VOLCANO

1. The Foreground
2. The Background
3. Magma Chamber
4. Tectonic Environment
5. Seismic Experience
6. Genesis
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1. The Foreground

At first sight, the painting seems to be fairly innocent, one a swift and lazy mind might dismiss as a psychedelic-surrealist-erotic-Daliesque kind of affair. It is worthwhile trying to disengage such facile, ready-to-hand schemata, just for a moment.

The painting has a clear triptych structure involving three main figures: the red net curtain, the cold statuesque man and the potent red outline of a fiery woman.

This woman, so embedded and woven into the landscape, if not the central figure, is at the core of the symbolism flowing through this space.

It seems she has been slashed, or as if she is proliferating gashes. Bego’s technique here is fundamentally that of a sculptor - she has been carved out of the canvas, and these are the violent, primordial slashes of his first sketch which have returned to the surface to take the form of bloody lacerations. Her legs are rooted in the earth, her sex a dark core, above which, in the transparent terrain of her womb, lies a fertile field of wheat and a solitary tree. At the mountainous horizon we find her, in fleshed out form, behind the landscape. Her breasts are situated at this vertiginous height because this is the height of yearning, the searching look upwards for maternal nourishment; developing into the primordial spiritual search for light and enlightenment at the horizon. Then her head is obscured by an outpouring of blood-red lava. She is walking fire, an erupting supervolcano, an explosion of feminine sexuality towering over the East.

So, to the man. He his first and foremost a statue: monumental and passive – an absolute lack of activity - carved out of icy granite. His form consists of abstract shapes, rather than renaissance anatomical-correctness.

One of the few artists Bego really takes his hat off to is Henry Moore, whose reclining figures are a clear inspiration for Bego's 'painted sculptures':

Henry Moore “Reclining Woman” 1929.

At first glance Bego's Reclining Man might seem like a cool customer, even arrogant, as he reclines, with his huge, thighs and hands. But then his pin-sized head and stretched, elongated neck – recalling the sketches and sculptures of Giacometti and the paintings of Modigliani – seem to be melting, perhaps by virtue of being in close proximity to volcanic woman.

Giacometti - Busto di Diego 1964

Amedeo Modigliani. Portrait of Lunia Czechovska. 1919

The eyes of Bego’s monument-man betray tragic awareness of the fact that his ascendancy is over. Man has gone from being the head (of the family/tribe/state/empire) to being a sperm donor. A slow-melting figure from antiquity, maybe from the last ice age, he has absorbed elements from his surroundings: the events he has witnessed are engraved in his look.

The red curtain has been pulled back, theatrically, to reveal two elemental players - a statuesque man melting in the central foreground, and molten woman, embedded and erupting. - in a scene of domestic intimacy blown up to global scale.

2. The Background

In the East, from a spot which, on close inspection, turns out to be cave, a shot is fired, and this shot passes through the woman, through the man’s head, through a computer screen and into twin towers which - until now? - had been hidden behind a blood-red net curtain.

The innocuous-seeming curtain now transforms into victims caught in mid-flight, each painstakingly commemorated with a red cross, hung out on a line which leads up to heaven on a gentle gradient.

A crack in the Twin Towers passes out beyond the computer screen and into the landscape, drawing a blood-red fault across the Earth, through woman, and back to the rugged mountain terrain. The smoke bellowing from the twin towers is blown eastwards to become engulfed by the volcanic gases emitted from the volcano woman.

Bego frames 9/11 as an iconoclastic attack on the symbols of the West. For Bego, 9/11 was above all symbolic warfare.

There are, of course, many examples of attacks on symbols. English Protestants whitewashed churches and went on statue smashing rampages during the reformation; the Soviets destroyed Buddhist temples in Mongolia and any iconography connected to Genghis Khan; the Soviets either destroyed Mosques or converted them to functional buildings (such as cinemas) in the Muslim areas of its Empire (e.g. Dagestan, Kazachstan & Uzbekistan). Such attacks on symbols are attacks on the ethnic or cultural groups that identify themselves with them and in extreme cases (e.g. Lenin and Stalin’s depredations against the Crimean Turks 1920-1945) are accompanied by ruthless ethnic cleansing and genocide.

There are, however, two iconoclastic forerunners to 9/11 which are particularly important to Bego:

September 26, 1687: the Turks and the Venetians managed to destroy the Parthenon - the Turks through ripping up the temple stones as they turned the Acropolis into a bastion and using the Parthenon as a powder magazine, and the Venetians by bombarding the Acropolis for 8 days until they managed to make the aforementioned powder magazine explode and start a fire which lasted for 2 days and gutted the Parthenon. This destruction cannot be described as a deliberate attack on a symbol of antiquity and pagan religion – the Venetian attack was part of a European ‘Holy Alliance’ attempt to put a stop to Ottoman expansion - the very acts of using the Parthenon as a powder magazine and the Venetian bombardment of the Acropolis reveal the contempt in which both parties held the Ancient Greek religions. Adherents to the Greek pantheon being rather thin on the ground in 1687, the casualties were goddesses and gods.

In 1687, newspapers were in their infancy and the pictures are not of very high quality:

March 2001: the Taliban bombarded the Buddhas of Bamiyan for one month. These 55 meter and 37 meter statues of Buddha, carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan, had stood for 1500 years before the Taliban decided they were idolatrous and overcame great difficulties in demolishing them: During the destruction, Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal lamented that, "this work of destruction is not as easy as people might think. You can't knock down the statues by shelling as both are carved into a cliff; they are firmly attached to the mountain.”

This time CNN 'obtained' pictures and the BBC had to rely on the word of mouth of an archaeologist until reporters were allowed to visit three weeks later. There were 'protests' from Buddhists and 'the international community', but nothing was actually done. It might be argued that this was destruction without victims, but this would be to ignore the fact it was sacrilegious for the world's 370 million+ Buddhists.

September 2001: The 9/11 attacks on The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacks on a American symbols: the Twin Towers were a modern sculpture, the instantly recognizable symbol of American dominance in global trade; the Pentagon was/is the symbol of military power, the temple inhabited by the military caste.

Bego: “I saw the Twin Towers as the computer world, like these two huge antennae sticking out of the Earth – Can you imagine how many computers there were in that building? They thought ‘Hmmm, so we blew up the Buddhas and nobody did anything. Let’s attack a modern sculpture this time.”

In terms of spectacle, the 9/11 attacks outdid anything in film history: on a paltry budget of between $400,000 and $500,000, with the backdrop of a clear blue sky, the terrorists’ destruction was broadcast live across the globe, the main feature lasting 102 minutes (start: WTC1 struck at 8.46.30, end: WTC1 collapses 102 minutes later).

After a series of disappointing and preposterous special effects-driven apoco- disaster movies in the 90s (Independence Day, 1996, in which the Empire State Building and the White House were trashed by Aliens; Deep Impact,1998 – New York flattened by a megatsunami; and Armageddon 1998) Al Qaeda finally came up with the goods, providing jaded, desensitized audiences with death and destruction that was, at last, genuinely shocking. And provided an abundance of material for TV replay disaster porn.

So real were the attacks that they defy belief: they were/are so unbelievable that people in some quarters still cannot accept the fact the attacks were external. On 9/11 reality became painfully and demonically cinematic.

Three months after the attacks, cinema audiences began their three year retreat into the realistic fantasy of The Lord of the Rings – a world of lifelike digital characters, creatures and landscapes where the express aim was for CGI to be believable, to be indistinguishable from reality. As audiences were captivated by this reassuring and predictable war of the ring, a somewhat more disconcerting war, which variously goes by the names of 'WoT', 'WWIV' or 'Global Jihad', was already busy unfolding.

In Volcano, the world beyond the screen is devastated and torn by disputes. The lines from the cave pass ingeniously into the screen: their point of impact is through a scroll bar. It is as if the scroll in the display window assists them in their flight – a sign that the West's technology is being turned against itself.

Bego sees the screen as being the chief determinant of the West's perception. The color of the landscape on the screen is in stark contrast to the color of the landscape beyond the screen, and yet it is, apparently, the same landscape in both. Volcano casts 9/11 as an attack from beyond the screen, an attack that the screenheads watched helplessly.

This desert terrain features a decapitated pyramid – foundation stones enduring from antiquity. They were symbols erected by a civilization which wanted to leave its mark on the landscape in the shape of indestructible stone; people who identified themselves with their symbols and underlined their being by means of them. Elevated parts of the landscape evoke the highlands of Armenia, a land whose people have had more than their fair share of atrocities. As we approach the lacerated woman and devastated landscape again, it becomes clear that civilisations waging wars over symbols is nothing new.

3. Magma Chamber

In Volcano it is no accident that the figure of woman is located at the point where the Earth is carved up into arbitrary borders across crucial arteries, forming the basis for conflicts which last for centuries.

Woman is found superimposed on, and underlying, two of the world's most contested terrains: the Middle East and Tibet. In the case of the Middle East, at a crossroads of arteries, it seems that it is the faults and hotspots of the Earth itself that steer the conflict. Bego wonders how conscious humans are when they carve lines in the earth and then fight to the death over them. What compels the human families/tribes/states which inhabit (and interfere with) this region to embroil themselves in irresolvable, bewilderingly complex feuds?

Alongside the land, the symbolism of woman is also bitterly contested. The war which is kicking off around her is, on a deep level, about her image, or rather what can be seen of her. There are two extreme forms that woman can take: one form is woman covered and protected, walking the street like a sculpted, abstract shape, a gem that 'needs' to be kept hidden away, safe from attack; the other form is woman confidently advertising her deterritorialized sexual power (no longer chained to her childbearing potential), with legs, midriff and cleavage bared, strings and straps on display, shapes outlined so clearly that imagination is unnecessary.

In conversation Bego suggested this concealment of woman could be driven by two motivations:

1) to protect woman from the sight and potential attack of predatory males whose genes are bent on self-replication – which in practice keeps female reproductive potential (and thereby her sexuality) firmly under the control of the male.

2) to protect Man from woman: if woman were to have control over her reproductive power, the consequences for Man could be disastrous.

For Bego, after 9/11 the next attack on symbols was the murder of the film director Theo van Gogh on November 2 2004, in response to his controversial film Submission, made in collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The film addresses the issue of violence against women in Islamic societies and features naked women with Qur’anic verses unfavorable to women in Arabic painted on their bodies. Though Bego does not have a very high opinion of either the film's artistic merits or van Gogh's crude provocations, he sees the murder as an unequivocal statement about what cannot be shown, under pain of death. This murder, which took place three years after Volcano was finished, confirmed the theme and symbolism of the painting for Bego.

Bego conjures up a revised Pandora story: Pandora's box actually contains Pandora herself. Pandora must stay in the box because if she is let out she will erupt and rule, as she is doing in the West, where the climate change brought about in the wake of her explosion induces Man to become increasingly effeminate. The feudal, fundamentalist mindset looks ahead to the post-reformation West and sees what will happen to Man if the volcano blows her top.

Bego, being an Armenian, a culture that still has male and female ‘enclaves’, admits to a certain amount of ambivalence on this point. It would be crass and pointless to suggest that either of these extreme shapes that woman can take is ‘better’ or ‘healthier’ than the other. Nothing could be more stupid than to say that woman is necessarily 'freer' because she displays her body (or her body is on display). Bego’s observations are based on what he has seen on the streets and they are above all aesthetic observations: the clash of civilisations as a clash of shapes. His vision of the female volcano comes from the formidable sight of scantily-clad, sexually confident women with their metrosexual, manscaped other halves strolling arm in arm along the streets of Central Europe. On the next patch of pavement chador-clad women sporting designer sunglasses and expensive shoes walk inscrutably behind their husbands. Bego is fascinated by this apparent clash and what it symbolizes (for man and woman).

4. Tectonic Environment

Volcano is a Guernica for now.

Similarities

Picasso's Guernica was painted as an immediate response to carpet bombing of the Basque town by the Nazi Condor Legion and Italian fascists on April 26 1937. Guernica had no military significance and the 1650+ dead are seen to be the first civilian victims of an aerial bombardment. The total destruction of the town, helped by the use of incendiary bombs, was a trial run for the Nazi Blitzkrieg doctrine .

“By May 1st, news of the massacre at Guernica reaches Paris, where more than a million protesters flood the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city has ever seen. Eyewitness reports fill the front pages of Paris papers. Picasso is stunned by the stark black and white photographs. Appalled and enraged, Picasso rushes through the crowded streets to his studio, where he quickly sketches the first images for the mural he will call Guernica. His search for inspiration is over.”

Bego's Volcano was painted as an immediate response to the 9/11 WTC attacks – after receiving an hysterical phone call, Bego watched the spectacle live on the Internet. Then he locked himself in his studio for the next three months (experiencing utter exhaustion on completion of the painting (and losing six of his teeth)).

Bego adores Picasso’s temperament and approach to painting and Picasso exerts such a powerful influence that Bego has to make efforts to escape it. Often without success. Without even thinking of Guernica at the time, without realizing for ages, Bego produced a work which is similar to it in many respects.

1. The scale – though Volcano is far smaller than Guernica's huge 349 × 776 cm proportions, both paintings are epic and monumental, reflecting the significance of the events they grapple with.

2. Both paintings incorporate the media in which the news was received into the composition of the painting: Guernica is restricted to the black and white tones of newspaper photography; Volcano makes watching the WTC attacks on a computer an integral part of the painting.

3. The composition – the paintings have a triptych structure. Particularly notable is the way the light falls on the right side both paintings.

4. Both paintings are symbolic. The symbolism of Guernica is still capable of creating controversy. Though Volcano is considerably more realistic than Guernica, neither painting is clear or unambiguous, neither provide any answers. One person who saw Volcano said that the painting is so extreme that only Rudy Giuliani or Osama Bin Laden could buy it and hang it on their wall.

5. Both paintings created controversy. Guernica was universally panned by the critics after its appearance at the Spanish Pavilion in Paris. Volcano was entered for the Art&Business Painting of the Year competition 2001, but was not even accepted for the last 100. Quite unusually for Art&Business competitions, a huge, heated internet discussion developed on whether or not the painting had deserved to win. Since the painting was judged from a tiny JPEG on computer screens, it is somewhat surprising that it managed to provoke such strong feelings.

Differences

Despite these similarities, Bego's painting style owes more to the renaissance and baroque's painstaking attention to detail than it does to Picasso's revolutionary, violent approach to form and perspective.

For Bego, revolution in style has become rather meaningless. He wanted to create a realistic landscape, so that a child could recognize the tree in the woman’s womb. In contrast, Picasso’s mutilated figures are entirely symbolic and allegorical. There are no specific references to the town of Guernica in the painting. It is more an abstract, general symbol of the destruction of civilization by war.

Bego is first and foremost a sculptor who adores the art of painting. He paints in a fury, trying to carve a three dimensional space out of/into a two-dimensional canvas; the process uses time to realize art in space. This is why Volcano has a decidedly static feel even though the process of painting is dynamic: it is a moment frozen in time. There is also a sad beauty in the landscape, despite its ravages: it echoes the mournful music of Djivan Gasparyan. Tragic subjects are few and far between in Bego’s vast oeuvre and it seems that even when dealing with tragedy Bego is unable to refrain from creating something beautiful. The contrast to Picasso, who clearly took a measure of enjoyment in disfiguring and distorting three dimensional space, is obvious.

The two influences that Bego refers to are Tinteretto and Rembrandt:

Tintoretto – The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave 1548.

It is Tinteretto’s attempts to capture a moment in time in depth that inspire Bego. Tinteretto went to great lengths to help his figures gain a true feeling of depth:

“To help him with the complex poses he favored, Tintoretto used to make small wax models which he arranged on a stage and experimented on with spotlights for effects of light and shade and composition. This method of composing explains the frequent repetition in his works of the same figures seen from different angles. He was a formidable draughtsman and, according to Ridolfi, he had inscribed on his studio wall the motto `The drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian'. However, he was very different in spirit from either of his avowed models -- more emotive, using vivid exaggerations of light and movement. His drawings, unlike Michelangelo's detailed life studies, are brilliant, rapid notations, bristling with energy, and his color is more somber and mystical than Titian's.” (from here)

Rembrandt – Danae 1636

This painting has many formal and thematic links with Volcano. Danae was shut away in a brass tower by her father, Acrisius, because he had heard from the Delphic oracle that her son would one day kill him. Zeus became besotted with Danae and overcame her as a shower of gold that poured down into her lap, which led to the conception of Perseus. Acrisius locked Danae and Perseus in a chest and put them out to sea. Perseus later killed Acrisius by accident at the games in Larissa.

[And the moral(s) of the tale? That repression rarely works, that youth and beauty can’t be caged without this backfiring on the repressor, that the godly desire and the fates cannot be thwarted in their inexorable process?]

Somewhat boldly for 17th Century Dutch painting, Rembrandt depicted Danae completely naked. Her brass tower is replaced with plush curtains which are pulled back to enable the entrance of Zeus, whose gold light bathes Danae. The meticulously painted curtains and the illusion of depth created by Rembrandt’s masterly use of light are inspirations explicitly cited by Bego.

Bego's Volcano creates a similar illusion of depth through its use of sculpture: literally, in the central male figure and stylistically, in the complex layers of planes.

In contrast, Picasso's Guernica occupies one flat, violently fragmented plane where the figures are quite literally flattened.

5. Seismic Experience

Bego experienced natural disaster first hand in December 1988, when an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale “turned blocks of flats into mincers of human meat” and he lost his house, studio and worldly possessions.

He draws a distinction between such natural disasters and political disasters, such as the Armenian Genocide or the 9/11 attacks: “When there is a natural disaster like that people feel dwarfed by the immense power of nature, but they immediately start going about the business of survival, they start digging about in the rubble, trying to find firewood. It strengthens them in some way. But after political disasters there is an atmosphere of paranoia, psychosis and hate – and this is the basic aim of the perpetrators, not the number of victims they kill.”

The Soundtrack

The importance of music in Bego’s art cannot be underestimated. The first two thirds of the painting were executed with Crooklyn Dub Consortium – booming, subterranean, seismic - playing on continuous loop, even when Bego slept. The music of Crooklyn Dub Consortium put Bego in touch with a fierce elemental power and transported him psychologically to the subterranean caverns of New York. When it came to painting the realistic landscape, Bego felt the need to return to his native land and so the gentler, happy-sad tones of Djivan Gasparyan were played continuously for the last third.

Volcano also appeared in Sweet Noise’s Nie Było video. Sweet Noise are an increasingly experimental metal-hardcore-electro band that Bego has been collaborating and performing with for the past four years. The band’s uncompromising approach welds seamlessly with Bego’s total commitment to his art.

Old School Hardcore

“Artistic creation... is an affirmation of Existence in its metaphysical horror, and not just a justification of this horror through the creation of a system of soothing concepts, as is the case with religion, or a system of concepts showing rationally the necessity of this and not any other state of affairs for the totality of Existence, as is the case with philosophy.” S.I. Witkiewicz, New Forms in Painting (1919)

Bego's painting is an unsettling and bewildering work, but not in the 'shocking' sheep in formaldehyde and My Bed manner. Bego is no stranger to extreme public performance...

Protest Against Maniacal TV Watching, 1996, Lubomierz, with Plawna 9

We Cleanse Our City of Sin, 1997, Lwówek Sl.

Erecting a Statue during the intro to a Sweet Noise concert, Poland, Woodstock 2002

Vahan's Mask, Sweet Noise, Poland, Poznan 2005.

... but his art, whether it takes the form of painting, sculpture, or performance, is a deliberate and principled application of hard-earned technique. It is not unusual for a sketch to take seven years to reach fruition on his easel. His approach to art is closer to that of Witkacy, who saw art as the sole source of mystery and stimulus for metaphysical feelings after the collapse of religion. Real art does not entertain, titillate, inform or educate – it is a wake-up call.

6. Genesis

The first, inspirational sketch for Volcano, 1997, 14 x 21cm, ink.

Sketch on Canvas, September 2001

The first stage, laying the foundations, oil on canvas, October 2001.

The second stage, sculpting the figures, end of October 2001.

Into the last stages, end of November 2001.

Volcano Finished, 19.12.2001

[Thanks to Bartek Rogalewicz for some of the photos.]

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