ABSTRACT
This case study is dedicated to The 3rd Floor in Armenia, a cultural movement in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period that challenged the dominant state-run system of fine arts. Operating in 1987–1994 the artists of the movement appropriated artistic styles, consumerist symbols and counter-cultural icons – everything that carried an anti-Soviet symbolism, and romanticized these symbols to the degree that they came to denote ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. The critique of the Soviet through its other – signs of consumer culture – situates The 3rd Floor within the intellectual climate of the late Soviet and socialist intelligentsia’s romantic alliance with the notion of bourgeois democracy. In the practices of The 3rd Floor these ideals were understood from an artistic perspective: the citizen’s freedom was equal to that of the artist’s “absolute and universal right to mix different artistic styles and images on the surface of the canvas.” The case study suggests that contemporary art in Armenia that institutionalized in the 1990s with the country’s break-up from the Soviet Union has its roots in the anti-Soviet consciousness that the 3rd Floor advanced artistically.
