The art of Gary Deirmendjian and the cultural power of social media
Artist Gary Deirmendjian’s vignettes on social media are a haven from the relentlessness of daily life and its myriad distractions
Gary Deirmendjian uses the social media platforms of Facebook and Instagram to post photographs and sometimes short video clips that may seem slight or ephemeral at a casual glance – he has compared them to Japanese haiku poems – but actually raise important questions both about the nature and social functions of what we think of as art, and about the places and circumstances in which it can effectively address an audience today.
Humans have made things that we classify as art since the earliest prehistory. At first they may be decorative patterns carved into tools or inscribed on a vessel, or rudimentary magical and apotropaic figures. Much later they may grow into statues, reliefs, fresco cycles, landscapes and portraits. But what they all have in common is that they are a form of concrete thinking. Abstract, logical, self-critical reasoning arose little more than two and a half millennia ago; before that, pre-rational thought made sense of the world in the embodied, concrete forms of picture-making and storytelling.
In a sense then, art is a primitive form of thinking, but it is not rendered obsolete by the development of philosophical and scientific thought, because although rational thinking is a monumental step forward for the human mind, it does not answer all our questions. Many of the deepest concerns of the human heart cannot be resolved by critical analysis. Art can speak of shades of feeling and intuition that reason cannot define.
There is a dialogue between reason and imagination in subsequent centuries, so that art often seems to feel its way towards intuitions that will later be pondered rationally, or to sense cultural and social changes that are not yet visible to reason. We can think of Giotto imaginatively and concretely building a first model of the solid material world that will be the foundation of nascent science; or at the other end of the modern arc, the various avant-garde schools of art that all in their various ways speak of the fraying of reason and cultural self-confidence in the years before the Great War.
The nature of this dialogue has changed radically over the past few centuries, however. From the earliest times, art has spoken of the shared values of the community, which in practice primarily means its religious beliefs. The cultural dynamism of the early modern period in Europe derives from a tension between reason and faith, reaching its apogee in the 17th century, when the Scientific Revolution coincided with a movement of religious revival. But it was science that prevailed, and by the 18th century religious faith was on the back foot, never to regain its dominance. This in turn led to a gradually growing crisis in the practice of art: a loss of stories, of waning of shared beliefs – which are not the whole of art but are its backbone – and therefore an erosion of audience.
Art once addressed vast congregations, whole communities with subjects that were meaningful to all of them; for the past couple of centuries the audience has become increasingly narrow and the art itself has grown specialised, aestheticised, self-referential and inaccessible to the common people. And this has been accompanied by dramatic changes in the environments in which art is shown and for which it is increasingly made. It is no coincidence that museums and art galleries, in their modern forms, are phenomena of the last two and a half centuries.
Galleries were first formed to hold national collections and they helped to make art and art history far more accessible to visitors in great new cities; but at the same time, to remove an altarpiece from a church and transfer it to a museum was also to sever it from a living communal environment where it had been part of a world of belief and a shared culture, and effectively treat it as something dead, a specimen of a defunct culture. Like an entomologist, the art historian inspects these samples pinned up side-by-side while visitors troop by listening to the platitudes of guides.
The creeping necrosis has grown worse in the past few decades, for now art is not only largely experienced in galleries and museums but increasingly made for such environments. Most art of the kind produced for biennale-type exhibitions cannot be shown in a private home and has no place in a church or public building like a palace or parliament house. Art galleries all over the world are indeed increasingly turning into fetishised quasi-sacred spaces, as though they were contemporary cathedrals, yet underpinned by no faith except the late capitalist mysticism of the “contemporary”. And galleries like the AGNSW or the NGA spend millions on third-rate art, convinced that if you pump enough money into the trivial it will become monumental.
Shared beliefs and common narratives, as I suggested above, are the backbone of art but do not exhaust its meaning. The Iliad is built around the great myth of the Trojan War, but its beauty and importance as a work of literature lie in its myriad insights into human existence and the tragedy of finding ourselves entangled in a fateful series of events that are not of our making. Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, like many sacred works since, tells stories fundamental to Christian belief, but is full of human tenderness and emotional nuances. In all great art a whole ecosystem of smaller ideas and perceptions clusters around the great central narratives, like the understorey of a forest sheltering under great canopy trees.
All serious artists today have to deal with the loss of the great upper storey of shared cultural references and values, but certainly a way to understand Deirmendjian’s distinctive and quietly radical work is as a collection of deliberately small and fragmentary insights that fully embrace a pervasive condition of cultural disorientation and attempt to bring moments of perception into a world dulled by routine, noise and consumerist amnesia.
In the first place, his work does not seek to occupy physical space in one of the increasingly vast contemporary art mausoleums, with their lumbering group exhibitions like Sydney Modern, Melbourne Now or the Melbourne Triennial – all primarily gatekeeping operations for the contemporary art establishment to maintain its monopoly on the field and ensure that all grants, corporate commissions and publication funding are channelled towards their approved candidates. Establishing this monopoly of official artists means that everyone else – smaller galleries and corporate collections – can all buy from the same shopping list without fear of making a faux pas. Everyone is safe in the cosy consensus of groupthink.
Deirmendjian has indeed produced large-scale works, which are documented in A Prevailing Sense of Disquiet (Hardie Grant, 2020), a beautifully-produced book with a selection of short and generally insightful texts. These larger works, including installations using shipping containers, generally take the form of interventions in public spaces, and his recent work on the free and openly accessible platforms of Facebook and Instagram is an extension of this kind of intervention; any reader can look him up and choose to follow him or not. These are media in which his work occupies only momentary and virtual space, and only, so to speak, at the invitation of the viewer. Viewers can look at them as long as they like, and can comment if they like, so that there is a degree of reciprocity.
The images themselves are often unexpected and surprising, and yet at the same time things that lie right before our eyes. This morning, I happened to see on Facebook a black and white photograph of an unremarkable building facade that had been preserved, as so often, while the building behind it was completely demolished and rebuilt. The facade is held up, seemingly precariously, by steel scaffolding; the accompanying comment is “keeping up facades, hard work”.
What makes this image interesting, or differentiates it from other pictures that any of us might post, is in part its low-key artfulness – from the choice of black and white to the angle of the shot – accompanied by its equally low-key annotation. But mainly it is simply a matter of noticing something and having a sense of its potential resonance. Most of us, most of the time, don’t notice things because we are too preoccupied with our lives, our wants and anxieties, anticipations and memories.
In addition to such preoccupation, much of the apparatus of the human mind is in any case designed to stop us noticing, or having to notice, things. We don’t walk into a room, for example, and stand amazed at the different tones and hues on each of the walls; our brain instantly recognises that the room is painted in a single colour and that all the objective differences, as distinct as they are, are just effects of lighting and so can be ignored. Our perceptual system scans for outlines, movement and change, while ignoring or filling in all that does not require our attention.
The combined effect of our brain’s radical filtering of perception and of our tendency to be preoccupied by the ego’s desires and fears, is that we can pass through the world and hardly see any of it. It is one of the pleasures of art that it invites us to stop and look at something in a disinterested spirit, with that ego-free attention that Kant called “disinterested interest”. Good art – whether painting, music or poetry – creates a space of suspended desire in which we can contemplate the world, as in a state of meditation.
Some of Deirmendjian’s most striking images are found merely by looking down; the ground beneath our feet is fertile in incidents, from the unusual shape of a piece of crumpled paper or a bus ticket to reflections in the rain or cracks in a pavement. And looking up too can reveal unexpected perspectives, shapes and silhouettes that can be whimsical or threatening. Anything, in fact which forms a break, a momentary interruption in the relentless preoccupation with our own pursuits which amounts to a permanent state of distraction from reality.
But these little moments of attention and perception are not wholly random. They are in fact like fragments of a potentially greater narrative, for certain themes recur throughout Deirmendjian’s work and explain why some things in particular attract his notice. As he writes in the preface to A Prevailing Sense of Disquiet, he is acutely aware of the brevity and fragility of our existences. Civilisation too is haunted by entropy; themes of decline and collapse are often hinted at in images or their brief annotations. Some of his most memorable shots are of pavements that are damaged, patched or in one case disrupted by the movement of an unseen tree root. It is the pathos of ruins, the sense that time will consume and nature reclaim all that we so confidently constructed.
Gary Deirmendjian
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