Speaker: Dr. Vardan Azatyan, State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia.

The lecture is held in the framework of Angela Harutyunyan's Colloquium in Contemporary Art History and Theory.

What power does the image acquire in a moment of danger? What kinds of images are invoked in times of war to resist impending violence? Ultimately, what is an image—an appearance, a likeness, or a confrontation?

I address these questions in two stages. First, I focus on the divergent yet fundamentally related theories of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Gombrich, both of whom appealed to the power of the image in response to the dangers posed by the Second World War. Second, I examine the understanding of the image within the Armenian cultural tradition—a fundamentally translational tradition.

I argue that this tradition preserves a distinctive conception of the image as a form of presence-before-us or presence-in-encounter, inherited from the ancient Iranian tradition and differing from the Graeco-Christian conception of the image as a visible likeness or appearance. These two meanings nevertheless coexist within the Armenian cultural tradition, where the relatively newer Christian understanding has been both assimilated to and shaped by the older local conception. Finally, I point to the conceptual difficulties involved in understanding the image in its translational complexity within the Armenian context. 

Vardan Azatyan (PhD) is an art historian, theorist, and translator. He is the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Armenia and co-founder of the Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities in Yerevan. His work has appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Springerin, and ARTMargins, amongst others. He is the author of two books such as Art History and Nationalism: Medieval Arts of Armenia and Georgia in the 19th Century Germany and has translated major works of philosophy into Armenian.