Yerevan's Cascade Monument, housing a new contemporary art museum./L. Kohlenberg 2009

Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

-Orhan Pamuk, Snow

YEREVAN, Armenia – The tiny Ulikhanyan music club has only 12 tables and a tiny stage. But the place is packed to listen to the three Ulikhanyan brothers and their band on a Sunday night.

The music is all original, a jazz version of Armenian composer Komitas’s classical scores, and background for poetry by the famous Armenian poet Hovhannes Tumanyan. The playing is flawless, the compositions delightful, and the mood very light and informal: as a small child runs through the crowd, master clarinetist Martin Ulikhanyan makes his instrument follow the ebbs and flows of the child’s laughter, easily incorporating it into the composition.

“Ah,” says my friend Larisa, who brought me here, “I was just reading these poems to my daughter the other night.”

They announce they’ve made a cd of the poetry to donate to schools to help children maintain interest in Tumanyan. When we ask Mrs. Ulikhanyan, mother of this musical family and manager of the club, who paid for the cds, she says the money came out of their own pockets.

I want to buy one, but Larisa discovers they aren’t for sale, and in fact there aren’t any on the premises. That’s OK, she tells me. Martin is her clarinet teacher, and she tells me she can get one for me for free later on.

“That’s Armenian artists,” she says, laughing. “They don’t think about money at all.”

***

In November, a well-known art critic for a famous New York newspaper came to Yerevan. He was invited to give a key-note speech for the grand opening of the country’s first proper contemporary art museum, and he was supported in style: a $20,000 speaking fee, and another $5,000 in benefits – a stay at one of the country’s luxury hotels, dinners, tours and a flight from Berlin.

This reporter, not surprisingly, wrote an article about Armenia, which he knew the majority of his readers, like himself, knew very little about. It showed up, if you’d like to read the full text, on Nov. 19, 2009.

I know this, and not only because I am an artist, I live in Armenia and I worked as a temporary curator at the aformentioned contemporary art museum. Many people forwarded me this link thinking I’d be thrilled at a mention of Armenia and art, let alone contemporary art, in this prestigious paper.

Instead, I was horrified.

Beyond the somewhat mischaracterizing reporting on the Turkish-Armenian border disputes, the article hints at something deeper and more disturbing: it equates money with culture. It’s a mistake Americans coming to Armenia make all the time.

**

“You want to listen to a classical music concert?”

This was the question, asked incredulously to me by an Armenian translator I worked with when I first came to Yerevan nine years ago.

“I’m sorry,” she said, recovering quickly. “I am just not used to thinking of Americans as being interested in cultural things like this.”

You can hardly blame her for thinking that way. Americans generally don’t exactly have a reputation as being classical-music-listening-art-gallery-attending kinda folk. Unless money and/or celebrity is involved, of course. Artists in the U.S. are commonly perceived to be social slackers who either fetch too much money for their weird contemporary installations or make too little money, raising the question of why they would do art in the first place. As an American artist living in the U.S., I was constantly condescended to by those with so-called “real jobs.”

“How’s that little hobby of yours going?” was a constant refrain I heard as I struggled to make the time to paint and also earn enough money to be able to eat.

Read this well-meaning brochure created by an American arts group to try and counter that stereotype – the entire thing quotes statistics showing how much money artists and cultural groups contribute to the economy, and features quotes from mega wealthy patrons such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

From my translator’s perspective, she explained, the Americans she met generally bandied about terms like “GDP” and “economic development” rather than anything arts and culture-related.

Even art critics from famous New York newspapers, it seems, spend more time discussing the economy rather than … well, the arts.

This is how he introduces Armenia to the reader:

(The new contemporary art museum has) 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.

Though during his lecture, he perhaps pandered to the audience by praising the country’s fine art collection housed in the National Gallery, that’s not what he mentions in the article. Instead, he compared the $40 million dollar new contemporary art museum to the shabby building which houses the national collection:

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.

There is, in fact, very little about art at all in this story by the New York art critic, besides one passing mention of the contemporary art museum benefactors’ “mixed bag” collection. The remainder of the article is devoted to an anecdotal story representing the worst kind of ugly-American cliché, a story hauled out at cocktail parties to show how cool the story teller is for living overseas, by mocking both the poverty and the people who are living in it.

**

After reading this article, many of my expat friends and I who live in Armenia find ourselves in the funny position of becoming Armenian apologists.

“It was ridiculous,” fumed one American friend (provider of the Pamuk quote above). “Armenian artists and musicians can compete with anyone else in the world. I was offended.”

Another British friend concurred, adding “I felt like the Armenians were being personally attacked, just for living here.”

It’s a funny position because we know – much better than any parachuting journalist penning his lines while looking out the window of the luxurious Golden Tulip hotel – how frustrating it can be to live in Armenia. We know that the poverty and the lack of infrastructure and corruption can wreak havoc on the lives of everyone living here, Armenian or foreign.

But over time, we’ve learned also to admire how the arts blossoms here, despite the lack of financial support. We’ve discovered that there is a fragile, original beauty here that expresses itself through the arts. It’s often hidden in tucked away, hard-to-find locations, like the Ulikhanyan Music Club.

I’ve been leading tours to artist studios here for the past two years. We pile into funny old lada taxis and doddering marshutka vans, dodging potholes in the streets as we move into non-descript neighborhoods with crumbling buildings. It’s not till we climb the dirty staircases and duck around the exposed electric wires hanging there, into a grandmother or grandfather’s apartment that has been converted into a studio, that one sees that one sees the beauty of Armenia. Scuplture, painting, drawing, printmaking. It’s all here.

Even contemporary art concepts – from formalism to Pop Art – are present, though they were mainly filtered out until the 1980s. Many artists adopted these ideas at the risk of career suicide, such as the talented painter Karine Matsakyan, whose works make pointed critiques about feminism, capitalism and the problems of adhering too closely to folk traditions. Or abstract expressionist Artur Sarkissian, whose emotive, thick layering of paint and silkscreened imagery, reminiscent of 1960s Robert Rauschenberg, has nevertheless a distinctly unique and contemporary feel.

These artists are excited about the new contemporary art museum, as was the 20,000-strong crowd that the New York art critic was gracious enough to point out thronged the grand opening of the contemporary art museum, clogging the galleries and waiting in hour-long lines to get into the tiny galleries.

Yet it’s a cautious optimism. During the soviet era, artists could be banished from the union – as good as death during that time — for as minor an infraction as using the color green in shadows (this happened to painter Hariutunyan Galents).  And they’ve learned a different kind of humiliation from the new wave of westerners, who won’t censor their work, but will belittle or ignore it. They are careful, therefore, whom they let into their studios and their music halls.

They may be poor, but they aren’t stupid.

Renovating a Cafe in Yerevan, Armenia, November 2009/L. Kohlenberg

Two year ago, I first wrote in this blog about a battle with myself over my identity – between the journalist I spent my first 15 years of professional life becoming, and the fledgling artist I was. At the time, I didn’t state it directly, but intimated that I had somehow won that battle. As in, I thought I had managed to integrate both sides of myself as a journalist trainer working part-time, and as an artist part-time. I was living in Yerevan, Armenia, an at-times-screwed-up-but-always-interesting country, with a natural pink and tan-hued-stone backdrop and evanescent light that would put a Greek Island to shame.

Yet now, I find myself deeply engaged in the same struggle – giving up journalism YET AGAIN.

You see, it worked exactly as it was supposed to. As an artist, I have grown tremendously since I moved to Yerevan, both in skills and more importantly, in voice. I’ve produced a body of work I’m really pleased with, and am working on a new series that is challenging all my skills. Even my photography, which was dismal when I started out five years ago, has improved, as I look for compositions I can transfer to the canvas. If I’d been able to stand the structure of art school, I’d say I’ve done the equivalent of an MFA.

At the same time, I was doing important work with local journalists, helping them learn to cover the complex problems of our contemporary world – AIDS, the environment, bad economic shifts, national and crippling protest movements, war, etc. – in ways that would enlighten and activate their readers, listeners and/or viewers.

Did I mention that I was able to pull myself out of debt, too, and build a bank of savings for the first in my life?

Ah, but there’s the rub. As I practiced them both, the two areas began to interfere with one another… specifically, the journalism would interfere with the painting. I’d have to spend two weeks not painting to teach a class on digital reporting, for example. Or a deadline would loom for the monthly magazine I was editing in English and Armenian. It always took days, sometimes a week or more, to get back into the flow of my studio.

Then in August, through a lightening quick volley of sexual politics, I lost my job, my boyfriend and got thrown out of my house.  To make matters worse, my back went out, and a recurring health problem resurfaced, so I couldn’t walk for weeks. In this weakened state, all my fears came out – about money, and not having enough of it. About lack of security and stability.

I began to make decisions related not to art but my ability to earn money.

I was offered a job as a temporary curator at an art museum, and though the pay was not good and I knew up front I wouldn’t have time to paint while I was working there, I took it.  I thought I could learn something about the art business.

Suddenly, I was miserable, pretty much all the time. No time for painting, as I suspected, and much of what I learned about the art business were lessons I could have done without.    My cruel and vastly insecure American boss abused his hard-working, primarily Armenian employees, including me, driving us towards a glitzy grand opening featuring an odd A-list of ex-Beattles’ wives and washed out art critics.  It was a textbook case of showcasing celebrity versus showcasing the art itself.

I felt knocked off course. How did I get here, I thought?

The job ended, mercifully, and I flew to Germany for a surgery to correct the recurring health problem that had come up in the summer (it was much cheaper than having the same surgery in the U.S., even with my health insurance). My mother met me there. But as I lay in the peaceful, spotless hospital room post-operation, staring out the window at neat rows of apartment blocks and parks, and later laid out the cash to pay for the hospital bed, I was still panicking.

I began looking for and applying to international journalism training jobs. And quickly, it seemed I might have landed one, working in Zambia for a year. Ah, a new country, a new job, I’m sure I can fit in the art somewhere, I thought.

I felt better about myself, even a tad superior: I would be working with journalists to help them cover AIDs and other health problems. How honorable. I’d figure out how to fit in the art around this new work.

And yet …

“are you sure you will have time to do art?” My friend Carrie, an artist, novelist, and herself a former journalist, asked, when I explained it to her via our regular skype call.

I couldn’t actually say yes. She urged me to research it, and the more I found out, the more my heart sank. It would be honorable, it would be good work, I was terribly well-suited to it … and it would take all my time and energy. I would, indeed have to fit the art around the job.

It should be the other way around, I thought, and cancelled my application.

Mom and that pretty hospital room view.

I won’t lie, today I am mourning the loss of the potential job opportunity and all it could offer me: money, travel to interesting countries, doing important work for the community. I am not giving up the idea of journalist training all together, but I have to think of a new way to earn money, potentially more directly related to art-making, and it has to come second, always, to my work in the studio.

How will my decisions differ, if I put my work as an artist first, and fit the other work around IT instead?

This is where I find myself today, my last day in Germany. Recommitting to art¸ with a laughably insignificant nest egg, nothing but a vague idea for teaching creativity workshops, no home, and a great deal of trepidation. I think about a line from one of my favorite rap songs by Eminem, Lose Yourself:

Hold your nose, here goes the cold water.

Here I go.

“No,” said my teacher, as I picked up a piece of charcoal, before I even laid a mark on the paper.

“No,” he said again, as I, hesitantly, lowered the charcoal a little. Then “No!” again, he took the charcoal from my hand, impatiently, and marked my paper himself. “Start here,” he said sternly, then walked away.

For perhaps the fifth or sixth time, I feel like a complete and total idiot, in front of a whole class of people who can draw better than I.

At 33, I was a successful journalist, who had worked for Time Magazine and ABCNEWS.com, and who was routinely flown around the world to train journalists in various countries in the former Soviet Union.

Then I decided to become a painter. All of a sudden, after being a teacher and a so-called “expert” – a word I chafed at, but accepted – I was a beginner, and my ego didn’t take to it well.

I hadn’t spent my life drawing. My friend Carrie took me to an open studio figure drawing session, where I nervously started sketching nude men and women, worried that someone would call me out as a fraud. When nobody did, I kept going. But I soon knew that I had hit a limit in my ability to see, or perceive the objects in front of me. I needed to learn how to draw, so I began enrolling in classes.

My first proper beginning drawing class came two years ago, in the winter of 2006. The teacher, named Yi Liang (pronounced “Ee lee-ang”) was Chinese, classically trained, a brilliant draftsman, and a fairly gentle soul. He was modest about his English – which was good enough – and humble about his work — which was, quite frankly, incredible. He was exacting and demanded a lot from his students, just as I’m sure he’d been challenged at one of China’s premiere art schools.

At first, I enjoyed the challenge, but quickly got in over my head. I found the issues of perspective particularly tricky, and my gentle teacher began to get impatient with me. First he would try to correct, but then, he began to consistently cut down my work. I miserably continued to try, and just as miserably, I continued to fail. I could tell Yi didn’t know what to do with me.

The more self-conscious I got, the more irritated my teacher would get, until, during the last class, the word “No” came out so many times that I was convinced I was a complete failure. I psychologically got smaller and smaller in the class, until I felt like absolutely nothing.

**

Lida was by far the oldest Armenian journalist in the group of reporters facing me in August of 2006. She’s been an editor of a regional newspaper for 30 years, and she writes and thinks in the old Soviet way.

I know her well, because I’d been working with her as a trainer, traveling back and fourth between Armenia, Georgia and the US, since 2001. Four years ago, when I held a photo in front of her and asked her for a fact about it she scrutinized it closely and came up with the following:

“It’s a picture of a man planting flowers in front of a skyscraper,” she began. “So the fact is that the man works for the city and he is proud of doing his job.”

I could not, at the time, convince her or any of her colleagues that what she’d stated wasn’t a fact, it was an assumption. In the soviet journalism world, people wrote what they were told to write, regardless of whether it was true or not. They wrote in a way to raise national pride. And they were actively discouraged from collecting information through independent observation. Even the fact that she was wrong about the photo didn’t perturb her: she knew what she saw in her own city, alright. “We know it, we know it,” she and her colleagues said.

But in August of 2006, things were different — both for Lida and I.

After two years of eschewing journalism entirely and working as a bartender to have more time to paint in Seattle, I had decided to move back abroad, teaching journalism part-time to support my painting habit. My first stop was Armenia, where I’d teach a one-week workshop, then I’d move onto Budapest, where I would make my home for more than a year.

For Lida, the key difference was that she was the only reporter in the room who had worked during the soviet era: everyone else has been working for independent newspapers and news agencies for between two and ten years, on average. These reporters asked more questions, were more likely to look up voting records of their various politicians, they didn’t want to portray everything perfectly. I watch Lida as Lida watches them, with a mixture of both interest and puzzlement.

The subject of our workshop is how to conduct and write about a straw poll – that is, a poll that isn’t statistically significant, but can help reporters guage how people might be feeling about a particular issue.

Our issue was parliamentary elections, which would occur the next May. Because previous elections have been so corrupt and poorly managed, and there is virtually no opposition group ready to challenge the current leaders, we suspected – we assumed — people would be fairly cynical. We decided to design a set of questions checking voter attitudes towards their parliamentarian in particular, towards the government in general, and whether they planned to vote, and whether they’ve ever been offered a bribe for their vote.

Each journalist was assigned to a different neighborhood, and required to get 20 interviews, so we’d have at least 200 respondents. Lida arrived back to the air-conditioned hotel a little before the rest of us, still panting from the 102-degree heat.

“I’ve never done anything like that,” she said.

And she, unlike all the other reporters, stayed with me and the workshop organizers for three more hours to help tally up the survey results. Maybe it’s the air conditioning. Or maybe, for the first time, she wasn’t sure what the results would show, and she wanted to see it.

**

In the spring, I signed up for another drawing class – this time, drawing the figure. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d suck again, and that I’d try to get out of it what I could. I even announced this to the group, when we made our introductions.

“Hi,” I said. ”I’ll be the worst student in the class.”

But Mike, the American teacher, made it clear immediately things would be different from my somber winter quarter.

Mike was, like my teacher, Yi, very exacting. He was also a very good draftsman. But Mike also knew that adult learners come to things differently than those naturally talented as artists and drawers from a young age. He had taught long enough to see those pitfalls. And while he would be sure to correct something if it wasn’t done right, he never stood behind me or anyone else in the class and said “no.” Mike was very positive, and he thrilled at any little achievement his students made. It was an infectious attitude.

Slowly, I began to unfurl from my tight ball of insecurity. Once, when we’d drawn a figure by pulling light tones out of a darkened paper, I asked Mike what he thought, cringing inside. He took me across the room to look at the drawing.

“What does it look like?” he said.

“It looks like a nude woman sitting on a stool,” I answered.

“Right,” he said. “And because you can see that from this far away, you’ve done a good job.”

When the course ended, I certainly wasn’t the best drawer in the class. But I didn’t care anymore. All I cared about was that I knew more about drawing, and that I wanted to continue to draw. Everything that I’d learned in Yi’s class came back to me, coalescing into something that would help me move forward. I still draw most days. And slowly, slowly, I’m getting better.

**

When I was asked to participate in the survey, I had to run around and talk to 20 people in a short amount of time. I had never done anything like that.

This was the news lede — or first sentence — to Lida’s news story, which I’d asked her and everyone else to write in class and read for critique. The instruction had been to find the most interesting fact from the survey results and use that in the first sentence of the story, and technically, she’d done just that – the most interesting fact to Lida was that she’d conducted the survey at all. She’d listened to what other people thought, rather than interjecting her own opinion.

I thought of Mike, I thought of Yi, and suddenly I realized we had progress.

“I can see that this is the most interesting thing to you, Lida,” I said. “That’s excellent, and you did follow the directions I gave you.

“But we’ve also got to think that if a thing is important, it’s not just important to us, it’s also important to the readers.”

I asked the other reporters, who had argued so vigorously against the leads I’d presented them, to weigh in. Did they like Lida’s lead? Why or why not?

A resounding set of ‘nos,’ and explanations, followed. Lida sat, nodding thoughtfully, as her colleagues told her it was the information in the survey that was most important to the readers, not that the survey had been done, or some vague generalization about the results. It was fascinating: all of sudden, the very thing they had argued me with at the beginning of class they were now supporting as if it was the best idea on the planet.

So she tried again:

A survey had been conducted with 200 Yerevan residents on the subject of Parliamentary elections on Aug. 16, 2006.

“That’s better,” I said in a private editing session I held with her, “but even more important than that your group conducted the survey, what did you find out?”

Together, we came up with this:

It’s a puzzle of the Armenian mind that 81 percent of people surveyed in Yerevan say they don’t trust the government, yet 70 percent of those same people plan to vote next May.

“Thank you so much, Leah, this was a great workshop!” said Lida, patting my shoulder and smiling at me as if I was one of her grandchildren who’d just done something clever. “I’m going to print this in my paper on Monday.”

Thanks Mike, Thanks Yi, I thought to myself, as she walked away. Thanks for teaching me not not only how to learn, but how to teach.