RES No.1

W e’re right in the thick of it – with all the weight and the levity it entails. As the cliché goes, we’re in the thick of a world with travel, media and communications unfolding like a net, the traffic in actions and reactions reaching maximum speed and the spread of a new cosmopolitan feeling. There is of course an artistic dynamic to the individual losing and rediscovering herself in this frenzied exchange.

This energy makes itself felt most in the new generation of artists, who are told that they can capture the age. The boundaries have gone and there’s nothing between you and the Western artist, or the Eastern artist, the critic, the collector or the curator. For the first time in history you are experiencing the same problems. You eat the same doughnuts, you go to the same schools, you see the same exhibitions, you have the same kind of computer. You are beyond all the complications, the good and the bad, caused by the miles of geography and cultural differences, so what are you waiting for? But there is a danger - the threat of an impotent kind of art, since just as art cannot lose itself in a totality without inventing itself first, it cannot get out of that totality either. It is a vicious circle. The solution to avoid this trap is quite simple: comprehend the world, notice and take part in what is going on and try to create a subjective memory. Some of the answers lie in the extent to which this memory has come into existence, or how many gigabytes this memory takes up. Is the memory enough? Can this accumulation of memory be used to create a kind of art? Or is there any other way out of yielding to schizophrenia and say this is the real deal? We should also see how well we are reconciled with that.

The visible increase over the last decade in the number of museums and contemporary art platforms opened in Istanbul is in this sense encouraging, as is the new activity on the art market. With this sense of everything beginning to take off, it only remains for the art world to value, question, embrace and interpret this memory – founded on firm ground – and close an important gap… The steps taken so far might only be small ones, but there it goes: we are in the thick of it.

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1 RES SEPTEMBER 2007

IN MEDIA RES

INTERVIEW WITH SARAH MORRIS

KENAN ERATALAY When I first contacted Sarah Morris’ manager Robert Schmaltz, I told him the dates that I was going to be in New York, and he invited me to the Guggenheim Museum where Ms. Morris would be holding a conference and meeting for art aficionados. This was part of a program the Guggenheim Museum started in order to bring the artist and the public together (a great idea). There were at least 100 people in the lecture hall, each having paid $10. Ms. Morris talked for almost one hour about her art, her films, and also about her building projects; the result was a wonderful experience. After the talk I met Ms. Morris and Mr. Schmaltz over cocktails and we set an appointment for next morning. We met at Milkshake, a very nice café, and I put the tape recorder on table. I rarely found the need to interrupt Ms. Morris as she talked - she was so natural and expressed her thoughts so clearly that I wanted to write the interview all in her words and expressions. As far as I am concerned, I would have talked with her for another four hours easily, but she was on her way to her summer house and had to go, leaving me with a share of the excitement she has for her work.

SARAH MORRIS I am shooting a film in Beijing at the time of the next Olympics so that is why I’ve been repeatedly going there and also I have a series of new paintings about Beijing.

KE Those rings?

SM Yes, the rings. Also this ideaof the history of origami interested me because everybody assumes it is Japanese and it is actually Chinese. I liked the idea of origami because it parallels the history of the advent of paper. There are contentious theories about where it actually developed but they do assume it developed at the beginning in China. I also like this idea that with a limited actual formal piece of paper you can create a very complex form. There was a very intriguing article in the New Yorker magazine a couple of months ago about how origami is used now for scientific solutions to do with a heart valves, for instance. They use this idea of folding something that can then expand into something else in another situation and be sterile at the same time; you know no one touches it. This is very interesting to me. I also like the idea of origami as a sign of something to come. Cinematically, it is always used as a sign. You’re not really sure of what and I feel like that’s very similar with Beijing or China, in general.

Everybody wants to be optimistic and think progressively, but I’m not really sure that we should be celebrating this form of capitalism. It’s up in the air. When you go there, even with this concept of congestion and the city, there is a slowness there, which actually saves the city. If it was like New York City, with this level of mass, it would be intolerable. But there is something that is balanced there in the sense that the speed of the city is very slow. It is almost static!

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The mass there is overwhelming. People, bicycles, cars, buildings, etc. It really feels so multiplied. I can only speak about it in this effect. We went to scout in a place in the center of the city where Rem Koolhaas was supposed to redesign this building and the plan fell apart. It’s called the Beijing Books building and it’s a building from the 1980s located on the main street. There are so many people there rabidly consuming books. It’s a frenzy. You go in there and you feel overwhelmed. You are in the mass.

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3 KE Did you go to Big Wall?

SM Yes.It seems that there is an idea in China that through this mass you can achieve anything. If you can organize this mass and get it into a momentum there are no limits. This is something that I was introduced to probably when I was a kid by my father speaking about China. I mean, this is not always good and not always progressive because you can have very highly developed situations where a mass of people is working around the clock on all of these building projects and one of the architects there told me that it was okay that all of these workers were being paid the equivalents of 2 or 3 euros a day.

Another person I know told me that this was a gross exaggeration of what they were actually being paid. But again, it is relative in terms of how much their needs cost. There is a very different economy there. But really it is the idea that if you can move a mass and move it into momentum, you can achieve anything. You can build a building that looks like it is falling down. You can kill out a whole beetle population, kill off an insect if you wanted to, get rid of pollution, etc. In a way, there is something parallel to that in the idea of approaching art as a system that is an open structure. Umberto Eco talks about it in The Role of the Reader, that you create something that is an open structure that is larger than yourself. Larger than your intention. A lot of art does function like this, and some more than others. You have an open structure that almost moves in its own momentum. That’s how I feel like my work develops. You come up with a set of rules for yourself on how you’re working and how you’re thinking about things and how you’re codifying things and reducing things. For instance, with the films I only use people as citizens, I don’t use actors, as actors, there’s no drama involved, there is no script involved. It’s all cinema verite, there is no lighting, there is no script. There are rules that I have in place that are actually much stricter than anything that developed years ago with Dogma in Holland. It is completely different than that. When all of my films shown in the Rotterdam International Film Festiva, and I was the guest of honor, of course people talked about this idea of Dogma, and actually their films were very interesting but this is different. To me that is acting, you’re still coming up with a script, you’re still directing in a very concrete way. With my films there are only narrative possibilities because you’re creating fragments of narrative scenarios through situations, through reality. I liked what Robert Towne said to me which I showed the other night during the Guggenheim talk, which was “your job as a director is to appreciate the situation as fast as possible”. That is completely what I try to do. I try to enter situations that I know are already happening. To be in Beijing in August 2008 or to be in Los Angeles during the Oscars or to be in Clinton’s White House Cabinet Room at the end of an epoch, the end of a particular administration. You place yourself at the particular coordinates which are not simply geographical coordinates of a specific time and it reveals a complex form. You obviously can play with these scenarios later on or heighten them or undermine them but you know that the scenarios are there. They’re part of our popular vocabulary, they’re part of our consciousness.

KE Do you digitally change things while you are editing?

SM No. KE Colors?

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All these people using it as a library in the true sense that this moment of browsing is this consumptive act and it’s obviously very progressive because this has been historically denied to them.

The books are there, you see everything from Marx to Don DeLillo.

Sarah Morris, 1976 [Rings], 2007 Household gloss paint on canvas 60 1/16 x 60 1/16 in. (152.5 x 152.5 cm)

SM Color, yes. Absolutely, there’s color correction.

Another thing that I didn’t really go into is that by using these parallel worlds to art, whether its politics, entertainment, journalism, the literary world, graphic design, behavioral psychology, if you use these other worlds you can possibly learn something. You can actually learn something that’s very interesting. You can pick up certain vocabulary, a way of thinking about working, a way of thinking about process and I find too often that these arenas remain too isolated, whether it’s science or literature. But we know experientially that they are not really isolated at all. Definitely I want to be involved in all these different worlds. I guess that goes back to when I stated that it’s not like someone starts just in art….

KE You plan a lot of things in advance because you can’t make a mistake later on. And in your work I see that sort of detailed preplanning. I see your paintings, I examine the lines carefully, there are no shades in colors, and everything looks as done at once. That’s what it looks like anyway.

SM Well it’s a series of steps. Both of my parents are from science backgrounds so I grew up going to my dad’s laboratory and seeing the whole system of how they code all the tubes, how they work from theorems and reduce the impossibilities, ultimately how they have a system for interpretations the world. Science doesn’t exist just by itself. I was very well aware growing up how the funding of science is extremely political, how the grant writing system works, and how the publishing of writing influences what you can do. This arena fascinated me, also through its fallibility, the limits of science.

For instance the idea of science and capitalism heading in the same direction instead of as a challenging force in the culture. When I was studying I was very interested in theories of science, like the idea that you can’t prove anything, all you can do is go through a series of disproof’s. I like this idea a lot. This was Paul Feyerabend’s in Against Method. It’s actually very parallel to Frank Stella and the idea that you have what you have. A particular American form of materialism…You can’t really prove anything except for the facts or the reality that you have. I’m very captivated by science fiction, in particular the work of J.G. Ballard. Going back to this issue of reality there is almost no reason to create fiction because there are so many unresolved scenarios that we witness daily and that we know how to read as fiction or as narrative that absorb us and then we lose the thread. It happens with journalism all the time. There are stories that become very powerful in the popular imagination and then they disappear. It is tragic and beautiful.

KE You said you didn’t go to art school, and you opened your first exhibition in Saatchi & Saatchi?

SM No. That was a group installation called the “Young American” in 1997.

KE Which school did you go to and what did you major in?

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SM I went to Brown University and I majored in a department that was at the time called Semiotics which was basically cultural theory, film theory, political theory taught on an undergraduate level, a very interdisciplinary approach to the text whether it be literary, film or art. But it was the only

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5 RES SEPTEMBER 2007 Sarah Morris, 1988 [Rings], 2007 Household gloss paint on canvas 84 1/4 x 84 1/4 in. (214 x 214 cm)

program in the country at the time that functioned like this on that level. I went to this program because putting together politics, literature, art, film and looking at it in almost Marxist reading of how to look at things in a context seemed very stimulating.

KE What is it that moved you towards art?

SM All of my friends at school were making films. I never really made films at that point because it was way too expensive. I just read all the magazines…It was through the reproduction of art that I became involved.

KE You call them films or movies or…?

SM Films.

KE Installations or films?

SM I would say that I’m an artist and I make paintings and films. And if someone asked me to be a bit more specific I might say I make short films.

KE That is the kind of films you make. I’m talking about the context. You don’t have any script, you change places, you have a music that is composed without seeing the movie. Do you put the music and film together yourself afterwards?

SM Yes, I do that. Usually what happens is that it’s like a vocabulary of different sounds and compositions that are the audio and these obviously have very different meanings and very different nuances. What I’ll do is I’ll take those 50 components and I will place them in various alignments with the image. But sometimes I will do something to undermine the image or the music itself. It’s not always that I’m using one thing to heighten the other. I’ll sometimes use it in a contradictory way.

KE So you use it as a tool. The music is sort of a tool in your films.

SM Yes. KE And who makes the music?

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SM Liam Gillick. He usually knows the subject matter well because I’ve spoken about it enough and there’s usually a point as I said before. I use my filmmaking as an excuse to get to know something that I don’t know about or I want to be involved with. I did a talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rem Koolhaas and they said: “So you’re saying that art could be defined as some sort of exploratory learning process?” The answer in short is yes. A politics of engagement. But to use something as an excuse to be in a certain situation, to meet new people, to see situations that I would normally not see as an artist and not just be exposed to them visually and aesthetically. For example, to look at the way Beijing is structured, the colors, how everything looks mute there, the colors look very bright but at the same time they look like they’re in a desert, they look sun blasted, sand blasted and sort of faded. There’s something faded and second hand about the place. Even though they make it shiny and new it’s to do with the dust that is constantly coming from the desert and it’s also to do with the pollution. It’s also to

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7 KE You probably spend more time on your films than your paintings in the preparation phase, like set up contacts, arrange everything…

SM If you actually measured it on a timeline, then yes you’re right. But then it is hard to measure it on a timeline because there are low level things that are constantly going on while something else is going on. To me it’s normal. For instance, we’re at a café right now that is putting up a structure and there’s another structure behind us that is being taken down. This is a constant thing. This idea of a fetish for the marginal in art, you know it’s not the only story of art in the 20th century because you have Duchamp and there are many people who counter that. You are constantly battling the fetish for the marginal or the abject or behavior that basically teaches artists to enjoy being marginal and not being part of a mainstream. I think this is changing for sure but there are obviously norms and conventions in art that are more rewarded than others.

KE When you say “mainstream” you mean for common public right? And do you expect that the common public appreciates your work or is it meant for a certain population.

SM I don’t really think about a specific public when I make my work. On some level it is a very selfish

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do with the economic forms, like what happens when you have rampant, out of control capitalism, what does that look like? This is very interesting. It goes back to science fiction and time being accelerated. But also trying to expose yourself to something that you would normally judge… Los Angeles may be a better example that you have a city that is represented internationally by this one industry, the film industry. Whether it’s right or wrong, who cares? That’s what Los Angeles is represented by; this export that it pumps out to the whole world, controls everybody’s dreams, attempts to control everybody’s idea of beauty and Sarah Morris, Rabbit [Origami], 2007 desire, controls different narratives, Household gloss paint on canvas 48 1/16 x 48 1/16 in. (122 x 122 cm) everything…But this idea is very easy to critique.

This isn’t necessarily a form but there are elements of it that are actually really fascinating. It is like talking about your friends in movies and how they might talk. The way they talk about the future, the way they talk about their projects, the way that they’re constantly in the future. This is very similar to artists because as an artist it doesn’t matter how many problems I’m confronted with in the studio, like a problem with a painting, a problem with a contact in a film that might not be returning a phone call…

It doesn’t matter how many problems that are going on, ultimately you’re always thinking about the future as an artist, you’re always thinking about the interface between your work and a possible future audience or a possible dialogue that hasn’t yet quite become materialized. You are working towards possibilities. So you’re working to make this dialogue more clear or simply something that becomes tangible. As an artist that is what I am constantly thinking. With film development, what I observed and absolutely adored, if not fetishized, is the idea of discussion, the idea of projection, the idea of the future, the idea of the multiplicity of projects, co-authorship. You have a basic idea of talking, and they really have a fixation with talking… Even more so than in the art world.

thing that I do. You make your work because somehow it satisfies you. It pleases me, it satisfies me, I like to be in these situations, I like to make this type of work. Again, it’s about making a structure that is larger than you that can somehow propel itself forward and then you get a feeling, almost a very transient sort of ephemeral feeling, in the most positive sense of that word. You get the feeling like you’re creating something that is lighter than you, that somehow is a vehicle. Not only is art a result of conversations but it is a vehicle for conversations and that is the part that expands beyond you but the initial starting point is “I want to think about this” or “I want to be in this situation” or “I want to make this thing that has a scale that somehow moves one past oneself, moves one past these ideas of ‘marginal’ being the subject for art, and moves into realms of issues about economy, politics, science, industrial design, behavioral psychology, all of those things that can move.” You can start to talk about art as something that could possibly raise issues in a lot of those fields and the idea of making this thing, which in my work is actually literal. With other people’s work you can talk about relational aesthetics, for instance, in a way that goes beyond specific practices. You can look at all work as existing in a context, you can look at any piece of literature, any piece of art, as enmeshed in economic, political, and social milieu. Obviously we all know this. But I think my work specifically does this in a sense that it is just one fragment, it’s not actually resolved. The work expands in a way completely off the canvas and moves on into the next piece. It really is unending. It is about creating an after-image of these late capitalist forms. But it is an after-image similar to blinking your eye and still continuing to see part of an image or the structures that were in front of you.

KE So you use household paint. And you don’t use shades, just red or yellow or white.

SM Well that’s not totally true. I’ll make a very specific palette and it is mixed by a computer. It is household paint. I’ll bring in a predefined paint chip like banana yellow and the computer at the paint store will match the color. I don’t mix it in the studio but obviously they make a tint, a hue in the shop. I started working with household paints again because it was the easiest and simplest thing and also I was teaching myself how to paint, so this other stuff was way too complicated. I also didn’t like what it was attached to which is this super-preciousness, what I consider craft.

KE Let’s talk about the ring paintings. Unlike your building paintings those ring paintings have dynamic sense in them. The building paintings are static, strong, standing. That is the impression I got from your exhibition. Rings are more dynamic, moving.

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SM It’s funny because I just got this request the other day to be in a show in Basel. This idea of machines. With the machine people always think of Warhol, the desire of being a machine. I don’t have the desire to be a machine but I have the desire to be part of a machine. It goes back to this idea of a large structure or large mass in momentum. In the ring paintings there is something very fragmentary and in motion. It is like taking a stop motion fragment of a system in work. Right now I think there are 6 ring roads in Beijing and they are huge, something like 6 lane highways that create the system of Beijing. Unless you are driving you don’t really realize it. Otherwise you don’t even think about this. It is a series of rings and they have three more rings in development and on each side of the highway there is something like 6 lanes. These are huge, massive roads. This isn’t Munich or Frankfurt, these are enormous rings that make the city. It is actually very hard to have a proper sense in these rings because of what rings do. Frederic Jameson discussed this in relation to the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. The level of disorientation in relation to the self. That’s why perhaps after they complete some of the architecture there, maybe the buildings will become markers in the city where you’ll be able to

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9 I am really trying to have conversations with the Olympic Committee and it is very difficult right now because they really look only towards the news or media. Art is not a media for them and I don’t know who is responsible on an international level in Switzerland for this idea of appreciating art and the Olympics.

Because I need to find out who will be the best person to have a conversation with, I wrote a request to the president of the IOC. He is a doctor and his name is Jacques Rogge. His office wrote back to me and said, this is very Kafkaesque, they said: “Really you should be going to Beijing, BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games) should handle this.” I had a meeting with them and they had already told me that I have to go to Switzerland for this type of request because I am not paying millions of dollars to broadcast something. They sell the image of the Olympics. The filming rights is a big business. So there’s a very special exception that I need to have them make for me and of course BOCOG said “We can’t make this decision, you have to go back to Switzerland.” I went to Switzerland and Jacque Rogge’s chief of staff said “You need to go to BOCOG” and we’re trying to say to him “BOCOG already sent us to you!”

Sarah Morris, Cat [Origami], 2007 Household gloss paint on canvas 84 1/4 x 84 1/4 in. (214 x 214 cm)

KE You should go to the company that bought the TV or the image rights for the Olympics because they sell them. Someone buys it for NBC or ABC. SM Two or three people have said this to me now. The American people are the NBC and the British people are the BBC and BBC is much more interested in cultural production and arts. I’ve been on a number of their programs so we’re talking to the BBC right now about this sort of strategy. Going back to your idea about going in with somebody else who has already bought the rights is a very good strategy but it might be more interesting and more rewarding if I could just get the International Olympic Committee to recognize me and say “ this is a special exception, the film that this person is making will have a life way after NBC and BBC stops reporting… it is promising for us to have this document”.

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orient yourself. Obviously the grid is much more straight-forward, it’s much more condensed. Beijing is a very decentered place. You’ve got Tianenman Square which is like the heart of the onion but there are all of these rings. If you came to the studio, and looked at the wall of the studio now, there is a map of Beijing made up of names, names of institutions and names of people. We have the International Olympic Committee and then we have the Beijing Host Committee, then we’re working with another group called the CFCC, which is the China Film Co-Production Corporation, and all of these bureaucracies are so Kafkaesque. It goes back to the way the city is actually planned, like something within something within something and the idea of no one person taking responsibility for it at all.

Again, this lightness and mass in motion that is equally fascinating and frustrating from a Western position of trying to get things done, because you’re completely not used to this way of working or this way of abdicating responsibility. Everything about the Enlightenment or Rousseau forward is about the social contract of responsibility and the individual. It is so contrary there that you really have to stop thinking this way to get anything done. You just have to accept that this is the way this system works.

And it does work…

KE It is an art project too. It is not TV. SM Yes, and it does not compete at all with what they’ve sold because I’m not going to broadcast.

KE The Sydney Olympics brought 92 billion dollars to Sydney, including everything. It’s a big business, so every photograph of an athlete running belongs to the companies who bought the rights. Even a piece of paper produced has a copyright. So you cannot reproduce it, you cannot use it.

SM There are several strategies for a Trojan horse.

KE You said in your conference that your works were political. In what context are they political?

SM Imagine if you saw a piece of paper describing a synopsis of someone’s activities and I said to you that somebody makes paintings that use the titles of the institutions and corporations of the West.

Even without telling you what anything looks like, that in itself becomes political. It’s like a game of Monopoly. You are appropriating social forms that are not yours. They are mine in the sense that I view these things as public. The paintings are made by me. Authored by me. If I want to make a piece called “National Geographic” or “Department of Energy”, I will. The boundaries between public and private, I certainly don’t respect. I think all of these forms and all of these images are public and there is a certain provocation about that. If you go to these structures, these institutions, there is a physical sign that says “Private Property”. These institutions are not public at all. I mean, Revlon, UBS… these are not public institutions.

KE So you are sort of protesting?

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SM I’m not protesting, but there is a certain rhetorical function of titling things in this way and also doing it in an accumulative, serial way that somehow lessens these structures at the same time making it clear to you. There is a book called “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, which is a very good book. It is about the World Economic Forum and late capitalism and how these corporations are basically governments.

She has a very structuralist viewpoint on the forms or organizations that are in power. These are the people who are making legislation, making decisions, “we are not in a democracy…”, and so on. But actually I think things are more fluid than that. I think there is a space, there is a cultural space and a political space where people can change these institutions or can change the perception of an institution in the blink of an eye. The French writer Louis Althusser wrote a lot about these structural forms and how they create a hegemonic force with no way out, no theory for cultural change. Suddenly Al Gore makes the film “The Inconvenient Truth”. Suddenly there are five million feature articles on ‘going green’. You have the world’s most famous movie star under 40 posing with a polar bear. This sounds really absurd and trivial but what I’m really trying to say is that everything is just perception and in constant flux and it is up for grabs. Appropriation is not just about Richard Prince appropriating a Brooke Shields photograph. It can be saying this zone over here is actually ours. It is a political act to say that. Even the United Nations... For the last couple of years the UN park has been closed and it’s been upsetting me because that’s ours. That’s a public park. And it was shut because some guy jumped over the fence and shot at the UN and it became a security concern of the park for a while. These things are ours, yet they are all up for grabs. I think even looking at this notion or thinking about how that could become a cultural form or an artistic form or could make an artistic practice, that itself to me is political model.

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11 SM Yes, I am very interested. I’m not that knowledgeable. I had a very good friend who was in the Mujadin in Afghanistan. I know a bit from friends of mine who have very captivating lives and trajectories. Like this friend of mine, we always had a joke that he was brought over to Harvard by the CIA. This is all pre-“9/11”. I don’t know that much, but it’s obviously very interesting because it’s completely intermeshed.

KE Are you interested in buildings? Because in the Middle East there are different buildings.

SM If I was not shooting this Beijing film, it would be in the Middle East. But I wanted to do this now because the Olympics are so fascinating an event. There is a very capitalistic form, which is the IOC, which is very extreme as you were saying, the image as a commodity, the information as a commodity, the information being highly controlled and distributed. But at the same time it is a public world event of politics and unification and so on… This contradiction is thought-provoking so I have be involved now, but I am very interested in the Middle East. I’ve been thinking about it for years…

Sarah Morris, Swan [Origami], 2007 Household gloss paint on canvas 84 1/4 x 84 1/4 in. (214 x 214 cm)

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KE What about Middle Eastern culture and art. Are you interested in that?

TODAY’S GREEK CONTEMPORARY ART

SYLVIA KOUVALI T W O Y E A R S A G O , nobody would ever have considered asking what is happening in the Greek contemporary art world. Everybody felt that things had stopped in ancient times and Greece has nothing to do with the real world. Once in a while, the Greeks would win one Euro Cup or two, and then came the Olympics. It is interesting how we end up using a sports event as a cultural milestone and by doing this, we most probably lose the importance of things before that, but let me use 2004 as a date where at least it was used as an excuse for the promotion of Greek culture and the arts in the out-ofGreece world. At this year of cultural (prod)action, one of the first big exhibitions took place bearing the title “OUTLOOK,” curated by Christos Joachimides. This show involved and activated many institutions both public and private and many youngsters that had (just) arrived from abroad (most of them from universities in the UK). Although the exhibition at the end proved itself to be controversial, with two works removed from the show under a scenario of self-censorship, it activated a group of mainly young people in order to do more things.

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There had been many contemporary international exhibitions in Athens long before “OUTLOOK” that really created a sensation within the artists’ milieu and the city, the most important one being the 1996 exhibition “Everything That’s Interesting is New” in the factory of the School of Fine Arts in Athens (asfa), a big show featuring works from the Dakis Ioannou collection. The most interesting in that case is to see the difference in the students’ works before and after this show, a very important factor in the history and analysis of Greek contemporary art. The next year (1997), the Museum of Contemporary Art was established in Athens under the directorship of Anna Kafetsi, without it having a permanent building. The old Greek beer factory FIX has been waiting since then to house the museum and it is this year (2007) that all bureaucracy and corruption were set aside and works started in situ. The museum has organised many group and solo exhibitions, international and Greek, within this decade and has been maybe the only established consistent source of international contemporary art in Athens.

Of equal importance has been the role of the Deste Foundation. Deste was established in 1983 by the Greek Cypriot collector Dakis Ioannou. Ioannou’s Georgia Sagri, Performance, “We never knew collection is one of the most important contemporary collections worldwide what could never know”, 2006 and the collector is an active member in the art world and has offered a lot with the foundation’s exhibitions. Between 1998 and 2003, they organised more than twenty big exhibitions in their previous building and in 2004, and at the same time with the Olympic Games, the new building of the foundation opened with the blockbuster “MonumenttTo Now,” with works by Jeff Koons, Maurizio Catelan, Sue Webster, and Tim Noble, among others. One of the activities of the DESTE is the young artists’ award that is given every two years after an international committee elects the

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13 It is true (and everyone agrees with that) that there is lot of activity in the art world the last three years, especially when there are so many graduates from the School of Fine Arts, so many graduates from UK Fine Arts Schools (Goldsmiths, Slade, Camberwell, Glasgow School of Arts, RCA, among others) that are coming back to Greece, and finally more curated shows and commercial galleries tend to become more international and extroverted. Highlights of what I just mentioned have been the “What Remains Is Future” exhibition curated by Nadja Argyropoulou under the aegis of Patra as a Cultural Capital of Europe 2006. The show included mostly every artist between 25 and 35 years old and was like a Greek Biennial within Greece. It is true that there was no serious or coherent consensus under that show, and personally I believe that the choice of the curator was mainly sensational, and that it did manage to grasp and frame the situation within the art world very well. The truth is that one cannot speak of a “scene” or a particular characteristic that “Greek Art Today” possesses, especially in a show with approximately sixty artists. Another highlight has been the exhibition of the Leonidas Beltsios collection curated by Sotiris Haris Epaminonda, “Untitled”, 2006, Bahtsetzis, titled “An Outing.” Another show outside Athens , this Courtesy of Rodeo time in the Northern part of the mainland (Larissa), featured works of the collection acquired in the last five years. Beltsios, a lawyer by profession, has been supporting Greek artists for many years now and one can say that he is the most consistent and loyal collector of Greek artists.

Athens is a city with more than a hundred galleries but most of them are Greece- oriented and do not really work for the artist; most of the time they do well to the gallerists. One of the most, and certainly the first, serious gallery in Athens has been Eleni Koronaiou Gallery, with a list of shows in the early 90s of Michael Schmidt, Kippenberger, Christopher Wool, Majerus, and has also been showing Greek artists in Art Fairs worldwide since then. Then came The Breeder. The only gallery that was from the beginning international and consistent in what they are doing by showing internationals and at the same time promoting Greeks in serious Art Fairs and with a thorough understanding of the art market and the art world in general. They’ve collaborated with Sadie Coles, and represent artists like Mark Bijl, Iris van Dongen & Kimberly Clark, and Ilias Papailiakis, among many others. Given the good example in other Athenian galleries, they played an important role in the comeback of Art Athina (restart version)

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winner. The winner in 2005 was the Greek Cypriot Christodoulos Panayiotou, who later came to Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre for a residency. The prize has become a very important event in the contemporary art world of Greece and gives the opportunity every two years for very serious and established people internationally to see, analyse, and judge artists’ work. The Foundation within the last two years has organised exhibitions involving only Greek curators and Greek artists, one of them being “Anathena,” curated by active independent curator Marina Fokidis and featuring an amalgamation of street artists, graphic designers, and web-based artists among others that created a sensation in Athens. The second one mainly focused on sound and rock n’ roll as a main factor of contemporary art practise; that onewas curated by the musicians and artists Lakis and Ionas Callas (The Callas).

by creating the Contemporary Club compiled by important international galleries like Cosmic, Javier Peres, Blow de la Barra, etc.

In September, the First Athens Biennial is taking place under the catchy title “Destroy Athens,” curated by three locals: Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (Director of Deste Foundation), Augoustine Zenakos (art journalist) and Poka Yio (artist). Organised to overcome the stereotypes that surround the cities of Greece and especially Athens, the curators have activated a big apparatus of critics, artists, and foundations always with the support of the Dutch till-recently-director Marieke Van Hal, who was suddenly fired at the ends of July without any reason. This I can only translate as a big curatorial mistake that will hopefully be corrected at the second run. We do hope that the Biennial will put Athens on the art map; the only tricky part is which map that is (referring here to the best art critic in Greece, Despoina Zefkili, and her always thorough analysis of the situation in Greece the last years).

There are some very good individual artists who within this institutional analysis I have to end my text with because without the artists, all the system wouldn’t be there: Ilias Papailiakis, Vasso Gavaise, Thanassis Totsikas, Jiannis Varelas, Haris Epaminonda, Athanasios Argianas, Eftihis Patsourakis, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Georgia Sagri, Loukia Alavanou, Panayiotis Loukas, and Angelo Plessas, among others...

Please note that due to word limitations nothing could be mentioned on Thessaloniki.

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15 RES SEPTEMBER 2007 Angelo Plessas, “What remains is future”, 2006, Courtesy of the artist

SCULPTURE PROJECTS MÜNSTER 07

AYfiEGÜL KURTEL B O R N I N 1 9 7 7 as a decennial project, Sculpture Projects Münster 07 is taking place for the fourth time this summer between June 16 and September 30. Occurring only every ten years, these events have placed Münster, which is a small city of 17,500 in the Westphalia region of Northeast Germany, among the world’s renowned addresses for contemporary art.

Münster is a small university town, known as the ‘bicycle capital’ of Germany, as bikes are the most common means of transportation in the city. Indeed, the first thing that struck me as I got off the train was the endless bicycle lots. The exhibition ties very well with the university town character of the city, with an army of spectators holding exhibition guides, checking off sculptures as they go along, resembling something between a school trip and a treasure hunt. For this year’s event, around 500,000 spectators were expected to visit Münster; 400,000 art lovers from around the globe had already visited by mid-August.

Sculpture Projects Münster 07 is curated by Kasper König, Brigitte Franzen and Carina Plath. The project has been conceived by Klaus Bussmann, the director of the organizing institution Landesmuseum, and Kasper König, starting in 1977.

Kasper König, one of the most respected curators in Europe, have been the chief curator of all four exhibitions.

From the very beginning, the planning and organization of Sculpture Projects Münster has been done by the LWL State Museum in Münster. The Museum has purchased 39 important international outdoor sculptures and also holds an important collection of preliminary artistic materials, including drawings, planning sketches, models, letters, and media publications of all four exhibitions. One of the most acclaimed parts of the exhibition this year is the 77/87/97/07 archive that is displayed for the first time in the Landesmuseum to accompany Sculpture Projects Münster 07. This archive is a solid addition to the overall “cumulative” character of the event. The visual concept, designed by Martin Schmidl, represents the exhibition with an appearance matching the idea of art to simply question the urban space. The catalogue, edited by the curators, is also an important part of the whole event. The glossary holds 131 short essays from 74 authors selected to reflect the theory and history of public space and its relation to art, artists, and art works is a great help to have a deeper understanding.

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When the project first started with the exhibition in 1977, it was meant to be a museum exhibition with a specific topical form to deal with the question of form and function of sculpture in the twentieth century and of art in public space. The ten-year interval between the exhibitions allows for a fresh

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17 This year, the exhibition includes works of 34 artists from all over the world. The presentation of projects planned 30 years ago and sculptures created starting with 30 years residing side by side with the new ones in Münster, makes the city a unique example of a discussion platform for exploring the specific examples surrounding “art in public” and to question the relationship and understanding between art and the public. Each artist chose a site in the city, then made a work with that site firmly in mind. Some of the artists have been invited repeatedly, whereas for some of the artists Sculpture Projects Münster 07 is the first experience. Sculpture Projects Münster 07 consists of 37 works from the previous exibitions, which are mainly placed in the center of the city. Thirty four artists of 2007 have placed their projects juxtaposing with the old ones and also on the outskirts of the city. A bicycle is always handy and appropriate to see all the works. Some of the old projects have already taken their place in the daily life of Münster. Daniel Buren’s 4 Gates from muenster87 is a very good example for this. His tinny striped, square-edged arches seem to have sprouted all over the city and it seems like they have been there for ages. Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls from muenster77 has been shaping the silhouette of the city since then.

Ten years seem like a long interval for a periodic event but in Münster, with the overall intention and the connection between decades, there is an obvious unity. For example, Bruce Nauman’s project Square Depression, designed for 1977, had not been completed at the time and also in 1987 for technical reasons. For the exhibit in 2007, it is located at its original site, near the Institutes of Sciences of the University.

Nauman’s architecture-related project is as topical as it would have been 30 years ago. The sculpture is a city square-like structure with a diameter of 25 metres, a square hole, whose edges descend toward the centre like a negative pyramid. When standing at the centre, the outer edges are at eye level. The viewer finds himself on the other side being presented in the centre of the sculpture as a medium, and space and the body interplays.

On the other hand Michael Asher’s Caravan project has been participating since 1977. The caravan installation comprises a caravan that has been used already in 1977, 1987, and 1997, parked in twelve

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reflection upon public urban space, and also an objective reflection upon and reestablishment of the meaning of the Skulptur Projekte. One key concept that has survived over the past few decades pertains to the idea that the purpose of art is not to decorate urban space, but rather to reflect critically on this tendency. The overriding style in Sculpture Projects Münster is so heavily conceptual that it has been commonly referred to as “antisculpture.”

Emphasis is not on visual experience, but rather on facilitating an interactive thought process over art and public, which is the essence of contemporary art today being reconfirmed by the many established periodic exhibitions that came together in the year 2007, like Documenta 12, Sculpture Projects Münster 07, Venice, and Istanbul Biennials.

different locations over the period of the exhibit, changing location weekly. Documented in photographs since 1977, this installation is an excellent display of modern urban development over the past 30 years. Asher is exploring the concept of mobility with a constellation of rigid forms and changing sites, and calls this method “dislocations,” aiming to increase awareness of the automatic production of ideas through order and layout versus shifts in space and modifications.

One of the artists who have been participating repeatingly is Thomas Schütte. Sculpture projects müenster 07 continues the cooperation with Thomas Schütte that began in 1987 and 1997. In 2007, the artist returned to Harsewinkelplatz, a public square in the centre of town, where in 1987, he erected Cherry Pillar, which has led the square being redesigned in the following years and a fountain has been built there. In 2007, Thomas Schütte has worked with this fountain. For the duration of the exhibition, the fountain will be covered by a rectangular glass construction. On a roof, Schütte has erecter a radiant, orange sculpture, a Model of a Museum, whose form resembles a high-rise building. The work of the artist is a counter-proposal to the small buildings surrounding the Harsewinkelplatz.

Gustav Metzger’s project Shattered Stones is is one of the very specific public space sculptures. The scupture is auto creative and embodies itself fleetingly with inpermanent actions. Every day during skulptur projekte müenster 07, meaning 107 occasions in total, a man drives a forklift to the Westfälischer Kunstverein, takes off the vehicle, goes inside the building, and use a password to activate a computer program that informs him, by means of a random generator, how many stones he has to take to a certain location in the city. The man finds his payload in the courtyard of the LWLLandesmuseum, uses the forklift to take it to the specified place, and then take a photo of the pile of stones. When he has to return to the Kunstverein, he post the image online for all to see. The stones are mainly placed at the center of the city but you never know when and where you will face with a pile of the Shattered Stones just placed enywhere or maybe a man with a forklift carrying then to an unknown location.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann sees his contribution to the Sculpture Projects Münster 07 as a service to the public at large. Since he was asked to participate to produce “art in public,” he decided to produce art which will function with the public. His project, WC Facilities on the Domplatz, is to redesign the restrooms, improve the lighting system, and offer the toilet service to a large number of visitors. Most of these old toilets have been eliminated from the urban landscape but the one in front of the cathedral is one of the rare remaining but was in a bad condition. It is in the middle of the busy local market, tourist sites, bus stops, post office and other public buildings and was busily visited. Feldmann planned to pursue a spatial concept in Münster 2007 through this project. The toilets designed exclusively by the artists are being visited by the public and the visitors of the sculpture projects müenster 07 and will stay in the heart of the city to take its place as one of the public space sculptures.

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19 Photo credits: Ayflegül Kurtel, Münster 07 For additional information: www.sculptur-projecte.de The list of the participating artists in Sculpture Projects Münster 07 Pawel Althamer / Michael Asher / Nairy Baghramian / Guy Ben-Ner / Guillaume Bijl / Martin Boyce / Jeremy Deller / Michael Elmgreen und Ingar Dragset / Hans-Peter Feldmann / Dora Garcia / Isa Genzken / Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster / Tue Greenfort / David Hammons / Valérie Jouve / Mike Kelley / Suchan Kinoshita / Marko Lehanka / Gustav Metzger / Eva Meyer und Eran Schaerf / Deimantas Narkevicius / Bruce Nauman / Maria Pask / Manfred Pernice / Susan Philipsz / Martha Rosler / Thomas Schütte / Andreas Siekmann / Rosemarie Trockel / Silke Wagner / Mark Wallinger / Clemens von Wedemeyer / Annette Wehrmann / Pae White

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Sculpture Projects Müenster 07 has already taken its part on the discussion platform with its rich context. I was lucky to be invited to Germany by the Goethe Institute this summer to view Documenta 12, as this gave me the opportunity to visit Münster during this rare event. As I boarded the train to depart Münster, I was filled with enthusiasm for the Port Izmir Project we are initiating this September in Izmir/Turkey, and the hope that it will carry on with such spirit and success as an international open space art event.

INTERVIEW WITH YONA BACKER: ANDY WARHOL INITIATIVE

ÖZGE ERSOY Can you please give us some background information on the Warhol Initiative?

YONA BACKER Basically, the Warhol Initiative is focused on small to middlesize artist-centered spaces which can also be called alternative spaces in the U.S. As the Warhol Foundation, we were working with a lot of these groups through our regular grant programs, giving support for their exhibition program. While working with them, we realized that they are the ones who are closest to the ground, providing platform for emerging artists, yet they are the most fragile group within the ecology of the art world. These groups also are very vulnerable in the sense that they are constantly struggling in financial terms. These aspects of the arts nonprofits with a relatively small scope led us to meticulously research the existing funds for these organizations, not the general operating fund or paying people’s salaries, but financial sources for the infrastructural needs of these groups. Even though there were various capacity-building initiatives, none of them was geared towards the alternative spaces on a national level. This is when we decided after discussions in-house and with our board that we could play a small role in this area. ÖE How did the Initiative’s capacity-program evolve?

YB The basic idea has been to invest a relatively modest amount of money, $110,000 per institution, which would be individually tailored to each group. We were aware that every single organization had different needs, and that they are at different phases of their growth. Susan Kenny Stevens, who is also on the Initiative’s advisory panel, elaborates this paradigm in the context of capacity-building projects: each institution goes through seven major stages of development, including idea, start-up, growth, maturity, decline, turnaround, and terminal. Bearing in mind that every stage involves different goals and needs, we wanted to tailor the program to each organization in order to make it more organic.

Moreover, we have been able to work together with the organization’s key staff and board as well as with the consulting group that did the initial research for us. Our aim was to be very strategic in allocating our funds. ÖE Can you elucidate the eligibility and selection process for the Warhol Initiative?

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YB Because we wanted to narrow down our scope in order to be more effective, we selected eligible organizations and sent invitations. These invitations encouraged them to apply for this grant and do a

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21 ÖE What made this program design unique from the beginning?

YB At this point, I have to emphasize the way the program was set up. We have chosen the groups we had initially known well. The consultants with whom we worked were invited to spend at least one day with the organization to understand their capacity in order to mould unique program designs. They talked to the key staff and board members, discussed together, and assessed the organization itself. These meetings resulted in almost business-strategic-plan-type report, because it had a comprehensive scope comprising of the finance, the management, the staff, and the program itself. Consequently, we reached to an assessment of how the grants could be used. For some groups, the process was a little bit different.

For some, we immediately knew how the funds might be used, and for others it took more time to figure it out. This process depended on the organization itself. ÖE I believe the self-assessment was one of the important aspects of the Initiative…

YB In the beginning, we did not know what impact it would have. However, the self-assessment turned out to be a very key part of the whole process. Taking time to actually sit with peers, having an inclusive discussion regarding the specific needs, future goals, and analyzing the current situation is not something we take time to do, or we have the luxury to do. Therefore, this participation was an inherent aspect of the program. Nevertheless, to be honest, we did not really expect that when we started out. Furthermore, we realized, through these conversations, that it is effective to bring everybody together. This is how the idea of organizing biannual peer convenings was born. For the first retreat in the second year of the Initiative, executive directors and board chairs of the grantees convened in Puerto Rico, and enjoyed the opportunity to enter into dialogue to share experiences. ÖE Inviting the EDs with board chairs all together seems to have different outcomes.

YB Yes, definitely. Often, EDs and board chairs do not have a strong dialogue among themselves.

Particularly the EDs of the organizations that are located in non-major urban settings may feel isolated because of the lack of communication. Hence, this gathering paved the way for many emerging ideas to be shared and exchanged. Moreover, the board chairs realized that the challenges that have faced were not unique to their institution. In a nutshell, this is how we had the synergy. ÖE Can you give more details about the content of the convenings?

YB The biennial convenings involved professional workshops led either by organizations themselves or by the consultants. They enabled an intense peer-learning as well as networking, and self-identified issues such as board development were unveiled. In addition, in terms of location, we always try to immerse as much as we can into the local art scene that gives various perspectives; hence, we try to pick up vital places. The first meeting was in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the second one was in Miami; the third one was in Los Angeles; and the fourth one, which will take place next June, will be in New Orleans. There used to be a group called the National Association of Arts Organizations (NAAO); it is

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self-assessment. We requested them to express how they saw themselves, how they would imagine a grant like this strengthening their institution, and what their organizational and financial needs were.

The board approved one million dollars each year during the first stage of five years. In addition, we set up an advisory group to help the nominee group to select. This is how we started the program.

unfortunately not very active anymore. Lots of the arts non-profits used to go to the annual convening of the NAAO. However, around the time we started our Initiative, the NAAO, by coincidence, faced serious problems, and they stopped their annual meetings for a while. Thus, the convenings organized by the Warhol Initiative became an alternative opportunity for the non-profits visual art organizations in the vacuum of platform for exchange of ideas. I would like to underline that this situation is much more different than what it is going on at the established museums where curators and directors frequently meet at their institution, at Miami Basel Art Fair, or at various biennials. Some of the younger groups sometimes cannot even find fund for travel. As a result, the Initiative’s support for the convenings unexpectedly became another significant part of our program. ÖE Since you have worked together with the key staff of these small to mid-size arts non-profits, I assume you have closely examined their vulnerability. Can you elaborate on the common challenges they have been facing?

CREATIVE TIME (New York, NY) Founded in 1974, Creative Time has commissioned, produced and presented adventurous public artworks of all disciplines. The organization derives its values from this historic impetus to foster artistic experimentation, enrich public space and the everyday experience, and forefront artists as key contributors to democratic society. Creative Times’ pioneering spirit, embrace of artistic innovation, and commitment to New York City has earned the organization the reputation as the vanguard and veteran public arts presenter.

“Sky is the Limit” project by Haluk Akakce, Courtesy of Creative Time.

YB It depends on the size of the group, meaning their budget size. We started to invite the groups we had known for a while, and most of these groups had a budget under one million dollars—this was one of the requirements.

However, most of them had budgets of $250,000 and above, and had paid staff. As the initiative continued on, we realized the presence of much smaller organizations, and we decided to cooperate with some institutions having a budget less than $100,000. For instance, the founder was running the art space, and was also bartending at the same time. Their issues were much more different compared to the more established art spaces. ÖE And you have chosen to work with these younger and smaller organizations in your second phase.

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YB Yes, we have. In addition, in our third phas,e we decided to mix it all up. Thus, this new phase that started in 2006 includes both more established mid-size arts non-profits that we had not have invited before for some reasons and the newer groups. Until now, the Initiative has served fifty-eight organizations. To get back to your question, major issues were management and staffing challenges, programming challenges, governing and financial challenges. These include cash flow, membership programs, raising funds, retaining a loyal audience, audience development, as well as technologyrelated problems, i.e. the very basic needs like computers and phone systems. Also facility challenges were widespread. Because of the unattainable rents, most of the art spaces had to move; I believe we helped to facilitate this transition by providing funs for their facility. Furthermore, in the second phase, we even paid salaries, which was a big risk for us because we were really concerned about the specific goals and targets of the capacity-building program. However, in the case of the new groups, if you help the person who actually runs the place, you consequently help the capacity-creation. This is why we either paid the person in charge of the organization, or we hired a professional to run the institution. In other words, we tried to be as flexible as we can.

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ÖE This is where the individually tailored part becomes significant.

YB Yes. As you can see from this example, whereas we would not pay a salary for a person, we tended to be flexible and sensitive in order to address to the specific needs of the groups. Developing sound systems, creating database, helping for marketing, PR, and membership programs were also included in the assistance program. ÖE In an institutional framework, most of these organizations have difficulties to articulate themselves, their significance in the greater arts community and to express their own identity. I believe this is also one of the major program-related difficulties.

YB As we all know, the arts non-profits have membership programs like most museums. However, they have to be more creative for what they can offer in terms of memberships. Because the admission fee does not apply for the non-profit art spaces, they have to come up with actual programming to provide something valuable and attractive for the members. This also relates to the difficulties of articulation and self-expression. ÖE From this perspective, although the emphasis of the Warhol Initiative’s supports has been on financial and operational aspects, the impact implies sustainability and to capacity-related developments. I think this is the gist of the program.

Sam Durant, “We are the people” / Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas

YB Everything that was done in terms of the cash grants were operated with the idea it would be sustainable. ÖE To be more specific, the Warhol Initiative’s supports have been more inclusive than the performancebased grants, endowment-building, or operating supports. They are a combination of grants, technical assistance, and peer-engagement, which offers a flexible set of provisions.

YB In our view, the ultimate goal was to strengthen the organizations’ infrastructure from an organizational and financial part, which in turn allows them to serve the artists better. If the organization is strong, it is more able to carry out its mission. This was the overarching goal. ÖE We know that the Warhol Foundation has a commitment for the “advancement for the visual arts.” At this point, I want to ask the reason why you specifically turned your attention to small to mid-size arts non-profits. Is this the new stance of the Foundation itself?

YB I do not know how ongoing the Initiative is going to be. It had first started out as a pilot program for three years, and then became a five-year program. Now, it got extended to another three years, which means that its life-span has been eight years.

ART IN GENERAL (New York, NY) What we are thinking about now is how to take it to the next Founded in 1981 in Lower Manhattan, Art in General is a nonprofit stage. We do not want to drop the program, and we are eager to organization that assists artists with the production and presentation of try to keep the program fresh and relevant. To give an example, new work. With an inner-city arts education program, artist residencies, other exhibition opportunities and a full calendar of public programs, the we have started the Alumni Fund. It is open to anybody who is a organization serves as a platform as well as a resource for those part of the Initiative, and it consists of smaller grants up to interested in new ways of thinking about contemporary art. Through publications, collaborations with other institutions, and an updated $25,000. Through the Alumni Fund, anyone from the Initiative is website, Art in General extends its programs beyond the exhibition space. invited to participate supporting capacity-related activities. The Photo credit: Jerry Thompson program is flexible and very open; it could be professional development, it could be a peer talk relating to program-based works, it could be to do with strategic planning; hence we are interested in anything related to capacity-building and to strengthening networks among the groups. Going back to the Initiative, we are also aware that the $110,000 would not create miracles; but it will hopefully make a little difference. We look forward to seeing that the institutions we have been working with are stronger. ÖE Why did you focus both on small and mid-size organizations for the third phase? Considering that the future of the program is unclear, are you still willing to enlarge the scope of your activity?

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YB While we were considering groups to invite, we have realized that younger and smaller groups also suggest interesting identities along with the more established ones. Why create a superficial category?

The first phase involved the organizations we had already known. And now, we do not want to leave the new emerging groups out. From our talks and travels, we also realized that there are mid-size groups we did not invite to the Initiative in the previous stages. As a result, we are now eager to work with a large spectrum of arts non-profits.

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ÖE What are the major differences between older and younger organizations?

YB The younger groups that are usually led by people in their twenties and thirties are much more entrepreneurial; they are much less likely to think that they should rely on public funding. The older groups were more willing to have public and government funding. However, this sort of funding has just stopped because of various controversies that have been happening. Therefore, older organizations had a hard time to adjust to the new funding environment, whereas the younger groups had started in this new atmosphere. Newer groups also are much more savvy to use the Internet, whereas the older groups tended to come a little bit later. And some of them are structured differently.

For instance, Art2102, based in Los Angeles, is one of the new institutions we have just invited into the Initiative, and their program exceeds gallery-based works. Their mission is to enhance the dialogue between local, regional and international artists. They work in collaboration with the other organizations throughout the L.A., and use the Internet to communicate. Why should they have only one destination in L.A. when everybody is all over the place? They are much more than a white cube. ÖE Can you give an example for the new models of programming?

YB I think of the idea to use the Internet to network with artists as well as the constituencies, and to use this not only to build and develop the program, but also to have it materialized. In addition, the nature of the work is not necessarily something that will fit in a gallery. Artists’ works are more and more process-based; their final products may not be an installation piece, or a photograph, or a video, but it is about tracking the process. ÖE I think the works that are exhibited in more established mid-size arts non-profits are also focused on process rather than the final product.

However, we may talk about a difference of presentation to the public.

SPACE ONE ELEVEN (Birmingham, AL) Space One Eleven’s (SOE) purpose is to provide professional opportunities for visual artists, to create a forum for public understanding of contemporary art, and to offer arts education to area youth. Located in downtown Birmingham’s warehouse district, Space One Eleven’s exhibition program showcases professional artists of local, regional and national prominence.

Typically, three to four exhibitions are presented annually in SOE’s galleries and storefront windows, along with related artist’s talks and forums. Complementing the visual arts program is City Center Art (CCA) program. Targeting youth of low-to moderate income- this program offers tuition-free summer camp and after-school programs taught by professional artists.

Courtesy of Space One Eleven

YB A lot of the groups show experimental works anyway. Actually, most of the differences between these groups have been overcome since we have started, because the older arts non-profits have new executive directors who are from the new generation. It was an amazing turnover in the last couple of years in terms of the EDs. For the first five years, I must say, there were no turnovers. For instance, for the first three convenings, we had the same EDs. Nevertheless, in the next convening in New Orleans, despite the participation of the older groups that have been in the Initiative for a long time, there is going to be huge amount of new EDs. Thus, we have a new energy even in the older groups. ÖE The fourth convening will reflect the new dynamics, I assume.

YB Yes, the next convening is going to be very interesting and different from the previous ones. Also, a lot of the new people do not know each other; that is why this is going to be a more dynamic and a more productive meeting. Regarding your question of differences, I also can say that the younger groups

have less overhead, and hence they tend to be more flexible and risk-taking compared to the groups in the phase one. However, we are aware that the older groups have been already showing experimental works for a couple of decades. Consequently, the flexibility becomes relative. ÖE My next question will be regarding the role and position of these alternative art spaces. To quote Nina Möntmann, “classically bourgeois institution model has been replaced by corporatist institutional logic, flexible working conditions, event-style programs and a populist concept of the public sphere.” In this context, how do you consider the role of these contemporary art organizations, and how to you envision their potential for evolution?

YB I think a lot of them are struggling with what it means to be alternative today. It is getting more and more difficult to raise funds. That is why the foundations like us, which support these organizations, are so important. It is inevitable to see that there is always a mutual impact between the corporatist mentality and the content of the art works.

Alternative spaces enjoy the possibility to work outside this mega-institution logic that is under the influence of sponsors and businesses. For this reason, I believe they transform controversies and fragmentation into a productive form in an era when the institution itself is in crisis. ÖE As you emphasized, new alternative spaces suggest a new institutional identity in the arts community. How do locate the Warhol Foundation and the Warhol Initiative in this framework?

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YB We obviously fund museum exhibition projects as well.

What we tend to fund are the exhibitions that the museums have a hard time getting funding from their other sources.

SPACES (Cleveland, OH) These could be projects that corporations or government SPACES, Ohio’s leading alternative art gallery annually presents five major would not support for the nature of the works. For instance, exhibitions, ten SPACELab exhibitions, and hosts five SPACES World Artists we supported a Larry Clark exhibition at the International Program residencies. By providing freedom, resources, and an audience, SPACES enables artists to engage the public in a vital dialogue about Center of Photography in New York. I am sure that the ICP had contemporary art. The organization interacts directly with artists, promoting a point in going for private funding, because the nature of the excellence and experimentation to produce challenging gallery exhibitions, public programs, residencies and, publications. work could be very controversial especially for the corporate and governmental entities. A lot of museums, when they Photo courtesy of Stephen Manka and Jamie Janos from the exhibition Street Repairs (2006) approach us, we always ask whether what they work on meets our guidelines involving the works for which it is difficult to get funding for. In sum, our dedication is to support unconventional artistic practices and also emerging artists. The funding can become a challenging aspect if the artist is not well-known in the arts community. Even though the artist deserves an institutional venue, people may hesitate to fund the project because they do not know the artist himself or herself. This is where we come in. Also, we barely fund a project in its entirety; all we can do is to make the project happen. Moreover, what we often hear is that if an organization gets funding from the Warhol Foundation, it can get further grants by mentioning the name of our institution, especially if this is a project that is hard to get the funding

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for. Therefore, our relations with the established museums are limited to this; we only support unconventional works. ÖE Thank you, Yona. I hope the Warhol Initiative will encourage other foundations and fund grantors to support the non-profit visual arts organizations.

BRIEF INFORMATION ON THE WARHOL FOUNDATION AND YONA BACKER Created upon Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, the Andy Warhol Foundation is “dedicated to the advancement of the visual arts.” In 1999, the foundation launched the Warhol Initiative project that has supported small to mid-size arts non-profits by providing capacity-building assistance and help. In the first phase from 1999 to 2004, the Warhol Initiative served thirty-one arts non-profits including Art in General (New York, NY), Artists Space (New York, NY), Creative Time, Inc. (New York, NY), DiverseWorks (Houston, TX), Galería de la Raza (San Francisco, CA), Intermedia Arts (Minneapolis, MN), 911 Media Arts Center (Seattle, WA), SPACES (Cleveland, OH) and White Columns (New York, NY) among many others. The second phase included younger organizations that were mostly founded in the late 90s and the early 2000s, such as Artspace (New Haven, CT), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY), and TRANS> (New York, NY).

Yona Backer, Program Officer for the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, has been working at the Warhol Foundation for the last eight years. Having a masters degree from Columbia University in Archeology and Art History, Backer previously worked as the Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, New York, NY.

INTERMEDIA ARTS (Minneapolis, MN) Located in South Minneapolis, Intermedia Arts was founded in 1973 by community and student activists under the name University Community Video. Intermedia Arts has received recognition for its success engaging the power of the arts to increase social connections between people from different social, economic and ethnic groups. Intermedia Arts’ mission is to be a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art.

Photo credit: Rachel Raimist

MODERNITY AS A STATE OF MIND

AYfiEGÜL SÖNMEZ J A N H O E T, T H E A R T I S T I C D I R E C T O R of Documenta 9 in 1992, saw the essential task of contemporary art to be to provide real subjective experiences in order to counter a reality that increasingly slipped into the virtual realm. In this context, art could be seen in Documenta 9 in the natural history museum across the street from the Fridericianum; in several galleries at the Neue Galerie, a nearby museum devoted to German painting from the 18th century to the present, and in several storefronts around the Friedrichsplatz, the grassy square in front of the Fridericianum. On Mr. Hoet’s “'Documenta would have taken the artist and the artist’s work as its sole point of departure." His main strategy in this regard was to create juxtapositions. For example in the Neue Galerie, where artists devised works using the museum’s collection, the radical American photographer Zoe Leonard caused something of a sensation by alternating some of the museum’s 18th-century German paintings with her oddly chaste black-and-white photographs of women’s genitals. The images were seen in closeup, replicating the female body pictured in Gustave Courbet’s famous painting “The Origin of the World.” Leonard’s effort made manifest the “male gaze,” which feminist art theory holds most art is made for, in a way that was shockingly direct, funny and rather beautiful.

Documenta 12’s curator couple Buergel and Noack had a great respect for Documenta 9, in my opinion, and began to create their exhibition by choosing themes ranging from “Is the modern our antiquity?” to “What is our bare life?” This enabled them to include artworks from a wide spectrum right back to the 16th century Islamic caligraphy, Central Asian embroidery, Kerry James Marshall’s Afro-American quadri’s, Australian Juan Davilla’s breathtaking scenes, historical global conceptual works, etc...

Documenta 12, containing over 150 artists and taking place in five buildings in Kassel, Germany, consists of different venues creating different vibrations. One of the venues is an open-form layout in the new Aue-Pavilion, a custom-made 10,000-square-meter shed with clear corrugated plastic walls hung with silvery polyester curtains, and a hard asphalt floor. Another venue is the Museum Fridericianum, the columned, yellow-and-white neoclassical building, acting as the heart of the show.

There is also Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, a four-story Old Master picture gallery, which makes a great tribute to Documenta 9’s way of juxtaposing art. Across the road from the Museum Fridericianum are the Documenta-Halle, a long, tall space with one soaring wall painted bright blue, and the Neue Gallerie, the modernist venue of the show.

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The sensational project of the big exhibition certainly belongs to Ai Weiwei, the Beijing artist. He is bringing 1,000 ordinary Chinese citizens on a free trip to Documenta 12 (in groups of 250 at a time), housing them up in two-story camp-style barracks of his own design. The project is dubbed Fairytale, in reference to Kassel’s distinction as the home of the Brothers Grimm; the work also includes 1001 weathered Qing dynasty chairs, which are spotted throughout the exhibition as seating for visitors.

Another major Ai Weiwei contribution is Template, a 40-foot-tall arch-like structure with an eight-

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29 RES SEPTEMBER 2007 Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia

J. D. Ojeikere

pointed base. Located on the lawn next to the Aue-Pavilion, there is an arch formed by Ming and Qing Dynasty doors and windows that the artist salvaged from destroyed houses in northern China, where entire old towns have been demolished. “It really is a mixed, troubled question context,” the artist says, “and a protest for its own identity.” From Turkey, the radical, young, hyper-productive magazine editor and artist Halil Altindere shows a film about a Kurdish tribe called the Dengbejs, who chronicle their history by singing songs of rebellion, massacre and family tragedy. The film is not poetic but informative, and according to one Daily Telegraph reviewer “belongs not in an art exhibition but on the Discovery Channel”. Alt›ndere, however, had another idea that cannot be realized in Documenta 12, so he quickly decided to display his 2007 film for the big exhibition. His idea was to tour the prisoners of Kassel State Prison by a plane...

From Muslim-Hindu strife, Palestinians dispossessed, the trials of immigration, reparations for Native Americans, mounting AIDS deaths, and male chauvinism to Yugoslavian genocides, and Nazi and postwar German traumas, Documenta 12 is making the contemporary art globe smaller and timeless. On the floors of Museum Fridericianum, dancers perform Trisha Brown’s Accumulation (1971) and Floor of the Forest (1970), a work in which performers climb into and hang from colorful pieces of clothing attached to a heavy, horizontal rope scaffolding arranged like a trampoline, combined next door by constructions of stainless steel rods and translucent plastic sheets by the Rio de Janeiro artist Iole de Freitas. Documenta Halle is filled with oversized works like a Garden Carpet from Iran (ca. 1800), oversized stuffed animals by Cosima von Bonin and a giraffe sculpture “from the Qalqiliyah Zoo” by the Berlin-based conceptual artist Peter Friedl. The sculpture Phantom Truck by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, made of smooth aluminum painted gray and depicting a truck trailer loaded with tanks and equipment, represents the imaginary mobile bio-weapons lab that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell conjured up in 2003 to help launch the Iraq War. The show features “new” artists from Eastern Europe, India, Asia and the Middle East, and several rediscoveries like German Minimalist Charlotte Posenenske, a 1938 born artist who stopped making art in 1968 and turned to sociology, and died in 1985. Like Posenenske, abstract works by artists like Poul Gernes, John McCracken and Gerwald Rockenshaub are installed all over the exhibition, having the task of functioning as the sophisticated upbeat impulse. Probably guided by this concern, the curators have placed works by some individual artists in several different places in the exhibition, so that viewers meet the same artists in varying contexts. Some of the artists who are repeated throughout the show, in addition to the three abstractionists mentioned above, are the late Gutai Group performance artist Tanaka Atsuko, the caustic Argentine figurative painter Juan Davila,

Ion Grigorescu

the 1960s cult painter Lee Lozano, the great Chicago figurative painter Kerry James Marshall, Charlotte Posenenske, Martha Rosler, and Cosima von Bonin.

At the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, an Old Master picture gallery where contemporary works have been integrated into the existing installation, is the space where the curator couple’s hard to answer question “what is antiquity” is echoed at its loudest. Known for his black-and-ehite photo-collages, Polish artist Zofia Kulik has contributed a large portrait of himself as Elizabeth R., entitled The Splendor of Myself (II) (1997), which is accompanied by Rembrandts displayed in the permanent collection of the museum. Zofia Kulik is the post-Zoe Leonard of Documenta 9, mixed and matched perfectly just like Kerry James Marshall’s Afro-American daily life “peinture” figures sitting next to 17th century white-European portraits.

Documenta 12, which features the work of 16 American artists such as the famous feminist Martha Rosler whose most widely known works are the pioneering videotapes are “Semiotics of the Kitchen”

(1975), “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained” (1977), and “Losing: A Conversation with the Parents”, which today are considered to be seminal feminist works in conceptual and postmodern photographic practice. Many of her works are concerned with the geopolitics of entitlement and dispossession. Her writing and photographic series on roads, the system of air transport, and urban undergrounds join her other works addressing urban planning and architecture, from housing to homelessness. (At the Utopia Station show at the Venice Biennale of 2003, she worked with about 30 of her students from Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as a far-flung internet group, ‘the Fleas', to produce banners and a mini-pavilion exploring utopian schemes and communities and their political and social ramifications.) For Documenta 12, Rosler displays a slide show of photographs of luxurious gardens and parks in Kassel, tucked away in a corner of the Aue-Pavilion.

As a result, from the Canadian Arctic with the Inuit painter Annie Pootoogook to Southeast Asia with the Singapore-born Simryn Gill, the show includes several artists from India and more than a dozen from Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, and in particular the avant-garde movements after World War II, trying to define “what is contemporary” in a Jack Derridean way. It tries to deconstruct modernity as “a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre...” as the “history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” (“Structure, Sign and Play” in Writing and Difference, p. 353.)

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(Documenta 12 opened on June 16 and will run for 100 days until September 23, 2007.)

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Juan Davila

James Coleman

Simon Wachsmuth

OPPOSITE PAGE Left: Zheng Guogu Right: Paul Gernes

Tanaka Atsuko

RAYS OF LIGHT FROM PLANET IRAN THE VISIBILITY OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION IN A LIMITED WORLD

PARASTOU FOROUHAR S I N C E T H E N E W P R E S I D E N T of the Islamic Republic of Iran took office, reports about his provocative public appearances have been piling up. And while his statements indeed pose a global threat, they also strengthen the selective, merely geopolitical view on Iran predominant in Western media.

This situation resembles an absurd theatre play, with Ahmadinejad as the only actor while the Iranian people are presented as the audience, making themselves heard only in short comments taped in the streets of Teheran.

However, the fact is that Iranians have been trying for years to escape the role of bystander and victim.

This development does not take place on the political stage and is thus hardly recognized by foreign media, which are distracted and channeled by the political furor time and time again. This is why I want to focus on a field of artistic experience where “escape attempts” happen frequently.

The many years I have lived and worked in a European context have altered the way I see my home country. The view alternates between closeness and detachment, and opens up variable gaps and perspectives. This detached view makes Iran appear like a strange planet whose surface is covered by firm grid structures.

In some places, this grid appears to be deeply rooted in the planet, but at others it has simply pressed itself down. Even from the distance I have as an observer, I can still feel the pressure of this grid imposed by the Islamic Republic.

Life on the planet Iran grows beneath this grid, needs new habitats, seeps out of many small openings, and spreads out slowly to form glowing patches on the surface. It is suppressed and grows again – time after time. It is a sight which produces hope and joy as well as disappointment and anger, and it is also exhausting. The accompanying tiredness and lethargy in particular have become an attitude toward life which also is palpable for many non-Iranians.

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THE PICTURE OF REPRESSION IN IRAN IN THE 1980S AND THE EARLY 1990S One of the first repressive steps the Islamic rulers undertook was to fix bars onto public space, the planet’s outermost skin, by imposing religious and political regulations. Dark colors and camouflage patterns, serious and lamenting tones, aggressive slogans covered the entire surface. In the media, this grid structure grew so dense as to be impermeable. All actions that did not conform with the regime were punished; to underline the fact, there were public announcements of daily executions in the media. Many people retreated into inward exile.

At first, these inward-directed energies were manifested in a wait-and-see attitude, until they finally discovered art and literature as a stepping-stone to a fictional realm, and in the process typically focused on the products of Western culture. Below the grid, the black market for uncensored films and books grew.

Artists who did not conform with the regime initially sought images with which they could express – in highly coded and often pathetic forms – the prevailing standstill and their suppressed longings.

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33 INDIVIDUAL FORMS OF EXPRESSION IN THE GRID STRUCTURE OF THE IRANIAN PUBLIC More than 15 years have passed since then, and there is no longer any stopping the cultural growth below the grid imposed by Islamic laws. Ever more frequently, it has laid claim to virtual space. For some time, the Internet has offered a parallel public space.

Weblogs are used in Iran as individual forums for exchanging ideas and presenting oneself. Precisely such individual forms of expression are devouring the roots of the grid structure millimeter by millimeter.

Film and photography, which are very close to actual reality, offer considerable means of visualizing a person’s perspective and thus of establishing an own, individual reality.

Photographs and clips posted anonymously on the web stimulate the critical discussion Khosrow Hassanzade, “Self on both social and political conditions. This procedure repeatedly breaks out of virtual portrait” / Terrorist serie, 2004 space.

In summer 2005, I visited a large photography exhibition in Teheran organized by the magazine Iran Image for its annual “best photograph” competition. Appropriately, one room was devoted to the presidential election. No analysis could have revealed the carnivalesque setting of hysteria and the candidates’ theatrical behavior any better than these images. As a result, many of the visitors who had been carried away by the hysteria and had voted in the election found the exhibition sobering and alienating.

Almost at the same time, the performance of a play by Bahram Beyzaie proved to be another, rather confrontational, means of providing visibility. The play’s topic is the politically motivated murder of intellectuals in Iran, which the government has done its utmost to hush up. The story is told from the perspective of an Iranian couple critical of the regime, which has to repeatedly re-live its fate in a joint nightmare. The play was banned after having been performed just a few times, nevertheless creating a public platform for an issue that mars Iranian society like an open wound.

CHANGES IN THE GRID STRUCTURE Meanwhile, subtle changes in the grid structure itself are beginning to emerge. One such example: the religious banners. Used on numerous occasions – the birthdays of the prophets, the twelve imams, and the two most important women in the Shiite world, as well as the anniversaries of their deaths – they serve as a strong reminder of the presence of the country’s rulers. During the holy months of Ramadan and Moharram, these banners also are hung on every available streetlamp and house front.

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Painting opened up a suitable framework between abstraction and the formation of metaphors. In the paintings produced during this phase, the lethargy of the moment was mitigated by poetic approaches so as to render the paralyzing state more tolerable.

Since galleries remained closed for a long time, such works were presented in private circles. These circles compensated in part for the cautious and conserved state of public life, providing a place for the continuation of cultural life. There were many small circles in which people got together to watch films, read, paint, and draw in secret. Little by little, speaking and laughing penetrated the forbidden and a society that – for fear of death – was frozen in silence. Iranian literature professor Azar Nafisi’s book, Reading Lolita in Teheran, is a telling example of this development.

In the late 1980s, as a student at the Teheran Art Academy, I also ran weekly nude drawing sessions with three of my fellow students in our private rooms. We experienced and studied nakedness. And gradually we forgot that the vice squad was patrolling outside. The simultaneous existence of such conditions produced schizophrenic behavior and removed us from the actual circumstances in which we lived.

In the early phase of the rule of the Islamic regime, black, the color of mourning, was used for these banners; they often had white writing or other things printed on them in the symbolic colors of red and dark green. Now the banners look totally different.

In Naserkhosro Street, close to the Teheran Bazaar, banners and other religious utensils are sold in a number of small stores that almost vanish behind the vast amount of overlapping banners. From year to year, they look more colorful, friendlier: Today the banners that dance lightly in the wind are yellow, orange, pink and blue, printed in neon colors on soft and sometimes transparent fabric. Inspired by Western carnival tradition, you now also find pennants sold by the meter in all the colors of the rainbow. Naturally the pennants are printed with the names of the holy figures or with short verses and the like. But you no longer see the dominant black of the revolution era.

Moreover, the depictions of the Shiite holy family also have undergone various changes. They lead the observer into a world of idealized, cliché male beauty: The holy men look out from under perfect eyebrows with soft, seductive eyes. They have elegantly shaped noses and voluptuous, soft lips. Their luxurious soft hair peeks out from under silky turbans. Flowers and ornaments frame their portraits.

But the banners sold in Naserkhosro Street are not the only items to draw on the appeal of pop culture; religious songs also have been inspired by Persian pop music and now have a stimulating effect even on the impartial listener. In other words, the regime attempts to use the pull of pop for its own mass mobilizations. The last campaign for the presidential election clearly demonstrated this trend.

Some artists are addressing this phenomenon. In a work that was part of the Berlin exhibition “Entfernte Nähe” (Far Near Distance), artist Mehran Mohajer presented pictures from the photo studios in the holy town Mashhad, in which pilgrims have their souvenir photos taken. The backdrops show the glowing holy shrine of the Imam against the background of a sunset ,or depict branches with blossoms, swans on a pond, and flying doves.

This kitschifying and trivializing of religious life sets in motion a process of trivialization which is absolutely ambivalent: The repressive side of the religious rule is increasingly disguised.

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THE ORNAMENTAL ORDER However, the repressive nature in the Islamic Republic is not the only grid that presses onto the culture of the planet Iran. Government regulations, which have regulated artistic activity in Iran for centuries, are deeply rooted in the interior of the planet. This grid is difficult to recognize as such, since it is very delicate, finely wrought, and aesthetically attractive.

I would like to describe this as the “ornamental order.”. Within this order, the value of every single person is predetermined: His or her presence merely serves to express a certain overall message. Any old Behrang Samadzadegan, “Walking on Persian miniature claims to be a small, idealized mirror of the world. the begining line of horror” Our eyes are guided from the curved lines used in the representations of human bodies to the curved pine trees, to soft clouds, domes, and hills. All surfaces are covered with the oscillations of these patterns. It is a harmonious portrayal of the world, symbolizing the omnipotence of the creator.

But this unimpeachable harmony conceals an enormous potential of brutality. What does not subject itself to this ornamental order cannot be portrayed – and as such does not exist.

The parallels between this ornamental order and the one-dimensional, simplistic and popular religious dogmas of the fundamentalists are not to be overlooked.

With its potential of rhythm and poetry, the Persian miniature captivates us, gives us beautiful

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35 RES SEPTEMBER 2007 Amirali Ghasemi “Coffeeshop ladies”

surfaces that cloud a structural analysis of the artistic forms of expression. And perhaps Iranian artists’ liking for and obsession with surfaces partly define their response to Western art, evidenced at first by an Iranian production of art often merely imitating Western techniques.

Frequently, impressionist, expressionist, and very often cubist styles were simply complemented by a portion of Oriental sensitivity for color, line, and composition – but the elementary motives that had originally led to these techniques were ignored. In response to the criticism of being too Westernized, the Oriental aspect was gradually increased.

Iman Afsarian, a young artist and art critic, published an article in Herfeh Honarmand accusing modern Iranian art of mannerism. He claims that even contemporary art in Iran hardly ever reflects authentic experiences. As an alternative, he is not the only one who tries to achieve directness in his artistic creations through isolation, drawing on his subjective visual memory. “This is not hermetic escapism, but the necessary retreat to a place where one can concentrate on the essential.”

Jinoos Taghizadegan Metaphors form another aspect of this ornamental order.

Initially, they opened up space for the poetic and the inexpressible. In the mechanical repetition, though, they often were reduced in their symbolism to a representative function and thus marginalized. During the era of political and religious suppression, metaphors became an expression of the forbidden. But in the course of time, they gained a rigidity and unbearable superficiality, undermining their original significance of creating scope for development. As a reaction to the ban on depicting female eroticism in images, lemons and pieces of pomegranates or watermelons were employed to represent this femininity. Gradually, the lemon became so erotically charged it was no longer seen as a sour fruit.

Even though there still is a strong use of metaphors in contemporary art in Iran, some artists have permitted themselves to break free of the old vocabulary in search of a more individual symbolism. The striving for individuality, which currently shapes cultural activities in Iran, results in artists making concerted efforts to position themselves and attain authenticity, which is connected with particular expectations of the West and consequently attracts the latter’s interest in this development.

The mutual position, which is more observation than observance, results in those producing art in Iran walking a thin line between projection and reality. Very often, stereotyped Western views of Iran are confirmed by local artists assuming that it might be easier to market this kind of aesthetics in the West. But this phenomenon also is critically reflected in Iran and generates counter-positions.

Khosrow Hassanzadeh addresses this stereotype trap of a Western perspective in his “Terrorist” series: large-format self-portraits in which he adopts a typically oriental pose in front of his traditionally arranged extended family.

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MODERN ART IN TEHERAN IN THE AGE OF THE CONTROLLED SPACE In recent years, contemporary approaches by young artists outside the ornamental order have developed in Iranian society. Drawing on creative forms of expression such as installations,

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performances, and actions, public space is appropriated. One example: In 2001, artist Jinoos Taghizadeh produced numerous photocopies of her own palm and glued them on house fronts in a central street in Teheran. She was arrested repeatedly by patrolling security forces and then released again, as no violation of a law could be ascertained. But ultimately, the repetition of her action was seen as an unacceptable provocation and led to a ban.

In another instance in 2000, Neda Razavipour and Shahab Fotouhi created an installation by sticking the portraits of young, unknown Teheran citizens onto the window panes of a high-rise on the edge of a busy highway in Teheran. The portraits were illuminated in a rhythm matching the pace of breathing.

Previously, the public space had been reserved for the portraits of martyrs and Grand Ayatollahs. Now it was occupied by the “breath” of anonymous individuals.

Active since 2004, the artist group Movazi (Parallel) works exclusively in public spaces. It conducts unannounced actions in the city of Teheran which exceed the limits of accustomed structures.

Afterward, the group discusses the responses gathered from a random audience. The politically charged nature of public space in present-day Iran is investigated and explored.

Since the time of the so-called “reformers,” the Islamic regime has adopted a shrewd policy towards those involved in the arts: Professional associations of various artists are allowed, government budgets and grants no longer are awarded solely to members of the regime, and there is less control of galleries and smaller art schools. Yet, people still move in a controlled space in which the regulations are determined by those in power. This creates a general dependence and uncertainty, which has increased enormously since the new President assumed office.

An example of this can be seen in the story of the artist Sogra Zare: Three years ago, she established her new studio in a former midwife’s office that had been vacant for a long time. Besides medical equipment, she also came across numerous birth and medical records on babies born in the 1960s, a generation whose youth coincided with the turbulent era of the revolution and the war.

Having tracked down a number of them, the artist conducted interviews with some of these persons at the place of their birth. The result: pluralistic recollections of an ideologically shaped era which contradict the official version.

A few weeks prior to the opening of the exhibition, the curator of the Teheran Art Center suggested the artist should rethink her concept and omit the documentary part of her work, namely the interviews, as they crossed the “red line.”.

The term “red line” refers to the censorship line in the political discussion in Iran. It was the topic of an installation by young artist Behrang Samadzadegan, a work whose symbolic approach can be interpreted as a call for action. He hung two paintings on opposite walls in a narrow room. These paintings show a man and a woman, looking at each other with interest. A red line on the ground separates the paintings from each other. On entering the room, the viewer is drawn automatically by the gazes of the two persons and moves to the middle of the room, where he has to cross the red line in order to be able to see the installation properly. In doing so he forms a link between the two portraits, which are separated from each other.

Visualizing the prevailing censorship and social restrictions also is the topic of a work by Amir Ali Ghasemi. In his interactive animation “Coffeeshop Ladies” from 2004, the artists presents photographs of Teheran Internet and coffee shops, which are popular meeting places amongst young people. In accordance with the censorship tradition of the Islamic regime, the faces of the female visitors are covered with white rectangles. By clicking with the mouse, these blanks transform into the empty, white faces of the women. The scenery is accompanied by a recording of the everyday conversations. As a result, the fine line between presence and invisibility, which defines the public life of Iranian women, becomes tangible.

The approach of the online magazine Teheran Avenue, which has reported on the cultural life in Teheran for the last five years, illustrates how censorship is dealt with. One of the magazine’s managers describes the work of his group as “micropolitical.” The major political topics are omitted. This gives the team a certain unobtrusiveness, which makes it possible for them to continue their work. It is this continuity that creates the necessary basis for critical discussion.

This attitude has been put to the test by the new political leadership through constant provocation and increasing repression.

THE RETURN OF RADICALISM Even before his election, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad established his strategy based on political and social polarization: the masses against the intellectuals, social justice against democratization, intransigence against dialogue. He became the symbol of Islamic fundamentalism that scared the cultural scene while his opponent, former president Rafsanjani – who for years had been accused of various crimes and corruption – became the knight in shining armor. A majority of intellectuals put their full weight into the scale to prevent the radicals’ coming into power.

Failing to reach this goal has not been their only defeat. With hindsight, the loss of selfAzimeh Hassanzade, respect and credibility overshadows their commitment. A young artist commented on the “Terrorist”, 2004 situation in a rare moment of openness: “We got carried away by the hysteria, discussed, collected signatures, and cleared Rafsanjani of his dark past.”

The social situation that has developed is regarded as a dead-end road by many of those engaged in the cultural sector. A general state of uncertainty caused large numbers of people to revert to a wait-andsee attitude characterized by hopelessness and fear. When I visited Lili Golestan, the owner of Teheran’s oldest gallery, in 2006, she cynically remarked that she was planning to turn her gallery into a grocery store as she was forced to sell her artists’ culinary products instead of art.

Farzaneh Taheri, one of the country’s most well-known translators, told me that books on healthy nutrition had become her favorites for translation since the change of government. It had not been possible even before to use open language, but now translation itself was increasingly becoming an instrument of censorship. Passages about prostitution, homosexuality, blasphemy, and even the portrayal of a priest’s bad character, had to be omitted. In former times, she had been forced to replace terms like sex or coitus by “intercourse.” Now this word was forbidden as well. She also told me that for years the censorship office had been sending her lists of words that she had to translate into nebulous phrases. She felt swamped by the excessive demands of the increasing censorship. Her inner resistance against this type of censorship exhausted and demoralized her.

An interesting view on the current situation of censorship was provided by Abbas Kiarostami at the last Fadjr Film Festival in winter 2006. He claimed that censorship in Iran had become irrelevant as numerous street vendors allowed people easy access to uncensored pirate copies. Even though it might be possible to question the importance of censorship in the area of cultural reception, this statement does not apply to the area of cultural production. The discrepancy between consumption and production that has developed affects the cultural understanding of society.

With the end of the reform era, the traditional balance between control and freedom that had determined artistic production had been unsettled. Many people engaged in the cultural sector now are trying to defend their niche existence. In this position, they are waiting for a change.

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IN TIMES OF WAITING Waiting seems to be the condition that affects the entire Iranian society – with one group waiting for

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39 [1] Einleitung von Treibsand [Discharging quicksand], DVD Magazine on Contemporary Art, Volume 01, February 2007, ISSN 1662-0577.

Neda Razavipour and Shahab Fotouhi

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freedom, the revolution, the intervention of the United States or reforms, and the other group waiting for religious salvation due to the return of the “Madhi,” the “Iman of the times” – and seems to be characteristic for the art world as well. It is shown in humble longing, in depression and lethargy. But it also can be seen as a time during which – thrown back to the own self – people analyze the present state, come to terms with their own history and its consequences, and start to identify potentials. “But possibly, the goal of this is waiting itself, the willingness to stay, to persevere, in order to be present when the opportunity arises to rebuild the city!” Susann Wintsch [1]

MACRO/MICRO FOCUS ISTANBUL: INSTITUTIONS AND INDIVIDUALS ADNAN YILDIZ WITH THE KIND CONTRIBUTIONS OF AHMET Ö⁄ÜT, ERDA⁄ AKSEL, HÜSEYIN ALPTEKIN, PELIN TAN AND VASIF KORTUN

I F W E D R AW A M A P of contemporary art practice in Istanbul today from the bird’s eye view… What primarily needs to be stated is that there is no rooted and sound museum tradition in Turkey. After the top to bottom foundational actions during the first years of the Republic, it is difficult to talk about a decisive state policy or any other investment, especially for modern arts. Maybe the reason is the relation with art. The art history of a country where the sight of modernism arrives before itself, and where people believe they can be “westernized” by wearing a hat instead of a fez, is full of examples whereby art is used as a medium of “made up” modernization, “becoming contemporary.” Only after the nineties can we mention a production keen on looking back at and problematizing itself over art production.

During the eighties, the military intervention that cut public life and democracy as with a knife, intruded into the literary and leftist tradition that had been growing since the sixties. This was unavoidably reflected in other discussion areas. Even literature—the strongest narrative tradition of Turkey—couldn’t overcome the eighties trauma for a long period of time; though it tried to transform itself through a get-together with cinema, the chief protagonists, “censorship” and “impossibility of politics,” always interfered. The politics of Turgut Özal—which started Reaganesque and ended Clintonesque—already defined the financial source of art; however “art” in the broadest sense became “framed and hung” decoration of the private sector. This effect pulled “art”—given a new role in the direction of PR strategies of globalizing companies—to a different point. Yes, Turkey became more visible on the international art map: for the first time its institutional structure collided with the one of the time…However, there was no root.

When the Republic cut itself from its own historical narration-symbol-concept tradition and orbited itself with an obsessional center of westernization that can’t be colonial, all that happened from classical music and modern art had to grow “in a pot.” Still today, the second most important problem of the art produced in Turkey, the art practices born out of Turkey, is the relationship that can’t be held with the viewer. A museum user, socializing over discussing art profile, still is not common. The ones asking for the first important reason probably don’t know about the borders of “censorship” or state/army/army state.

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A) INSTITUTIONS AND BRANDS Let us make short visits to the institutions. At Istanbul, where contemporary art nested itself with a centralist structure, we see a state-owned dying museum and its historical collection (Painting Sculpture Museum) that cannot be revitalized by the naive attempts of the museum director. The most impressive jump of contemporary art no doubt was felt with the birth of the Istanbul Biennial; a curious viewer group and a productive maker group appeared in the city that became part of international art traffic with this turbulence. This flow naturally created its own generation, ruptures

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41 1.

AY Considering the last biennial as a breaking point, Istanbul has become a context rather than an exotic city that hosts an international biennial... How do you personally evaluate your curatorial work in relation to the concept of “contextual curating”? What was the main attempt to transform the city and what is the reference or inspiration point for you? Is your Istanbul similar to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul?

VASIF KORTUN Although the script of the 2005 Istanbul Biennial picks up from when Pamuk’s finishes his book, the two are contiguous in a sense that extends beyond how the city experiences a transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. It is a kind of anchoring, anchoring the exhibition to a context. I think I realized that I should stick to contextual curating after a few bland failures in dealing with exhibition situations where I was invited. The context could be artistic, geographical, social, institutional, etc. For me, what makes sense is how to use the tool of the exhibition to let an argument, a discussion, take place in a place. I like to bring it all back to social space and to the different disciplines of life. I am interested in art that is discursive but that does not constitute a discourse.

AY Is there any relation between the concepts of “resistance” and “autonomy” and the artist initiations being opened in Istanbul recently?

PEL‹N TAN I don’t think that the starting point of the initiations is directly connected to the discussion of “resistance and autonomy” in Istanbul; however, the practices that they pursue are simply forms of resistance and autonomy in economical, political, and institutional levels. Firstly, the main reason why the initiations begin to exist is the lack of spaces where you can present art in Istanbul; but also spaces where you can work and present several different forms of collaboration and participation. This means that the need of hosting, presenting several collaborations, participations, process-based projects and informal encounters, was the urgency in establishing initiations here.

Also, the global visibility with local knowledge that is knitted with international connections (again with people, other initiations) is easier now; rather than to struggle with the established, clumsy art spaces.

AY What do you think about this process of “anti-institutionalization” here or is it institutionalization in a different form of communication itself?

and poles within the generation. From outside, the Biennial was perceived as a European Union process project for a long time (just like the perception of the Havana Biennial was seen as Cuba’s contractingintersecting point with liberalization) [1]. But the effect it generated inside was different; many new discussions and works visiting the city brought excitement to Istanbul.

Just after this, a process started with the new century.

The museum founding attempts of the private sector need to be mentioned. When Project 4L—changing its title after the opening (today Elgiz Contemporary Art Museum) and now exhibiting the private collection in a crowded, bad manner—first opened, it was the first contemporary art museum of the country. Its institutional identity, designed with a refined and smart strategy between museum definition and city habitation planwas pointing out to the future of contemporary art in Turkey. Founded at 4 Levent—the rising financial center (intersecting with shanty towns)—Project 4L created a context sensitive to its viewers’ identity chaos. The founding curator of the museum, Vasif Kortun, pondered a long time over a detailed first exhibition, “Becoming a Place”; mapping the “public space” movement, he opened the first design ideas of the 9th Istanbul Biennial to discussion.

Project4L is important today just for being “the first private contemporary museum.” Even though it lost the first years’ discussion environment and audience, it showed a working model for other museums supported by the private sector. Kortun’s first “contemporary art museum” at the kitchen of his office was perhaps the enlightening idea of this process. ‹stanbul Modern—positioned as “Turkey’s modern art museum” with a great advertising campaign—has been trying to construct its institutional identity ands has similar problems. ‹stanbul contemporary art circles, which still can’t openly discuss the extent of power that financial supporters may have in an

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REFERENCE POINTS In order to extend our discussion, I invited some other professionals, and asked them some questions that are related to the whole picture.

PT Of course, it is a kind of reaction against established, clumsy institutions that are not able to move, react, or catch the “knowledge production” in contemporary art; also, not able to understand and present other forms of process-based art projects; and which are closed in their own specific “class” in terms of publicity. On the other hand, I would call the practices of art initiatives-space as “institutionalism in a different form of communication." Most of them exist with a global selfnetwork (which actually sustains its autonomy through trans-local connections) and they use international funds, and can’t control any more the funding income and its positioning. Therefore it has two sites, “Can those practices create alternative institutionalism?” Of course they can; if the initiatives expand in economical and communication levels. Secondly, according to collaborative practices, the initiatives can influence the framework of established institutions (which is not bad).

An established institution can learn from them.

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

institution, wake up continuously with new museums and “blockbuster” exhibitions. ‹stanbul Modern, luckier than Project 4L, which was turned into a bad exhibition hall showing an Elgiz collection with Can Elgiz’s decision, lost its starting professional staff within six months (mostly through resignations). This resulted from the founding family Eczac›bafl›’s (especially Oya Eczac›bafl›’s) desire to “direct” the museum, a kind of “Turkish” Peggy Guggenheim story.

The genetical genes of the design of ‹stanbul Modern have common cultural and organic structures with Cola Turca, Power Turk, or CNN Turk. The ways they are replicated or reproduced are very close to each other.

Without localizing their content, they develop a kind of unhistorical and fake memory and rootless cultural climate that pretends to be there always but never can build itself up. The short history of the museum is filled with poorly worked out and representative exhibitions in which works, again mostly out of the Eczac›bafl› collection, are exhibited, “creating a modern art history.” Taking into consideration how violently Turkey experienced modernism, the panorama of Turkey’s modern art history is expected to be more chaotic with open-ended questions. The exhibitions realized up till now generally are situated within concepts copying western canons, with the titles selected almost from the chapter titles of Edward Lucie-Smith’s art history books, Eczac›bafl› collection repositioned, prices rising…

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Ali Artun [2], an important name in museum making, explains the existence of these new museums over bourgeoisie’s curiosity to create its own history, and mentions how and why surnames of rich families like

However; a global network, funding system, and types of collaborations are important in transformation of the art initiatives/collectives. Types of forms of “normalization” can be a big danger for resistance and autonomy; in that sense, sometimes any type of established institution could be better.

AY What is the main problem in the contemporary art practice in Istanbul? What kinds of problems do you see between individuals and institutions?

ERDA⁄ AKSEL To reduce things to a “main” problem inevitably generates some constraints. Nevertheless, if one tries to present “the problems” in contemporary art practice in Istanbul in a nutshell, I would first have to speak about the extent of art production. This particular problem of art production—or rather the lack of it—also is substantially linked to the institution/individual relationship.

Recently, in this city, we have witnessed the emergence of numerous venues and organizations displaying art. Some of these venues are museums or museum-like buildings, while others are temporary organizations in the form of grand exhibitions and biennials. Private institutions generously fund these organizations, exhibition spaces and museums. Though there is plenty of goodwill and philanthropy, in these artistic patronages, by nature, donors also expect some sort of a spectacle. At that moment, the act of showing artworks becomes an event that is to be designed by professional intermediaries.

The organization of grand exhibitions, the building and the presence of impressive spaces to display art, certainly appear as positive additions to contemporary art practice in Istanbul. However unintended, it also is the very part where several problems regarding contemporary art practice and production occur. Some of the problems are certainly not limited to Istanbul alone, while there are other problems that demonstrate essential attributes of Turkish modernization.

AY Like what?

EA A widespread global problem of these sorts of exhibitions as “professionally designed events” occurs because of a shift in emphasis toward the designed event rather than what kind and quality of art are

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43 A more local problem of art practice and production can best be explained with a particular aphorism used to describe the visual aspect of the Turkish modernization project. “To put the cart before the horse” is used to explain the particular approach of the Turkish elite with a mission to modernize the country by forced appearances and laws pertaining to dress codes (for instance declaring particular headgear un-modern and illegal during the last century). With this technique of making things “appear” rather than “be,” modern can be seen in the recent emergence of venues to display art in Istanbul. Here, the problem exists in the gap between art practice/production and the new art display venues. These impressive new exhibition spaces of many square meters and high ceilings are expected to be filled by artistic works produced by Istanbul artists, most of whom work in 110 square meter apartments with 2.4 meter ceiling heights. It appears that all the philanthropy and generosity is geared toward “how art is to be displayed,” but very little attention is paid to “how art is to be produced.”

There seems to be a misconception and misinformation about the contemporary art practice/production in Istanbul. There is no shortage of exhibition spaces here. On the other hand, there is a serious production problem of quality contemporary art to exhibit. The production process of art requires time, space, materials, money, blood, sweat, and tears. The production of “museum quality” contemporary art requires more of those, as well as serious evaluation mechanisms and literature with an academic distance. Typically, most of the time, resources allocated to production process may simply disappear within the studio floor. In the long run, positive results may be obtained, but compared to “event design,” those artworks certainly will be slow in coming and hardly ever as flashy as an opening cocktail.

To think that in Istanbul there are numerous poor but passionate artists who are relentlessly producing high quality contemporary art, yet unfortunately have no venue to exhibit, may be a romantic assumption, but is outdated and simply not true. Most of the resources devoted to the art world are destined towards “displaying.” That, combined with the lack of analytic literature and inadequate support for the art production processes are the main problem areas of contemporary art practice in Istanbul.

AY Istanbul is an exotic city for many foreigners, and sometimes for the art world, it is very appealing to come from Istanbul. Many people are only curious about the city itself. So, as an artist, you can already get some credits for being from Istanbul. Maybe, Istanbul is a sort of father figure that the West can fantasize about, the historical archetype of civilization, for instance Byzantine, and also it is available.But is it a

Koç and Sabanc› are becoming museums, finally underlining that these art institutions are in fact places more for self-justification than for transformation of art. The strategy of Sabanc› Museum, known for Picasso and Rodin exhibitions, in fact gives us enough tips about its institutional policy; a brand show created out of juxtapositions of its own brand with names such as Rodin and Picasso and PR obviously do not contribute to Turkey’s contemporary art discussions. Making closed-ended conceptual, touring exhibitions, indifferent to Istanbul context within a boutique hotel architecture, Pera Museum, belonging to the Koç family, couldn’t come up with an impressive discussion.

Borusan Art Gallery, closed last year, was a small hall showing good exhibitions and generally young artists.

The closing story gives us an important detail about the executive ways of art institutions in Turkey; it shows how they are generally public relations department of the private sector, by which decisions are made and how the viewers are positioned. Borusan and ‹stanbul Arts and Culture Foundation (IKSV) signed a contract. Then, Borusan decided to close its art gallery and focus on investing in classical music.

IKSV, realising the Biennial, withdrew from the Music Festival and decided to handle contemporary art. The reason is obvious: smarties from brand strategists— using consistent advertisement and communications policies for a healthier public perception of your brand. The formulas (music identified with Borusan, contemporary art identified with the Eczac›bafl› family and IKSV) will work, but nobody will consider the 10year long past of Borusan and its viewers. There is no difference in the story of transformation of Akbank Arts and Culture Center’s entrance floor into Teknosa with the Holding decision. The reasons pushing Holdings to take such decisions are extremely economic and pragmatic, just like Starbucks of Istiklal Street…

Contemporary art practice is one of the best carriers of the culture and economy that it exists within. It replies back to the existing context fast, shaping and transforming itself. Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, a good model with its archive and residences, is

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to be shown within the event. The professionally designed event usually is evaluated by its splendor, by attendance figures, and other public relations criteria, but hardly ever by artistic criteria. Wherever this occurs, it naturally affects the contemporary art practice. Since a good PR campaign can make almost everything look good and important, the overemphasis of professional public relations combined with a lack of artistic evaluation result in an artistic atmosphere of “anything goes.”

one of the witnesses of the gentrification, the transformation into a shopping street story of Istiklal Street. How the surrounding shops—that is, the economic structure—have changed is hidden in the details of its first days and the photos shot from afar today.

Mapping ‹stanbuliote contemporary art institutions produced with a private sector flirtation because of the lack of a serious state investment and support, we actually are positioning the financial giants of Turkey as well. Many art institutions, especially museums, are the backyards of private monopolies. When we look at the big picture, the differences among the institutions are more related with the contracts made between the monopolies and institution directors and employees, the stated borders rather than art discussion. Of course the ones who provide this contemporary art traffic/flow to instituions are individuals; this makes some individuals more privileged, some names monopolies, just like the institutions. There are three to five names working as advisors-curators for the same museums, same art institutions, same publishing presses. The same gardener is taking care of different gardens with the same water-fertilizers rather than opening up territories, creating institutional vision.

Lately, the only institution that follows its own vision, continously creating discussion and criticism practices (Platform), has been working like an (artist) initiative, positioning itself in a more alternative way.

This openly reveals the need for an “art institution model” in Turkey.

The clumsy structure of the institutions, the monopolies that haven’t yet been transformed historically (from family business towards projectoriented structures) and the art that can’t sustain its own autonomous/ethical process bring out different problems as well. There is a look-alike dynamic, a feel like a lot crowd noise; however, when we look at the existing discussions, we realize that for most of the time contemporary art questions are narrow and out of context.

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This way of institutional working also is reflected in individuals. What we have is a map where the

trap for an artist to be from Istanbul, to come from Istanbul, if she/he is within the art circulation?

HÜSEY‹N ALPTEK‹N Adnan, as far as I understand your complex question, you are talking about a multi-faced, multi-perspective trap, about being an artist from Istanbul within the international art scene, and vis-à-vis the global network, etc. And how tricky the position of a foreign artist might be, or in that context being a Westerner, an artist from the West, who stays and works in Istanbul, regarding the City, the City of Istanbul (that represents anyhow a certain exotica). Also, Istanbul easily is the trap itself. (At the moment when I do write, you know St Antoine Church’s bells are ringing at 12 noon. An empty moment of other sounds and muezzin’s call of praying, if you walk in the spot where I am, with that sound, you might have a momentously different idea of the city).

Let’s see the situation: Istanbul historically and geographically has been considered the gateway to the East and the Orient. That fact is still the same, although the city is only 3-4 hours of jet distance from any European city. Paris is 3 hours, London is 4 hours, let’s say maybe Berlin is 2 1/2 hours. That fact, which is still the same, is not due to the distance then, but to the sense and consciousness. And therefore exotic... I am not going to talk here now on the image of “Orient” and “Orientalism” and “Levant.”

AY And? HA So that an artist from that town is inexorably identified with some cliché facts of the “other” and “otherness,” and there is an expectation of the artists from that territory. That expectation of reception needs to be covered with a certain image of Orient, Islam, folklore, exotica, etc.

An artist from that city and context is expected to produce coherently to that cliché, just as I expect snow and melancholia from Nordic art.

The trap is to answer that expectation, to answer and produce regarding that exotic fact, constantly. But exotica are not the sole fact, since all political and ethnic issues are the same. Minority issues, ideological frames, also are part of the cliché of “otherness.”

AY What is the trap?

HA Trap as such: I know what sells in the West of Europe in that sense and I produce regarding that expectation. It’s easy to be part of the network. But that is ending now and we all are in better shape now compared to the situation 10 years back. The trap is not to legitimize that Western expectation vis-à-vis an artist from Istanbul by answering that, but to loose one’s own artistic track and capability due to the market and cultural cliché senses. Thus, an artist might condemn himself to produce works that are political, ethnical, folkloric, exotic, etc. (The same case works for any Balkan or Russian art and artists).

Unfortunately, there are pathetic consequences of that system. Great artists have done mediocre and vulgar works within that give-and-take network system. Let’s take the other way as you emphasize: Trapped artists as outsiders visit and work in Istanbul. There is nothing wrong for a Western artist being attracted by Istanbul, either through its exotica or another reason. That other reason might be a wise wish that to understand the other, peripheral and marginal; where it is, go and live and conceive and perceive there. The trap is here, through the residency programs and due to the paradigmatic system of contemporary art. Can we really be within the texture of a certain city and that city life?

AY Can you give an example of this?

HA An artist in residency might just live in the same circuit: residency life, checking e-mails, meeting local artists, or other resident artists and walking around the same inhibited environment. As a consequence of that, artists are quite easily trapped dealing with photo-journalistic local imagery and media facts and global issues. And another fact is

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45 (Hüseyin Alptekin contributed to “European Cultural Policies 2015,” published by IASPIS and eipcp. For more information, please check its pages 76-77.)

AY When installing the piece “Light Armoured” at YAMA, did you have a sort of feeling inside that it would create a problem with the state authorities? The vehicle did not have a direct reference to any national army, and it was a rather abstract form. Is it getting more dangerous when it’s getting more abstract?

AHMET Ö⁄ÜT I did, but how and when it would appear was totally blurred for me. We all know that it is impossible to get permission for showing even such an abstract narration in the public space. What should be done when it is very clear that it is beyond the impossible to get legal permission? The answer is that the bureaucratic system is working slowly in Turkey. I mean it takes time for everything. What we can do is to make this slow system work for us, to show without any permission, to exhibit without any permission or to publish without any legal position—to meet with the audience, and to circulate the creative and critical ideas and works. We also should work on finding new ways that are unpredictable, like using a screen at the top floor of a building.

Then it is really late when they try to stop it. The Turkish police realized that the video “Light Armoured” could be provocative after it was shown for 20 days at the center of the city. One of the reasons that they thought that it could be provocative was the main symbolic action in the video: there were stones thrown at a military vehicle, and according to the police, it was possible that people on the street and terrorists would be inspired from that action. That’s why they stopped it. On the other hand, the stones thrown were also considered as stones thrown at the Turkish Army. However, there is no reason to believe in these arguments. I think that these arguments are produced by the extreme paranoia and they are like “presents” to us from 12 September (the symbolic date, the day of military intervention in 1980).

production is not discussed, analytical and critical idea bases that aren’t working, and production is imprisoned by historically singular readings. We still do not have enough “input” in ‹stanbul; though the change has started, there is still a long way to go.

B) INDIVIDUAL AREAS/ TERRITORIES AND RESISTING MECHANISMS Even though “self branding of private sector over museumising”—starting with Project 4L—brought an intense art traffic with a growing list of examples such as ‹stanbul Modern, Pera Museum, Sabanci Museum and santralistanbul, it didn’t change the fact that this is all illusion. ‹stanbul Modern’s café and Sabanc› Museum’s queues (Picasso, Rodin) were rumoured. The artists desiring free discussion space continued founding artist initiatives and alternative spaces. An active group formed Selda Asal’s Apartment Project— oldest of them all, Selim Birsel’s Bir Art Space, Oda Projesi, Nomad, Alt› Ayl›k, BAS, and P‹ST has been trying to survive as autonomous islands in the middle of this “institutional” map. It is not wrong to underline Platform Garanti as the only “institutional model” in relation to the surrounding initiatives and discussions instead of an institutional program.

AY Your work is generally positioned as a reflection of political joke, but I think it is more than a joke. It has a strong irony, which leads to a discussion about modernist discourses clashing with cultural gaps.

AÖ During the 90s in Turkey, there was a considerable increase in the development of copying technology and piracy. And people were bringing cheap stuff from Russia, and refugees were exporting lots of VCD and CD from Iraq. Muslims who were visiting the sacred places in Saudi Arabia were bringing cameras with them. We can name all of these under a big title, analogical creativity. Or maybe we can conceptualize all of these as unstructured technological reformation. In accordance

Ahmet Öğüt, “Light armoured”

Artists’ initiatives, resisting territories constructed with individual labour and sacrifices, face the fact that they have to change again today. If we try to define

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these artists already bring with them cliché survey issues a priori, before coming in Istanbul or any other city. (All the local artists from Brazil, Sao Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro are fed up with the Western artists coming in there with the wish to discover the favelas.) But, of course, these are obvious facts, and the same goes for an Istanbul artist who might in one of the Western cities. The major trap is the city of Istanbul. It is a trap for any local and outsider artists. It is a complex and multi-faceted and layered kind of bizarre town.

this formation within an ‹stanbul context, everybody— from curators’ to artists—will agree that there is no future with only showing art. A small group living in a bell jar can only exist as “safe islands” through producing itself again and again. The dynamics are gradually changing; everybody within the practice of contemporary art realizes that they have to redefine themselves for a system more open to the world, more integrated. Everybody knows this is possible only through creating one’s own local context. This is our griping pain today. We have to position ourselves within the democracy discussion, which audially and visually became insufferable political garbage, and redesign and discuss this art within this context. Thus, “‹stanbul”s being opened not only as a biennial title but a territory problematizing context instead of the title.

Artists’ initiatives can be regarded as young generation’s fresh breath. However, one has to be careful talking about this generation. Born within the eighties trauma, taking time to find their political identity, understanding the vitality of a political identity, they crashed “public space” discussion of art.

This generation for whom streets are for open air concerts and party places, learned about the borders of public space by experiencing and trying it. With an army dominant in taking decisions, in a country where students, pensioners, leftists are beaten up by the police, a “non-existing public space” has started to be discussed, to be transformed into an exhibition space.

Upon the clashing points where the political content of art hit the walls of the controllers of public space, public space has continued to give clues to the new generation. The closest example was last year: Ahmet Ogut’s piece “Light Armoured” shown on the screen at the top of Marmara Hotel was closed by the police to “protect the country’s sensitivities.”

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The most important question: How will artists’ initiatives deal with the most important reality concerning them? The institutions already have their own auto-censorship, auto control mechanisms; they have developed their immunity systems against art’s all-system deciphering activities, andmemorization deconstructing strategies. However, the initiatives are

with this context of our time, what I am mostly interested in is how political structures shape the formation of late modernism. That’s why I proposed to cover the whole gallery space with tarmac and my statement was, “I would like to cover the ground of the gallery space with asphalt for this project. I am interested in using asphalt as an important medium, which frames my initial idea conceptually as well. In terms of ideology, the asphalt is the subject of the post-production of modernity and civilization. It operates as the best and basic way of the normalization and legalization of the territories. The asphalt is the materialization of the authority. With asphalt, each undefined place, each no-man’s-land can be merged within the power territory of the state. For my thinking, power can solely introduce and materialize itself through such materials as asphalt. So, why do I desire to cover the interior space of an art gallery, the white cube, with asphalt? Simply, it is about creating a different position within in a weird context. Gallery space is an absolute ‘inside,’ but on the other hand, asphalt operates basically to control the outside… So this weird and sharply visible exchange I aim to make bases itself on reintroducing the discussions about control mechanisms ideologically.”

AY How do you relate the material, tarmac, with the historical context?

AÖ Tarmac is the symbol of a sort of condensed programming of modernist social engineering for me. For instance, in order to organize an opening for Istanbul Modern, the first private museum, it was an emergent decision to finish the tarmac cover first for the visit of the prime minister. For some, a tarmac cover is the first step of modernism, of making something more governmental or established. Here, the most interesting thing for me is not the source of my work, but the direction that my work could lead us. Or it is the context that it could open. Or the discussion platform it can create. “Somebody Else’s Car” is the work, which I believe that I was so close to creating this effect. It is not only playful but also illusionary and exciting. It gives us a kind of hope in which we can believe that we can transform something. Humor is a good starting point but you should really be careful about its dose/level.

AY How far is it between Diyarbak›r and Istanbul? Is it so close or so far away?

AÖ Years ago, I was thinking that I was going to the end of the world when I was taking the train from Diyarbak›r to Istanbul. Today, I know that it is true.

AY Do you remember how Y›lmaz Güney smiles at us in his movies?

AÖ I do. It is not only the smiley surprise of yesterday, but today and tomorrow.

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47 C) INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION: OPEN-ENDED DEMOCRACY The Army’s control over the Internet, affecting the public view with a declaration published on its Internet site before presidential elections, proves how military interventions are shaped today, becoming electronic. Still there are hundred thousands of people demonstrating in Turkey “claiming for the Republic”; the agenda became a power fight between secular and muslim groups again. It is possible to see how the system is controlled and constructing self-immunity mechanisms in every field of life, just like the prosecution rejecting petitions. Demonstration—democracy—is only allowed insofar as permitted and controlled. The police still can beat up the demonstrators on 1st May. If we head to the beginning, Orhan Pamuk has always nourished the historical political contexts he constructed in his novels with different polarization discussions and sharp political subjects. “The real disaster for Turkey is not having a developed democracy. As long as there is democracy in Turkey, EU problem will not be of real importance. I’d like to tell what I want without the risk of being lynched in fascist campaigns or put in prison” [3], says the writer, and underlines how he still feels insecure.

Essentially, he made the literature of the tension he experienced following his wish for an open-ended democracy. He attempts to write it, its history, its possibilities and impossibilities.

The contemporary art practice that doesn’t work on its closed history, that does not investigate and naturally is not successful in founding its actual context loses its way at this part of the map. The question should address us perhaps: “ How do we problematize our participation in the democratic process as a citizen?”

NOTES [1] Stallabrass, Julian. “A very short introduction: Contemporary Art” [2] Artun, Ali. “The museum that can not be” [3] Pamuk, Orhan. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/5145643.asp

Proje 4L

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freer in a sense, almost totally free without the borders they set for themselves. They have space and context constructions to touch the system to make it more visible.

THE VOICE OF ISTANBUL

GÜNDÜZ VASSAF O N C E , W H E N G O D S A N D H U M A N S mingled together, I was called Byzantium, named after Byzas, grandson of Zeus. Then came Constantine, who named the city after himself. Now the Turks insist on calling me by their own version of my Greek name stin poli, while the Greeks claim the name of their Latin conqueror as one of their own.

What’s in a name? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But, no! I have had at least thirty names, from New Rome to Islambol. Even the Swedes had a name for me. Now, they say I am between the East and the West. An identity crisis! Whose? Mine or theirs? Enough of this nonsense.

Take the labels off and (just) look at me.

Just look!

You won’t need a guide book. Like all cities, I have my own sense of time. Unlike most cities, you will never be disoriented. If you are hesitant, not sure which way to go as you walk about, follow one of my cats or dogs. They will lead you to places, introduce you to people, point out secrets that they keep even from me. They, more than anyone, are the longest continuing residents of the city.

Some cities are dazzling, some humbling. Some are pious, some cater to whims, provoke desires.

I am a labyrinth of layers that only makes sense without a compass.

RES SEPTEMBER 2007

48

49 RES SEPTEMBER 2007

Trust in me. Let yourself be, let yourself go. But be careful what you go away with. When you leave, all my empires, my religions, my crimes and passions will be your fertile soil wherever you go.

I have been captured, I have been looted. Many a fleet has landed on my shores. One after another, people have raised their flags on my soil. I have no flag. I have no religion. I have no loyalty. They come and go.

I remain.

Listen to those long gone, my diaspora. It is they who are loyal to me. It is they who yearn for me.

Praised that I am, I am not proud.

Much has been written about me.

To those who have found me melancholic I say, do not look for sparks in ashes long buried.

To those who seek amusement, I do not exhibit my past as decorations for a perpetual carnival.

Though I have given birth to empires, I am not an imperial city. My monuments do not awe people into submission or glorify the might of conquest..

Nobody need stand on ceremony before my doors, I am a home.

I am a home without owners.

Some protect me, some abuse me.

A challenge to those who see the future in my past, I am an obstacle for those who see only the future.

I am an old coin appreciated by some, worthless to others, but always in demand.

Pay no notice to those who, in rediscovering me, seek to glorify their edifices in empty new shells. I see change with the patience of centuries. Some want only to change the past and shout opportunity.

Look at my silhoutte from the bridge on the Golden Horn.

Time has not passed me by, it has protected me.

I ask of you, the same.

Carl Gustaf Löwenhielm, 1820’lerde Bo€aziçi (detail) M. Sinan Genim Collection

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