[-empyre-] New/Mixed/Sound Media Art in Istanbul
Eliot Bates
eliotbates at cornell.edu
Thu Feb 10 02:52:29 EST 2011
There's a few vaguely interconnected points I'd like to begin with. In part, my choice of frames has been quite affected by the thought-provoking ways in which Isak has related new media art with media representations of the political upheavals that are consuming several Arab countries, and in which Larissa has introduced her own work. I can't really match that sort of saliency in introducing new media and sound art in Turkey (and in particular the gallery scene in Istanbul, which is a thriving center for some amazing work), in part since many of the new/mixed/digital media artists that I know have chosen experimentation with medium as a conscious or unconscious alternative to using art as a means to explicitly engage with the political (or, what they themselves consider to be the political).
More directly, much of the emergent contemporary art is among the least political contemporary art I've seen anywhere, and in part this might be (and this was suggested by Taylan Cihan, a PhD student in digital audio here at Cornell) because there aren't really many prohibitions on what sorts of expression contemporary artists could make in Istanbul. One can't deface printed pictures of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, one can't directly "insult" the state (indirect insults happen all the time), but other than that, most everything is at least in principle fair game. If there's a political expression Turkish citizens want to make, they would be more likely to choose the most direct and expedient means for doing so, and for whatever reasons that hasn't for the most part been through sound art or mixed/emergent media forms. So this contrasts starkly with more "traditional" media such as novels (Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak, etc); and perhaps most dramatically in contemporary arranged folk music (rock artists Kazım Koyuncu, Marsis, Grup Yorum come to mind) where every note of every song performance is political, and the music is nearly inseparable from a host of contested issues at the heart of contemporary Turkish society. I believe that the saliency of novels and arranged folk music has to do with the aftermath of the September 12, 1980 coup, where thousands of authors, musicians and intellectuals were imprisoned and many fled to Europe or elsewhere - but that's just a hypothesis, and I'll hold off on veering down this path for the moment!
However, there is one set of issues that seem to appear thematically in the works of quite a few artists, and I'll introduce this via an interesting exhibition/performance that I participated in in 2006. Pi Artworks is one of the gems of Istanbul, a gallery with a history of showcasing great work by Turkish artists, and the director of Pi, Yeşim Turanlı, collaborated with American pop artist Michael Parenti (no relation to the political scientist) and German utopian artist Robert Jelinek to host the creation of a "temporary embassy" for the State of Sabotage. Over the course of several exhibitions and several days of events, Turkish, German, French, and American artists contributed towards this project. İrfan Önürmen's contribution, "Arşiv 5," took the form of a 21st century version of the Suner cuneiform tablets, creating a set of archeological objects with incomplete "texts" taken from contemporary media sources -- incomplete snippets of thoughts on the theme of nationhood and identity. Gülay Semercioğlu's "KapitOne" (which literally means "quilt" but is written as a play on "capitalism") took the form of a quilt woven out of metal wire and nuts and bolts, suggesting a more foreboding impression of a new kind of national belonging and the transformation of a traditional Turkish handicraft. One performance that is crucial to mention was the passport application - one could apply to become a citizen of the State of Sabotage, and receive an official passport, which the curators encouraged people to attempt to use when actually traveling abroad.
For the sound art part of the event, Pascal Lesport and a number of his Max/MSP students created sound environments through a sampling system that was architecturally modeled on the "new state of sampling," while gothabilly industrial musicians Neoplast gave several performances, of their own goth-leaning interpretation of the national anthem of the State of Sabotage, as well as of their own Ottoman-inflected lyrics that explore themes of being "ucube," (monstrosity) "garibet," (freak) and other forms of outsiderness within contemporary Turkish society. There even were new recipes created for the occasion, including Dilara Erbay's "Sabotaj Çorbası" (Sabotage Soup).
In all, this was one of the best attended contemporary art events I saw in Istanbul, and I was interested in particular in how participants viewed the nominal theme of statehood, of new forms of citizenship. A couple of the artists I talked with suggested that their resonance with this theme had to do with their own specific relation to being a Turkish citizen. All the artists I talked with emphasized the contributions of the European and American artists, and showed how the work of the Istanbul-based artists very much fit in with the work of their peers residing in other nation-states. In a sense, many Istanbul artists have a sense of belonging to a broader network of Europe's greatest cosmopolitan hubs -- Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Istanbul. This is not an imagining of Turkey as a part of the European Union so much as it is a sense of an unqualified personal belonging to cosmopolitan Europe, albeit one that is sometimes hampered by having a particular kind of passport (hence the great interest in the passport performance). It is also most emphatically not an expression of an identity where "east meets west" -- but rather a redefinition of the West to include (at least parts of) Istanbul, which after all has been one of the great cosmopolitan cities for centuries.
A couple of aesthetic attributes I want to emphasize about inforNation/deforNation and the State of Sabotage events/exhibits: even through the negotiation of one of the key political issues of contemporary Turkish society, many of the artists use what we could term as "playful" ways of engaging with the themes. Irony seems to pervade participation in new media (I explore such themes in a forthcoming article about Turkish social media sites), and is also evident in the SoS pieces -- a new national soup for a new nation?
relevant links:
http://www.piartworks.com/
http://www.sabotage.at/about/what-is-sabotage
http://www.myspace.com/fitnessproductions/
Perhaps in another post I'll write about the 2 university programs which are producing the next generation of new media artists, and more specifically about the sound art scene of Istanbul.
Many thanks to Renate and Tim for the invitation to participate in this energetic list!
-eliot
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Dr. Eliot Bates
ACLS New Faculty Fellow in Music, Adjunct Fellow in the Society for Humanities
http://www.eliotbates.com
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