Sometimes it can feel like the street is speaking to you. Do you know that feeling?... A peculiar aliveness, a sudden calling of your attention into a moment: a shadow, a broken rear view on the side of a car, a constellation of leaves in the gutter.
Maybe you’d describe this sarcastically as being in your own movie. Now that we all have music in our ears as we move around, it’s an experience that can be turbo-charged. But I think, if we are lucky, we can go one step further and enter into our own form of eyes-wide-open dreaming.
Walking the streets, this is how writing poetry often begins for me. Though, if I am honest, it is also about a mood that is already descending, something you sense, and lean into, as you look around and listen. Your creative response becomes a way of keeping a strange veil parted, suspending you between the visible and the invisible.
With luck, the outside world is acting in sympathy, its textures and coincidences turning your inner life open with only the slenderest and most prosaic of keys. Your reward is not only the little work of art that arises, but a time of prayer, a shiver, an elusive chance to identify meaning in your life, however instinctual that ‘meaning’ might be.
It's via this sensibility that I began to notice the work of Gary Deirmendjian about a year ago. His seemingly random posts signalled a whole other way of using social media that I had not seen before.
The first that stopped me in my tracks was a brief video of tensioned yarn in an abandoned building, suddenly cut and falling gracefully through the darkness. There was something about the look and rhythm of it that made you play the footage back a few times, simply figuring out what it was, then experiencing a little moment of Zen amid the daily online static we like to refer to as connecting and communicating.
Other photos and videos by Gary kept coming: some whimsical and humorous, like the two abandoned chairs on the street appearing to copulate; many shape-shifting out of their base materials and shapes into new forms and profound, if fleeting atmospheres.
A recent favourite for me was a photo of a half-obscured man, his shoulders and profile visible in a bus window, the glass glittering with reflected light as if he is deep inside his own galaxy. I could relate to this image. See myself in the experience.
Gary had likewise noticed me posting my poetry online as I rolled through the city. We struck up an online conversation about what each of us was doing. It landed in the real world at a local café in Sydney’s Inner West.
Our biographies and interests held surprisingly similar notes, echoing one another: the early influence of Christianity (Catholicism for me, Armenian Orthodoxy for Gary); the import of our grandmothers in our growing up; affinities for the artist-as-outsider; and a goodly dose of boredom and frustration with conventional hierarchies and structures that controlled how our work might find an audience. I joked with Gary, “It’s like we are these parallel animals who did not know one another existed.”
Now, in observing one another’s work – and meeting face-to-face – we did know.
We were also mutually aware of other ‘parallel animals’ moving amongst us: poets, photographers, visual artists, site-oriented performers and left-field journalists-cum-diarists operating outside of official channels and sedated spaces like the galleries, festivals, and legacy media outlets.
We expressed an empathy for this wilder realm of artists who were sharing their work online: unable to stop themselves creating; not driven by money (although that would always be helpful) but forging their own forms and lines of communication. There was, quite literally, another world happening, a new community emerging ‘out there’ in fairly anarchic and individual ways.
This was an exciting conversation to have. It’s a cliché for artists to see themselves as ‘outsiders’, of course. But the nexus of digital life, its immediacy and potential as a broadcasting stream, most definitely suggested we were not alone in our romantic views and activities. To some extent, there was a necessary sense of rebellion in the creative act online: a strategic refusal to let oneself be boxed-in by identity algorithms that reduced the human face. Art as a form of spiritual protest against all definitions and limits being placed around it. Ironically, our freedom in an online context was all too easily compromised by how that world could likewise, literally, own as well as restrict us.
Gary spoke with me about his Armenian family background in the Soviet Union. Reading the Bible as a boy to his illiterate grandmother. My own grandmother was a Catholic convert so I could relate to this inculcation into the zeal and something more magical as well. “I was heavily religious. It dictated my dreaming,” Gary told me. “Heaven and saints; swords and sacrifice. And my grandmother’s horrific stories about the Armenian genocide in Turkey.”
Refugees, his family had fled to Soviet Union by a circuitous route, only to find themselves conducting another secret life to survive the political limits around them. Eventually they’d get out of the Soviet Union and end up in “planet Marrickville” in Australia. Gary’s only preparation had been viewings of Skippy, dubbed in Russian, that he’d seen on State TV.
Arriving as a 12-year-old in Sydney, “as the odd one out of my kind at school”, Gary makes an unusual distinction about a shift in his sensibilities. It difficult for me to follow what he means at first.
He says he started to recognise “the gap between what you begin to hold as true based on an experience of otherness – and what has been encrusted upon you by the particulars of your upbringing… It’s this abrupt jumping into the deep end of otherness – and the coming to terms with it – that a lot of my work is rooted in.”
Gary gives me an example to clarify what he means by ‘encrusted’. Coming from an Armenian family and all its lived history and stories told in the wake of the Young Turk’s genocide of a million people in 1917, he tells me how he began shrugging off the terrible prejudices and deep-grained resentments he had against Turkish people. It happened, in part, because his first friend at school in Sydney was a Turk – and a boy, just like him, trying to bridge an old world with a new one.
“There was a lot of undoing,” Gary says. “I went from being a believer to losing my God. Not through carelessness, but in trying to hang on so desperately. I had to shit him out of my system. I now believe we are the same monkey, that life is limited, precarious – and that we are largely led. I had been desperate for some dose of certainty. Give me a small hunk of truth to stand on, please. I’d been impressed with earnestness in my upbringing but came to slowly understand that the only certainty we have is uncertainty.”
A little paradoxically, he is quite adamant about the need for uncertainty in our evolving worldview: “If left unquestioned, we are shaped by outside forces. There’s no doubt about that.”
Gary laughs about this “shaping’ energy”, as he calls it, experiential and even faintly mystical despite his claims on an almost stormy agnosticism now. Talking about his images and likening the work to my poetry, he thinks there is a kinship in our journaling spirit, a relationship to movement and change.
When he puts a work up online he uses a series of hashtags by way of an additional artistic signature, making use of self-identifying terms like ‘urban nomad’, ‘flaneur’, ‘streetwalker, ‘drifter’, ‘wanderer’, ‘wonderer’, ‘watcher’… the list goes on. I recognise him in that code like a brother from another planet, a parallel animal indeed.
A very recent post shows a yellowing foam mattress leaning against a corrugated iron wall, a traveller’s neck brace placed on its thick top edge by a random passer-by. It’s easy to interpret the image as a body and head slumped like some rough sleeper against their fate. Gary always incorporates a cryptic, humorous or poetic phrase to introduce his images and give them some additional context or resonance. In this case it is of a more wounding nature: “Don’t look away. It is I who feels the shame.”
It is this convergence of the poetic and the political that appeals to me most in his work. A feeling, too, of some kind of street song occurring each time Gary hits on something really special and shares it for free online.
Now and again, Gary stretches the possibilities even further with installations left to be deconstructed or decay whatever the situation they might be placed in. Some endure long enough to become little icons in their own right, transcending Gary’s transient art of intimate and prosaic interruptions.
A mixed media sculpture called lone man was put on a badly-damaged wharf at Berrys Bay in Sydney. Gary had to row out with friends in early morning light to discreetly place the larger-than-life work on its edge, a white figure staring down into the water from a precarious and rotting edifice.
Against the odds, both the sculpture and the wharf lasted all through 2023, becoming a local landmark before the wharf collapsed into the water in early 2024. An outpouring of local grief for the solitary and reflective man – followed by a rash of news articles – prompted a friend to identify Gary as the guerilla-style creator behind the artwork.
Of lone man’s collapse into the water, Gary told the ABC News in Sydney, "That's where he wanted to go, then that's where he should stay. I'm very comfortable with that proposition."
From beginning to end this project greatly pleased him. A triumph Gary describes in typically muted terms: “something interesting happened”.
Against any melancholy or weight in work is Gary’s natural inclination towards more absurdist forms of protest or stoppage. Playful acts that rearrange everyday reality for his own amusement and anyone else who might notice. He’s had a board series of his own eyes printed off so he can paste them to locations as he walks around, part peek-a-boo and part-prisoner in a reality he enjoys shaking up for laughs as well as any deeper intentions. How does one disturb without disempowering? Can you cause a ripple and inspire as much as upset? Where can art have fun as well as make its more serious intentions felt?
Gary’s work continues. On the street and in the world – and online as either a document of his activities, or another art experience in its own right. Most it fleeting, and, like the lone man, destined for the waters to take it all away.
“It’s a futile cry,” Gary says to me today at the cafe, smiling. “You know it’s futile, the whole endeavour. But you gotta carry on. We’re looking for fellow travellers in doing it too, aren’t we? People who are sensitised, charged.”
“I guess you and I are just fishing,” he says, giving me an friendly push of the shoulder as we speak. “The bait is out, and somehow we’re managing to get our hooks into people. However, it’s not a one-way thing. What we find – it reveals our humanity to us through the responses we have. It becomes a dialogue. You can’t name it really, or quite put a finger on it. Somehow it’s there in the work. And somehow it is nourishing. With luck for you – and for the people you are giving it too and connecting with as well.”
Gary Deirmendjian will publish a collection of his work over the last few years entitled Common Ground in early 2025. It will appear through Bandicoot Books; final announcement and details yet to come. This essay was commissioned with a series of others for the Common Ground project.
Mark Mordue is at work on a new book of poetry mapping his life in Sydney’s Inner West as well as completing a novel entitled There’s No Telling for HarperCollins Australia.
Excellent read, thank you Mark.
Like a dispatch from a parallel universe where art lives much closer to the surface than it does around here.