Steel-Lives, Still-Life

Steel-Lives, Still-Life Norayr Kasper

A collateral event for the 55th International Art Exhibition, June - November 2013

“Norayr Kasper is a unique voice, blending a distinct artistic formation and diverse cultural background into a rare and precious vision. Steel-Lives, Still-Life is a summation of his aesthetic and intellectual obsessions.�

Atom Egoyan

Freedom of criticism is undoubtedly the most fashionable slogan at the present time, and the one most frequently employed in the controversies between socialists and democrats in all countries.

V. I. Lenin

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Roger Connah

Forget Matisse, concentrate on Delacroix. To listen to Norayr Kasper talk about his photographs is to enter a still life before it has even arrived. He will move, wistfully, get carried away with talk of flowers and rabbits, skulls of planted rocks; this is the fading beauty, he implies, the dead matter of life at its last moments. When it matters!

We have no choice but to get carried that same way. The corpse will go on dying certainly, and the haunting familiarity of these images will pull at a history some of us can never have, can no longer recall. We are, ultimately, as wounded as the steel, the plants; the ruins of progress falling into hands unknown and indiscrete. The faces holding onto a story that sweats, that glistens with concentrated labour, with all sorts of conspiracies, of hope and deception.

Kasper will recall Delacroix without realising: Still Life with trophies of Hunting and Fishing (1826-1827). Trophies is a precise word and we can juggle with it across one hundred and fifty years, across terrain that needs more attention given it than others, across countries that need more attention than others. Armenia. Then at a moment when the trophies are distant, untouched, it becomes difficult to discern the feeling of self-abandonment. Painting flowers, captured beauty, are always transformed by labour. The inanimate, even commonplace object is about to transform and be transformed. Flowers share that special democracy with steel. History shares it too when it hides itself from its own passing.

Steel-life, steel-works, invite the passing that we cannot quite grasp. The man-made has only its own still life to contend with before it dies; phoenix in amongst the ashes of disinformation and sorcery. Ah, we have seen these images before, the young digital beings announce, these internet users will say, unable to read detail from background and background from detail. Vision has been hijacked by the very looseness of attention. Even 1989, the year, the life that was still broken for a whole year, is now virtual and unknown as it fights with the reality it must and surely does leave behind. Walls, classrooms, control panels and machinery, the new jewellery, books: all compositions arranged by the arranger invisible to all. Who put the steel in this way, who set the tableaux, who edited the un-editable, who put the remnants out and left them for any of us to enter Harold Brodkey’s Church of St Death and the ease of leaving true meaning behind?

These are not landscapes. We speak not of the painting but of the detail of a modern still life holding within its careful precision of these Armenian steel plants a wish to break once more the two dimensional barrier. No glass bowls of shattered dreams here, no vases of the tall stem thrashed across the face. Flowers can whip, trophies can slash and betray as they are betrayed again and again. Trophies as great as steel.

Suitable to their original place in tombs, it is still believed, just as food objects, these familiar worlds depicted here would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Ready for its next life, decoratively reduced to paper towel containers, sanitary napkin holders; the greatness of the Armenian steel industry once in service to the USSR turns and turns again at the flick of the hand. These are emblems in the homes of the steel men, still tending the machine that will never quite go away.

It is not the seasons depicted here by the light, by the scale, it is the shadow spaces of history. Let us not be fooled by revisions that invite us into the spaces through which untold sweat has glistened. Just what are we to do with symbols of morality in today’s world? And what is our position in the earthly paradise once promised by The Union? All steel here is the skull and the remains of language, omnia mors aequat. As death makes all equal but obviously some more equal than others.

Roger Connah, writer, architectural historian, independent scholar and researcher.

He currently directs the graduate school at Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa, and previously taught at University of Texas in Arlington, Royal University School of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and at the Department of Architecture Technical University of Helsinki.

NORAYR KASPER : DANS LA FORGE Chakè Matossian

L’espace-temps de Kasper relève de l’étrangeté familière, proche de l’expérience du « déjà-vu », celui de la rêverie, éloigné de la raison aussi bien que du rêve. Il ne nous renvoie pas au passé car la vie existe et se donne à voir à travers la transformation continue de la matière ; on voit l’herbe pousser, le métal changer de couleur.

Rien ne demeure, c’est l’impermanence en laquelle consiste l’immortalité de la vie même. Et la matière, même la plus lourde, le métal, vit ici ainsi qu’en témoignent le bleuissement, le rougissement, l’oxydation en cours. […]

Peut-être le cinéma joue-t-il un rôle dans cette approche du temps particulière à Norayr Kasper, une temporalité qui échappe à la nostalgie et récuse tout autant la volonté du photo-reportage. Aux objectifs perdus de l’industrie planifiée de type soviétique, Kasper substitue l’objectif de l’appareil photographique. Il cherche à montrer la beauté d’un monde industriel un peu fantomatique et nous savons tous que les fantômes existent. Ce n’est pas la disparition qui est à l’oeuvre dans ces photographies mais l’existence. On pourrait à cet égard rappeler ce qu’Antonioni disait à Jean-Luc Godard qui l’interviewait sur Désert rouge : « Il est trop simpliste, comme beaucoup l’ont fait, de dire que j’accuse ce monde industrialisé, inhumain où l’individu est écrasé et conduit à la névrose. Mon intention au contraire, encore que l’on sache souvent très bien d’où l’on part mais nullement où l’on aboutira, était de traduire la beauté de ce monde où même les usines peuvent être très belles. La ligne, les courbes des usines et de leurs cheminées sont peut-être plus belles qu’une ligne d’arbres que l’oeil a déjà trop vus. » […]

Les hommes portraiturés par Kasper (il n’y a qu’une seule femme), de même qu’une grande partie des lieux photographiés et la prédominance du métal nous plongent dans l’atmosphère de la forge. Le travail sur les métaux est aussi celui de l’alchimie et c’est en cela peut-être que Kasper trouve le moyen de dire quelque chose de la photographie, elle-même, à l’origine, engendrée par des processus chimiques utilisant des métaux et se produisant par un marquage de lumière. De même que ces hommes, forgerons cyclopes, fils d’Héphaïstos, réalisent la transmutation du métal, de même Kasper transmute-t-il ces hommes en produisant, à travers l’art, la sublimation de leur condition. Loin d’être ravalés au statut d’abandonnés, de ruines parmi les ruines, les ouvriers sont révélés comme alchimistes par le travail du photographe. Il ne s’agit pas d’un hymne à la gloire du prolétariat mais d’une opération visant à montrer la force de la transformation également repérable dans la poussée vitale de la végétation qui prend le dessus sur les bâtiments en ruine.

Chakè Matossian, critique d’art, philosophe, essayiste et professeur.

Elle est membre de l’Association internationale des critiques d’art (AICA) et professeur à l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. Elle a publié de nombreux ouvrages, articles et textes de catalogues, collaboré à des revues d’esthétique et sciences humaines, et ses conférences sont présentées au sein d’institutions internationalement renommées (Villa Medicis, Collège de Belgique, Collège de France), des centres universitaires et écoles d’art.

HORS D’USAGE Gérard Chaliand Norayr Kasper nous vient, pour sa formation d’architecte puis de photographe, d’Italie et pour le cinéma, du Canada. Il présente plus d’une centaine d’admirables photos consacrées à l’Arménie. Il s’est rendu à plusieurs reprises dans ce pays, dans diverses villes et dans plusieurs provinces. Étant d’origine arménienne et parlant la langue lui a facilité la minutieuse enquête industrielle à laquelle il s’est livré. Ces photos ne montrent ni les admirables églises ni la nature alpestre et sévère de ce pays de pierres. Elles ne prétendent pas rendre compte de l’ensemble de l’Arménie. Mais elles montrent avec une rigueur chirurgicale la fossilisati on industrielle de l’ère post-soviétique. Elles donnent à nous le désastre d’une économie où la maintenance n’est pas assurée, où vingt années d’indépendance, en dehors de la capitale n’ont multipliés que des machines désormais hors d’usage.

Gérard Chaliand, geostrategist, expert observer in international and strategic relations studies and in armed-conflict, professor, writer and poet.

He is a visiting professor at Harvard University, UCLA and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, as well as the National War College of Paris. He is the author of over 40 books.

ESSENCE Norayr Kasper Inspired by the remnants of post-Soviet industrial legacy in Armenia, Steel-Lives, Still-Life, is an installation that attempts to give a representational form to the notion of loss of relevance of both machine and man, against the desperate state of a dilapidated industry, a mere shadow of an era interrupted by sudden and sweeping geopolitical events.

Vast expanses of desolate and abandoned buildings trace the tale of a once vibrant industry. Inside those still surviving factories are the portraits of workers, in age-old canvas uniforms, still tending to the odd machine in dim light and textured shadows of rust and grease, layer the images with tonal and emotional significance.

Dismantled machinery, deconstructed and recomposed in various piles, in a flux of constant transition and transformation, as if on a stage, with an entrance and exit, recount an ephemeral and regenerative narrative. Like the Still Life paintings of J. S. Chardin, whose inert cast of animals, vegetables, and flowers placed on a wooden table manifest their ultimate virtues, so does the textured layers of metal evoke the memory of its history.

My intention with Steel-Lives, Still-Life, is less concerned with technical exactitude, and more interested in the state-of-mind, the loss of the dream, the architecture, and its relevance to society today, while expanding the vectors of our introspection onto a microcosm of similar faiths elsewhere.

Norayr Kasper, Photographer, videographer, cinematographer.

Norayr Kasper is a Canadian visual artist of Armenian ancestry. Growing up in Venice and now living in Toronto, Kasper’s sensibilities stem from a diverse cultural background, resulting in a rich multidisciplinary art formation. He studied photography and architecture in Venice (IUAV), graduated in film production and cinema, Montreal (Concordia University, 1990). Kasper’s filmography includes art films, documentaries, Television films and projects, and feature films out of which he has shaped a distinct visual signature. The feature (in collaboration with director Atom Egoyan) “Calendar” was an exploration of the roll of architectural sites in forming identity, a dialectic between photography and memory. Using video, photography and film, it garnered praise from scholars and critics alike. A more recent video-art installation Vital Movements opened at the Contemporary Art Museum of Yerevan in collaboration with Garen Bedrossian’s exhibition captures the custom of tying cloth to a wish tree near monasteries. It inventively explores the relationship between repetitive ritual customs/movements symbolizing desires and wishes, and their spiritual significance. Over the years his work has received many awards and nominations; recently Best Cinematography at Antalya International Film Festival for the groundbreaking feature film Zenne Dancer. Kasper’s expressionistic style emphasizes a rich visual experience where textural elements, lighting, and movement heighten the expressiveness of his varied, multidisciplinary works.

www.norayrkasper.com

THE SETTING The installation is set in the 18th century Venetian ‘Loggia del Temanza’ designed and built by the homonymous architect Tommaso Temanza. The Neo-Palladian pavilion was originally built as the ‘casin’, family library of ‘Palazzo Zenobio’, and later served as Armenian College Moorat-Raphaël library. Since its restoration in 1991, the Loggia is the headquarters of the Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena and Oemme Edizioni.

Steel-Lives, Still-Life Norayr Kasper

JUNE - NOVEMBER 2013 A collateral event 55 International Art Exhibition th

LOGGIA DEL TEMANZA Corte Zappa, Dorsoduro 1602 I-30123 Venezia phone +39 041 5224225 www.steel-lives.com sl@steel-lives.com