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The new construction site of a tubular transportation system
divides the historical avenue Meclis'i Mebusan (Ottoman Parliament)
into two "cut off" pieces. Historical monuments such
as Tophane-I Amire (16th century canon factory, now one of the
main venues of the biennial), exquisite examples of mosques and
Mimar Sinan University (the oldest academy of fine arts) are being
recklessly sacrificed to the ugly mass transportation system.
This has happened before in other historical parts of the city;
each of these interferences set up a new metaphor of rupture,
a new loss of memory.
Here in Istanbul, when discussing the biennial, the public and
the artists have the habit of focusing on the curator rather than
the artists; he/she is the center figure. When the biennial began,
the foreign curator was for them “the other”: they
were not wild about entrusting them with the biennial.) It is
also customary to look at the social and artistic environment
of the curator – just as one always asks about the background
of the artist, why not inquire the curator's back-ground? In Dan
Cameron's case, the New York art system is supported and sustained
by private enterprise (transnational investment and mega-art market)
and by foundations; state and local government funding in the
USA is quite exceptional. This is the crucial difference between
a curator from the EU and a curator from the USA. With all of
its components, the NY art system is still the center of values,
criteria and trends - this may stand against the currents of globality,
but who can disagree? Up to now we have had curators from the
old world (Rene Block from Germany, Rosa Martinez from Spain and
Paolo Colombo from Italy), where to some extent state subsidies
are prevailing. They tried very hard to shake the dust of orientalism
from their shoulders, but still carried some euro-centric vestige.
Before Dan Cameron, we had Yuko Hasegawa from Japan with her "egofugal"
concept, who diverted the look to the individual's position within
the global process, but stayed somehow detached from the reality
of the Turkish society, which could roughly be defined as "male
egocentric".
As seen from a distance, Cameron, with the benevolent "nimbus"
of USA private enterprise, carried through his task with dignity
and self-confidence. Contrary to worrisome expectations, he also
bypassed the fixed ideas on Istanbul's exoticism and emphasised
the current political situation in the region, skilfully combining
it with the current artistic dilemma. New York art circles did
not leave Cameron alone. They came in groups, supported him during
the opening and discovered Istanbul. In the near future, this
might be of benefit to the art scene.
At the beginning Cameron's task was ambiguous. He had to conceive
his concept between the 11th of September and the pre-Iraq war,
he was caught in the middle of the regional tension. The instability
of the economy had a bad effect on all classes of the society.
When noone could see his/her way clearly, the biennial was a minor
concern. However, the winds of war passed quickly (!), the tide
turned, the economy smiled, and the biennial came almost as a
celebration. In his catalogue text, which is more of a political
essay than a curatorial manifesto, Cameron not only made his position
clear by declaring his radical opposition to current USA world
politics, but also found his way out of the impasse of being a
citizen of USA in the Middle East.
"Poetic Justice" with all its optimistic implications
might be seen as a gateway out of the conflicts and dilemmas we
are living in; yet it also spells trouble. The first word "poetic"
touches a very soft and sore spot in the heart of the Turkish
public. Poets in Ottoman and Turkish literature are almost sacred
and heroic people. Apart from the numerous poets who suffered
or died a tragic death throughout Ottoman and Turkish history,
the most recent memories related to poems and the poets are the
legend of Nazim Hikmet, whose citizenship was revoked, and who
died in the Moscow Diaspora, as well as the so called "Sivas
Events" (1993), when in Sivas (an Alavi city in Middle Anatolia)
during a fundamentalist riot, 31 poets were burned to death in
a hotel. For the reason that, neither in the past nor in the recent
events, "justice" could pair up with "poetry",
"poetic justice" sounded at first peculiar, but later
favored as a proposal. Poetic justice also touches the harmony
between the aesthetics of the art work and the spiritual needs,
whereas harmony reverberates optimism and good will. So even if
it is not realistic, the public - ready to be consoled - could
easily get carried away
During the opening days of the biennial, I was organising, with
AICA Turkey (International Association of Art Critics), a workshop
for young art critics from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Egypt, Lebanon,
Greece, S. Montenegro (18, 19, 21 September) as well as a round-table
for the public.)
During one of the sessions two art critics from Turkey, Ahu Antmen
and Levent Çalikoglu, aptly indicated that for the first
time since we have had foreign curators, a curator did not talk
our head off with the boring statement that Istanbul is a bridge
between East and West. This has been pronounced by almost all
curators in slightly different ways; without considering that
the city is enduring political and social fragmentation, a formation
of heterotopia and distopia. Nevertheless, some of the speakers
asserted that the title is a container, effortlessly filled in
different ways. Moreover, they said that the dialectic formulation
of concepts has been a typical method since the 80's and that
"Dreams and Conflicts", the title of the 50th Venice
Biennale was a recent example of this habit.
All these ideas and statements do not prevent us from questioning
the "poetic justice" within the political context of
the Middle East. Here, poetry is being presented as a creative
process and expression, through which we - all players of the
art world - hope, seek and desire to make the humankind feel,
comprehend, perceive, cognise the dilemmas, emergencies, stratagems,
particularities, peculiarities, enigmas of this world, a task
with open ends. For the artists, in the classical sense, there
are two ways of achieving this goal. In her online essay (*) about
Bakhtin, Dr. Mary Klages indicates that Bakhtin defines that as
"the novel is more oriented toward the social/historical
forms of rhetoric than toward the particular artistic or aesthetic
ideas present at any particular moment, while poetry focuses primarily
on aesthetic concerns and only secondarily (if at all) on other
aspects of social existence. Further on there is more about this
division: Poetry is meant to be an art form, to be (and to create)
something beautiful; fiction, on the other hand, is a kind of
rhetoric, a literary form meant to persuade or to present an argument,
not to produce an aesthetic effect." According to Bakhtin,
poetic language has been conceptualized historically as centripetal,
and novelistic language as centrifugal. "Novelistic language
is dialogic and heteroglossic", Bakhtin says, "and as
such it exists as a site of struggle to overcome (or at least
to parody) the univocal, monologic utterances that characterize
official centralized language."
In this case, poetic language (or artworks) are centripetal and
cannot overcome the official centralised language. Curiously enough,
this is true for Turkey and also for the Islamic countries in
general, where (today’s) contemporary artworks are not valued
as ideas and concepts to challenge the state ideology, wild capitalism,
or the misuse of democracy. The power to create public opinion
is in the hands of prose, in some particular cases in the form
of novels, but mostly as represented by the press and the media.
Thus, to provoke any kind of justice through art is a dream come
true.
All artworks have a poetic aspect corresponding to the grade
of abstraction and conceptuality; from Duchamps "Pissoir",
from Schwitter's Merzbau made of litter and garbage to Richard
Serra's colossal and dangerous steel walls. These examples are
fusing or melting the beautiful and the beast, spirituality and
sensuality, pacification and irritation. In Marlene McCarty's
drawings of criminal girls, Ann Hamilton's gigantic blue and white
curtains sweeping back and forth, Monika Sosnowska's corridor,
Tania Bruguera's passageway of tea bags (shown at Antrepo 4, the
main venue of the Biennial), in Peter Sarkisian's and Danica Danic's
video projections (at Tophane-I Amire, the Ottoman canon factory),
as well as in Mike Nelson's "dark room" (at Valide Han,
a 17th century caravansary), one could comprehend and perceive
this kind of fusion and merge. However, two works in Antrepo 4,
which attracted much attention from the viewers, have not achieved
the same significance. Despite the cracked parapet glasses of
Monica Bonvicini's chain and glass staircase, and despite the
hopeless material of Suh Do Ho's pink tulle staircase, they have
only been beautiful, sensual and pacifying.
When we look for responses to the title or concept, we see that
some laconic artists immediately associated poetic justice with
divine justice, while others directly delved into the intricacies
of justice. The politically-laden works of artists from traumatic
regions, such as Sharam Karimi's portraits of political victims
in Iran, Jasmila Sbanic's video of Kosova tragedy, Emily Jacir's
photo-diary of her Palestinian transit identity, Fernando Bryce's
drawings on Peruvian official history, or Zwlethu Mthetwa's ethnological
portraits, reveal the artists' commitment as sagacious but also
anxious witnesses to the present.
All the videos, skillfully installed in circular tents which
break the austerity in the Antrepo, join forces with the curator's
intention and send out documentary, semi-documentary or artistic
images dealing with the familiar, everyday life topics, media
criticism, performances, interviews, tracking, body politics,
performances. What makes a video an artwork? Should a video work
be an artwork? Why do filmmakers prefer to present their video
works within the contemporary art context? What is the difference
between a documentary and a video work? These questions are being
discussed, since the videos take up large spaces in the exhibitions
and since there is a new kind of exhibition design according to
the character of the video works. There are many direct answers
to these questions, which I will not deal with. The crucial point
for the artist is to be as ego-centric as possible during the
shooting and get most of the truth into the camera, and then weave
the net of intimacy and captivity in the dark room between the
viewer and the work. Yet, the paradox is that the viewer can effortlessly
escape from this captivity which obviously happens when the video
is longer than 5 minutes… Who would look to Kutlug Ataman's
hours-long video interviews? In his video works, he lets the subject
talk for long hours; the viewer joins in at one instance and never
gets at the whole story/truth. The only responsible person in
these kinds of video interviews is the interviewed himself/herself;
the artist is absent, the viewer is unpredictable…
As long as the historical buildings are being used for the biennial
in Istanbul, one cannot overlook the fact that the historical
and religious space (St. Irene and St. Sophia) becomes a part
of the work (or should be considered as such by the artist and
the curator). The viewer expects an extra stimulation when entering
the historical space to see a contemporary artwork. The question
here is: why are the videos of Danica Dakic and Peter Sarkisian
not installed in St. Sophia but in Tophane-I Amire? Dakic's work
is based on the unity of religions and would be more eloquent
in St. Sophia, which is a hybrid space of Christianity and Islam.
Not one of the works (Feher, Garcia, Marepe, Rasdjarmrearnsook
and Geers) was qualified to be in this unique space. The works
were ordinary, inappropriate and buoyant. The Yerebatan cistern
has been used by numerous artists by now; there are only a few
which have left an impact on common memory. The first impression
of animation, shadow, changing colors and sounds is pleasant,
but all these works use the cistern as a background and not as
the reason for the work.
Religious buildings in Istanbul should be dealt with, with utmost
care and responsibility. I have witnessed the deep esteem of artists
like Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Jannis
Kounellis, who have masterminded many historical spaces in different
cultures with their concepts and skill; almost all of them have
indicated that contemporary artworks in these buildings should
have another dimension, definition, intention and significance.
For a number of past biennials, the artists and curators have
dealt with these spaces as if there was no debate or statement
in the history of contemporary art, in terms of the dialogue of
the work with the space.
Moreover, there are too many layers of controversy and conflict,
when it comes to questioning the position of religious buildings
in Istanbul. Although the city is being praised for its historical
capacity for different religions, numerous mosques are the proof
of an absolute Muslim society. A watchful eye can see that most
of the churches, synagogues and various buildings (i.e. cemeteries)
of non-Muslim origin are somehow camouflaged by other buildings
or by high walls. Yet this is not a fundamentalist act, but a
policy which has emerged within the post-war nation state formation,
dictating homogenisation in language and culture. Islamism in
Turkey cannot be compared with the radical Islamists in the Middle
East and elsewhere. It is a kind of defence against modernity
and not an attack on Christianity or Judaism. Islamists in Turkey
are struggling to find their place in the secular culture and
within the post-modernist process. This brings me to the questions
European colleagues have been asking me for many years: How does
contemporary art fit into the Islamic society? How is it received
by the Islamists? Contemporary art is an integral part of modernism,
of the global culture of consumption and communication in Turkey.
Islamists - even if they are distanced from it - swallow it as
a bitter drug, as they swallow all facts and features related
to the economic realities, such as prescriptions of IMF and everyday
urban life with Western-style entertainment and leisure culture.
Within the heterogeneous architecture of the city, there are
many spaces to be articulated by the artists as the background
or as the reason of their work. However, the status quo of the
biennials is a totality, a space where all works exist side by
side. In the 8th Istanbul Biennial, one work has surpassed all
schemes, obstructions and prejudices of the biennial system. Mike
Nelson's work in Valide Sultan Han, near the Grand Bazaar, invites
the viewer to see Istanbul from the inside out. Next to the Grand
Bazaar, which is the golden egg of Istanbul, this Han is a misfortune.
Its magnificent 16th century architecture has been abused, neglected
and destroyed. However, all of the inhabitants - mostly light
industry workers and artisans - love and cherish this building,
(in part because they have been living there since their childhood.
The sub-economy in this Han is medieval. Nelson worked there for
weeks; he worked in one of the empty two-storey darkrooms, took
photos of the district, developed and hung them all over. In my
opinion, with this work, Nelson has achieved a total "de-orientalisation".
Thank you Mike Nelson.
Beral Madra / October 2003
Note:
Mikhail
Bakhtin. Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English,
University of Colorado at Boulder
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Beral Madra
Born in 1942 in Istanbul, lives there. Curator, art critic, director of the BM Contemporary Art Center.
Coordinator of the first two Istanbul Biennials (1987 and 1989), curator of the exhibitions Contemporary Art in Historical Spaces. Since 1990 curator and commissioner of the Turkish Pavilions at the Venice Biennials.
Website:
www.btmadra.com
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