Afterall, Volume 47, Spring/Summer 2019
Turkey’s ambivalent relationship with the West and its distinct history as a ‘third-world country’ are articulated through the lens of its constitution. The country was a product of an ensemble that included the remains of a nineteenth-century pseudo-colonialist empire. The Republic of Turkey was less the result of a rupture with the past than had been argued, and it struggled to develop a sense of postcolonial awareness.(1) Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs was rebuffed by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1955 during the Bandung Conference when he spoke in favour of NATO. Dismissed later by the Non-Aligned countries, Turkey partnered with Iran and Pakistan as part of the ‘Northern Tier’. Their goal was to keep Soviet Russia from extending to the South and serve as a strategic outpost for the United States of America. The US’s nationalist anti-imperialism was shaped by a series of crises like that which provoked the infamous ‘Johnson Letter’ that forbade Turkey’s prime minister from proceeding with a military intervention in Cyprus in 1964. This fed the increasingly anti-American climate in the region in the 1960s. The binary relationship with the West was shaped by confrontation and appreciation, as 1968 was quickly absorbed by traditional Marxist politics, often with a nationalist thread. Turkey was culturally removed from the Middle East; the West and the North were Soviet; and the Francophone establishment frowned upon the Anglo-Saxon world. Hence, any cultural expression that did not grapple with or respond to a continental modernist legacy was disadvantaged.
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Context: Artistic Tensions
In 1969, the students of Istanbul’s State Academy of Fine Arts started a boycott and occupied the main building. The Fine Art Department’s boycott committee distributed a seven-page declaration.(2) The declaration chastised the education in the painting department for the promotion of what – it argued – were stale and slavish imitations of concepts taught by mediocre teachers. The declaration also contained concrete demands, including a library catalogue, reading materials, syllabi, language classes and guest lectures. This was followed by a student committee report that underscored the necessity of a foundation year. The course was finally established in 1971, creating a context for more advanced exercises beyond the rituals of studio practice. Expanding the applications of what art could be, the course broke away from academic habits and turned out to be formative for a generation of ‘conceptualists.’ The boycott declaration was characteristic of the Turkish Left. It spurned the academy’s painting department and graduates for being rootless and disclaimed by the nation. The declaration stated that a true ‘Turkish’ Academy of Fine Arts would reflect the characteristics of Turkish society and stand firm among the world’s art organizations.
The academy (founded in 1882) had been the authority and the arbiter of power in Turkey’s art world. It managed Istanbul’s Museum of Painting and Sculpture (founded in 1937); organized the country’s participation in the São Paulo, Tehran, Paris, and Venice biennials; and sent more students abroad on scholarships for further study than its smaller siblings, the Academy of Applied Arts and the Gazi Institute of Education in Ankara. (3)While it may have looked inordinately mighty, the governments’ increasing negligence of the arts was coupled with mistrust of a politicizing youth, and the academy was viewed with apprehension.
The sixties were overdetermined by a contentious argument between ‘universalism’ and ‘localism.’ This was not only the case in Turkey but in many other countries grappling with cosmopolitan modernity as a universal idiom combined with efforts to embrace a local yet national space while claiming authenticity. This conflict has short-circuited nuanced investigations, such as heritage extraction, hyper-westernism, and Cold War politics of abstract art. For instance, after seeing an exhibition by professors and students of the academy, the socialist journalist and youth leader Osman Saffet Arolat tore apart the opposition between ‘localism’ and ‘universalism’ in one of the most important periodicals of the time, ANT. He denounced it as a conflict between ‘westernists’ and ‘nationalists.’ The Westernists, Arolat claimed, merely mimicked the West and yearned for a Western milieu accompanied by Western-style institutions. He suggested that while nationalists also accepted a ‘deficiency’ in the local situation, they tried to ameliorate the problem with heritage robbery, offering folkloric and populist solutions, such as producing idealized images of village life or copying carpet designs and calligraphy. (4) The opposition between the universal and the national cast its shadow on the political sphere. The national (localized social-realism) was meant to be the expression of the oppressed in cinema. Classical theatre was being undermined by peoples’ revolutionary street theatres and Brechtian approaches. ‘Second New’, a significant movement in poetry that began in the mid-1950s, was accused of being too bourgeois and oblique. Compared with the rich discussions around cinema, literature and theatre, the visual arts were mainly out of synch and served an ancillary, illustrative role. As a result, there were not many places artists could turn to.
Situating Gülsün Karamustafa
The same year of Istanbul’s State Academy of Fine Arts boycott (1969), Gülsün Karamustafa was in the last year of her studies. This didn’t stop her from participating in the event. She represented the painting department in the student commission category. At the time, she was working in Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu’s studio. He was an artist and a poet looming large in the history of twentieth-century Turkey. (5) Bedri Rahmi gave his students nicknames, and Gülsün’s was ‘the radio guy’s daughter’. This ‘radio guy’s daughter’, who graduated from the first private school of the Republic that instructed in English in Ankara, came from a specific background. Her father was a songwriter, composer, journalist, author and Turkey’s most memorable radio professional, thus Gülsün’s nickname. At home, they had the privilege of welcoming the erudite and the stars of Turkish classical music. Her uncle was Mihri Belli, one of the leading socialists in the country who was often imprisoned. He was married to Sevim Belli, an early proponent of women’s rights. Not only did Gülsün grow up among intellectuals, but surrounded by a variety of experiences of imprisonment. The artist watched her grandmother packing food and clean clothes to take her son to prison. Gülsün’s father was also imprisoned following the 1960s coup d’état. A decade later, she encountered the same situation after she and her husband, Sadık Karamustafa, were sentenced by a military court for protecting a fugitive following the 1971 coup. Gülsün was placed in a women’s prison for non-political offences together with people convicted for crimes of passion, robberies, scams and killings. There were women who entered prison pregnant or with their babies and older children, and odd couples like two women who had killed their husbands and chose to dress up identically.
After her release, she made a series of small-scale paintings using notes, drawings, and photographs. They were shown in 2013, 41 years after their making. (6) She neither capitalized on her incarceration nor made a fuss out of it. The Prison Paintings were far too unique for the 1970s: they had timid dimensions, were decorative and had a seemingly naïve candour and deliberate flatness that may have been understood back then as retrograde. Additionally, lifting the curtain concealing such collective intimacy without a ‘resolution and class consciousness’ would not have been viewed with sympathy by the local art world and like-minded colleagues. Albeit congested, the prison also represented a private space with women emerging from under a mass of quilts thrown on each other, posing, playing games, falling ill and lining up for meals. Pop art’s thrust was conspicuous in her pared-down approach and her choice of colours that seemed to come directly from the paint tube. She was beginning to figure out the use of colour as a splendid signifier of perseverant poverty rather than its camouflage. (7)
Gülsün spent two years fewer behind bars than her husband Sadık because he had claimed most of the charges in court. Both the state blocked their passports, and they could not leave the country for fifteen years. 27 years after their sentences were read in the courthouse, she turned a photograph taken into an installation called Bühne [Stage]. A large-scale copy of the picture was displayed on the walls of an exhibition called ‘Echolot’ in Kassel in 1998. The room was scanned by randomly moving surveillance lights while projecting the words ‘stage.regime.ideology.control’. The image speaks of the despair and horror that the couple experienced during the readings. The surveillance lights kept the moment extant as if they repeatedly brought the image into the present. In an interview, Gülsün states: ‘I waited until a photograph of myself standing in front of the military court had become iconic before I made the work Bühne in which it appears because I understood that at that moment the image and its references were mature and therefore ready to be shared and reconsidered with a larger audience.’ (8)
The artist also produced later prison paintings that appear more storied than the initial small-scale ones. From the works of the late 1970s, images of the thick-moustached revolutionary men and images of women gazing at the vast or the muted steppes of Anatolia seem more tormented and appear to have been painted with a certain distance. Some of these paintings were shown at her first solo exhibition in Istanbul at Taksim Sanat Galerisi in 1978. The statement for this show reads like a socialist textbook dedicated to the cause. The works aligned with what was expected from a politically engaged artist of the time: there were a series of portraits of her heroes, progressive poets and writers; prison paintings that were more gallant and resolute than those she painted after the prison experience; and works reflecting on the collusion between ‘foreign, imperialist culture’ and the traditional culture ‘of our people’.
While not belonging to a specific faction other than having an affiliation with the progressive women’s association, Gülsün was, in effect, what the organized socialist cadres called a ÇBS (an idependent socialist with an indecisive position) and, worse, a KBU (petit-bourgeois element). She was neither working class nor a card-carrying member of any revolutionary group. The unspoken ambivalence between her politics and the divisive, factional politics of the late 1970s may have created an intensely uncomfortable situation, but this never stopped her from servicing the cause.
With a thesis on the history of posters that argued for the concurrency between different agencies of image-making, Gülsün received her MA from the Academy of Applied Arts in 1980. She helped produce propaganda for 1 May (‘Workers’ Day’) by designing posters and banners for the parades. These designs provided a potential source of extra income besides her teaching. As a contemporary of Gülsün had remarked, their most consistent employer was the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions.
As the 1970s drew to a close with political murders, assassinations and fascist mob violence in ascendance, Gülsün’s practice got more sombre. For instance, one particular work, of which there are two versions with different backgrounds, seems to depict a scene from a primary school parade, most likely of Children’s Day in the spring, commemorating the founding of the parliament. It is a cheerless, pathetic image. Children who were robbed of a future are depicted in Boy Scout costumes. Uniforms and marked gender roles are abutted by two teachers whose faces are partly disguised by the large banner they hold. The teachers frown identically at the same time. The word on the banner stops short of meaning, it only says Yaşasın, meaning ‘long live’, which is also the work’s title. Yaşasın alludes to collectivism (in short, the state) as the higher cause, one which exists at the expense of people’s own lives. Around the same time, Gülsün begins to open second vistas and frames within the picture frames. One can see a woman and a child watching from behind the window a man – most likely a loved one – being arrested by a soldier in the street. The window opens up to a sublime field from a room in which lies a murdered revolutionary. This scene depicts a woman at the back with a market bag under one arm and holding her child close to her under the other. They watch the framed image of a soldier whose back is turned against them. The artist consistently places viewers outside the event, asking them to think beyond the specific.
Newcomers: A New Cinematic Language and Symbolic Transpositions
The morbid mood of the end of the 1970s breaks with her increasing passion and curiosity for the new occupants of the city. People from Anatolia came to Istanbul to seek work, possibilities and a future beyond rural life. She was interested in how they ‘made space,’ in the phenomena of Arabesque music and the ‘kitsch’ representations that thrived with them as vital cultural expressions. From music to clothing to homemaking, such expressions were despised by the Republican secular elite as manifestations of the ‘uncultured’. Arabesque was banned from the radio, and the singers were not allowed to go on television. However, their songs blared on the minibuses that took people from factories and workshops on the new fringes of the city to informal settlements. These songs were also frowned upon by the Left for being apolitical and fatalistic. However, Gülsün found a new language for making images in this burgeoning cultural context and recognized its convergence with the decrepit inner-city neighbourhoods of Istanbul that the new dwellers occupied. (9) In her interview with the singer, songwriter and musician Orhan Gencebay, who was also known as a father and leading advocate of the Arabesque movement, he told the artist that he was simply making ‘Pop, popular music’. (10) Gülsün’s search for a commensurate popular language finds its home in Istanbul’s immigrants. She adapts to the context in her refusal to make a derogatory homage from a position of authority and distance and suspends judgment. In works like Mastika Mastika, two middle-aged men with sagging bellies are depicted in their sleeveless undershirts, dancing to a Roma song composed after the drink Mastika and a pack of Marlboros. The tune is known for being able to make even the dead dance. The song brought each festivity in Istanbul to life in the early 1980s. On the wall behind the men hangs a framed photograph of two young men (perhaps themselves some years before) engaged in a classic oil wrestling pose, which seals the impermeable homopolis. It is an endearing work where kitsch is both in the act and the image.
After 1980, the coup put a halt to everything. Gülsün gave birth to her daughter and resigned from her teaching position at the Academy of Applied Arts. However, even when laying low, she became extraordinarily productive, incorporating everyday materials into her practice that eventually led her to make installations. In the post-coup context, she abandoned the immediate political work in favour of a political critique and contemporary archaeology of urgency. She continued to work on things that were lost and will be lost, that needed to be cared for, that were there in the present but not discernible and needed to be brought back to consciousness. Her practice, unique in the visual world, resulted in collaborations with Turkey’s eminent filmmakers such as Atıf Yılmaz. She worked as the art director of Bir Yudum Sevgi [A Sip of Love, 1984], a movie about shanty towns, factories and love. The script was written by Latife Tekin, a female writer whose magical realism of the slums had mesmerized Turkish readers in the early 1980s. Two years later, Gülsün collaborated with the feminist author Pınar Kür’s in Asılacak Kadın [A Woman to be Hanged]. Gülsün’s preoccupation with cinema came to an end in 1990 when she co-directed the movie Benim Sinemalarım [My Cinemas] with one of Turkey’s most poignant women writers, Füruzan. These collaborations were fruitful since they paved the way for a new set of artistic practices. It was not until 2001 that she turned to stand-alone video installations, such as Men Crying, where she showed three aged iconic male stars of Turkish cinema weeping after being abandoned by their lovers. In this and other works, her inquiry relates not only to space but also to how habits are superseded, traces put to use, and how the notions of the sanctimonious are transposed.
Scouting as an art director also allowed her access to two additional things. On the one hand, she could get closer to the lives of the working class and their neighbourhoods, and on the other, she could further explore issues of displacement, migration, and cultural occupation of space over the residue of another. (11) As she recounts: ‘Istanbul is such a city that you cannot avoid stepping on Byzantium wherever you go.’ (12) These ideas are palpable in her works, such as Double Christ (1987), where she sews an identical Jesus figure next to the existing one, a quilt found in a Muslim family’s home. Ideas of transposition also become evident in her involvement with icons as the prime vehicle for her image-making. She elaborates: ‘This is totally related to Istanbul, an Orthodox city full of iconography. I have painted icons and they also appear in other works such as the quilts with Jesus or Elvis, a work with Greta Garbo, the sculpture of the leopard, etc. I like to express myself through the icon, the icon’s symmetry and the altar’s symbolism. It is a personal and instinctual relationship.’ (13)
I conclude that Gülsün’s work represents a living archive of the city made by its users and told through her agency.
1 – Tanıl Bora refers to the absence of postcolonial experience as mahrumiyet [deprivation] in reference to Ali Bulaç. Tanıl Bora, Cereyanlar: Türkiye’de Siyasi İdeolojiler, Istanbul: İletişim, 2017, pp.96–97.
2- The declaration and the student commission report are accessible at Gülsün Karamustafa archives hosted by SALT Research. See http://archives.saltresearch.org.
3- The State Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Applied Arts were established in 1957, and the Gazi Institute of Education (Primary and Secondary Teachers’ College) was founded in 1926. Both institutions were reorganized as universities after the coup d’état of 1980. The Gazi’s curricula and educational model were contemporaneous with Germany-inspired models. The institute served as a format for a considerable number of underprivileged youngsters in the tabula rasa of Ankara within the framework of the state ideology and the urgent needs of the early Republic
4- Osman S. Arolat, ‘Sanatı Öğretenler bu İse’, ANT, no.151, 18 November 1969, p.15.
5- Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu was connected to ‘Blue Anatolianism’. Those who sympathized with ‘Blue Anatolianism’ suggested that ‘westernization’ was a return to the essence because Anatolia is the home to Greek and Roman civilizations. This approach profoundly influenced the reading of history, especially among archaeologists and historians. The believers were leftist humanists distancing themselves from Turkey’s official history. Bedri Rahmi’s wife, Eren Eyüboğlu, was an important painter. His older brother, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, was a writer, translator and art critic. Their sister Mualla Eyüboğlu was a restoration architect. Mualla’s husband, Robert Anhegger, was a Turcologist and the founder of Türk-Alman Kültür Derneği (Turkish-German Culture Association), one of the most progressive institutions in Istanbul in the 1960s. Bedri Rahmi visited the United States and taught there. He was a recipient of Ford and Rockefeller scholarships. Although not only interested in the French tradition, he studied under André Lhote in the early 1930s. Lhote’s impact on many artists from the south-eastern Mediterranean exceeds the scope of this text. However, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that the technical cubisms of Albert Gleizes, Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger and Lhote had more purchase on the art students of the periphery than those of Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso, a fact that throws another spin on the periphery’s selective habitation in modernity.
6- Prison Paintings were first shown at ‘A Promised Exhibition | SALT’, 2013, SALT BEYOĞLU and SALT Galata, Istanbul, available at http://saltonline.org/en/616/a-promised-exhibition (last accessed on 20 October 2018). The curators Duygu Demir and Merve Elveren juxtaposed the paintings against Bühne (1998). The deployment of the paintings and the installation in oppositional proximity unfolded a set of questions, such as why Gülsün kept the work to herself for all these years and why Bühne, a commissioned work, would first be shown in Europe and what may have been the kinds of constraints placed on the artist locally and internationally in terms of practices destined for a local context and an international one.
7- When the artist Lukas Duwenhögger questions the timidity in Turkish artists’ use of colour, she looks to Gülsün as a counterpoint. Gülsün mentions in an interview with November Paynter: ‘…but I wanted to shout and point out important issues and observations. It was probably the activist in me and the influence of Pop art and a period spent producing magazine illustrations, posters and banners when young, in order to make money. Colour was and still is a way to express my character and boldness and it seems that for the younger generation there is a fear of going too far with such a strong mode of self-expression.’ November Paynter’s interview with Gülsün Karamustafa, ‘The Bold and Poignant Palette of Gülsün Karamustafa’, Idea: Arts + Society, no.32, 2009, available at http://www.idea.ro/revista/index.php?q=en/node/41&articol=632 (last accessed on 19 October 2018).
8- Ibid.
9- ‘I’ve been trying to make images of this rapid change for a long time. Kitsch was first revalued in the paintings, and I began developing forms to create a more real, material foundation over time. It entered my practice as a living object, and began to guide me. I employ the aesthetics of bad taste in Turkey in my practice (wall carpets, assemblages, collages and paintings). When choosing a material, I’m really careful that it is really alive at this moment, that it has an important place in human lives. It is critical to me that it will or it has already an active use before it enters my practice. I do not institute a new proposal or make an interpretation of this new aesthetics that we are living with. I exhibit it and urge the audience to pause for a moment…’ in ‘Söyles ̧i Gülsün Karamustafa,Resimde Kitch Estetiği Üzerine,’ Üç Nokta, February 1987, pp.52–53. Translation by the author.
10- Interview by Gülsün Karamustafa with Orhan Gencebay. ‘Arabesk Türkiye’de en Çok Dinlenen Müzik Türüdür’ Gösteri, no.16, March 1982, p.76.
11- As Istanbul’s historical minority communities of Christians and Jews dwindled during the twentieth century, with the Great Catastrophe, the wealth tax of 1942, the pogrom following the race riots of 1955 and the 1974 Cyprus war as parts of the inner city were used by newcomers from rural areas.
12- The late writer Deniz Şengel argues cogently for the rebuttal of the typical reception of Gülsün’s practice: ‘In fact, the work of Gülsün Karamustafa, whose every exhibition and installation has received wide recognition, has been consistently taken up in terms of categories of psychological and socio-cultural decay that range from a vision of the work as a series of arguments on “arabesk sentimentality” and “fatalism,” to the “documentation” or “gratulatory illustration” of “decadence” and “rampant aesthetics of kitsch,” to the perception of the work as “transmitting to the viewer a certain dejection,” presumably about the loss of high culture, integrity and historical identity.’ Deniz Şengel, The Fallen Icon: A Rhetorical Approach to Gülsün Karamustafa’s Art 1981-1992, Istanbul: SALT, 2014, p.37–38, available at http://saltonline.org/media/files/the_fallen_icon_scrd-1.pdf (last accessed on 25 November 2018).
13- Gülsün in an interview by N. Paynter, ‘The Bold and Poignant Palette of Gülsün Karamustafa’, op. cit.
vasıf kortun 