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Jumadurdy Juma, a sculptor who lived and worked all his life in Ashgabat, spent his last years in a studio on the outskirts of the city. It is one of a group of studios built in the last heartbeat of the Soviets by an artistic foundation, nestling behind newer, but dilapidated-looking apartment blocks and across some wasteland from the railway. The little close is peaceful and shady, a world from the hellish main road just up the hill, and its place marked by a handsome mosque newly built just above. Before the evelopment he worked in a basement in the centre, by the building that houses the Georgian and Kyrgyz embassies, by coincidence my neighbour.
I was here a couple of months ago for a concert. The studio is kept by Juma’s widow, Natalya, who also uses the space to host concerts a precious and rather risky activity in a city where music is all but prohibited, musicians have no livelihood and audiences have no music. I asked her why music was banned, but her answer did not satisfy either of us. There must have been a mistake, she said. Many of the heinous travesties attributed to the president are, she said, not his doing at all but those of his mandarins. (Still, although he likes to be shown on TV scolding and firing his acolytes, he hardly seems to rush to rectify the situation). Meanwhile Natalya gives her soirees, during which a temporary exhibition also opens for preview, and the place is filled with pleasant, arts-loving people. In all Ashgabat there is a roomful of them left; the events are also well known among foreign embassy staff, who turn out and show support. And with its being so far from the centre of town, miles from marble wonder country, the bureaucrats have not so far put the place under a demolition order.
Arriving this time in daylight, the concealed side street is marked by a larger-than-life statue of Oguz Khan, produced to order for the city but without yet an agreed location. Half-finished oversized figures of the portly president stand in the yard of another sculptor. Jumadurdy Juma never seems to have stooped to such depths; the work in his entrance yard and fine little sculpture garden is of a much higher order. Nevertheless he was also active in producing public works for the new republic. Here is a series of panels from a street installation in Dashoguz (a city in northern Turkmenistan) that show traditional figures a musician, a shepherd, a girl, a mother ancient yet not at all old. Next to this, a life-size bright-metal camel is led by a girl recalling a Turkmen legend in which she goes in search of her lost brothers and is helped by the camel. In a shed opposite is an intricate bronze-cast monument to the 1948 earthquake: a young woman holds up a violent shard of moon (which is remembered in the sky in the aftermath of the quake) while people cower to the sides. The reverse side of the sculpture, pushed up against a wall, shows the figure holding the moon as male. Heads loll on a shelf, including the composer Nury Halmämmedov (of whom there is a magnificent portrait by Mamed Mammedov in the Arts Museum). Figures from what was the Ashgabat arts world, gathering dust many of whom dreamed of the Turkmen soaring in his own world undiminished by invasions, yet seemingly not wanted on voyage in this new, brave, headlong one.
The arts were surely plunged into crisis by the 1917 Russian revolution and subsequently underwent extremes of censorship and bending to compromised, politicised ends; many of the best exponents fled the country and among the rest it was a good while before much could be created and made known that stood on its merits. It seemed that the spirit baby was being thrown out with the revolutionary bathwater, against the very grain of what had surely, surely been intended. The same is happening here, with eloquent dreamers and harbingers of Turkmen freedom and expression relegated to the scrapheap while new, sterile and inexperienced puppets are employed by the regime that has actually won that freedom of expression. In both cases what begins as a broad, inspired dream ends up as a narrow, forced movement that must expunge all that does not fit its narrow confines of ideology, in order that it survive. There are places where art and engineering can meet and even overlap, but social engineering is not one of them.
The path to Jumadurdy’s door is lined with small pieces, many of them moving in their simplicity: natural stones with the slightest modification revealing a mother and child, a reclining woman. Shepherds feature frequently in all of Jumas media and styles. Inside, we meet his son, a large-built man who is also a sculptor and lately a jeweller. He shows us a fine collection of Turkmen silver jewellery, all of which is astonishing in its intricacy. The traditional necklace is reminiscent of the full breastplate that many tribal women wore in battle. They were out there with their men, sword in hand. It has changed, however, from a solid plate to a curtain of fronds of silver, symbolising running drops of water, the precious source of life in the desert, terminating in birds claws, seen as a talisman and protection from harm. More modern neck pendants also carry traces of the water and claw imagery and carry large semi-precious stones. The bezelik (bracelet) is a solid silver piece set with stones and silver fretwork, again harking back to the forearm-length armour worn by women in battle.
Natalya, an energetic woman surely in her seventies, takes us on a guided tour of the permanent exhibition. She gives me a severe look when I mistake women for men and vice versa. Surely one can tell from the context which it should be? Can’t I tell the difference? I am caught at once by a pair of figures, clearly human, with heads, but a body totally hollow, supported by two thin sides, like arms, as though they have no chest. These commemorate the Armenian earthquake (of 1988) in which Jumadurdy lost a number of friends. The empty space speaks for itself. The hanging drop in the middle, suggesting a heart shape, is a tear that has rolled down from the eye. The man has one large, all-seeing eye from which the tear has run. His lips are small and to the side; not worth much. The woman has no features left, her mind has left, there is a great hole in the front of her head speechless, frozen, totally out of mind and subservient to what has to happen, unable and past caring whether to object. Another pair of quite different figures also marks the earthquake, in which the heart-hollow is solid, but there are no arms this time; and no mouth, just the one great seeing, weeping eye.
What I took to be a monument to deep-seated Turkmen tradition turns out to be a vindication of Saddam Hussein. Made when he was still powerful, this is a bronze (or bronze-like) grating in which Saddam sits in gold, like an Egyptian god, a small figure at the centre. Standing astride and above is a much larger dark figure representing his dark soul and dark intentions. Below are the people oppressed under him and the doors of his palaces. The whole is supported by two pillars that I assumed to be minarets but are in fact giant rockets – the weapons of mass destruction that were later never found. Our conversation leads us suddenly to a different area of the exhibition. Here is a sublimely lyrical evocation of the myth of Lei and Mezhnun, two lovers of legend who are ill-crossed: a poor man in love with a princess. Their love cannot be permitted. We see the lovers swirl together, a circle, their swan-like necks never coming together and yet held one to the other with the strength of a ring, an unseen vortex drawing them together. In another piece we see Mezhnun exiled to the desert, far from his beloved, worn to a wisp and crazed with lovesickness. In the legend they never do find happiness. Otherwise it wouldnt be a legend, Natalya says firmly in reply to my clearly unexpected question. So legends here don’t show the triumph of love over law, but rather the extent and nature of the law, in which compassion does not have to serve a happy end.
A bronze casting shows an angular squatting woman with long limbs and a child on her shoulders. She is the becoming mother-land and the child will be the president. This was made by Jumadurdy in the early 1990s to celebrate the independent new state. In those days, Natalya tells me, things were different. The president was a different man. He was approachable, he was loved by his people, he listened to them and responded to them. Jumadurdy also loved him. So, I ask, how is it with him now? I have been wanting to put this question for months. Well, time has moved on, things arent the same any more. He has grown older, is surrounded now by career mandarins. She does not think of him as evil (I have suggested that Western opinion sees him as an evil tyrant), though some mistakes have certainly been made. She tells me about the presidents intention to create an aesthetic training system for children in which they can be taught music, arts and the like. Yet she agrees with me that under the present system education has gone to pot. Why must children be forced to leave school after only nine years, to go and get work experience? There is no guarantee of work for everybody - how many of the young are unemployed – yet nobody has a chance of higher education without that two years’ work experience. What is it about? She suggests that few people can understand what the president has in mind, few have an overview of the situation or the action plan. She makes the analogy with the story told by Rumi and others of the group of blind men who go to visit an elephant. One touches a leg, another the body, one the ear, and each has a different description of what they found. There lacks an overall vision of what is happening in the land.
A bright figure of a bard-like man catches my attention, on bended knee, an arm being proffered as though a proposal is being made, his face ardent. It is the poet Nesimi, a Sufi who tried to introduce changes to the religion, for which he was skinned alive. Today he is a national hero. Natalya goes on to point out a figure of a woman from whom long black birds are taking off into the sky. This is the basis of a monument to the late poet Kurban-Nazar Azizow, who died at age 34 and was a much admired Turkmen-language poet and friend of Juma. Apparently he was returning from Krasnovodsk with two companions when they noticed a particularly beautiful field of flowers. They stopped the car, got out and went to look more closely. A handful of army deserters was hiding out nearby and thought that the three had come to arrest them. They turned their guns on the three and shot them dead. Thus was the tragically early end of a blossoming poet, back in the 1960s.
A series of pieces show birth, marriage and death on the basis of hands. We see marriage as the coming together of two hands. The bride and groom are like the two thumbs, and the two families stand as the other fingers. The body of the hand forms the two houses that have been brought together. Then is Juma’s own family, with him and his wife in close embrace in the centre and relatives forming on the fingers. A third hand shows death in the family, of a wife; the widower stands upright, a finger that will not bend, like a memorial stone to the last. Another shows the death of a musician, the death theme treated more sensitively; while the last in the series depicts the birth of a child. Two pieces are based on the Parthian finds at Nissa large horns, and a rider drawn on the back of a fabulous mythical winged horse. A metal casting shows the burial of a hero, attended by a tall and erect angel; his wings, however, were sawn off by the Soviets (because Soviet angels do not fly). A companion piece shows the burial of a defector: no angel but rather wolves draw the hearse wagon. A man facing four directions with four noses indicates a man who cannot make decisions for himself, does not know which way to turn. This theme finds resonance in the figure of the man who regrets: tall, white, with an upper body like a swans neck above angular, unstable legs, his head bent back and round in despair at the sky. He did not know what life held for him, and grieves the time lost. A series of bronze figures stand for the time of day: two women and a cockerel for morning, a mother and father with a sleeping child curled up in the crook of the crescent moon for night.
The exhibition is but half covered, and we have not looked at any of the paintings or drawings, but have been talking for the best part of two hours and Natalya is called away to other tasks. I wonder whether I can help her compile the catalogue she dreams of for her collection which requires $7000 for printing, but also a good photographer to record the items and somebody to check the English language translations and the naming of the pieces. This artist shows the credentials of a rounded and genuine practitioner, working in a variety of styles and media, with both public and private works, participating in the life around him and contributing to it while not becoming embroiled in or identified with it.
Coming home to my flat, across the yard from the house in whose basement Jumadurdy used to work, I notice that the adjacent boulevard is filled with large sculptures. Of course I had seen them before, but not paid attention to what I arrogantly took to be no more than officially-decreed decoration. Some resemble Jumadurdy’s work with astonishing closeness and I wonder how much of them could in fact be his. Another question for Natalya next time.
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