Interview with Hale Tenger [1993 - 1996]
The text below is from the book “Mission Impossible”, Galeri Nev Publications, Istanbul, June 1997, translated from Turkish by Fred Stark, edited by David Frankel, Zeynep Tenger
Part one of this interview was done in the spring of 1993. Three years later, using a transcript from those tapes and trying to remain faithful to the flow and spirit of the original, we communicated by e-mail between Turkey and the United States in order to make necessary corrections. As for part two of the interview, it was conducted entirely by e-mail in 1996. Strangely, although I have worked more with Hale than with any other Turkish artist, and have expended more effort on making her work known outside Turkey, I had never actually written anything about her. Indeed the idea of an interview came up because I was leery of being able to find the right diction to match her work. In the following conversations, I feel we have touched on the points in her work that matter most to both of us.
Part One: 1990-93
VASIF KORTUN: I’d like to ask the most important question right off: Why do you make art? One feels in your works the urgent need to say something–they immediately declare their main idea. I don’t often come across this daring kind of commitment in contemporary Turkish art, and I think it shows a serious need on your part to tell and to describe. Over the years, your work has increasingly clarified, crystallized, become more declarative and urgent. Was that drive always there?
HALE TENGER: When you first came to my studio, in 1990, I had never even had an exhibition, and you had only seen History of Time [1990]. Chronologically, Progress [1990] and Wishing Tree [1990] came later. History of Time is a little different from the other two, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all teetering, ready to fall. In Progress this goes so far as to seem to defy the laws of gravity, while in History of Time it’s less pronounced, more introverted and static. What I’m trying to say is that back then I was involved with myself, and there was no question of things like urgency or declarativeness. So when you look at those works, it’s actually me, myself, struggling to stay up, but threatening to crash at any moment. That focus you speak of, that urgency, came in when I broke away from myself–however much a person can be freed from herself, of course. My expression and its techniques developed as time went by.
VK: But your starting point for a work is still yourself, some anger or unease, and then your discovery of ways to express that. Of course when I say you start with yourself, I don’t mean in the sense of binding the subjective “I” to the work. But I’d also like to ask you about how you first got started how you became an artist.
HT: In my high school days I had some interest in art, as a thing of the feelings, but it was pretty undefined-though I was determined to go to art school, I didn’t know where my talent lay, or what I could do with it. Of course back then I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Though actually I should give myself a little credit as far as intention goes, because despite lack of guidance and support (though it was much better not to have those things, as I found out later), in fact despite the unfavorable milieu, by which I mean Turkey, I had a stubborn eagerness, a stubborn interest. You’ll notice I’m not giving the grammatical complement, what I was interested in, because I don’t want to say it was art. It was more an urge to put something out there. I mean there was no clear beginning when I said, OK now, I’ll do art, and I’ll become an artist. I just found myself making art. Maybe that was the only way I could manage to become, to exist.
VK: When did you start collecting materials off the street, taking everyday things you’d seen before and putting them back into circulation? Because that was what gave you a chance to build a distinctive language, or rather put you on the trail of that possibility. You mentioned how your teacher in England [at South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education] told you “get out and around.” Did that have anything to do with depression, or some kind of dead end?
HT: The idea of “getting out and around” was important, because it came at a turning point. Back in Turkey, I had been brought up in a system [Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts] where they took attendance every single day, so in Cardiff I was hanging out at the studio whether or not I was doing anything there. Then during the tutorials I had with two faculty members, I kept saying that I should
try this, I should try that. During one of those tutorials Michael [Hose] told me to get out, go down by the sea, get around, gather materials. That moment mattered because right then I was ready to hear it. It freed me up. And that’s how I started using various materials. In fact I got so caught up that finally the department sent me a written warning, Use more clay or you won’t get your M.A.! It was only later that I started using found objects.
VK: You didn’t start by making privileged objects from traditional materials, or by producing art “befitting the academy.” You didn’t find yourself in the continuity of that sort of tradition. Today this may seem natural and ordinary, but it was quite the opposite in the context of Turkish art in the ’80s-its tradition of derivative, ketchuplike neo-expressionist painting, and its conceptualist copycats. One thing is clear: you never considered the production of objects from privileged materials a valid means of expression for you.
HT: At some point during my first years at the Academy I saw a photograph of a Donald Lipski work in some magazine-a light bulb full of water standing on something like a bunsen burner you’d find in a school laboratory.1 It had a great impact on me. What appealed to me most about that piece was the directness of its statement, but it took time for that awareness to work its way into my expressive language. First I had to walk down previously trodden paths.
VK: In Turkey, arts like literature don’t much hesitate to articulate their times, but in the visual arts that kind of description is hard to find. So you couldn’t build a language on any preexisting tradition that had been over the same ground. In fact one might say that it’s only in recent years that artists in Turkey have become less institutionalized: a market has taken shape; there’s been a weakening of the art schools, and of their bureaucratic teachers and their extensions into the artistic community; the biennials have brought more international connections; and the artist has become more of an individual, a “civilian.” A work you did in 1992 for the third Istanbul Biennial, for example, I Know People Like This 2, landed up in court, accused of insulting the Turkish flag. This is an example of art pushing the existing laws, and of the friction between the state and civilian will and desire.
That brings me back to the question of urgency, which we’ve said was less pronounced at the beginning of your career but was always there, and has gathered momentum. Given the memory loss
that Turkey in particular suffers from, and the long years of silence, urgency is something that may indeed be needed.
HT: Urgency has to do with pain and anger-an urgent bringing forth of what has built up through long patience, long suffering. Suddenly you can’t bear to keep quiet. The rope snaps.
VK: You can’t bear it… And that shows verbatim in a few works that came in a run, like The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa -against apathy. Some writers argue that apathy in Turkey is a symptom of the separation between the public and the personal domains: given the sleazy politics, and the oppression, people tend to isolate themselves in their warm, secure private lives, creating a kind of civic cordon sanitaire. Apathy becomes a defensive gesture. But you came at this social attitude from just the opposite direction, by engagement. How does this relate to the problem of gravity, that teetering quality that you mentioned in History of Time, Progress, and Wishing Tree?
HT: I made all of them at a time when I myself was feeling wobbly, when my life was starting over in every sense-a time of deep depression. I was setting the meter back to zero, starting from scratch. History of Time came right at the beginning of that depression. After you and I first met, there was a period of serious introversion, a shutting in. When I look back on it, History of Time clearly heralds that crushing period. It’s like the calm before the storm. With Progress and Wishing Tree there’s a resistance to gravity, a return to the struggle after letting go. (A person can only look at things in her own time; it’s like not wanting to look at the obituaries in the newspaper if you’re having a wonderful day.) On the other hand both Wishing Tree and Progress are standing against the belief system invented by humans. There’s also the tragicomic situation of mankind boasting with everything he does.
VK: In a cliché sense, Wishing Tree has to do with fatalism, with being “eastern,” which is supposed to make one irrational. And Progress connects up, doesn’t it, with Union and Progress Movement of and the Young Turks, a particularly provincial modernist moment in our history, and also with scientific advances, Westernization, the belief in progress? Maybe Progress also unconsciously recalls our century’s tradition of modern sculpture, and pokes fun at the avant-garde.
HT: It’s a work that mocks progress and everything people think of as progress. It’s funny, but Wishing Tree rises on airborne roots-this business of faith, of going to places considered sacred, saying prayers, tying handkerchiefs and rags to a bunch of trees and waiting for your wish to come true. . . . Once, as I was climbing up Haghia Yorgi Hill on Büyükada [the island of Principo in the Marmara] I came across an irritating sight. All the trees below the church were hung with scraps of plastic, Kleenex, lengths cut from bikini straps etc. It was an ugly sight, but so was the whole situation.
VK: It has that poor bird you made in silhouette from a saw chain. . . .
HT: It’s just a pathetic bird trying to squeeze into a nest the size of its head. Just like the people who tie those handkerchiefs. The tree’s roots are exposed, perhaps it can hardly stand, but at least it tries to be the source of its own strength.
VK: Progress and History of Time seem to point to The Dream Before [1990]. All three treat the same idea: a certain view of history and a warning for our own time. I see History of Time as a breakpoint in Turkish art.
If urgency matters so much, how do you relate to a work once it’s finished and shown? If your work begins so close to yourself, does it live on for you when it’s finished, or is it over and done with?
HT: Urgency is not the situation with every work. In relation to my own works I’m not so interested in the past; I would never want to go back. I can’t stand repetition, and I guess that shows clear in my work. As for the rest, you can say that a person can only occupy the immediate present, the immediate spot, not the spot just before or after. But on the other hand the “I” is a continuous entity-we shouldn’t think of it as being interrupted. So in that sense there’s continuity, whether I want it or not.
VK: The names of your works are organic parts of them.
HT: My point of departure always has to do with making the sentence I’m living at the time. So when I don’t have anything to say, there’s no point in my getting into the studio. All this has to do with the work’s self-generation. As for its name, that either pops up spontaneously or comes out of rooting in books and dictionaries. Ultimately the name and the work are complementary, and mutually enriching.
VK: Which comes first, the work or the name? Or both together?
HT: Well, with The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa, for example, the name came straight out of what was there visually. The two went together. And the fact that both work and name suddenly emerged had to do with my reaction to public events. There was the killing of Professor Bahriye Üçok, by a letter bomb mailed to her home.2 Then right about that time, the papers were carrying the story of a man in jail who had to be taken to the hospital. He was an accountant who had drawn a sentence of a month or two over something connected with money. His relatives said that just before going to the hospital he had been babbling, “Don’t you see, I burst,”3 and reported that they saw blood on his pants. No physical ailment could be diagnosed, but he gradually lost consciousness and stopped talking and eating. It wasn’t long before we read that he had died. So that work came after a few such nasty incidents.
I Know People Like This [1992] is a name that came after the work was done. It’s based on the kind of person who is cut off from his own feelings, and who consequently makes other people suffer. This too was grounded in a reaction I was having, but it didn’t have what you call “urgency.” For a long time I didn’t know what to call it. I tried different alternatives and threw them away, until finally I was left with that very straightforward I Know People Like This.
VK: That work had a different meaning for me, probably because it was done during the Gulf War. People were selling gas masks, and we’d all been primed with the fear that Saddam Hussein would fire missiles with chemical warheads on Turkey-which, considering the Halabja massacre of the Iraqi Kurds, was quite probable! There were fathers who had pulled plastic bags over their children’s heads for protection, and had accidentally killed them. In I Know People Like This, the folds of the mop hanging down from the gas-mask hose, the way they seem to pour from a tubelike stick, from what looks like the brain to the mouth and then to a hospital bedpan, and the heartlike shape of the mop-it all made me think of the Gulf.
HT: Actually it’s not so very different-there’s an endless Gulf War going on inside the person the work is related to!
VK: There’s humor in your work, but I wonder if that humor isn’t a little black-not cheerful. Perhaps the work taunts the viewer, or holds him accountable, even as it has a funny side. I wonder what sort of smile it generates. There’s the pathetic stance of those men in History of Time-you keep waiting for them to go under, but they’re still funny. Or in Wishing Tree, when the spectator realizes that you’ve used a saw chain to draw a huge- beaked comical bird.
HT: I’m not one of these cheery people who laugh a lot. Maybe I do in my work what I don’t do in everyday life.
VK: In World Cracker [1992], there’s a kitsch crocodile, a nutcracker, crushing a toy globe in its jaws-the effect is comic, and simultaneously fairly kitsch. Then there’s I Know People Like This, a hard work that makes your throat tighten. Or think on the one hand of Everybody Has Right Not to Forget the Commonculturalhistory of Humankind [1991] and on the other of Pasarea Maiastra/Aphonia[1990].
HT: I guess they are not that funny anymore.
VK: Do they mark the end of a phase?
HT: Maybe. In my mind that era is related to the need for irony after the oppressive history of the ’80s in Turkey, and of course that includes my own past. I think the same applies to the works of Eastern Bloc artists after the Cold War.
VK: What came next? Was it Relic Box: Her Dish [1990]?
HT: A friend of mine who does also wry ironical works had made a little relic box. At first glance it looked solemn, but close up you saw that its ornamentation was tiny Japanese tourists holding cameras, with money spilling out of their pockets. And of course relic boxes always preserve His drinking glass, His hair, and so on. When I was giving a patina to the figures in History of Time, the pot I was using couldn’t take the acid anymore and finally its bottom fell out. So the plate in Relic Box: Her Dish is actually the bottom of the pot.
VK: Her Dish!
HT: Her Dish precisely! A weird plate with something like fossilized puke on it, resting on crimson velvet.
VK: Relic Box, The Dream Before, and Portrait of a Woman [1990] were all about man and woman. The articles you used in The Dream Before-a dustpan and broom-were homey but at the same time symbolized the two sexes. You’ve also got the witch’s broom, Hansel and Gretel, flying as lightness and liberation, and the witch hunt, attacks on women; and on the other side, neverending housework, drudgery. In that sense the plate in Relic Box, the dustpan and broom in The Dream Before, and the hawser, rope, and tying up that give us Portrait of a Woman are all interrelated. Of course the meanings in The Dream Before are multilayered. And in Portrait of a Woman the thorns on the rope could mean ferocity in women, the fear of women, fear of that part of women.
HT: The Dream Before started with a Laurie Anderson song of that name. I had the lyrics on the wall, right by the work, while I was installing it; I wanted the words to speak through the work, and vice versa. Anderson dedicates the song to Walter Benjamin, whom she quotes, through a conversation between Hansel and Gretel. It’s the text where Benjamin sees the angel in Klee’s Angelus Novus as reflecting his own view of history: he describes the angel “looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.”4 Benjamin’s angel of history also has its face to the past. It wants to repair all that’s broken there. But the storm from paradise keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future.
VK: Where does Pasarea Maiastra/Aphonia fit in all this?
HT: I remember at my first show you said that Pasarea Maiastra/Aphonia was the odd one out of those works. To me, since it had been made in opposition to the debate over that sculptures ought not to have pedestals anymore, there was nothing incongruous about it. It was talking to Brancusi, and my pedestal alluded to his ones, which are sculptures in themselves. The Pasarea Maiastra is a bird from Romanian folklore, believed to sing beautifully and to have magical powers. At the same time it names a Brancusi sculpture. After his elegant birds, mine is a freakish fowl that has lost its tongue and voice, has only head and feet, and is missing a body.
VK: How did I Know People Like This 2 take shape? Though I guess that before you did that you’d already done The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa and On the Basis of Reciprocity [1990].
HT: When On the Basis of Reciprocity first began to gel visually I had a David Byrne song on my mind, “Women vs. Men.” It starts, “She had psychic defenses/He had animal dreams.” And my work too is based directly on the confrontation of women and men.
VK: Is there any resemblance between the positions of the umbrellas in that work and, say, Wishing Tree? I remember how at Cracow we just couldn’t bring those umbrellas to their knees. An
umbrella will turn inside out with the first gust of wind, and is no good for self-defense.
HT: That resemblance is there, of course. Wishing Tree is ready to keel over with a little puff, and so are the umbrellas. An umbrella will follow the weakest lead, plus if you subdue one side of it the other side rebels. I still have to laugh when I remember what it was like installing them, those umbrellas were all over the place. The fact is they’re miserable, so at the same time there’s a sadness to them. The gear shifts, they can regularly be installed into their place, no problem, their direction’s plain. But they can only go in one direction, in the direction they’re facing at.
VK: Aside from with those blunt, stiff gear-shifts bearing down on the umbrellas in On the Basis of Reciprocity, I Know People Like This is the only erect, anthropomorphic work you’ve done. It’s male, and stays up if you push it.
HT: It looks like that from the outside, but inside it’s reeling! That’s classic, you know-to appear strong, not to show your weakness.
VK: Do your earlier works make things difficult for your later ones? I mean, an artist following a certain line of thought starts doing things in parallel with earlier things he or she has done-there’s a formalization, a kind of continuity of expectation. When you look at your works, does being aware of the ones behind you create a pressure, make it hard to act? By the time we get to Orator [1992] we see it as a typical Hale. The microphones in front of the figure are made out of electric shavers, so in Turkish you get the slang meanings of shave, “put someone on” and “make noise”; and then the figure’s face is a lock, so you have the idea of being tongue-tied, or, again, of putting people on instead of saying what should be said. In works like this, your own peculiar tools, your form of expression, the way you like to shuttle back and forth between language and image, have become a kind of trademark. How do you feel about that? Does it bother you? There’s no question with you of understanding what you’re doing, and how, only later; everything you’re doing is clear to you while you’re making the work.
HT: The business of figuring a work out after it’s finished ended with History of Time and Progress. After that I knew what I was doing and how and why I was doing it. However aware you are at the time, though, when you look back from a distance you might see connections between yourself and the work, details that you hadn’t noticed before.
After the first shows I felt a bit uncomfortable about producing single works, five or ten separate works side by side in the same show. I only managed to describe this discomfort clearly after my exhibition in the Atatürk Library, Necessity of Air, in 1992. That show marked a turning point for me, the beginning of a change, because I realized that after those first solo exhibitions I didn’t want to do that kind of work any more. This was right at the time of the third Istanbul Biennial. It’s
funny, but orbiting around the same subject, I produced two works at the same time whose languages are utterly different: I Know People Like This 2 spoke directly, whereas Necessity of Air was layered with references. What they expressed was similar, but the style of expression and the presentation were completely different. Anyway, starting with Necessity of Air I started preferring works that demanded time from their viewers, works that drew them in. Even though Necessity of Air appeared at the same time as I Know People Like This 2, the flexibility in the way it was put together made me feel much more at ease in the Atatürk Library. In those days the library’s exhibition hall wasn’t very popular with artists, and Zerrin Iren worked hard to shape it up. What I liked best, though, was that at that time it was a completely neutral space.
Part Two: 1993-96
VK: It always seemed to me that the three hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys in I Know People Like This 2 stood for the state of civil war that was making Turkey bleed in every way, even though it hadn’t been named, and some people were calling it low-intensity conflict. The Priapus statuettes (in local folklore: Ali Baba) in I Know People Like This 2 and the three monkeys were coextensive with Turkey, with violence and apathy feeding on each other I think that was at the heart of why your work looked different from a distance than it did up close: It’s when it’s far off that it looks good. Dragging you through the courts on the grounds that I Know People Like This 2 insulted the flag suited the prosecutor perfectly, with help from the yellow press, which published a detail of the work as if it were the whole thing. Actually, though, those Priapus statuettes of Ali
tied in to the female/male social descriptions of your previous work, and also to the figures in Commonculturalhistory of Humankind and to Down Up [1992], from your second solo show. As a woman artist, how do you see I Know People Like This 2?
HT: In Turkey there’s a distorted representation of violence as a problem of Western societies, an image that minimizes the violence there is right at home. Nobody wants even to think, much less accept, that Turkey’s silence in fact embraces violence. Anyone who points violence out encounters an immediate, extreme defensiveness-the soft underbelly — dead on. That I Know People Like This 2 looks different from a distance than up close is related to this situation; it’s inviting those people who insist that the stars look beautiful from afar to face the truth. Seeing the truth does not please me either, but I
don’t see an alternative to it.
Down Up was done a year before I Know People Like This 2, and deals specifically with the Kurdish problem in southeastern Turkey. It’s based on the Turkish expression “If you spit down there’s a beard, if you spit up there’s a mustache,” which means that the situation is irredeemable. The piece features ten maps of southeastern Anatolia, five below and five above, and Ankara is seen through the hollow arrows of an elevator panel right in the middle.
As far as being a woman artist, I’ll repeat something I said in an earlier interview: If I’d used the Venus of Willendorf instead of the Priapus figures, I couldn’t have gotten the same meaning; and in the same way, the fact that I used the Priapus because of what it inherently expresses, together with the fact that I’m a female artist, are nothing but an expression of a situation. If the violence, bullying, power, and so forth that we see in the Priapus figure pertain to the male identity, if the figure has a penis and not a clitoris, well, I can’t help it. In the world as it is, being born female brings with it certain burdens and differences. Like it or not, that’s how things are. What I’ve done is take a kind of snapshot of this situation.
VK: In Necessity of Air you use materials from the Atatürk Library to set up a sham scientific/ethnographic/historical field, pointing to the subjectivity of science, history, and anthropology. This matches work by certain foreign artists that I know you didn’t know at the time-work involved with institutional critique. I’m not sure I know why, but you clearly seem prompted by the same thing.
HT: I couldn’t have guessed at the eventual structure of Necessity of Air when I started it; it developed as I went along. I had this splendid opportunity to do an installation using materials from the Atatürk Library, and also from two city museums. It was terrifically appealing to go into the library’s storerooms and hunt out books, armchairs, tables and so forth. The most enjoyable thing about the show was the process of installing it, and being totally free as to the end in sight. Plus the fact that it was impossible to repeat this installation. In the end, the zone I established reflected the typical Turkish approach to museology so well that some people who had never seen the library before thought the exhibition hall normally had those objects in it-that furniture, those carpets and curtains, and so on. Ultimately the installation was involved in criticism of a country, embracing criticism of institutions in an indirect way, but going well beyond it.
VK: A while after this, in Decent Deathwatch: Bosnia-Herzegovina [1993], you worked on another very tangible issue that I think is related to the first: you were the first Turkish artist to do a work on Bosnia of any scale. You didn’t depict the events there tragically, or create a stereotyped drama of human suffering; instead you went to the refugee camps in Turkey, listened to the Bosnian women there, and recorded their voices, their personal histories and stories. The work required preparation and research, including things like getting permission to go out to the camps, of a kind that has appeared in all your subsequent art. If I’m not mistaken, this kind of labor began with Necessity of Air.
HT: During the research phase for the Biennial, I came across a book by Mehmed Neşrî, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ.5 A chapter on the conquest of Istanbul by Sultan Mehmed in 1453 caught my attention; the excerpt I used in the installation told how after the conquest, when no one answered the call to settle in the new capital, Sultan Mehmed issued an edict by which hordes of people, both rich and poor, were forced into a kind of exile there. I also included newspapers like Vatan, Vakit and Söz, from the late Ottoman and Republican periods, which I found in the library’s archives, as well as items from the original print and lithography collections. And I pored through old manuscripts and
books in the secondhand stores, and put two volumes I found there in the show. One, describing the experiment that gave the exhibition its name, was called İlm-i Eşya (The science of things); the other was a dictionary from Ottoman times. Curiously, this dictionary does not contain the word “nose.” “Eye” is there all right, and so is “ear,” but not “nose.” This is because the book was printed during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid the Second. He had a large nose, so he forbade anyone to utter the word in public, or to put it in writing. This dictionary, then, was one victim of Abdülhamid’s despotism.
Decent Deathwatch: Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the other hand, grew out of five months of research. It came at a time when the international duplicity over Bosnia was becoming obvious, and I was beginning to think about what I might do personally. I decided to go to the Kırklareli Camp for refugees who had managed to escape from Bosnia. After a long bureaucratic hassle to get a permit, I went up there with my interpreter, Yasemin Özçelik. For two days I talked to the people in the camp, men, women and children. The Turks running the camp had denied me permission to take photographs or make videos, so apart from a few shots I took surreptitiously all I got were recordings of
their voices. Listening to their first hand stories of what they had suffered was a terrible, tragic experience that I can’t begin to describe. I came to realize that no matter how closely you take an interest, sympathize, or follow events in the media, you’re never going to really feel it, really grasp what’s happened, until you come face to face with those who have been through it.
When we got back to Istanbul Yasemin and I sorted out what was on the tapes. After the parts where she and I were talking had been weeded out, Serdar Ateşer mixed the tapes so that some voices were close up, some far off, some consecutive, others superimposed. Then he added a sound much like the bombers from World War II as a background. For five months I clipped articles and pictures from books, magazines, and newspapers. And I recorded images of Bosnia from TV shows. Then I selected material from this whole collection and made photocopies, which I put inside jars full of water. The sound system was concealed, with speakers on all four sides of the room, as if the very walls were speaking. What I was after was the impassable gulf between direct information, direct contact, and what we get secondhand. I wanted visitors to feel in their bones the void into which the Bosnians had been shoved, the drama of their untouchability, and I wanted them to start thinking about it.
The shelves held some 800 jars, with only one repetition-a news item that had appeared in the Herald Tribune under the heading “Human Genes Give Clues to Ancient Migrations.”6 The message was that after twelve years of genetic research, a team led by Luca Cavalli-Sforza had devised a map showing migrations in human history, and had reached the conclusion that the very first migrations had taken humankind from Africa to the other continents.
VK: You dealt with two different situations in I Know People Like This 2 and Decent Deathwatch: Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Turkey, Bosnia was a matter that the so-called democratic sector didn’t mess with, leaving it to the Islamic sector; the other matter [Kurdish problem] was one in which the so-called democratic segment of society showed more interest from the beginning. In both of these two works you treated the subject matter with the same seriousness, not according to a political ideology but in line with your view of life.
HT: I got flak from both the right and the left because I dealt with Bosnia. A group of women all wrapped up in black, and veiled, came to the Women’s Library and Research Center-they had seen something about the exhibition on TV. They were dumbfounded when they saw me. Why on earth, they asked, did you do an exhibition on Bosnia? Then a group of leftists were a little contemptuous for the same reason. The Serbian Consul insisted on coming to the library to see me, and we spent a long time in fruitless argument. But the strangest, most unexpected reaction came from a Western European lady in the Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly. The moment she realized what the subject of the work was, she asked me sharply why it wasn’t the Kurds, and stalked out without waiting for an answer.
When people assume that this or that group has a monopoly on a certain subject, or try to rank the importance of events that are all desperately urgent, or view anything at all from that possessive standpoint, it makes my flesh crawl. People who think that way are living on artificial respiration. Whether in the name of justice or the Lord, what they do should be regarded with great suspicion. I Know People Like This 2 also drew some interesting, heavy criticism on the “educated Islamic” front. Even though they themselves criticize the system, they had-and indeed were compelled to have-an intolerance toward criticism that made it impossible for them to decipher the work. Because they are stuck at a certain point in terms of the issue of men versus women, and because the work attacks what I earlier called the soft underbelly, they were led to a purely emotional reaction which was accompanied by a threatening attitude. In fact a woman complained to the public prosecutor. That complaint was a setup, and it was after that the prosecutor began his investigation.
VK: Let’s talk about Portrait of Kant [1994], which marked a sudden turn in your work. Using materials like those in Necessity of Air but this time appealing to four of the senses-hearing, smell, touch, and sight-you set up a space halfway between interior and exterior, yet within the institutional bounds, the shell, of current art. The space, with tree bark that you actually walked on going through it, recalled a forest in North Central Europe. You know the civilized feel and smell those forests give off, maybe because they’re controlled. On the other hand, though, behind a gauze curtain there was the roar of a storm and leaves, your way of preparing the visitor for Kant. So you’d started out to take a picture of the world you lived in, and ended up taking the picture of a description. Why Kant in 1994?
HT: I was getting ready for an exhibition in Poland, and I read an essay by Boleslaw Micinski that really affected me, “Portrait of Kant.”7 This was the germ of the project, but then that exhibition was cancelled. A few years later, though, I had the opportunity to put together the Kant project after all. And a good thing too-I’d carried it around in my mind for a long time, so it had steeped thoroughly.
Micinski’s essay ended with a long “Author’s Note,” dated December 15, 1941. Here Micinski says that his aim in writing the essay is to make Kant’s portrait in words rather than with brush and paint, and explains that his true objective is to transpose concepts into images. He says that the notorious monotony and colorlessness of Kant’s life have made it very difficult to write the essay, but it’s nevertheless a very successful text. That’s why it was so tempting for me to try and bring off in three dimensions what Micinski had done in words. Of course there was also the appeal of Kant’s incredible obsession with order and control. Just think-Kant asked a neighbor to cut down some poplar trees because their shadows were changing as they grew, and they were cutting off his view of the Königsberg Tower. One day a student of his who had had a button missing on his coat for a while showed up with the button sewn back on, and Kant begged him to rip it off again, saying, “I’m no longer used to the sight of it.” He’d also write the same note over and over again, reminding himself, “Avoid bad dreams.”
VK: Things that you might once have made works in their own right, and might even have displayed separately, here show up as pieces of one larger installation: the pillow with nail points sticking out of it, for example-Kant’s pillow-or the inkwell and “avoid bad dreams” note on the table.
HT: In a way, this has become an unfortunate obsession. Individual works, individual expressions, have come to seem inadequate, and to that extent my job has become harder. Those points jabbing up through the pillow weren’t nails, by the way; they were the spikes on a dog collar, to protect the dog against wolves.
VK: After the Bosnia work you installed a piece in Arnhem using material found in the building, as you’d done in the Atatürk Library.
HT: In the part of the building where I built Sometimes You See/Sometimes You Don’t [1995], there was an early-Christian relief on the wall. It had been preserved in its original site when they built a wing onto the museum. For a show called “Self Determination,” Mirjam Westen had asked me to do a new work besides installing I Know People Like This 2 and Bosnia. So I took my materials with me to Arnhem to install the new work in situ. Sometimes You See/Sometimes You Don’t took its final shape there; for example, it was only once I was there that I decided to put a copy of the first X-ray picture, which Konrad Roentgen had taken of his wife’s hand with a ring on her finger, below the relief. And then I decided to place below that an illustration of human evolution. And so on.
I also used sound again: a soft washing of waves on the shore was repeated endlessly out of the drain of an empty bathtub. In addition, there was a concrete tie to Decent Deathwatch: Bosnia Herzegovina: while preparing for “Self Determination” I read in a magazine that the study on human genes that I’d used in the Bosnia work had finally come out in book form, as History and Geography of Human Genes.8 I was in Paris at the time, and the book hadn’t yet made it to the shops. So I ordered it from England. I set up a little reading nook in the room I was installing in and put in it a chapter from the book called “Genetic History of World Populations,” which describes the first human migrations, the movements that spread out from Africa with the discovery of agriculture, taking humankind in different directions. It tells, for example, how the first settlements took shape in Anatolia and later Europe, starting from the Middle East.
VK: What were those figures flying over punchball?
HT: They were toy Princess Leias. In Star Wars she’s the symbol of goodness itself. In my work, though, she’s there encircling mind [punchball] not as goodness itself but as its representation, and a science fiction symbol at that.
VK: Offering no hope, in other words. Then there was that train installation in Europe in 1996, and before that Ephesus. . . .
HT: On a trip to Ephesus before the show I was taking photos of the places I intended to work with. On the stairs in front of the library sat a peasant woman, with a young man behind her. By coincidence, just to their rear was a statue, one of four-their originals are in Austria-depicting Arethe, the symbol of virtue. When the man and woman left, I took the same shot again. I’ve visited Ephesus time and again since my childhood, and it always makes me aware of our mortality. When I was little, every earthquake [in Izmir] made me think that our end had come like the Ephesians. So these two photos depicted in a very good way that ephemeral quality, being there and then being gone.
Later I went to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Selçuk and got a list of all the births and deaths in the town that year, and I did a panel showing all those births and deaths day by day, right up to the exhibition’s opening date. The double photo went at the beginning and end of each series.
VK: How did they find you for the train piece? I mean, it was the real Orient Express!
HT: The show’s curator had seen my work in the “Self Determination” event in Arnhem, and he got in touch with me. The train exhibition was especially interesting because it was in motion. The Flemish phrase Zij Sporen has two meanings: “side tracks” and “she tracks.” The show started in Brussels and visited nine or ten Belgian cities, plus Lille in France and Maastricht in Holland. The artists had been invited to create special projects based on the semiotics of the railway, including concepts like nomadism, deterritorialization, etc. The idea of an exhibition on a train was exciting, but I have to confess I wondered if there wasn’t something forced about it. At this rate, I thought, it’ll be trains today and who knows what tomorrow. Well, I needn’t have worried. When the train rolled into the station at opening time, with the cars carrying our work in the rear, when you saw that it would really be taken from one point to another, where people could see it, no doubts remained.
The show had one very sad aspect, when both Helen Chadwick and Chohreh Feyzdjou died a month before it opened. Seeing the projects they were working on brought to completion, and sensing their heavy absence. . . . Each artist selected the type of car he or she wanted. Some opted for a mail car, some for a passenger car; my choice was a freight car.
VK: Why that, Hale?
HT: For its associations with loads. In Turkish that word’s the same as “burden,” so there’s the burden of being human, of things weighing on oneself, and the fact that the real burden we bear in life is ourselves. Using the fact that a railway car travels both ways, I set up a totally symmetrical work, with an apple tree at each end, upside down, roots in the air, apples under them, spang in the middle two passenger seats covered with hair, and so on. What concerns me is the voyage of man in history-the way people are constantly on the move, from place to place, the making of something called a train and then, traveling on seats of imitation leather, always wishing to forget as they move along.
VK: Are trains for forgetting or for remembering? I think, for example, of Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa. And the train is so different from other modes of transportation-it stands for a world where memory is powerful and collectively organized, for being swept along, fleeing, the journey toward death. . .
HT: People usually want to forget, or to remember selectively. There are still some people, for instance, who can step up and say there never was a Holocaust, or that there was one but that it could never happen again in Europe-and then before even half a century goes by you have Bosnia. So I don’t think memory is all that powerful in our world. And that’s why we must never weary of remembering, as with Helen Chadwick’s project, which dealt with the Holocaust. I’d even go so far as to say that we should remind Europe of rotten apples. What’s that all about, you’ll ask, but just think of the Halle in Brussels where they sell apples with little rabbit figures on each of them. Hard to believe, but all these apples were grown with a little rabbit-shaped sticker on them, and the stickers were taken off individually as the apples ripened! Or there’s a marketplace in Stuttgart where you’d swear the loops of garlic were artificial, you have to get up close to see they’re real. They seem turned on a lathe. And the tomatoes are all six centimeters in diameter.
VK: The work you did for the fourth Istanbul Biennial was called We didn’t go outside; we were always on the outside/We didn’t go inside; we were always on the inside [1995]. The bonded warehouse they used for the Biennial had a little house in it, which I suppose the guards sat in to keep warm in the days when the place was a customs warehouse. You took this thing upstairs and laid barbed wire around it, creating a kind of border. The moment a visitor stepped inside it, he’d be immersed in Turkish music from the radio and the sight of kitsch calendar leaves on the windows, showing scenery. It brought warmth, a homey feeling, and also a kind of longing. The fact that it was inside a customs building (borders/countries/homeland/exile) coupled with the “refuge” and shelter of that little hut (pictures stuck to the windows on the world) gave it all a queer twist to signal the mode of coming into being in that milieu. And of course other meanings arose from the barbed wire, which made it a prison as well as a border guard-post. On top of that there was the work’s name, which you took from an Edip Cansever poem, and which made things that more complex.
HT: Everyone thought that guard house had been carried upstairs, but when I first went to see the warehouse it was on the second floor, right where I would later display it, standing in a corner. All we did was drag it out in the open. There were other huts on the second floor as well, but I wanted that one because of its interior, especially the way those pictures from the calendars were plastered on the windows. The hut itself, just the way it was, said so much in that space. And so what I wanted to do took shape in my mind. That music from the radio was actually songs from my childhood when there was nothing but radio. There were sad songs and happy songs with simple with simple naive lyrics. On purpose I left the walls unpainted in the section where the guard house stood. I badly wanted those walls to be just as they had been when the place was a customs warehouse, because the Fez Manufactory, where the previous Biennial had been held, had also been grotesquely prettified. However after the exhibition it was left just like that, unused, and it remains unused to this day. It’s like the tradition of the drawing room in a Turkish home-you fix the room up to be the nicest you’ve got, but you only use it when guests come. When the Biennial is over, the book is closed. Besides, this project had a direct relation to the work I did for the Third Istanbul Biennial; it was a response to the mentality standing behind my being taken to court.
VK: How do you feel about being Turkish but mainly being known and appreciated abroad, which is also where you’re mostly written up? You live in Istanbul, but you’re on the periphery of your own country’s art institutions, barely accepted. At the same time, you’re listed in a book to be published by Harry Abrams in New York as being among the hundred most prominent artists of ’90s. It’s an odd paradox.
HT: Istanbul subjects you to a range of paradoxes anyway, so what’s one more or less? But it does give you a boost to get noticed abroad. Naturally it’s constricting to work in Turkey where the arts in general are highly limited and the audience you’re reaching out is focused almost only on biennials held every couple of years or so. . . .
VK: All right, but in 1994 you started getting invitations from abroad, and finding your way into major exhibitions, and on the one hand this is exciting, in the sense of a new network of circulation and so on. I played a small part in this. But on the other hand it’s a bit fishy: when the central cultures show interest in a certain style at a certain time, you always have to question what’s behind it. Maybe I think this because I can never be pleased with anything, but I’d like to know what you think. Of course if you remember that Turkey doesn’t have much in the way of a community, audience, or readership, I guess one shouldn’t complain. In the past we had artists who lived in Europe or America and survived by sending work to Turkey. Now we’re starting to get the reverse: people who live in Turkey and export work to Europe and the States, surviving through institutional support. How does this strike you?
HT: Turks are a suspicious lot, I must say. Make your mark or stay obscure, either way you can’t win. The attention received has to do directly with the work you do. How else could things be? If you think of it from your point of view as a curator, with competition so intense, who would show a work or pick up an artist if he or she won’t stand up for it?
The fact that interest in art changes direction and focuses on new areas from time to time is rooted in a number of historical, social, and economic causes. If the East is attracting attention in general again right now, I think the chief reason has to with closed societies opening up. This applies to Turkey as well as to countries like the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary and so on. Until very recently, Turkey was very weakly tied to the outer world; it was a very self-enclosed affair. In the end, interest in the Orient has always been conditional, and that’s true for the East as well, for whatever it happens to be West of. Istanbul won’t look at Kars without good reason, or Ankara at Baku. But the face of the East, like a baby that can’t take its eyes off its mother, is always turned toward the West. When I graduated and was coming back to Turkey, for a number of confused reasons I wasn’t sure where I wanted to live. But I must confess that when I made my decision shortly afterwards to live in Istanbul, there was something I subtly wanted to prove: that I could remain in Istanbul, a city that courts artists coming from the West, or who live in the West, and make a success of it both here and there.
We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that in today’s Turkey there are far more alternatives than in the past. It was very natural for artists of the previous generation to choose a life abroad. I think that as time goes by and both communications and travel become still easier, the hierarchic importance assigned to where an artist lives will fade. In short, changing conditions mean that the situation of the artist, too, is constantly changing. Also, of course, there’s a question of vogue in all the winds of interest blowing through the world. Some things are going to be “in” at any given time. I feel this has to do with life and topicality, and I suppose now it’s the turn of the East. Who knows, maybe this will free the West from being hated and worshipped, and the East from being a mirror to the West.
VK: Okay, Hale, one last question. When you’re building a work, or answering with your works the question posed by a curator or institution, on the day the installation finally takes shape do you have any question in your mind like “Where am I,” or “Where do I stand vis-a-vis the general description of this work”? You don’t, for example, trouble with criticism of the institution in which the work is displayed, though you do deal with that in a certain sense-one thinks of Necessity of Air in the Atatürk Library run by the Istanbul Municipality, or Birth vs. Death at Ephesus. And then there’s your ongoing relationship to objects, which has been there since your 1990 shows and sets your work apart.
HT: If you’re talking about a general awareness, of course I’m aware of what I’m doing and where it stands. But in the act of turning the work out I don’t ask, or want to ask, such questions. The moment I did, the zest would probably go out of it. Whatever it is I want to get across, whatever I see as the best means to do it, whatever the place I’m doing it demands, whether building, city, or country, that’s how I work.
Something I can’t quite describe or explain is the fact that lately I’ve been turning out projects that self-destruct. (I like putting it that way, a kind of Mission Impossible thing.) At first glance the reasons seem obvious enough-the hauling of crates out of the studio, or being fed up with Turkey’s red tape when you want to send a work abroad. But there’s another side to it. Increasingly I’m moving away from permanence based on the “work of art.” In fact it’s gotten so I can’t even bear to imagine the kind of thing that might be “permanent.” Right now there’s no way I can tell if this situation is itself permanent or only a passing phase. All I know is that these are my feelings at the moment, and there are other artists in the same boat.
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1. Building Steam No. 266, reproduced in Art in America, November 1985, pp. 132-33.
2. Associate Professor Bahriye Üçok, 1929-90, was on the faculty of the Ankara University School of Divinity. She was known for work on subjects toward which radical Muslims were hostile-secularism and women under Islam, for example. On October 6, 1990, she was killed by a letter bomb.
3 In Turkish, the verb çatlamak, literally “to burst,” connotes extreme frustration and exasperation.
4. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 259-60.
5. Mehmed Neşrî, Kitâb-ı Cihan-nümâ, 2nd vol., ed. F. Reşit Unat, Mehmed A. Köymen (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1987), pp. 708-9.
6. Louise Levathes, “Human Genes Give Clues to Ancient Migrations,” International Herald Tribune, July 29, 1993.
7. In Jan Kott, ed., Four Decades of Polish Essays (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 148-81.
8. L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Tags: 1997, artists, interviews