UNVEILING THE HANGING GARDENS OF ARMENIA
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
New York Times
Nov 18 2009
YEREVAN, Armenia — Some 20,000 Armenians turned up for the opening
of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts last week. They jammed the new
sculpture park and the terraced gardens and galleries, including the
first exhibition ever in Armenia of the Armenian-born American great,
Arshile Gorky.
Did I mention the artificial waterfalls?
Built into a gigantic hill in the commercial heart of this capital
city, with a staircase that climbs the outside linking the gardens,
the place was originally conceived in Soviet times to be topped by
a monument to the Soviet revolution. That it has been turned into
a contemporary-art center by a rich American is a twist of history
whose symbolism is lost on no one here.
There’s no endowment, no professional board, so it may very well
soon fall flat on its face, as so much has in this country where
widespread corruption, lethargy and years of isolation have led to
an unemployment rate around 40 percent, a crumbling infrastructure
and almost no middle class.
But for the time being, at least, it is doing what precious few
museums, and even fewer vanity enterprises like it can dream of doing
— namely, offering a whole nation a kind of uplift.
>From morning to evening, as if out on prom night, young Armenians
at the opening rode the center’s escalator, in many ways the main
attraction, which rises via several grand, plaza-size landings inside
to, of all things, a little jazz lounge, where a view of the city
unfolds beyond tall windows behind the stage.
Armenia’s president, Serge Sargsyan, surrounded by swarms of security
guards (politicians can’t be too careful here) took time out from
the debate over opening the border with Turkey. He joined Gerard L.
Cafesjian, the 84-year-old Brooklyn-born Armenian-American patron
of the center, and the center’s director, Michael De Marsche, among
others, to hear the inaugural set.
These days Armenian newspaper headlines dwell on the Turkish border
opening, which the United States quietly presses for to gain an oil
pipeline that can sidestep Russia and Iran. In return Turkey wants
to table once and for all any talk about having committed genocide
in the killing of more than a million Armenians nearly a century ago.
Admitting to genocide has legal ramifications in terms of restitution.
So President Obama has lately stopped using the G word, leaving
Armenians to choose between desperately needed economic improvement
and justice in the defining calamity of their history.
Paralyzed for decades by that event, turned in on itself, landlocked
and surrounded by mostly hostile neighbors, Armenia has had until
now almost no place to see modern and contemporary art from outside
the country. When a perfectly anodyne fat Botero sculpture of a cat
was installed in the new center’s sculpture park a few years ago, it
caused a scandal. Then, resistance melted. As the center’s opening
proved, thousands of young Armenians are hungry for what’s beyond
their borders and are open to change.
I arrived, having been invited to lecture at the opening, dimly
aware of the center’s history, which began during the 1930s, when a
prominent local architect, Alexander Tamanyan, conceived the Cascade,
as it’s called, a towering, white travertine ziggurat of artificial
waterfalls and gardens tumbling down a promontory that links the
historic residential and business centers of the city.
Banquet-hall-size meeting rooms were devised for Soviet apparatchiks.
The plan was largely forgotten until the late 1970s, after which
construction began. Then came the earthquake in 1988 and the breakup of
the Soviet Union in 1991. Like much of the city during the post-Soviet
years of transition, the Cascade was left in the lurch.
Enter Mr. Cafesjian, from Minnesota. Armenian officials agreed he
could erect a building on top of the Cascade in which to show his
collection if he would complete the Cascade. Work started in 2002,
but costs spiraled swiftly out of control. What had been imagined as a
$20 million undertaking soon topped $40 million, with no end in sight.
Mr. Cafesjian regrouped. Two years ago he hired Mr. De Marsche, then
president of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The building on
top was put on hold, the focus instead turned toward completing the
Cascade and the sculpture park at the foot of it. Tamanyan’s original
meeting rooms became art galleries, a gift shop and the jazz lounge.
Peculiar doesn’t begin to describe the results. The galleries are
irregular and spaced far apart, some of them reachable only outdoors
across the gardens, which in winter will be frigid and covered
with snow.
It’s a world away from other museums here. I stopped several times
into the National Gallery, an aging palace of marble, worn carpets,
bare light bulbs and creaky floorboards in the middle of the city. You
wouldn’t necessarily know it was a gallery from outside. The facade is
covered by billboards for a bank. An unmarked entrance is shuttered
by Venetian blinds. Even on Saturday and Sunday afternoons I was the
only visitor in the entire place. Elderly female guards in starched
white shirts, startled, glumly rose to watch me pass.
Through the gallery’s windows, bossa nova music wafted incongruously
from an empty Soviet-era amusement park nearby. A panorama of
half-finished apartment blocks, Hummers and luxury shops for the
oligarchs, and bulky statues of Armenian heroes on horseback spread
out below.
According to Raffi Hovannisian, Armenia’s former foreign minister, the
country now depends for some one-third of its economy on money sent by
Armenians abroad. The global collapse has been devastating. Several
years of double-digit economic growth during the early 2000s have
largely evaporated.
Even Dennis Doyle, who sits on the board of Mr. Cafesjian’s family
foundation, wondered aloud about the center’s future. Mr. Cafesjian
promises to pay for it. But that means it all depends on him in the
end. The Armenian government is no safety net.
Karen De Marsche, Mr. De Marsche’s wife, said she was sitting in
a restaurant here with a friend one recent afternoon when a man
rushed in, agitated, and begged for something from the manager, who
disappeared into the kitchen. The friend, who knew the man, got up
from the table to find out what was wrong. She returned, distressed.
"What happened?" Ms. De Marsche asked.
The friend explained that the man was canvassing restaurants. His uncle
had just died in the hospital, and the man told hospital officials
the rest of his family couldn’t make it to town for a couple of days.
They told him, "Get ice."