wondering wordland

“Pyschic Defence Strategies on my defenceless moments

Çukurcuma has been the best route going home. It was full of brick a brack, color and ideas. A good surprise would be the open doors of Galeri Apel and finding a new exhibition inside. Apel is one of the galleries in İstanbul that make me feel welcome. I always anticipate that what i see here will at worse be accessible if not directly speaking to me. That one  specific day, Bahadır Yıldız's “psychic defense strategies” effected me emotionally. I couldn't tell why. I couldn’t at the time explain how I personally related to the figures, but I can say that they were “immature grown ups” to me. Shy but courageous individuals. I took their photos but was too lazy to post at the time. It was a time when I had just moved my apartment from Cihangir to Etiler after five years of living there. I was feeling the usual trauma I have for loosing attachments. I was feeling a bit angry and weak. I had no “psychic defense strategies.” I was just trying to figure my way out. After a short while, I had to move my office because the department I was working in was transferred to a different publishing company within the same holding. It was a whole new building full of new people, with a different energy. Again, I was feeling a bit odd, a bit weak and unhappy for leaving behind friends, collective humor as well as the familiar faces, voices and small habits that made me feel safe in my daily routines. With a mind trying to grasp all these feelings, I entered the Hurriyet building for a meeting, couple of days before moving there for good. To be honest the entrance hall was far from feeling remote but I was feeling so despondent and suspicious of moving again that I felt icy cold. Waiting to go up, somehow I wanted to look down the -1 level hall that could be seen from the entrance level. And there I saw again, my three immature friends, three sculptures by Bahadır Yıldız. All of a sudden I couldn't help smiling. I felt surprised and at the same time at home. It was as if my favorite curator brought them for me to note that there was not a break, that things would continue and that everywhere I could continue seeing things that would keep inspiring me. Sort of an imaginary promise for sustaining my flaneurie... On the internet I couldn't find much information about how Bahadır Yıldız's three sandpaper sculptures travelled from Apel to Hürriyet Building. However, at Galeri Apel's website I read and excerpt from Bahadır Yıldız talking about his artwork: “Artists are, within the system, subjects, but in the contemporary art market are they dealt with as predicates? Never before has there been such freedom (materials, language, thought, techniques, etc.), but despite this can we speak of a “contemporary”, complicated obligation for the artist to institutionalize? A situation involving the need of developing new strategies to be at the center of contemporary art, and of constantly updating oneself? Has art lost its power to change and ameliorate, lost its sacred function? Do artists and art institutions concern themselves only with the realities of their own markets? As I asked, and was unable to ask, this sort of question concerning the present situation, as a mechanism for defending art against the trend I did installations, pictures in sand, and spiral sculptures. In these works sand is connected with evanescence, while sandpaper stresses an inauspicious, corrosive ground. At the same time, I have produced these works cut off from the outside, on a tense line where I am caught in the middle, and shuttling back and forth to my other world. I describe these works as “psychic defense strategies,” and they can be seen within a spatial covering which is also made up of sandpaper.  (~ Y. Bahadır Yıldız, Galeri Apel Website) In contrast to the “corrosive” nature of sandpaper and what it refers to for Bahadir Yildiz, throughout my experience the three sculptures had a cohesive and strengthening  power. They magically appeared at transitional periods in my life and glued together the compulsory breaks my habits had to go through. These “immature adults” in my perception combined childhood with responsibility, obligatory changes with continuity, work with idleness, humor with precautious seriousness. Unlike their creator ”cut in the middle, shuttling back and forth in two worlds” while producing them, they are peacefully uniting. Seeing them every morning while waiting for the elevators I think: “Institutionalized?” Maybe. Not only by the contemporary market demands but by the spaces and routines the art works talk to us. Loosing or gaining new meanings in new settings. Moving from the safe artists atelier to a gallery, then to the atrium of a corporate publishing house and maybe in the future to a museum. Constantly meaning different things and forming new defense strategies towards new demands. Maybe. But if so that is just like us. With a few choices, through a constant struggle to find and realize our own paths… And that's how and why I(we) relate to them.  And I think that's how we keep each other safe.

https://www.galleryapel.com/go.php?page=sergi&lan=EN&sergiid=159

Picinini@Arter

Walking through the front window of Arter Gallery at İstiklal Street the passer by is attracted to “The Lovers”, Patricia Piccinini”s sculpture and invitation to her personal world, imagination and ways of thinking. As soon as we see this personified scooters we are engaged in a sympathy similar to watching a Pixar movie. We see inanimate objects finding life and this is a life that is peaceful and full of love. It shines all over with perfection and cleanness and makes us happy. For the similarly plastic yet less personified panel work at the back of the room, Piccinini says, “They reveal in the dubious pleasure of consumer culture, glossy superficiality of a gleaming new car. These works acknowledge the seductive power of these things ...For me they are a guilty pleasure but a pleasure all the same.” They are smooth, fluid, flawless taking us away from our own imperfections and “building the desire for owning them” as Bahar mentions moving on to the second floor. They represent in Picinini's terms “the increasingly natural place technology occupies in our lives.”

The progress to the upper floor almost takes us away from this shiny plastic world of beauty and desire. Suddenly we are located in between “Cyclepups”, the only inorganic, plastic looking sculpture at this floor acting as the continuation of the shiny world downstairs and a video installation of “Plasmid Region”, an ongoing and unending birth of organic shapes that are simultaneously attractive and repulsive. It is like a passage between the inorganic, the plastic, the fabrication and the organic, the natural. The sculptures of unknown creatures at this floor are produced to look real. Visually their skin, hair and eyes resemble ours. Materially we feel they need to be alive however our experiences tell us that such creatures do not exist. We tell ourselves that it is not the world we are living in, it is imagination, which has found the means to depict itself through right materials. We feel sympathy for the creatures/sculptures but it is quite different than the one we feel for the plastic scooter couple and their children downstairs. It is not safe. It is similarly unusual but it carries the danger that we do not know how to control creatures that have affinity to our own physicality. We are inexperienced in such a relationship so the idea of these creatures finding life that very moment reminds us how impotent we may feel. They are so close to us that we wouldn't harm them yet we feel we do not know how to control them either. At this point I stop and ask myself “what if it was vice versa; what if the human beings looked like these creatures and were uncomfortable with the existing human physicality?” The kids accompanying the creatures at the third floor with different reactions yet through same affinity could be interpreted as the kids' lack of preconceived notions about the external reality. Paccinini looks at this from another standpoint saying “The children in my works are young enough to accept the strangeness and difference of my world without difficulty, and they hint at the speed at which the extraordinary becomes commonplace in contemporary society.”

Piccinini's works blur the line between reality and fiction as well as organic and inorganic and our everyday reactions to these concepts. The creatures can as well be the ones we destroy or the ones we are about to produce. The destruction of nature and us setting ourselves apart from this disappearance takes place simultaneously. We are trying to produce new physicality and replace our feelings for nature with it. Mass creation of the inorganic and destruction of the organic accompany each other. Our reactions to them change as a result. We experience a relation with the shiny metal objects and we personify them while at the same time we distance ourselves from the nature and its organic imperfect products that are not too far away from ourselves. Are they reminding us of how dangerous we are? Our daily lives create huge parking lots and destroy natural parks. We are fed by highly unnatural means of production and the rest of the species turn into mechanical animal robots whose life cycle is composed only of serving human beings. An ongoing production that we no longer keep track of like the one in “Plasmid Region.” On the other hand we become friends with our cars, computers and mobile phones and attribute living qualities to them.

Without doubt Paccinini is approaching the world with a respect for whatever it generates from a blob fish to a human being. Thus she questions the role of human being as the predator to the other species. She doubts the altruistic motives of science for “doing the wrong things for the right reasons.” The introduction to her exhibition manual says “Her work addresses the ambivalent state of mind caused by opposing conventional wisdoms: one that there is an abundance of 'prophetic signs' indicating that we are approaching the 'end time', and two, that science and its technologies will heal the world and make it a paradisiacal never-ending place.” Paccinini's work generates positive and negative feelings about us handling the world we are living in. The ambiguous mind of the average person keeps wondering if science intends to maintain or destroy. Even if it does not intend to destroy we wonder if it is cautious enough. “Nature's Little Helpers” series, in Piccinini's words “creatures that might be genetically engineered to help engendered species and undo some of the damage...” represents the optimistic side of the spectrum in which the destruction of nature may be interpreted as a change, evolution rather than a discontinuation. This refers to the optimism that each one of us carry inside or a wish for the continuation of natural life.

How we feel about the so called “imperfection” in a world that tries to impose perfection, mass production, the sameness and expectedness in all fields? Where does our garbage go while we continuously clean and make our lives shinier? Or to be more optimistic in a realistic way (because Piccinini accepts the guilty pleasure of technology) how can we find the reconciliation between technology and respect for nature.

Passing by the first floor again towards the exit, one sculpture gains more meaning. “The Observer.” The gaze of the little kid at the top of a stack of mass produced chairs attracts my attention. Is he about to fall or is he stabilized there. Is he in one with the mass produced new world system or is this about to collapse and make him fall. Is he more at home at the third floor coexisting with the natural, the imperfect or is this plastic world downstairs what he needs, what makes him comfortable and what he will embrace?

Notes after the screening of Metropia at IF Film Festival İstanbul, and Q&A with director Tarik Saleh

Metropia’s 2024 is a world in which the whole Europe is connected through a single metro system operated by the biggest corporation in the world called Trexx. Above the subway is the dark, gloomy city with rotten tall buildings consumed and left to their own decay, reminding one of Blade Runner. If you are a skeptic of the system like Roger and decide to ride your bike to work instead of using the underground, you are all alone in this massive concrete that is consumed by the powerful few, whose remnants left for the average men. Beyond the common dystopian theme of 24  hour surveillance, Metropia introduces the idea of mind reading and mind control. This control is comprised as the hidden consequence of using simple anti-dandruff shampoo called D'Angst . D’Angst turns the hair into an antenna as well as a receiver, transmitting ones thoughts and simultaneously introducing the controller’s directions to the brain.

Hearing this controlling voice, Roger starts to fight it, but he can not resist it when it directs him towards Nina, the attractive face of D’Angst and apparently the daughter of and heir to the head of Trexx. After his interaction with Nina the truth starts to reveal itself. This truth is a dystopian power center with millions of workers watching over their so called subjects through home tv sets where they try to control the ones that use D’Angst. They do this through the microchips secretly planted in their subjects' brains.

It seems impossible to escape the appeal of D’Angst, placed in every corner and apparently hypnotizing Roger and his girlfriend when advertised on tv. Furthermore, becoming a second voice in Roger’s mind, it reminds one to associate it with the practices of advertising that the modern metropolitan faces everyday, interacts and at times contradicts at a subconscious level.  This manipulative voice permeate into the brain like a shampoo and keeps singing its song there at different levels yet for the same purpose; to make its subject behave the way that suits the maintenance of its system.

Although the atmosphere and the idea of the film depicts itself as dystopian, overall it gives a utopian feeling. Especially considering the skeptics’ stress placed on the global controlling power of the corporations today, it can easily be interpreted as an exaggerated picture of our day, inheriting an optimistic yet quite a fictitious way out. After the screening, Tarık Saleh talked about his optimism about the future which confirmed the upbeat ending of the story where we saw a couple coming over their suspicions of each other and happily rebuilding their relationship despite being stuck in one of the millions of tiny flats of the gray, rotten and abandoned city. It thus points that the space given to the average man in metropolis does not determine how one should experience that space.  The size of space is not correlated with the amount of freedom which the modern man often negotiates in his mind in order to find his own voice or to confirm to the one that is determined beyond himself.

Metropia’s optimism is not about the masses coming together to eliminate or overcome the power but is a rather naif one.  One which believes in the dichotomy of the good and the bad or the human and the inhuman as well as the idea that the human using the power of the inhuman is able to find the means to collapse it from inside, in favor of humanity and freedom. It thus seems in parallel with the optimism of comic books and super heros.

Talking about the idea of the Big Brother, Tarik Saleh said that he does not see the Big Brother of our day as a governmental or another version of a central power but as a structure where most people willingly cooperate, through means such as Facebook or other social networks. He gives the example of a breakup with his girlfriend and the way they published it two weeks after the event on Facebook giving it sort of an official character. He says “it was like a press conference”. So this idea of partial participatory surveillance seems like the way the shampoo D’Angst is used in the film. The moment you use it,  you are part of the surveillance system, partially by your own will, simply as a result of its appealing service to the basic human desires. Then its voice starts to follow you. In the metro, or online, on a social network we tell about our ideas, feelings and lives, in return we are dictated by a voice that reacts with this and tells what our limited choices are, what is expected from us, how we should present ourselves or what we are allowed to feel. Just like in the case of Roger fighting with the voice as to whether he should be jealous of his girlfriend or trust her. Participating in this network we become our own antennas sometimes loosing track of how much our privacy is affected.