The Emergence of Contemporary Art in Armenia Traced to Soviet Disintegration

Vardan Azatyan's article, published on February 5, 2012, traces the genealogy of contemporary art practices in Armenia, linking their origins to the disintegration of the Bolshevik political project. The Bolshevik agenda aimed to reconcile nation and class through art, but this dialectic was instrumentalized by Stalinist Socialist Realism. During Khrushchev's Thaw, National Modernists attacked this approach. By the 1970s, tendencies of contemporary art emerged from within National Modernism itself, challenging conventional artistic notions by framing art as a performative practice of liberatory subjectivization. This development marked the ultimate disintegration of the Bolshevik project, which continues to haunt post-Soviet contexts. The article is available via MIT Press under a subscription-only model.