ART and POLITICS NOW

The exhibition “Dream and Reality” at the Istanbul Modern Museum provides an overview of modern and contemporary women artists from Turkey. Since women constitute many of the leading artists in Turkey, the exhibition is a valuable survey of modern and contemporary art beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing to the present.

Jointly curated by Levent Çalikoğlu Chief Curator at the Istanbul Modern, Fatmagül Berktay, Zeynep Inankur and Burcu Pelvanoğlul, the exhibition offers an opportunity to look at an important chapter of contemporary art history.

The title of the exhibition is based on the title of a novel co authored by Fatma Aliye and Ahmet Mithat. But Fatma was initially identified on the cover only as “a woman.” Fatma was also the author of an 1891 essay on Muslim Women (Nisvan-ı Islam) defending women’s rights. Although women in the late Ottoman era ( note mainly urban, upper class women)were actively promoting women’s rights, this famous first female novelist (the novel was a  ”Western” genre and new to Turkish writers at this point) was unnamed on the cover of the book. The position of women in the late 19th and early 20th, right before the Republic, is important to pinpoint as privileged freedom within the limitations of traditional Ottoman customs and Sharia law.  ( read Reina Lewis Rethinking Orientalism for one  account of some of these negotiations.)

Educational reform in the Ottoman society led to a demand for the rights of women. The first essay in the excellent catalog for this exhibition by Fatmagül Berktay outlines the relationships of women and society in the Ottoman era and early Republic. They published magazines and newspapers, and participated in meetings and charity organizations. There were by the end of the nineteenth century 40 women’s magazines and 300 books that examined the relationships of men and women. They also began to struggle for their rights. After 1908 “they began to force the limits of Sharia law and go out into the public space, to expand the means of education and to earn the right to work in the public sector, in short to bring down the walls  that separated them from society.” ( p. 33) A University of Women was opened in 1914; a  School of Fine Arts for Girls in the same year, although the first art school for girls had opened as early as 1864.  Men and women studied  together by 1921 even before the  founding the Turkish Republic.

An interesting omission from the new catalog that appears in the pioneering exhibition by Tomur Atagök Cumhuriyet’ten günümüze kadın sanatçılar (Women Artists from the Republic to the Present Day) (1993) as part of the Women in Anatolia Series in honor of the 75^th anniversary of the Republic, is that women’s equality in modern Turkey can be traced back much further to the nomadic cultures of Anatolia. More specifically, as Atagök summarizes women “played a central role in economic life in rural Anatolia” and produced much of the embroidery, dressmaking, carpet weaving and other handcrafts. (p.12) The tradition of sequestering women during the Ottoman years actually was an inheritance of  Byzantine culture.  But the “new woman” of the early Republic was still part of an oppressive, patriarchal society.

Today, as one country after another in the Middle East is throwing over dictators, the spread of Islamist ideas is rapid. Knowing how women resisted Sharia in Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century might be of use today as the new Libyan government immediately declared that it wants to institute Sharia, and Iraq has stepped back to the dark ages in its treatment of women.  Afghanistan women outside Kabul are still wearing burkas as we saw in the PBS series Women, War and Peace .

“Hayal ve Hakikat”  begins with benchmark historical artists, among whom the most famous is Mihri Müşfık,(1886-1950?) the first significant women oil painter in Turkey (oil painting, like the novel, was a “western” import, see Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red) .  In the painting  Mihri Hanim documents her assertive attitude, as well as her negotiation with the rules of the veil. Her dark veil is completely transparent. Mihri Hanım  together with Müfide Kadri (1890 – 1912) led the way for women as part of the artistic culture of the late Ottoman society. There is a detailed discussion in the catalog by Burcu Pelvanoğlu of these early years. Many of Mihri’s students became prominent professional artists such as Fahrelnissa Zeid and  her sister, Aliye Berger included in both the exhibition of women artists and in the main display in the Istanbul Modern. Sadly Mihri Hanim herself died in poverty far from home.

 

Hale Asaf, Mihri Hanim’s niece is also a major figure in the early period.  More modernist, and cubist, she represents the next era of oil painting in Turkey. But the really spectacular painting in this exhibition from the mid twentieth century is by Aliye Burger, Sun Rising, 1954 that embraces expressionist colors in a stunningly near abstract composition.

 

 

Jumping to the late twentieth century, Canan Beykal honors Mihri Hanim in her piece Mihri Hanim’s Column,1993 a small doll sculpture that reinvokes the artists self portrait in three dimensions. It inhabits the gallery, imbuing the present with the past.

 

 

Tomur Atagök’s own painting and installations are an important connection from the latetwentieth century to the present. In the work in this exhibition, Plastic Paradise, or Don’t Soil,(1987) ( see beginning of blog) she works on steel panels with an expressionist style dominated by shades of pink and red. Her theme at this time was the contradictions of society for women: as the women on the right are enjoying themselves, a man with a knife threatens them. But her work also addresses environmental concerns about the planet in both the title and the suggestion of the empty landscape on the left.  Atagök mixes popular culture with expressionist references to political events.

Füsun Onur also spans the late twentieth century to the present with spare conceptual art that is both playful and full of threat, as in Untitled, 1993, a chained up chair with her name on the seat.  The chair is a symbol of power, property and social status ( catalog p. 130), she undercuts their function with the chain ( or in other works soft gauzy fabrics).

 

 

Nur Kocak has used a pop art aesthetic paired with photo realism  to make searing comments on some of the  ironies of women’s position in Turkish society.  In this work she is addressing the impact of fame on Turkey’s first female director Cahide Sonku during the 1930s.

 

 

A few pioneering artists began to show conceptual art in the late 1970s. Starting in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, the Turkish contemporary art scene has flourished. Of the 74 artists in the exhibition,  50 of them are still active, born in every decade of the twentieth century from the 1930s to the 1980s.  Ahu Antman’s essay in the exhibition catalog analyzes the relationships between these artists and larger trends, particularly feminism, in twentieth and twenty-first century art. She touches on the emphasis on empowering women in the Republic, but primarily she examines the ways in which these artists explore a wide range of contemporary approaches to media, subject matter and content, much of it explicitly relating to women in society.

Among the artists shown, the selection of the particular art work does not always stand as an indicator of the artist’s primary contribution to contemporary Turkish art. Gülsün Karamustafa’s Postposition, (1995) five quilts found in a bazaar and framed with gold gilt fabric, are an indicator of the contradictions of kitsch taste and the conservative ideology of those who buy it, only indirectly suggests that artist’s position as a major contemporary artist. Her work encompasses many themes, migration, orientalism, prostitution, women in popular culture, and much more.

The work of Hale Tenger is a crucial early installation by the artist in which she evokes potential violence in society with a great vat of red colored liquid and dozens of swords suspended above. It is not a feminist work, but it addresses the threat of violence which includes women. “The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa (I don’t give a fuck anymore)” 1990, was prompted by a letter bomb that killed a female professor and other acts of violence. Tenger addresses social issues, but cannot be considered a feminist artist; she does not focus on women specifically.

Among benchmark artists is Inci Eviner who has always gone her own way in terms of materials and content.  Her current medium is video, but eccentrically.  Fluxes of Girls in Europe. ((2010) superimposes videos of almost 70 moving female bodies on a satellite image of Europe. The women are small scale, although large on the map of Europe. They are accompanied by a text with words that describe their actions, “tear,” “stab” (catalog p.159).  These women seem to be trying to break free, but failing to do so.

Many of these artists have been prominent for decades. They adopt a wide range of media and subjects, suggesting the real depth of art by women in Turkey. For example, aside from those mentioned, there are several generations of conceptual art (Ayşe Erkman, Canan Beykal, Azade Köker, Gul Ilgaz, Nancy Atakan) , social activism (Nil Yalter, Esra Ersen, Selda Asal, Ipek Duben), references to folk art or history (Selma Gürbüz, Handan Börüteçene), classical art (Candeğer Furtun,) environmental issues ( Neriman Polat, Elif Çelebi, Canan Tolon), and a combination of several of these ( Aydan Murtezaoğlu).

 

I will focus on a few artists with whom I was not as familiar. Şükran Moral’s provocative video Bordello, 1997, in which the artist herself plays a prostitute, is a wonderful challenge to traditional attitudes . It was actually performed in a brothel on which she hung the sign “Museum of Modern Art” and held a sign declaring that she was “for sale.” ( catalog 174). Nilbar Güreş’ video Undressing (2006) was a delightful send up of the veiling controversy in Turkey and elsewhere, as well as a compelling social commentary. The artist began entirely covered, and step by step took off one head covering after another, each one identified with a name of a specific person, but each one also representing a different social or cultural identity in Turkey. Her work underscores the oversimplifications with which this issue is often defined. Another pair of videos by Aslı Sungu’s Just Like Mother, Just Like Father (2006) also spoke about attitudes to women and what they wear, but here in the context of parental approval, as the artist kept changing between outfits that reflected different identities.

Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s installation from her Cage Projects 2 Kitsch Room Project: “Where To?” was rich with meticulous details that accumulated into a reference to the same urban migration culture that Gülsün comments on.

Güneş Terkol sews images that address identity through dress as well . Gözde Ilkin accumulates, also mainly working with fabric, a serendipitous collection of objects from everyday life.   Ilkin is part of a collective called Atılkunst which created an audio tour of the exhibition which brings us back to the beginning of the story in the early twentieth century.

The exhibition with its excellent catalog essays documents the major role that these artists play in contemporary art in Turkey. Many of them are not politically affiliated with feminism per se, but, as suggested in this brief discussion, many of them address topics that engage social issues that concern women.  Of course, with any exhibition of this type, there is always a question of why this group was chosen, and other well-known artists ( like Suzy Hug-Levy and Şirin Iskit, just to name two) were omitted. On the whole though, the exhibition is a major contribution to literature on contemporary art in Turkey.

One of the biggest ironies of the exhibition though was the introduction by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of the Prime Minister and the juxtaposition of her attire-  elegant, but extremely conservative, with a thorough head covering with the ultra chic and contemporary Oya Eczacıbaşı the wife of the director of the  Eczacıbaşı foundation.

Today on Columbus Day Indigenous groups turned out at the Occupy Seattle site to demand the abolishment of Columbus Day, there were dances, drumming, songs, and a few speeches. They were also in support of Occupy Seattle on the other side of Westlake.

Those folks were having group meetings about media, peace and justice, and “demands” . Strategizing the way forward. I hope some of them were listening to the speeches especially by Jamal who mentioned the Hopi prediction that  those who live in villages of stone will wake up to find them gone. We are waiting for the day. The indigenous have a long view. They see the land as permanently occupied already. So it is a logical connection for them to join up with the Occupy Seattle movement. There was a big discussion about whether to change the name to Decolonize Seattle/Occupy Seattle, the vote was to leave the name the same. Indigenous peoples have played a prominent role in the Occupy Seattle demonstrations over the weeks. Probably more so than in other Occupy places. That has given the Occupy Seattle an historical perspective on the theme of exploitation since the land of downtown Seattle was historically Duwamish, a tribe that hasn’t even been recognized. In this region we have dozens of tribes that are beginning to do better as a result of revenues from casinos and the annual canoe journeys. The first provides new monies, the second build culture and community.

 

 

 

 

 

The 12^th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Jens Hoffman and Adriana Pedrosa offered art that created intersections of aesthetics and politics, both historically and in contemporary art.  The curators chose to distance the exhibition from  immediate political reality, but the same issues such as pursuit of oil in the Middle East, government oppression and loss of human rights, have been with us for decades.  The geo political framework of the exhibition spans most of the twentieth century and the early 21^st century. One of the earlier bodies of work is by Tina Modotti, an ardent communist who supported workers’ revolutions in Mexico in the 1920s. She is represented by photographs in the scale, but  not the context of her original work: it often appeared on the cover of New Masses.  Martha Rosler’s  Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful  series on the Vietnam War ( rather than her Iraq series of 2004), underscores that obliviousness to the atrocities of war has not changed.

 

The curators chose to call this biennial Untitled (12^th Istanbul Biennial) in homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 – 1996), whom they celebrate for his ability to “infuse” the elegance of post Minimalism with political statements.  The early 1990s was of course the height of the AIDS  crisis and many artists were rejecting the abstruse for direct political statements. In this Biennial works by Gonzalez-Torres create a point of departure for group shows (although his works are only referenced in the catalog):  Untitled(Abstraction), Untitled (History), Untitled (Ross), Untitled (Death by Gun), Untitled (Passport).  Surrounding these group shows were over fifty solo shows by artists who connected to the adjacent theme show. The design of the exhibition by architect Ryue Nishizawa  enhanced this sense of satellites revolving around a central galaxy, with individual gallery spaces defined by corrugated metal walls for each solo artist, But the installation was  also a maze.

This was an intentional act on the part of the curators and the architect: they referred to it as echoing the experience of walking the streets of Istanbul. The result was a sense that we could make our own show. We were free to ignore, or return, there were empty spaces between the gallery spaces, there were rooms that led us nowhere or back in a circle.

 

The first solo show that I encountered, Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin made clear the curators’ intentions and perspectives. It consisted of a contexualization of early 1940s modernism, most specifically the 1943 mobiles of Alexander Calder which he himself described in terms of “cosmic nuclear gases.”

The artists recreate the work, and also alter the original in a photograph by writing on the abstract shapes the names of world leaders who at that time were juggling for influence: Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill,  etc.. They also provide contextual events in 1943 such as the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

The rest of the gallery is filled with other examples that contexualize modernist art with other historical benchmarks and the simultaneous U.S. pursuit of oil and “cultural diplomacy” in the Middle East such as excerpts from Longines Chronoscope of the early 1950s, with experts expounding in much the same way that they do today, diagrams of the oil fields on Iran and Iraq from the Cheney Energy Task Force( whose shapes reminded the artists of a Calder mobile), and  a 2006 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker “The Iran Plans.” Nothing has changed in the US perspectives, but as Z magazine stated recently “As the  Arab Spring continues to challenge dictators, demolish old structures and ponder road maps for a better future, the U.S. remains committed to its failed policies, misconceptions, and selfish interests.” (Ramzy Baroud, “U.S.-Arab Disconnect: Revolutions Restate Region’s Priorities,”) October 2011

 

The group exhibition Untitled (Abstraction) was the least provocative in terms of art and politics. Historic figures like Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape were juxtaposed to recent artists who frequently did riffs on familiar works such as the shovel ready -made by Duchamp. Clara Ianni’s Trabalho Abstrato (Abstract Work/Labor, 2010 was a shovel with a square hole cut into it, thus rendering it useless and a play on the Marx idea of “abstract labor.”

Adriana Varejao transformed  abstract slashes inspired by Lucio Fontana  into a depiction of literal wounds.

But among the solo shows affiliated with the abstract section , the work of Dora Maurer, an Hungarian artist who began to  create conceptual art in the early 1970s in the midst of oppression and communism, again provides the contradiction of context and production that can be so provocative. Her subtle conceptual pieces were  an active protest against the world in which she was living ( she is still a major contemporary artist in Hungary.)

 

The Untitled (Death by Gun) group show swung between absolutely literal representations to historical images that did not gain by their loss of context. Some artists recreated intense experiences of the past, as in the video work by Edgardo Aragon who hired his young cousins to re-enact  rituals, games and killings that actually happened in his family when they were involved with organized crime.   Mat Collishaw’s giant photograph of a bullet wound was so confrontational  that it became sexual and abstract. This installation included iconic historic images like “Matthew Brady’s” ( done by various members of his studio)photographs of the Civil War. It juxtaposed the photograph by Eddie Adams of a street execution of a Viet Cong fighter with the equally well- known image of Chris Burden being shot as an art performance. What does this tell us? That the art world is effete, or that this shooting was part of the pervasive gun culture of this time that continues to the present.

 

Even the contemporary work had historical references:  Kris Martin’s Obussen II, used huge ornately decorated howitzer shells from World War I, and Kristen Morgin’s The Third Of May, reenacted the famous Goya using clay models of Pinocchio and Mickey Mouse as victims of the firing squad.

Are the curators avoiding the realities of death by gun in the present?   With the choice of Ali Younis with his hundreds of toy  soldiers,

or Eylem Aladogan’s gun stack that morphs into feathers,

they opted for the literal, but it feels like a mannerist literal. Even more literal and yet more than that are the photographs of Letiizia Battaglia done while she was working as a photojournalist in Sicily in the mid 1970s: the dead victims of Mafia hit men are unmediated and blunt.  There  is a direct connection between these Mafiosi murders and  the targeted murders coming from camera phones in Afghanistan and Iraq or the unphotographed murder of unarmed “enemies”  like Osama Bin Laden and Anwar al-Alwaki by drones.

Situated between the stark dialectic of Untitled (Abstraction) and Untitled (Death by Gun), lie the three other group shows:  Untitled (Passport) Untitled (History) and Untitled (Ross) –the third name refers to Gonzalez-Torres’ lover who died of AIDS. This section addressed themes of love, identity and sexuality and was the most historically focused and least provocative in terms of contemporary choices of work.

 

Untitled (Passport) lent  itself to more subtle negotiations between aesthetics and politics.  Several artists included resonant passports: Sue Williamson’s For Thirty Years Next to His Heart (1990) was a passbook for black South Africans; two Palestinian artists Dor Guez and Baha Boukhari referred to the constantly changing status of Palestinians.

Rula Halawani’s Intimacy, are close up images  of people’s hands  as they get out their documents at a checkpoint  at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah ( Halawani’s black and white photographs in the “history” gallery juxtaposes contemporary ruins to historic photographs of villages in Palestine.)

 

Untitled  (History) included Aydan Murtezaoglu’s well known work referencing Ataturk’s teaching Turks the Roman alphabet in the late 1920s as part of his language reform, as well as many works that utilized archives, books, and other documents to underscore the incompleteness and arbitrariness of what is included in history.

Some seemed a bit pedantic, others more compelling such as PAGES reconstituted a shredded letter from an American diplomat at the Iranian embassy just before the student take over. Volupsa Jarpa Library of No History based on declassified CIA documents referrng to Chile between 1968 – 1991 was mainly an unreadable aesthetic.

There was again an emphasis on the aesthetics of the printed page, the redacted printed page, the shredded book, the book turned into artwork.

Altogether the exhibition was elegant and provocative, as with all biennials, there were artists included that were astonishingly weak,. The unusual choice to emphasize historical work to such a great extent, as well as an obvious predominance of Palestinian artists (The Ford Foundation provided funding to include Arab artists) and an almost absence of American artists ( a cut in the US budget?) also points to other hidden political agendas that are not even mentioned in the exhibition, but which certainly framed it.

 

I had some favorite pieces including Taysir Batniji’s Watchtowers, Israeli guard towers in Palestine that directly quote the industrial imagery of Bernd and Hilla Becher  in Germany, but with obvious differences: these photographs were taken by a surrogate photographer in a hurry, they are illegal images, and they are not derelict at all.

Rosangelo Renno’s  Immemorial also invokes modernism in its grid structure, but that impersonal geometry is abruptly interrupted by the faces of young men in a series of photographs that Renno found in archives: they are young men who died building Brasilia.

 

Underlying tragedy is more indirectly invoked in the Camilo Yanez  video  of the National Stadium in Santiago, site of both heroic  and horrific events . We see rolled up cubes of grass and crumbling seats  as the history of the place disappears.   Simryn Gill’s series My Own Private Anghor, also documents  the collapse of modernism in hauntingly post minimalist photographs of abandoned window panes in empty unfinished houses in Kuala Lumpur. Abraham Cruz Villegas collection of political posters from various intense events in Mexican history and Elizabeth Catlett ( who is still working, but whose aesthetic was shaped in the 1930’s and 1940’s) also look backward to a time when artists directly engaged events.

 

While continuity with the present can be argued throughout this exhibition, its emphasis on both the literal and the abstractions of historical modernism, particularly conceptual and minimalist structures created a strange dynamic between the current burning state of the planet and the place of art in that discourse. Artists can engage directly with what is happening now, but in choosing this historical and aesthetic route, these curators suggest that the examples that have withstood the test of time can speak to us almost more directly, than a piece responding to the immediate event.

 

And, indeed, this split of the literal and the abstract is actually where we are now. On the one hand, drone warfare replaces human beings on the ground. The computer screen replaces the equipment in the field, the concept of war itself has become abstracted into perpetual war on terror. The defined wars of the past, with their titles, places, historical beginning and end, are definitely a relic of the black side of modernism. Today we have permanent war, word play, no social participation in the idea of sacrifice for a war, all of it making for a permanent abstract background to our daily lives, a background that many people don’t even bother to acknowledge as the single biggest fact of our contemporary world. This biennial is a bit like that: it includes a lot of abstraction that is post minimal framed with political discourses, but in the end, the world of politics is background to the elegance of the works, and is often even invisible.  On the other hand, we have the extremely literal and specific protests occurring around the world by masses of people who have nothing more to lose.

 

This exhibition offers a new variant on the theme of art and politics. Some critics and the curators themselves are saying that it is a reaction to the more specific art and politics of the last three Istanbul Biennials. They are trying to move the equation closer to aesthetics, which in their definition is late modernism.

That may explain the pervasive sadness that I felt. For in reaching for modernist aesthetics, they are reaching for a lost cause, a failed project, a twentieth century dream. Today, we need something entirely different, and that is actually being formed on social media, with mass connections of disenfranchised and economically bankrupted youth, workers, unionists and with protests like those in Wisconsin or in New York City.  Occupy Wall Street protests against the dictatorship of the corporations; protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East are against ruthless political dictators often backed by the US. So against the abstraction of drones and warfare we have the physical messy, open, people based  multi media, multi issue protest against oppression and the economic systems of exploitation and war that drive it. That is the contemporary dialectic of art and politics. Where it leads us is still to be discovered.