Vagrich Bakhchanyan

Vagrich Bakhchanyan was born in 1938 to an Armenian family in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine. His early years were marked by war, occupation, and then liberation by the Red Army, which executed locals who had collaborated with the German occupiers: the sight of people hanged on Kharkiv’s main square remained a vivid childhood memory for Bakhchanyan. [1] Bakhchanyan was forced to leave school before completing the eighth grade and work as a mechanic’s assistant at a factory. His formal education was replaced by classes at the arts and crafts studio at the Metallist Palace of Culture, which was interrupted by military service from 1957 to 1960.

In an interview Bakhchanyan gave to curator and critic Valentin Dyakonov in the last year of his life, he spoke about his teachers: “There was a wonderful teacher there, Alexei Mikhailovich Shevelev, may he rest in peace,” recalled Bakhchanyan. “He was unorthodox in his teaching and gave us complete freedom. He made us paint compositions at home, even abstract ones. Then he began inviting people who were the pride of the Ukrainian avant-garde in the 1920s. That’s how I, and other studio members, met Malevich’s student, Vasyl Yermilov.”

Alexei Shevelev (1908–1980) was a theater artist who came up in the 1920s and sought to convey the spirit of the avant-garde to his students. Vasily Yermilov (1894–1968) was not, despite Bakhchanyan’s recollection, a student of Malevich but rather a futurist associated with Vladimir Mayakovsky and David Burliuk, who created the cover of Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1920 book Ladomir. Through Yermilov, Bakhchanyan became involved in the figurative-linguistic experiments of futurism and “zaum,” which was close in nature to Western Dadaism.

“Kharkiv was the (artistic) center, both before and after the revolution. Burliuk was born near Kharkiv. There was a wonderful poet, Petnikov, a futurist. There was Bozhedar, whom Khlebnikov called a genius. I knew several people who were friends with these people. So, when I shook Vasily Dmitrievich Yermilov’s hand, I felt that this same hand had once been shaken by both Khlebnikov and Mayakovski. There was some kind of connection there,” Bakhchanyan said in an interview with the journalist Viktor Shenderovich. [2]

This artistic environment, as well as life experience—including participation in youth criminal gangs—contributed to the reckless experimentation in Bakhchanyan’s early works.

After Bakhchanyan was discharged from the army in 1960, he became close friends with Yermilov, who showed him secret stores of works by Ukrainian avant-garde artists in Kharkiv, works that would have been destroyed by the authorities had they not been secretly kept by private individuals. Bakhchanyan did receive some fragmentary information about contemporary art from the press. For example, after reading a newspaper article about Jackson Pollock (1912 –1956), whose works were brought to the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, Bakhchanyan tried the drip technique. He also saw examples of collage on the covers of the magazine Pol’sha [Poland], which was published in Russian and sold in Kharkiv, and he began employing collage in his works to change the context in which images of mass culture were perceived (in Soviet reality, most of these images had ideological connotations) and to achieve the effect of estrangement or absurdity. Collage became a mainstay of his work, but the glue available in the USSR turned yellow and warped the paper, so Bakhchanyan developed his own collage technique, which he called “pressing” or “transfer.” He soaked illustrations cut out from printed publications in a special solution that separated the image layer, then transferred this layer to a new base, like a decal.

Bakhchanyan, who also called himself “Bach,” became one of the Kharkiv bohemians. His friends included the poet Vladimir Motrich and the writers Yuri Miloslavsky and Eduard Savenko—for whom Bakhchanyan came up with the nickname “Lemon,” which gave rise to the pseudonym Limonov.

The French communist newspaper L’Humanité, which was distributed in the USSR, sometimes published articles about art. Bakhchanyan saw a list of art galleries there and tried to contact them: he asked Pavel Shemetov (who appears in Eduard Limonov’s prose as Paul Shemet) to write a standard letter in French for him to contact galleries in Paris. He sent the letter and received several catalogues in response. However, Bakhchanyan’s attempt to arrange an exhibition in one of these galleries was sabotaged by the Soviet post office, which refused to send out the package with his works.

Bakhchanyan held his first, self-organized exhibition on his birthday, May 23, 1965, in a courtyard on Sumskaya Street in Kharkiv. He displayed his paintings and collages there for one day and invited his artist friends, giving out his collages to friends and friends of friends right there on the street or in Shevchenko Park, taking the works out of a folder and laying them out on a bench.

Bakhchanyan’s attempts to establish connections with the West eventually attracted the attention of the KGB. At the factory where he worked as an artist-designer, a comrade’s court was organized that ridiculed his works, and he was subsequently transferred to the foundry. A devastating article, calling Bakhchanyan’s art “alien,” was published in the newspaper Krasnoye Znamya [Red Banner], a smear campaign that forced Bakhchanyan to leave his hometown. In 1967, he and his wife, Irina, moved to Moscow and, on the advice of Anatoly Brusilovsky (b. 1932), an artist who, like Bakhchanyan, worked in collage, got a job at the Literaturnaya Gazeta [Literary Newspaper].

In 1967, under the leadership of editor-in-chief Alexander Chakovsky, Literaturnaya Gazeta acquired a new format: it was published once a week on sixteen pages and was intended not only for members of the Writers’ Union, but for the general public. Page sixteen was given over to the humor section called Klub 12 Styul’ev [Twelve Chairs Club].  The newspaper, with a circulation of three to five million, was aimed at the intelligentsia and played the role of a “steam valve” for public discontent. Its humor section was allowed freer jokes than other publications were allowed.

Bakhchanyan found like-minded people in the Twelve Chairs Club, led by the satirist Viktor Veselovsky. Bakhchanyan signed his caricatures with pseudonyms like Yevgeny Sazonov, B. Vagrich, or V. Okopov, switching between them when a daring caricature attracted the attention of the KGB. [3] Literaturnaya Gazeta’s editorial office began receiving letters from the Kharkiv branch of the Union of Artists (backed by the KGB, according to Bakhchanyan) that demanded they stop publishing this unsavory artist’s work. In Moscow, Bakhchanyan became close to artists who worked with words, like Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023), but even more so with poets—he was friends with Genrikh Sapgir, Gennady Aigi, and Dmitri Prigov. He began to define himself as an “artist of words” because his collages of images and words were organized according to the same principles of paradoxical inversion, often playing on propagandistic clichés.

In 1968, he managed to organize a one-day exhibition in the Moscow café Siniaia Ptitsa [Blue Bird], where, in addition to himself, Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, and Komar and Melamid exhibited works.

Working at the intersection of words and images prompted Bakhchanyan to create handwritten books. In 1973, he introduced his fans to the first of them: Мух уйма [Muh uima, Lots of Flies] and Сон Л. И. Брежнева [Son L.I. Brezhneva, Li.I.Brezhnev’s Dream], whose title is a play on words: сон [son] means “dream” and is also the acronym for the Union of Nations.

In 1973, censorship in the USSR increased, and Bakhchanyan and his wife had still not managed to get an apartment in Moscow after several years of living there, so he decided to emigrate, ultimately ending up in New York, where he remained until the end of his life. In New York, his creative circle included the writers Pyotr Vail and Alexander Genis, with whom he published the magazine Семь дней [Sem’ Dnei, Seven Days]; Sergei Dovlatov; and artists Alexander Kosolapov, Henry Khudyakov, Vitaly Komar, and Alexander Melamid. Starting in 1981, when Viktor Perelman began publishing the magazine Время и мы [Vremya i my, Time and us] in New York, Bakhchanyan created the covers.

Finding himself outside the sphere of Soviet censorship, Bakhchanyan allowed himself to openly joke about sacred Soviet symbols. The first collage he made in Vienna depicted Lenin with his cap pulled down so low over his face that the recognizable image turned into an image of a hooligan. The collage Вся «Правда» органа ЦК КПСС [The Whole “Pravda” (truth) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)] (1974, Stella Art Foundation) combines the logo of the Pravda newspaper with an erotic image of a beautiful woman, with the word орган (organ, referring to the central committee) located near her spread legs. He interpreted the expression “Stalin is the Lenin of today” into a collage combining the features of the two leaders (1976). The “father” of sots art, Vitaly Komar, ackmowledged that some of Bakhchanyan’s works were of this movement. [4]
He certainly mocked capitalism: on one of the covers of the magazine Семь дней, three workers wave a dollar-bill banner under the slogan “Leaders of overproduction, raise the banner of capitalism!” (1984) Or, more subtly, in another collage Bakhchanyan compiled a table of objects that he associated with the overabundance of the USA, from a hamburger to an ice cube (Ребус [Rebus], 1977, Stella Art Foundation).

The themes of his collages were sometimes connected exclusively to art: for example, in the reproduction of Vasily Surikov’s Boyaryna Morozova, he covered up the boyaryna, or noblewoman—who is being taken away into exile on a sleigh—with a black square (Untitled, 1979), a reference to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square. A large series that Bakhchanyan worked on from 1984 to 2005 was called “Picasso and the USSR”—large and dense collages that absurdly combined socialist Soviet works with fragments of Picasso’s paintings.

A significant part of his work is devoted to purely formal experiments. In collages like Детский взгляд [Detskii vzgliad, Child’s Gaze] or Зима [Zima, Winter] (1974, Stella Art Foundation), he captured fragments of reality in photographs, then collected these on a piece of paper, in a formulaic arrangement. Having gained access to contemporary art, Bakhchanyan began to try out new artistic techniques. On June 13, 1978, he held a performance called Человек-агитпункт [Chelovek-agipunkt, Human Propaganda Point] at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—he arrived covered in red and white slogans such as: “Stalin is the Lenin of today,” “Beware of dog,” and “Why there is no vodka on the moon.” Bakhchanyan celebrated his sixtieth birthday on May 23, 1998, with an absurdist action: he gathered a “collection” of trash in Central Park and placed each “sample” in a bottle.

He would also send letters to his émigré friends in specially decorated envelopes: for example, using a stamp with an image of the Order of Lenin, on which the cheeks of the leader of the world’s proletariat are rouged, and the sender’s last name is replaced by the name VAGRICH (letter to Vladimir Kotlyarov-Tolsty dated September 10, 1985, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art).

Bakhchanyan saw New York as the leading city for contemporary art, but he had arrived in the city too late, in a sense, given that he was close in artistic spirit to the Dadaists, but Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst had long since left the city. Even Fluxus, which may have inspired  Bakhchanyan’s strategies, was perceived as a historic movement in the 1980s. In the end, in the USA, Bakhchanyan was not recognized beyond immigrant circles. His main recognition came from post-Soviet Russia. Bakhchanyan suffered from depression and constant tinnitus, and he he committed suicide. At his request, Bakhchanyan’s ashes were scattered in the mountains of Armenia.

In 2015, Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Andrei Zagdansky released the film Бахчанян и черный квадрат [Bakhchanyan i chernyj kvadrat, Bakhchanyan and the Black Square], and in 2016, the Kharkiv Municipal Gallery initiated a campaign to reinstate Bakhchanyan’s work into the history of Ukrainian art. After the first exhibition in Kharkiv, Vagrich Bakhchanyan—An Artist of Words, his works were shown as part of major exhibition projects in Odessa, Kyiv, and Uzhgorod, Ukraine.

Anna Bronovitskaya

Translated from Russian by Jane Bugaeva

Photo portrait courtesy of Kharkiv Municipal Gallery

Notes:

1. Dyakonov, Valentin. “Vagrich Bakhchanyan: ‘Ia pomenial kolbasu na karandashi’ [I traded sausage for pencils]. Artguide, November 30, 2016.

2. Viktor Shenderovich’s interview with Vagrich Bakhchanyan on the program Vse svobodny [Everyone is free] on Radio Svoboda [Liberty] on February 24, 2008.

3. Gorkova, Anastasia. Bakhchanyan, Khudozhnik slova [An artist of words]. Oktiabr’ 2010, no. 5, p. 135.

4. Tolstoy, Ivan. K 70-letiyu Vagricha Bakhchanyana [On the 70th Anniversary of Vagrich Bakhchanyan] on Radio Svoboda [Liberty] on May 18, 2008.