Hrag Vartanian

Critic, Curator, Editor-in-chief and co-founder, Hyperallergic

Critic, Curator, Editor-in-chief and co-founder, Hyperallergic

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Dear Neery

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Aram Jibilian's photography of Neery (photo by the author)
Aram Jibilian’s photography of Neery (all photos by the author)

Last Thursday, many of us got together to honor Neery Melkonian, the beloved Armenian American art critic and curator, with a memorial evening at AGBU Central Office in Manhattan.

Emceed by Houry Guedelekian and Nancy Agabian, the evening started with artist Aram Jibilian sharing the contours of his friendship with Neery, and an overview of her career, philosophy, and thoughts on armenity.

Some of the many speakers from the evening
Some of the many speakers, including emcees Nancy Agabian and Houry Guedelekian (center), artists Aram Jibilian, Tina Chakarian, and Kardash Onnig, architect Silva Ajemian, professor David Kazanjian, and others.

Then there were readings by Jean Marie Casbarian, Tina Chakarian, Silva Ajemian, Lola Koundakjian, Lusine Kerobyan (who introduced the two AGBU WebTalks videos featuring Neery), followed by an opportunity for friends and family to come up and say something.

Her nephew Patrick said some moving things about her relationship with the family, which I think everyone appreciated. One of Neery’s friends from Santa Fe ended with some energy exercise to have Neery’s spirit delivered into the heavens, or something. It was a little confusing but a light and playful touch that captured some of Neery’s spirit.

Kardash Onnig also spoke and he explained that a project he did with Neery ended up into a book that got him banned from Armenia. That book was recently translated into Armenian by a professor there and he got his copy the day before, and it mentions Neery on the back cover.

I read this piece as part of the program. It is a letter I wrote her after she passed away. Friendships never end the way you want, so sometimes we have to make up your own ending.

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Dear Neery

I still remember the last time I saw you. You came over for brunch at our apartment in Brooklyn and we ended up chatting for hours about life, art, and the future. I remember your excitement at what ended up being a Pyrrhic victory over something no one could’ve controlled. I shared the thrill with you that your work was finally getting noticed and that people were reading your essays, and they were interested in your ideas. We talked with a new openness and discussed the urgency of culture in the world, and I felt the buzz in our conversations that I often felt with you, as if there were fireflies fluttering between us.

It’s hard for some of us to get noticed in this world. Particularly those of us who feel tethered to history, very much in the present, and anxious about our future. We had that in common you and I, often feeling rejected by people who don’t understand us, but also being adventurous, maybe sometimes careless, as we forged our own paths.

I’m trying to remember the first time I met you and I’m certain it was in this office that we’re standing in today. You walked in like a windstorm, slightly disheveled, passionate, and we had an instant connection even if we didn’t fully know it yet.

And how could we? It was like meeting another alien, yet someone as connected as family.

You wore a scarf wrapped around your head and you were usually coming in asking for funding for your ambitious projects that not everyone understood. Personally, I wish I could’ve funded everything — but it wasn’t my decision.

At that final brunch, you said that you thought I was angry at you but I had no idea what you meant. How can I be angry at someone who is so like me, not a mirror, but a continuation, woven from the same thread and fading in the same sun. You seemed relieved with my answer and so was I that another weed was removed between us in the garden of our friendship.

Our time together was fragmented across so many projects, conversations, and rooms, and there was always something else, something new, different, that you were always excited to tell me about and to listen and talk and listen.

We bonded most over the art we hated. Kitsch or chintzy stuff that passed itself as more than it was in Armenian circles. Endless Ararats and sappy scenes of figures in traditional garb twirling in fields of grass amidst mountains. Everyone looked oddly depressed, and we’d laugh and laugh about all of it. You smoking, and we’d laugh some more.

I’m glad I got to see the Armenity pavilion in Venice, and republish your essay. You wanted to write more, I could tell. Epic histories, tying together things that no one thought about. All of it, anchored in a thirst that could never be quenched, in language that was shriveling and blooming at the same time, ideas planted in the cracks of pavement we treaded daily.

We’d complain that Armenians confused us, but only because we understood them too well. Or at least that’s how I’m choosing to remember it. We were two diasporan cultural workers, fluent in the languages of many communities, which created an automatic kinship, twice removed from stable narratives, which we both knew were a fiction anyway.

I know you carried a wound with you, because some days you let some of us see it, and at other times it was hidden so deep but I always knew it was there. I know we recognized each other’s wounds even though we didn’t talk about it, but then again maybe we both chose art because we knew some of the most interesting and important things are left unsaid.

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Memorial for Neery Melkonian at AGBU Central Office, NYC, March 9, 2017

Planning a Book

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Screen Shot 2016-08-29 at 12.54.37 AM
(facebook.com/hragv)

As soon as I decided it was finally time to write a book I knew I should revamp my blog. The truth is that I only started blogging when Veken, my boyfriend at the time, discovered my interest in possibly writing a book. He ask me how I intended to sell this future book. “I assume people who are interested in the topic will buy it,” I said naively. His reaction, which included wide-eyed amazement, told me I needed more than my fuzzy thinking about the matter.

This redesign conveys my love of clarity and simplicity. Good ideas don’t need filler, they need to be told plainly in order to have the widest impact.

It’s a big deal that I want to write a book, because I haven’t really been interested in the book form until now. I love books but I found their form conventional. After I discovered blogging, I didn’t look back because I loved the rhythm, speed, flexibility, and openness, even its editing feature.

I’ve shied away from the idea of the autonomous text for decades, preferring a more mercurial one that spills across platforms and incorporates images, hyperlinks, and mediums. In the 1990s I would photocopy and print out pages as objects, and I appreciated this physicality — I still have many andthey were mostly personal projects, sometimes poems, often designs (I was very into graphic design theory at the time), and sometimes they most resemble journal entries. The ephemerality of these clumsy pages, made into finite paper objects, gave the works and images what I perceived as an urgency. I created one book project, FutureHype/Kitabet, with the students of Beirut’s Haigazian University in 1998 but that was zine-like in its format, particularly in the way it was brought together as an object (a flawed one unfortunately as the printshop screwed up the final publication).

In the aughts, I focused on the internet, and after many pointless experiments I settled on my personal blog as the hub for my work. As a blogger, I began to write in a more fluid and urgent voice that was spurred by the tragic assassination of Hrant Dink — an event that infuriated me. Dink meant a lot to me, as a reporter of Armenian heritage his work to uncover truth in the face of societal orthodoxies inspired me. I was working at the time in the Armenian nonprofit community in New York, and I had the tragic distinction of being the last person to interview Dink. I remember him being kind, wise, and thoughtful in our interview. He seemed impressed that someone in New York cared about his thoughts. And the truth was that most people around me (including Armenians) had no idea who he was. He died the month after that interview was published.

My blog eventually focused more and more on contemporary art. So, here I am, on the trail of a book I intend to write. I figure it’s time to reuscitate this space as it has been far too long since I wrote here. I’m excited.

Tumbling, Tweeting, Blogging … Oh, My

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A snapshot of my Tumblog … it’s fun and insightful, I promise.

There are some changes in store for HragVartanian.com. This site, which has been the main repository for my writing, links, thoughts, pics, etc., for a rather long time (four years?) will now be increasingly devoted to my writing and thoughts on art, writing, and life. My quick links and simple photo posts (with minimal commentary) are moving elsewhere … more on that in a sec.

Many of you probably already know that the majority of my recent writing is being posted on Hyperallergic, which I edit on a daily basis (though I only work in the Hyperallergic office on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays). Others may also know that I also provide a great deal of links, some wit, and daily spewings on my Twitterfeed, @hragv. But what most of you probably don’t know is that I’m also quite active on Tumblr — hragv.tumblr.com — which is where the majority of my links, random pics, and other ephemera (though I guess when I post it the term doesn’t technically apply) will reside from now on.

Me sporting my awesome Andres Serrano “Shit Is Coming” tshirt (photo by Paddy J. and tee via Brent B.)

You may be wondering, “How can an individual maintain all those sites and still have a job, life … ?”

Well, the short answer is because I love it and I have a rather overactive personality. The more extensive explanation is that the online world is nuanced and I’m discovering where certain material fits better. I’m learning to respond to the evolving communities of each platform. Writing, at the end of the day, is about communicating and the world online is helping me hone my skills. My need to communicate isn’t restricted to my writing either (everyone by now probably knows of my love of photography and Photoshop). Tumblr allows me to explore visual conversations and connections that are unlike Flickr (something I won’t get into here), Twitter is like a digital telegraph for facts and quick reactions, and this blog is my notebook. I used to fill journals quickly before I started blogging and nowadays they are as likely to be filled with to-do lists, doodles, and stickers rather than straightforward writing. One thing is for sure, blogging keeps me sane. I’m not 100% sure why, but it helps. For that reason, this site will not be going anywhere.

Cultural Hypocrisy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

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People are funny. They often say one thing and do another. This isn’t more true than in the world of culture. My years as a cultural worker have shown me that people are not honest about how they would like to truly spend their free time. Ask most people what they would like to see and they may say concerts, art shows, performances, but then try to get them to attend and there’s always something they have to do instead of those noble cultural pursuits. We need to realize that the audience for culture, particularly specialized things like experimental video art, is rather small and that’s not a bad thing, it actually makes it more fun sometimes.

During my recent professional venture, Hyperallergic, I’m encountering the same problem. Ask people what they want to know about and they’ll tell you reviews, global issues, … but the stats don’t prove that online readers care. From what I’ve been able to discern, most people want to know about things that impact them directly and/or are an extension of themselves (their cultural group, their neighborhood, etc.).

There’s a great quote about the phenomenon from Newsweek editor Jon Meacham who recently spoke at an event organized by the Texas Monthly on how to get the news media to return to “intelligent” news, whatever that means:

He used PBS’s NewsHour an example, and said if the number of people who claim to watch the program actually did watch it, the show would have much higher ratings. “It’s fundamentally a supply-and-demand problem. There’s an infinite demand for something and a limited supply for intelligent something.”

But not everything is negative on the horizon for online content, according to the New York Times‘ Science article, “Will You Be E-Mailing This Columns? It’s Awesome,” which was reporting on the University of Pennsylvania’s study of online behavior by Times readers, there are signs of hope … awe, to be exact:

People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics … Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.

So, do we all have to go the Gawker route of reporting on Lady Gaga’s vagina for major web traffic? Probably not. But have I seen the pictures — particularly the one super enlarged by AnimalNY – ummm, how could I miss it.