Cengiz Çekil (1945–2015)

Artforum Passages

January 19, 2016

Cengiz Çekil was born In 1945 in a small town in the dreary Anatolian heartland. He studied at the Gazi Education Institute in Ankara. Gazi was a teacher training school epitomizing the resourcefulness of the early 1920s republic. Next to Istanbul’s prestigious academy of fine arts, Gazi’s “art-craft” department was a lesser sibling, graduating teachers with knowledge of diverse media and a basic overview of art history. The institute championed Malik Aksel, who wrote a number of influential books on the vivid visual folklore of Anatolia. Çekil, like İsmail Saray before him, was particularly receptive to Aksel. Saray’s father was a sign painter and Çekil’s a fixer of gadgets of all kinds, from watches to motorcycles. Like most students at Gazi, they were not middle-class white Turks, but devoted boarding-school conscripts. Çekil recalls it as a warm place with a decent kitchen, with copies of paintings of western masters lining the walls, the perfect environment for a poor young student.

After Gazi, Çekil taught for two years while stationed in Turkey’s remote, far eastern town of Van and left for Paris in 1970 for a second BFA at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, equipped with a state scholarship. There he unloaded the inherited burdens of Turkey and began to engage in a tactile conceptualism perfused with a frugal vernacular. He had a lasting affection for his professor Étienne Martin, and Joseph Beuys, Duchamp, and Sarkis were important influences. His prudence and spartanism were unique among his peers. His was not an ecological modernism, or a doctrinaire answer to a culture of consumption and waste. What may have started as a practical reflection on working precisely with limited means became his credo. On his return to Turkey in 1975, following a period of radical leftist engagement, he was detained on the train with political materials. Tortured by undercover officers, his beloved Beuys book snatched from him, Çekil grew fearful of politics

During this time he made one of his most poignant works, an expression of dread and fate, Diary, 1976, a notebook on which he stamped the seal “I am still alive today” and the day’s date, a work now in MoMA’s collection. Çekil chose light and mobile materials without any volume. In the face of the assault of radicalized politics on everyday life, having no community to turn to and feeling little hospitality from Istanbul, he began to cover the texts on newspapers to render them wordless, and produced his light-hearted, cynically hopeful, folkloric “Manifestos,” 1977: “I wish you happiness; Maşaallah; Life ends but the road never; what God wills comes to pass.” Reproduced in limited numbers and printed on manifold paper like political pamphlets distributed in the streets, the “Manifestos” short-circuited the declarative and welcomed fate with grace. After the pointless desk job in Istanbul that he was assigned as a mandatory service in return for the scholarship, Çekil sought refuge in the languid Aegean town of İzmir. It was here that he received his MFA and began to teach in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Ege University, over time becoming known as the legendary “hodja.”

In İzmir, Çekil roamed the streets as if they were his studio. He identified low-intensity everyday objects in storefronts and workshops, working with conventional, patently unprivileged materials. He had deep respect for crafts and unpresuming aesthetics, the unconcealed relationship with the source material, and garnered a reputation for his ability to work on the edges of the art world, neither resigning from it nor demanding accolades. No one has seen Çekil ask for a meeting, a referral, or a shot at participating in an exhibition, not once throughout his life.

When the dictatorship came in 1980, Çekil was in İzmir. A subtle rift with the military appeared in his works, but he also had the opportunity to produce sculptures of Atatürk, which were in high demand following the dictatorship. This outlet became a source of extra support, especially given that one of his children needed special care. His students, however, did not miss a beat and began to make work about Çekil’s statues, slyly teasing him. İzmir became Çekil’s kingdom, a life devoted to students. His booming voice and motivational sermons became a trademark. In the 1980s he produced works for İstanbul’s legendary Turkish avant-garde and the ensuing exhibitions with artists who embraced him. He helped organize versions of said exhibitions in İzmir, including the unforgettable “In Memory of Joseph Beuys” in 1986. During those years he created interventions anchored in local folklore. He would play on the semantics of “exhibition,” which in Turkish refers to a horizontal display of goods, from melons to tchotchkes, often on the ground, on a large piece of cloth providing a frame. Deferring to gravity and undermining the conventions of hierarchy of upright exhibition spaces, he kept looking to a communion with the ground.

I became close to Çekil in 2001. We were in his workplace in the school as he unpacked and rolled out one work after another with the help of his students, holding fragments of things, turning them around and touching them like holy fruit. It was one of those moments when everything one knows about a history becomes a weary oft-repeated fiction. Another international story had to be written, and another arcade of dispute had to be opened. I was blessed to work on his first and last retrospective in 2010 when he moved to Istanbul. He loved the city, carrying his frayed, ailing body to exhibitions; he even stopped smoking. We would see each other when he had a work in progress. The last visit was to see the preparation of 144 cheap frames, with various colored fabrics hinting subtly at domestic abuse, all turned around and held in tension with stretched lacework and yellow cleaning clothes in the middle squeezed to resemble pudentas. It was his first feminist work, he would say smiling impishly, but also apologetically. Unfailingly gracious, it is conspicuous that he chose to spend his last days in İzmir, the gentle town that took good care of him to the end.