In Parade Float (2023), the work that hangs at the centre of ANTO YELDEZIAN’s Monument Valley at Tāmaki Makaurau’s Coastal Signs, a giant inflatable Garfield drifts across the Hudson River. Painted semi-transparent against the sunset-skyline, the overgorged cat is like an apparition, his eyes looking greedily at the city.
The hovering form recalls another: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, or The Angel of History, as the winged figure was famously named by Walter Benjamin in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” he wrote. Yeldezian’s paintings layer the benign signs of cartoons with iconic European history paintings, images from his own memories and those which have come to serve as a shorthand for conflict in the Middle East through their constant circulation. Which of these images stand for civilisation, and which for barbarism? In the following conversation, Yeldezian discusses with FAISAL AL-ASAAD the ways in which his paintings devastate that distinction, per Benjamin, contesting the West’s hold on the popular imagination and rendering history ‘plastic.’
ANTO YELDEZIAN
I thought I’d start by showing you a Rubens painting that I copied in Royal Academy (2023), which I also speak to in my MFA research in the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism. I’ve paraphrased some of my essay here:
Peter Paul Rubens’ The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt (1616) depicts a dramatic clash at a riverbank; a vivid parable of ‘man conquers nature’. Taking an ancient allegory and dressing it up in his own fantastical version of the Orient, he presents a dazzling fusion of African, Middle Eastern and literary environments. By painting a palm tree into the background of the scene, Rubens would ensure his viewers knew that they weren’t looking at any old river in Europe, but one as far-flung and exotic as the turbaned hunters and their perilous game.
Baroque and renaissance history paintings, such as Rubens’ hunting series that contained these cultural flights of fancy, represented Europe’s fascination for the East as a realm of opulence and mystique. The world beyond was thus presented to the European public as a fantasy to be desired, with sumptuous fabrics and wild landscapes waiting to be captured and tamed by Western dominion. These representations, while captivating, visualise the Eurocentric gaze that would later underpin the political and colonial encounters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
FAISAL AL-ASAAD
Rubens’ depiction of the hunt is interesting because I viewed it before reading your text, and my immediate thought was of St George and the Dragon (or Bellerophon and the Chimera, but this one is way more removed from the Orientalist subtext), so it’s already redolent with some of the xenographic tropes even to the uninitiated. To then read the explanation makes me wonder about how renaissance or baroque art perhaps desacralised those earlier and more religious representations, restaging the conquest of sin as a conquest of nature.
It also makes me think of Timothy Mitchell’s ‘the-world-as- exhibition’, and the idea that European ways of representing the Orient served to produce a reality effect whereby it becomes possible for us to experience ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, but only when it is displaced through the very practice of observation or spectatorship. I think this is consistent with what you were referring to with the media’s production of plasticity, maybe? That the very practice of observing certain acts of imperialism and violence through (social) media makes their truth and reality malleable, uncertain, and not entirely accessible (or accessible only as ephemeral representations).
When thinking about the core premise of the relationship between history and its representation, the question that kept coming to my mind as I shifted between reading your research and gazing at the work was: if abstraction and abstract forms of representation are necessary for the colonial gaze and its construction of the real, are they also necessary for the post-colonial gaze and its construction of the meme?
If you consider the core methods of colonial thinking, of deconstruction through critique and the questioning of dominant Western ideologies, then you can absolutely make that assumption.
There are elements of your work, in particular the redeployment of images from Abu Ghraib and the Gulf War, which resonate with this idea in a powerful way. I have in mind your final note: “the work challenges art history, in the sense that it presents it as a meme.”
I suppose, for you and me in particular, these images pertaining to the Gulf War are more than news media nostalgia—they represent both spectres and spectacles of our birthplace.
My move to displace the Western art-historical canon by synthesising it with Western imperial atrocities intends to present a mutated history, suggesting the absurdity that state-sanctioned narratives would ever be taken as ‘true historicity’. So, where I draw on the concept of the ‘meme’ in regards to the construction of the work in Monument Valley, I don’t refer to the aesthetic of internet memes, but rather the methods they employ in the recombination of references.
Richard Dawkins introduced the notion of memes as any piece of transferable culture; tunes, concepts and catchphrases, to fashion trends and techniques of craft. Just as genes perpetuate themselves within the gene pool, transferring from one body to another through reproductive cells like sperm or eggs, memes persist within the meme pool, leaping from one mind to another. Of course, in a more contemporary context, this has come to represent the memes that circulate within social media.
I was considering Catherine Malabou’s philosophical implication of neuroplasticity and the formation of social structures with Dawkins’ idea of cultural mimesis through mutation. Plasticity characterises both biological and societal evolution. In the brain it allows humans to learn and adapt to cultural changes, while meme mutation or replication represents cultural evolution. The same plasticity that allows our brains to apprehend memes is what enables us to naturalise socio-political structures as they rapidly evolve in our crisis-stricken times. This really highlights the idea of a collectively constructed virtual decoy of instant history (the digital sphere of public opinion) that, in turn, acts on the collective’s lived reality through political motion. If we consider the cumulative effect of this digital content that circulates current events, the way in which it essentially destabilises the credibility of actual accounts, we can start to see the agency of collective perception over the course of history. So, on the other side of the Western Imperium, these political motions still have the power to dispossess people of land and destroy lives.
Your work is often about the degradation of history and narrative forms. In your thesis you narrate a history of representation, which I find evocative because, at least to me, this captures the form of plasticity, or the plastic form, which runs all the way through your practice. I wondered what you thought about this plasticity, and the mimetic, in relation to your work and identity, especially as an Armenian-Iraqi growing up and living in Aotearoa? My own experience of this, captured vividly in Monument Valley, is of being so historically out of place that the surrealism of it quickly slides into the absurd and comical.
I’ve always felt this geographic displacement embedded into my experience of living in Aotearoa, which definitely goes beyond that internalised sense of exile that generally underscores the immigrant experience.
The title Monument Valley comes from the famous Arizona desert tourist trap. It’s this environment formed by erosion, but it’s this process of erosion which has made it an iconic landscape. So it’s also intended to riff on the idea of the degraded icon or the icon’s half-life in cartoon environments such as Looney Tunes. I feel like history also has this half-life, where it acts on present-day social landscapes. My Armenian heritage has it, too. I’ve never stepped foot in the ancient country; like most Armenians today, I’m a part of the second and third generation of the diaspora. Armenia was largely presented by our elders through romanticised and quasi- allegorical origin stories, through a systemic longing for a home that was nearly destroyed, one that we had never seen. It seemed like a mythical place, especially growing up in Aotearoa. Folks here had never heard of the place for the majority of my life (still largely the case), so I grew up being culturally and ethnically misplaced by society (being largely generalised as Arab), exacerbating the delirium around my mythical motherland.
Is that a place? If I had a dollar for every time someone asked this about Armenia, I’d be able to buy their land back.
I recently came across a pocket of theological history about that part of the world. Apparently European religious scholars circa the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed that historical Armenia was in fact the site of the Garden of Eden, following a much older regional belief that Noah’s Ark had indeed landed on the country’s symbolic Mount Ararat. These sorts of stories, contrasted with those of genocide, formed this surreal and mythologised sense of my cultural heritage. My sense of a geographically unstable origin was in turn virtualised by the media content produced by conflicts in the Middle East, where this hyperreal version of home came to replace any living memory I may have retained as a child living in a quiet suburb of Baghdad.
This brings me to another strand that runs through your work: Orientalism and the representation of the Other. This is a strand that is increasingly familiar in many spaces of cultural and knowledge production in the West, but what I find so interesting about your work is a telling attempt to mimic, and therefore displace, this mode of representation in a quintessentially Antipodean way; or, as you put it, to do ‘history painting from the other side of empire’.
Said’s post-colonial position from his 1972 thesis has now been almost unanimously adopted by academia in the West. But the socio-political life of the West doesn’t appear to reflect this consensus. What appears to be an acceleration of ‘othering’ within political and journalistic institutions sort of proves that Said’s critique of Orientalism is still in fact relevant to the media being circulated and consumed today. It’s a poignant reminder of how Eurocentric viewpoints—whether in art, academia or social media—can misrepresent and come to distort the lived reality of others.
Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal was deployed to analyse the effects of live televisual mediation on war while it unfolded for the first time. Like Said’s ‘Eurocentricity’, the hyperreal also represents a mediated version of reality, but one that occurs in real time. The experience of the real as a media event represents an accelerated degradation of reality. In fact, it deters reality by perpetuating a virtual decoy. You could say that “we are no longer in a passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.”[01]
You could say that some of Baudrillard’s observations of the Gulf War are returning in full force at the moment with the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza, as we witness not only the live-streaming of Israel’s war, but also its concurrent meme-ification and its digital capture as ‘content’ online. What do you think about the relationship between representation and history at this current juncture, and how do you think it replicates or diverges from other formative (and violent) moments that you explore in your work? Have we gone from the ‘world-as-exhibition’, to the ‘world-as- photograph’, to the ‘world-as-meme’?
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of where history and its representation are concerned— the world-as-exhibition, to -photo, to -meme—what you are describing captures the evolution of the way we document, share and engage with events, particularly those of a violent nature.
This evolution also underscores the need for critical media literacy. Now firmly living in this ‘world-as-meme’, we need to understand that inherent biases also evolve and mutate. This contains the dangerously manipulative potential of media as we know it today, this ability for the hyperreal to replace the lived reality of others. Sure, this sounds like a Baudrillardian hyperbole, but it really isn’t. The live broadcasting of the genocide in Gaza proves this in the most gut-wrenching way.
I’ve been thinking about the phrase ‘history replicates itself ’, as opposed to ‘repeats’—especially in the context of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene as a metaphor of culture replicating itself through memes. Instead of literal repetition, certain socio- political dynamics and clashes recur but mutate to adapt to their respective contexts.
‘History replicating itself ’ is an intriguing idea. When you mentioned Dawkins’ gene metaphor I immediately thought of cancer (because I’m doing some research-assistant work on that right now), and I thought: what about ‘history metastasises itself’?Maybe historical representations replicate in such a way that they destroy their host referent: history itself.
In the post-postmodern cultural-junk space where we live and breathe, there is certainly a singularity of history. By that, I mean that it feels as though it’s all piled up at once, mixed into a mélange of fact and fiction that both instantly and consistently occupies our attention. The meme-ification of the world, to me, represents the current degree to which information sharing collapses geographic separation, the instantaneousness of which creates a decoy of lived reality. This decoy is, of course, as malleable as the clay beneath our feet, unlike reality.
In a sense, history is being destroyed the moment it’s created, through our habits of communication that enable the erosion of truth and erasure of life by dominant powers.
[01] Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 27.
Header image: Anto Yeldezian, Parade Float, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas, 280 x 195 cm
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