This article is the third in a four-part series, exclusively for the Armenian Weekly, on the making of Encounters and Convergences: A Book of Ideas and Art by Seta B. Dadoyan.
Part Two, Chapter IV, Of the spirit of matter
The last section of the book starts with a discussion of my American-Armenian experience and subsequent aesthetic-philosophical re-positioning. Starting in the eighties, I lectured at various universities and institutions, attended conferences, read papers and published studies on the broader subject of Islamic-Armenian interactive history in Beirut, Europe and the U.S. I particularly enjoyed writing for Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History (six entries). Interfaith studies, a relatively recent and fascinating field, was particularly relevant to Islamic-Armenian studies. After the publication of my Fatimid Armenians (Leiden, 1997), I began a very extensive research project for a trilogy entitled The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World – Paradigms of Interaction Seventh to Fourteenth Centuries (2011, 2012, 2013).
My American-Armenian experience was a turning point and a factor in another re-positioning. It started in 2000 with a lecture tour at Harvard, UCLA and Columbia universities to speak about my Fatimid Armenians and Islamic-Armenian interactions. In 2002, I was invited as Ordjanian visiting professor to MESAAS (Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies) of Columbia University, and again four years later in 2006. In the summer of 2005, we moved to New York to join our children, but always kept, and still do, our base in Beirut. Over the past 18 years, I have had interactions and encounters, as an educator, speaker and a community member, with a great number of people of diverse backgrounds and levels of education. I made a wide circle of acquaintances with scholars in local Armenian centers. I tried to map the intellectual and popular landscape, so to speak, and understand the American-Armenian mindset. The ultimate objective was to find grounds and contexts for new debates and fresh approaches to “things Armenian.”
What Armenians learn about themselves will make a difference in what they do. Knowledge is the key, and fresh, critical perspectives are only beginnings. Hoping that new ideas would appeal and stir questions beyond the marketplace of recycled concepts, I tried to reach the public through talks. To several institutions, I suggested launching well-studied and produced programs of adult education on Armenian history and culture at strategically selected times and locations. I even prepared syllabi for open courses, but I failed to prove my case. The problem is coming to terms with the cultural diplomacies of the institutions, parties and individuals in charge of the Armenian “culture industry.” Armenian cells on the East and West coasts, in the Republic and everywhere share similar dispositions, with only local variations of color and folklore. Everywhere, there is a set menu of worn-out themes and void reifications, in fixed styles and vocabulary, in poor or hybrid Armenian, or simply in English. A different regime of truths based on unbiased, new research and coherent and comprehensive visions of things Armenian is overdue. At present, what happens in the name of maintaining identity and survival is ethnic folklore with no consequences on the ground and in the long run.
After the publication of my trilogy, I dedicated the next three years to editing, writing and preparing the massive centennial volume on The Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia. History, Mission, Treasures (2015). The tremendous pressure of the Centenary of the Genocide and the manners in which it was remembered and celebrated generated a spontaneous response, rather a reaction. In moments of high spiritual tension and in a relatively short period of time, I wrote a bilingual book entitled 2015. The Armenian Condition in Hindsight and Foresight – A Discourse, dedicated “to those, for whom being Armenian is being.” The relevance of this work lay in the extent in which it could contribute to liberating the Armenian mind and soul from reifications, routine cultural-academic folklore, ideological rationalizations, sedimentations and vacant ritualistic practices orchestrated by the Armenian culture industry. At the time, I believed that the circumstances required a radical reconsideration of the cultural diplomacy of Armenian institutions and intellectuals. The first condition was having the decency to start from the beginning with integrity and courage.
By the end of 2016, I decided to withdraw from Armenian social circles and events, despite the popularity of the talks and my genuine enthusiasm to meet audiences. I felt that my perspectives on all things, and in particular “things Armenian,” were simply different. My philosophical background and explicitly critical approaches likely were not in line with the diplomacy of the Armenian culture industry and local norms. Except for occasional articles in papers, and some Zoom conferences, happily, but with a heavy heart, I have been “cultivating my own garden” since. This book is the last witness.
A different regime of truths based on unbiased, new research and coherent and comprehensive visions of things Armenian is overdue. At present, what happens in the name of maintaining identity and survival is ethnic folklore with no consequences on the ground and in the long run.
Previously in 2016, I had begun the research for a very extensive and complicated project, a magnum opus, entitled Islam in Armenian Literary Culture. Texts, Contexts, Dynamics. It was published by Peeters at Louvain in 2021. The pandemic allowed bonus time and privacy, and the research and writing took over five years. It was my sixth study in Islamic-Armenian interactive history. In the conclusion I wrote: “This study was a major phase, rather, a crowning of sorts of an existentially challenging and an intellectually complicated process. It started three decades ago as a lone journey into the twilight zone and uncharted territory of things Islamic-Armenian with no road map. I nevertheless moved by a firm intuition about the dimensions of the terrain to be explored and the Copernican revolution it could make in the way things Armenian as well Near Eastern were seen and explained traditionally.”
Finally, despite everything, I have been rewarded: first, by the immense gratification that research grants me, and next, by the three major awards in Armenian Studies, and two others. Undoubtedly, these reflect some “official” appreciation of my contribution so far: Society for Armenian Studies-SAS Lifetime Achievement Award (November 6, 2021); Mesrob Mashtots‘ Medal and Pontifical Encyclical (November 8, 2015); The Medal and Certificate of David Invictus-Anhaght – The Highest Award of the Armenian Philosophical Academy – Armenian Academy of Sciences in Yerevan (January 8, 1999).
The transition to art (Part Two, Chapter IV, section 2) happened at the end of 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, I frequently considered punctuating scholarship with art, but at each one of my major book projects, the intellectually demanding nature of the research stood in my way back to art. Having a “concentrated nature,” as Nietzsche put it, and exposure to and interaction with changing, contradictory and sometimes disappointing encounters kept me at a distance and made me ponder about my identity in a very different environment. So-called national identity is not an immutable essence. It is like a flowing stream of water that starts at a source and flows in a bed. As Heraclitus said, the waters flow, and “no man ever steps in the same river twice,” for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. Even though the source, my spirit, is the same, my American-Armenian experience made me seek different terrains and horizons to flow freely. After every bend and encounter, in the United States, in Yerevan where I met many scholars and public figures, and back in Beirut and Aleppo, I metamorphosed differently yet kept flowing. Encounters are at the core, and both art and writing were encounters and convergences.
Long before my last and very extensive study was accepted by Peeters at Louvain for publication in early 2021, I had decided to go back to the sketchpad as soon as the book was published. My decision to return after a very long interruption was a self-imposed command of existential dimensions. It was a moral duty towards what I was and stood for. I began with charcoal, because drawing and in general lines, chiaroscuro (light and dark) have always been expressive of my ways of thinking. Working with colors is a different process that will happen sometime.
When in January of 2022 I sat at the drawing board with a range of themes in mind, to my surprise I realized that as a form and means of _expression_, the human figure did not come forward. I also realized, sadly too, that a part of me had gone into “concealment” and decided not to pursue the matter. Even though I have always been, and still am, a politically and ideologically very concerned and committed person, on the immediate level of human relations I sometimes hesitate to connect. Here in New York, where everyone and everything intrigues me, and despite my absolute fascination with every aspect of this city, still I could not return to the human figure. I turned to nature, as many have and do, at least artistically. Rocks, and especially the dark gray/green rocks of the state of New York, have fascinated me since 1970, when I first visited. I see infinitely intriguing shapes, volumes and movements in the rocks by the side of roads and highways, in vast expanses and mountains, yet have not stopped to draw them. When I finally decided to go back to the sketchpad, I could think of no other subject than the rocks.
When I began drawing, I was surprised by a direction that I had not planned nor predicted. It was my “humanization” of matter, in this case the rocks. I seemed to be trying to “reveal” and “speak” of the “spirit of matter.” I was not avoiding my basic humanism; I had developed a form of “hard humanism.” I continued what I was doing to see where this path would lead. As discussed earlier, the artwork is never a representation of an object or correspondence to something outside it. It is an entity with its own truth-content. The relationship of my drawing to an actual “thing-out-there” is irrelevant. Drawings of a rock formation or a banyan tree are not imitations of rocks and trees. In other words, their meaning is not found in their representational aspect or my graphic skills. It is in the compositional and formal elements that reflect the internal dialectic and convergence between the subject matter and the creative-artistic process. Thus, the profundity of the truth-content and the aesthetic value of the image are inherent to it. Forms, lines, chiaroscuro in a composition are the means to this end. The actual object, such as the rock or the tree, and the artistic competence of the painter are prerequisites.
The bridge, New York, 2022. Mixed media, 16×39 cm
From January to the end of 2022 and some of 2023, my journey from the “Bridge,” my first work after a long pause, to the last three, “Unconcealment,” “Homes and graves” and the cover of this book “Encounters and convergences,” generated 28 drawings. After three decades of a withdrawal of sorts, my return to art was a crossing. The idea of a bridge seemed most appropriate. Simultaneously connecting, dividing and suggesting passages to other worlds, bridges are also things-in-themselves, or entities. I drew a natural rock-bridge that swirled into another unseen platform outside the frame. The climber on this rock-bridge would simultaneously escape and defy the Nietzschean “abyss” below. Dangerous stairs lead to a couple of dark and narrow entrances into another level, or a world, perhaps into a part of me that is in concealment there. Stairs, in turn, are intriguing entities. So far, no artist other than Moritz Escher (1898-1972) has even come close to expressing the complexity, beauty and symbolism of stairs. The “Stairs” is a dramatization of dangerous movements into other levels with feelings of instability in perilous and dark spiritual states.
The alternative view, New York, 2022. Mixed media, 18×37 cm
Often, during conversations with friends, I feel that I am standing in an odd place or position, perhaps not even perceived by some, and looking out onto other landscapes of hills, deep crevices and seismic terrains. My understanding of most things, including “things Armenian” and the “truths” I believe to have discovered and thrived on, seem to make an “alternative view” or perspective [“The alternative view”]. In this sketch, the contrast of different elevations and perspectives suggests this sense of estrangement, if not withdrawal too. From a holistic perspective, all things are parts of a whole, irrespective of and beyond value judgments. Encounters, conversations, dialogues and debates happen between opposites as well. The “Conversation” is a complicated composition of seemingly parallel yet interactive volumes and spaces, dark and light. Thinking, in my case, is always a dialectical process. It is a movement through known and unknown paths into entrances and gates, into hidden worlds, through caves with bursts of water that disappear into other caves, through rocks that resonate in eerie rhythms. Three sketches are dedicated to thought processes that seem to explain the dialectical nature of my work too [“The gate,” “The spring,” “Rhythms”].
Rituals and ceremonies have always been problematic for me since my childhood. I have found their spiritual content vague and often expressive of manifestations of domination. Public events and activities that I often avoid may be solemn but are inherently ritualistic, hence my sketch of stone pillars on a terrain of hills, standing ceremoniously, in ranks of high and low, heavy and frail, close and far. This is the inspiration of “Ritual.”
Ritual, New York, 2022. Mixed media, 17×37.5 cm
I believe that the fugue (from fuga, literally ‘flight’, running away, fleeing), as a concept and form, is perfectly applicable to painting, sculpture and all arts. Chase, escape and flight are human emotions and actions that everyone experiences. Even in its exaggerated sense in psychology (as a form of hysteria, loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s environment), the fugue has some relevance. The rock formations in the “fugue” are almost musical, reminiscent of the fugues of Bach, on the theme of flight and escape in rhythmical and harmonious movements [“Fugue”].
Dr. Seta B. Dadoyan (née Satenik Barsoumian) is a prominent Armenian scholar and painter and a Doctor of Philosophical Sciences in Philosophy. In addition to her research and publications on Western Armenian culture, her novel and extensive research focuses on the medieval and modern Armenian political, cultural and intellectual experiences in their interactive aspects within the Near Eastern world. She is considered a trailblazer and leading specialist in a novel discipline of Islamic-Armenian interactive history, initiated by her and to which she has dedicated six of her 12 volumes and many groundbreaking studies. She was professor of cultural studies, philosophy and art history at the American University of Beirut. After moving to the United States in 2005, she was visiting professor of Armenian and Near Eastern Studies at Columbia University, St. Nersess Seminary, the University of Chicago and the State University of Yerevan. For her exceptional scholarly contributions to Armenian studies and intellectual culture, in September 2021 the Society of Armenian Studies honored her with the “Lifetime Achievement Award.” In September 2015, she was granted the “St. Mesrop Mashtots‘” Medal, and in January 1999, the highest “Medal and Diploma of David Invictus/Anhaght” of the Philosophical Academy of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. She has authored 11 and co-authored and edited two volumes, as well as published over 60 scholarly papers in academic journals.