Outskirts. Reflections On Current Artistic Practices Found Outside The Centre, 2009
Outskirts. Reflections On Current Artistic Practices Found Outside The Centre,
Vitoria-Gasteiz : Montehermoso, 2008, pp. 266-276.
Periphery After Neoliberal Globalisation
Good morning. I’d like to thank Ana, Helena, and Montehermoso for this invitation. I don’t have a prepared talk. I have written about this issue and discussed it with colleagues several times. There is a text I’m going to refer to, titled The Disorbitational, that I wrote with Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin in 1991. I think it was important because that text was derived from the experience of the late 1980s. Then, there is another text: a conversation—that I want to read from—between Cuauhtémoc Medina and myself from 2001. We are in 2008 now, at another moment yet to be framed.
After recalling these bits of information here and there, I will return to what I do and share with you the experience of Platform Garanti and how it came into operation because that institution is a precise answer to the issues on the table. A few years ago, we had a conversation on Platform. It was in this context when a colleague was giving a talk about mainstream institutions and peripheral institutions. Then I had the misfortune to ask, “What do you think Platform is?” he answered, “Well, it’s a mainstream institution.” Well, I never thought of this institution as mainstream or peripheral. I was just trying to undo both concepts at the same time. That is what I’ll try to explain: why Platform is a neither-nor institution. People, of course, do not understand easily the difference between being powerful and being forceful and intense, whereas those are two different things. And success and, let’s say, the historical necessity of a Platform in Istanbul does not make it a mainstream institution.
Now, I’m confused. I’m confused because I was looking at older texts, trying to locate myself. It is difficult because, after several years, one can disconnect from what one has written some years ago. You can no longer inhabit the text; it can become more removed from you than a wayward reader who stumbles upon it. You are more alienated from the contexts and the precise situations in which the text came into being. At the beginning of the 1990s, Hüseyin and I were writing this kind of almost hypnotic conversations. 1989 was the background, and we were somehow fed up with this closed circuit of First World-Third World, universal-local, us and them, center and periphery, official culture and popular culture, high art and low art and all of that… or the mind and the body. Until then, the first part of the duality would certainly define the latter part. If something was found interesting, it was considered authentic and artisan-like. The low, the peripheral, the local—what have you—was sporadic, unstructured, and denarrativized. Let me approach this from another angle: The early 1990s context marks the beginning of Biennalism, the proliferation of biennales. It has to do with a decoupling from the national flows of art production. I mean that contemporary art’s pre-globalized distribution had distinctly different dependencies. The beginning of globalization in the contemporary art sector allowed us to write against a fluid background. 2001 was different because globalization took over with apparent authority, and Biennalism matured. The world had become flat. There was extreme visibility.
Now, let me go to the texts. This is 2001, and here is a piece of conversation between Cuauhtémoc Medina and myself:
Read it Here
Luis Camnitzer articulated the “local kingdom” with its middle and bureaucratic class base in The Hybrid State catalog. This Luis Camnitzer article is from the catalog published by Exit Art in 1993. I think it’s a brilliant piece that has not been well used and is called “Cultural Identities Before and After the Exit of Bureau Communism.” I’m just going to read a section from his text:
“Many of us, members of the diminishing middle classes on the periphery, will continue complaining about the exclusion of our art from art history. The complaint is based on both our acceptance of the parameters that determine art history and our trust that we are part of the hegemonic horizontal-circulation mechanism. Our real support group, the one that nourishes our art, the site-specific middle class, is ceasing to exist, and so are we as its expressive tools. The traditional path to success was to make it big within the local middle class, to be then catapulted into the international market. It was a process hampered by the dynamics of imperialism and chauvinism, but success was not completely out of the question. If, however, our home class disappears, things are bound to become even worse.” (Luis Camnitzer, “Cultural Identities, Before and After the Exit of Bureau Communism,” The Hybrid State, New York: Exit Art, 1993).
That’s him speaking. Therefore, the class base of the peripheral power can be linked to the project of modernity (other modernisms, if you will) as the privileged subject and agent, back to the other discussion.
Read it Here
When this discussion took place, I was trying to set up Platform.
In 1989, I knew I would not want to be buried in this discussion of center and periphery, and it was time for housekeeping. The first result was the Istanbul Biennial in 1992, which was meta-curating. There was a series of curators for the exhibition; I articulated one to the other and organized how they were operated. It was the first regional exhibition of this scale. Different types of cues were taken from the immediacy of that historical context. One was Orhan Pamuk’s Black Book, in which he imagines Istanbul in a radically layered format as a disorbitational city, a place where resorting to cartography becomes useless. Like the city, the exhibition had to be negotiated relationally. And it was just then that there was a return in Istanbul, a return to the center with a vengeance. The exhibition was locked between the post-industrial and pre-service city discourse.
Before Proje4L, there were no private contemporary art museums in Istanbul. But the talk about museums had been going on for fifteen years; “the time had come for Istanbul” as the time had come for many cities. To this effect, we set up the “New Art Museum Istanbul” with some colleagues. This is from the first exhibition there, curated by Erden Kosova. It was an exhibition that problematized the recent history of Turkey. Here is an artist sleeping under his painting in September 1980, just one day before the coup d’état, before the last dictatorship. The next day, of course, he was taken to prison because he was from the Artists’ Union, and he stayed in jail for several years. The other image is from 1971 when the artist Gülsün Karamustafa was taken to court and spent some time in prison for safeguarding a leftist fugitive friend at home. The museum was a box in the kitchen of this tiny institution called Istanbul Contemporary Art Project (ICAP). This was my initiative. Nedko Solakov designed the logo. It is a man with three legs: one is going West, one is going East, and the other has nowhere to go… so it’s immobile.
At the beginning of the 2000s, branded museums kept on coming. I will show you a few: SSM Museum, Istanbul Modern, Santral, Pera… If you look inside them, you think that you may be in the 1950s, with nothing particularly to be fascinated about them. I show this because I have a problem in dealing with such copycat institutions with arriviste programs and the logic of trying to catch up. This incessant repetition of institutional structures that are no longer vital is not the way to go. An institution must have a reason to exist; otherwise, it can just close shop. It is not like there is a category called institutions that we need at all costs. Platform is a three-layered beast. One is the exhibition space; the institution filters itself vertically as you go up. The second floor is where we keep our archive and library. Our talks and conversations occur there, and the open offices are also there. And the third floor would be the residency program. The whole project started on very modest terms. I needed to assemble an archive and library resource that would be essential for the artists, students, and professionals. The archive was an attempt to secularise the process of research. That there is no middleman, a preferred agency. There would not be a local curator who would say, “Oh yeah, I think you should look at that, but not that.” Because, especially in the old days, the local middleman was part of that situated middle class, often very well connected to the state apparatus.
Now, we’ve extended the archive to a level that belies its origins. We collect curatorial archives, sources of the histories of local exhibitions, including images, installations, workshops, conversations between the curators and the artists, press releases, interviews, and everything else. It’s a paper archive that is going digital. If we can contribute to one thing, that would be our contribution to rewriting history, which will not take the privilege away from those with access to particular material. It’s a corrective measure for the future; I don’t know why this is necessary, but I think it is; it’s fundamental to keep this all together. We have now about twelve thousand books, a substantial amount of periodicals. It’s a very, very good library. We are privately supported, working under the Garanti Bank of Turkey, but we are a public service institution. The archives are protected, which means that should the institution close, I have a contractual agreement to decide what will happen to the archives. We do not collect, so there’s no problem with where the collection would go. Dmitry talked yesterday about the Generali Foundation; what happens with the Generali Collection, or may happen one day with the Erste Bank collection, is potentially problematic. If you’re not collecting as a private institution, you’re fine. The only thing we’re collecting is archives, which have to be protected in the long run because they have not been monetarized to the level of the artwork.
In 2006, we were invited to participate in the Frieze Art Fair as a not-for-profit institution. We decided to check out of the flow of the fair and go for invisibility. I had trouble with what I saw from the experience of the not-for-profit institutions working in the Frieze: they became either decorations or over-critically postured. So, we proposed to insert one artist from the Balkans and Middle East regions—an artist who did not have gallery representation— in a top-notch gallery at the fair. We wanted to exit the system and see what happens. The Fair didn’t like the reasoning, but, in the end, they agreed to it. Only two of the 20 galleries we contacted accepted the proposal; the rest did not. They were not going to give up vertical real estate. So, it didn’t happen. Then, instead of “giving” to the Fair, we thought it’d be great to “take” from the Fair. Taking away from the fair and getting something from it became the “The Best Librarian” project. Here is the invitation by the artist Ahmet Öğüt. We researched our library’s weak points for about six months, then wrote to many institutions and asked for their donations—exact books, not overall things—and we came out with twelve hundred books in the end. It turned into a Collecting Point. The next step would be what to do with the expanding library. And so the question was: if we were in the city’s center, in a street with massive pedestrian traffic, in a very high circulation space, and our library was on the second floor, then it was not very public, and only professionals would use it. We wanted to visualize the library, and there are no accessible libraries in Istanbul that are within one’s everyday reach. We tried to reverse this trend and see if we could create a library in the exhibition space. So, I worked with this fantastic architecture office from Istanbul named Superpool, and they came up with a design. We brought a chunk of the publications down to the exhibition floor, and we had artists curate or sub-curate the library according to themes. The way it’s installed is quite normalized. In the evening, we closed the curtains; when the curtains were closed, the programs would be open. In this context, we invited many people internationally to give talks and have conversations in the library. It was called, ironically, the Open Library.
The idea behind Platform is to host projects. I usually say that we are a ‘yes institution.’ The idea was ‘oh, I want to do something’; ‘OK, yes’. That was the principle of the institution. Now, we’re going through a major restoration and expansion phase. We left the building in 2007, and we were supposed to move in mid-2009, but only Lord knows when we’re going to move.
In 2004, we decided to turn the institution over to the guests. What it means is that we reversed the relationship of host to guest. We would start working, for example, for Sparwasser in Berlin for a month. They would come, they would stay with us for about one month and, in effect, would become the directors, and we would just go into their service. We did the same thing with Smart Project Space from Amsterdam. But, after seven years of exhibitions and seven years of working in an institution, no matter how much you can reinvent your programs, no matter how you can reinvent your position, there’s a moment when an institution can become mute or fatigued. The walls get tired of you, exhibitions get tired of you, the public gets tired of you, you get tired of your roles, you get tired of other roles… It gets you down. At the same time, I know that I’m tired of it. And it doesn’t help if you’re just leaving somebody else to take over because it’s fundamentally just a continuation of exhibitions. So, in 2007, the end was quite OK for us in the sense that we stopped, we closed the institution—there is no more Platform—to emerge with a completely new institution that’s more about architecture, urbanism, issues of design, etc.
We’re creating a new institution that will be intradisciplinary and non-object-centered. Art questions are not object questions. I like objects, but our questions will not be about objects. Our questions will be about questions: a new institution about questions. And that’s why we can’t find the name for it. I’m pretty happy I can kill a label because Platform Garanti has a cache.
I’d like to show you two videos: Three Virgins (2004) from Jakup Ferri and Road to Tate Modern (2003) from Şener Özmen and Erkan Özgen. They speak better than any book about the center and periphery.
vasıf kortun 