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“Vartan Avakian’s A Very Short History of Tall Men commemorates the forgotten leaders of failed coups d’états. Based on careful, painstaking research conducted both on the Internet and in archives and libraries, it seeks to materially reconstitute these almost important figures from the minimal historical traces they have left behind. [...] This process seems to parallel, or better yet, parody the traditional method for creating likenesses of kings and leaders whereby the imperfections and shortcomings of reality are adjusted and augmented to create a worthy image. [...] These reconstitutions take a form that is proper for a commemoration of power: a statue of the man, standing tall, proud and triumphant. Portrayed at a moment that precedes his eventual failure, each man’s pose is authoritative and dynamic, still energised with potential, with the promise of success. Though the statues are almost photographically lifelike and are cast in gold, that most precious of metals and a common standard of value, they measure in at a diminutive five centimetres tall, their toy soldier-like stature indexing both their failed attempts to seize power and their subsequent near erasure from the historical record. And instead of standing erect, they are entombed in clear acrylic spheres; floating like apparitions in a crystal ball they are doomed to forever roll, head over heel, here and there. Pitched between registers of the ordinary and extraordinary, these forms and structures seem to materialise the uncertainties and paradoxes of history itself. While the statues’ diminished dimensions compromise the value of their mimetic detail and material richness, the hermetic little worlds they inhabit simultaneously immortalise and imprison them for eternity. Finally, it is hard to properly categorise these playfully ambiguous objects. Are they counter-monuments that engage in a sophisticated critique of both the impulse to monumentalise, and the forms through which this impulse is conventionally realised? Or are they simply monuments, modest but sincere commemorations of failure itself? Their very materiality suggests that they are both, and neither.”