” says Guez.
“This is a repetitive theme in tiles made in Kütahya and Iznik, the two leading centers of Armenian ceramic tiles.”
Naturally, politics rears its avaricious head here.
“Interestingly, when I researched Armenian ceramic tiles at various museums around the world, they were classified as Turkish tiles. Mind you, at the time, Kütahya and Iznik were part of the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey. It is like, for example, looking at an embroidered dress made by an Israeli Arab and to relate to it as Israeli. There is some dissonance in the definition.”
The exhibition emblem is a ruffled pair of rubber gloves. While that doesn’t sound very Armenian, or even artistic, it does an excellent job at conveying the tactile element that permeates the exhibition. The gloves also feature in the video, as we learn how the project came to be.
“I was in Istanbul in 2010 and visited the market when I came across this box of glass slides,” Guez recalls. “I was so excited to find them. I paid quite a hefty price for them,” he adds with a laugh.
The slides contained monochrome shots of World War I taken by a German photographer.
One of the slides notes someone called Enver Pasha who, as the Turkish minister of war was, de facto, one of the powerful figures in the Ottoman Empire. He is also said to be responsible for the Armenian genocide, which began in 1915, costing the lives of some 1.5 million Armenians.
The slides are exhibited, in enlarged formats, in subtly illuminated display cabinets, and the processing of the slides is shown in the video, getting the observer well and truly on board the Sick Man of Europe mind-set in the process.
“The Sick Man of Europe: The Composer” closes on April 18. For more information: www.islamicart.co.il/