At Lehigh, I am an Eckardt Scholar, part of the university-wide honors program. As part of the curriculum, I am required to complete a senior honors project next year. For my project, I have decided to curate an exhibition on contemporary artwork from Georgia at Lehigh (as well as an exhibit website for those interested who can't make the trek) entitled “Will you be my Critic? Post-Soviet Contemporary Art of Georgia,” which will examine not only art from Tbilisi but also provide information and commentary on the absence of a contemporary art foundation (institution, funding, native themes) post independence here. Following the project, I hope to write an honors thesis on the causes of this lack of foundation compared with its Armenian and Azeri post-Soviet neighbors. Research for this project has afforded me an academic excuse for spending far too many hours in dimly lit exhibit halls and dusty studios of local artists.
The art community in Tbilisi, though small and relatively young, is filled with inspiring and vibrant individuals from backgrounds as vast as my travels in the months to come. My interviews of these artists, gallery owners, academics, and all else aesthetically in between, have seemed to take on a standard routine. It begins with a professional-sounding e-mail requesting a formal meeting to be interviewed on their thoughts on contemporary artwork in Georgia, followed by a response with a phone number. A few days later I find myself nervously pacing some side street in Tbilisi, squinting at the little piece of paper I had scribbled the address onto and cursing my crude handwriting. Eventually finding the abandoned electric factory/tenant house/fallout shelter turned art gallery, I am welcomed into a hidden back room with a cup of tea and table to set up my laptop. After a few certain technical mishaps, I hit the record button and listen.
Everything about these people is implausibly beautiful. Their stories of illegally studying abstractions from Gorskey and Pollock or Pop icons from Warhol in smuggled-in western magazines under the floorboards of their mother’s kitchen are worthy of a Nobel Prize. They describe the censorship and artistic oppression under the Soviet regime and the orders to conform to the infamous Social Realism. They speak of their creation of underground art and untimely arrests as their oils were left to dry unfinished. They whisper what went on in those prisons, and how it only made them stronger. Together, their stories weave a magnificent tapestry of what life as an artist was like in Georgia for much of the 20th Century, with each thread shinning with the personalities and delicate tales of a young boy discovering action painting, of a mother finding peace in color theory, of a son watching his father be beaten for creating beauty.
Perhaps what is more impressive is their resilience to all this found in the bricks and wooden boards of the galleries and centers these interviews take place in. Despite the oppression, despite the censorship and arrests, despite everything, these people not only endured but thrived. They went abroad after the fall of the USSR to Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York to study the art they had so longed to create years ago. They exhibited in the Venice Biennial, found sponsors in local banks, made connections with foreign art networks and founded centers, courses, and galleries of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi- hubs of innovation, inspiration, and individual expression. In the interviews they always speak of the lack of institutions, funding, art critics, and ‘true Georgian contemporary art,’ but what they emphasize with wide eyes and hopeful smiles is what they have accomplished. They beam as they invite me to gallery openings, and greet me with hearty handshakes and glasses of wine as I join the crowd of art-lovers opening night; they introduce me to their drawing students with blissful expressions and usher me into their studios of experimental sound architecture; they bid me to return to Tbilisi in a year or two to see how much progress will be made. The future of art in this city, to them, is filled with infinite possibilities.
On Saturday evening, I joined a co-worker and about ten others for a party at the Israeli Ambassador’s house for Purim. Though I missed the staples of Purim at Temple Shalom (the junior choir singing prayers to the melody of ‘take me out to the ballgame,’ megillah gorilla rummaging through the kitchen, the surprise of what the rabbi and cantor would dress up as), I had an amazing holiday. As a few children played tag dressed as princesses, Woody, and farm animals, the Ambassador and I had a stimulating conversation about the practicality of international relations theories over hamentashens and dates. Before long, the Chabad rabbi from Tbilisi took out a long scroll of parchment, tightened his sombrero hat, and began to chant the all too familiar story of Ester, Mordecai, and Haman.For those of you who don’t know, Purim celebrates the story of Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai saving the Jews of Shushan from the evil plans of Haman, the prime minister of ancient Persia. As I listened to the chanting through the ‘boos’ and stomping of the audience (don’t worry, though it may look like the same reaction to a Boston home run in the Bronx, it’s a tradition to drown out Haman’s name with noise), I thought of the interviews and gallery visits of this past weekend. The artists and art supporters that I have been working with for these past two months are truly the Esthers of our time. They alone stood up to the leaders of the Soviet Union who plotted the extinction of Modern Art behind the Iron Curtain, and, like my ancestors, found the courage to persevere and fight for what they believed in with brushes as swords and pallets as shields. Their bravery and resolve are the reasons why a Contemporary Art environment exists in Tbilisi for me to study today. Nevertheless, the smile of these thoughts slipped from my face as this week progressed, particularly after a conversation with my father about NPR’s budget cuts back in America. Although current budget cuts for the arts are not as dire as Stalin’s cultural policies or Haman’s plot to exterminate the Jews, this battle, like those of the Jews of Shushan and the artists of Georgia, threatens the essence of many American’s identities as painters, ballerinas, musicians, actors, and art historians. Though it may not be part of your life tapestry like it is in mine, I ask you to find the valor that empowered those heroes throughout humanity’s history, from Mordecai to my new friend Yuri, and help defend those whose existence as they know it is endangered. Below is a link to show your representatives in Congress your support for the National Endowment for the Arts. It doesn’t take a soviet arrest or a three day fast in this modern Purim story. A simple e-mail will suffice.
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