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Knit One Below, Purl Two Together: Plying the Politics of Seduction

offers a point of entry for understanding a societal shift that also has aesthetic implication. She posits that the mistrust of television, even during the perestroika period, meant that what was broadcast was taken with great skepticism, as television was seen as an ideological tool of Soviet propaganda, an attitude that led to the perception of the 1991 artistic prank as unreal in the first place. In 1999, however, the coincidental broadcasting of real carnage in the parliament building left a huge mark on the collective psyche. Not only was the economy stable enough for Armenians to follow the broadcast on their own TVs without the interruption of power cuts, but they had grown accustomed now to taking televised representation as the real event. Concerns with the body, violence, and sex entered the work of artists after the televised attack, and the use of video within the artistic realm doubly conflated representation with the real. Writing an art historical account of a period of political transition, in addition to the epistemological difference of attempting to do so while using the dominant vocabulary of the Western art historical discourse, remains an unresolved challenge for all of us in the field. As a first attempt at historicizing recent alternative artistic practice in Armenia, Harutyunyan’s The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde is an impressive venture, and highly informative on artistic practices of the twenty-year period in question. If seen as a long-term historical unfolding of contemporary artistic practice in Armenia, it arrives at its true subject matter in its last chapter, specifically in Harutyunyan’s discussion of Kareyan’s installation and video work. If it is the gradual emergence of an antiSoviet consciousness that defines Armenian contemporary art through the period that Harutyunyan scrutinizes, the exorcism of the Soviet is perhaps completed at the end of the book with Kareyan, with claims neither for the vanguard nor for autonomy, but for a more modest, open-ended approach outside the purview of the Leninist historical time, an approach that embraces unresolved tension—which in itself could be seen as evidence of the contemporary.