OK, Back to Serious

If you’re worried, the worms are fine…
Throughout the Biennial there were red paper flyers, wrinkled up and thrown on the floor. If you picked one up, which I didn’t see many people doing, it was a list of injustices against women in Turkey, including honor killings, by Croatian artist Sanja Iveković.
In one of the school rooms there was an installation by Lado Darakhvelikze called “Ideal Media.” He was born in Kutaisi and lives in Arnhem. (I had no idea where either of these places is. So much for being educated… Georgia, on my list for places to visit.) Funny drawings on chalkboards and little videos, about how media coverage affects events. The school benches were on rockers, a nice touch.

Naim June Paik

Paik was the “big name” of the Biennial, and one of the only American representatives. Shown were several dozen “Life” magazines, each with a speech bubble coming from the cover figure, often about Paik’s sex life, dinner plans, or art events. Very low key and funny.
Fluxus stuff fit right into the flow of the show.

"Errorist Kabaret" (2009) by Etcétera

This very strange installation, by an Argentine collective, was like walking inside a junior high school project in the cafeteria, formally and conceptually. Which made it sort of fun. Etcetera "affirms error, compromise, confusion and surprise as productive qualities in life." Just like Kloe, always thinking positive...

"Postgraduate Education" by Sinisa Labrovic

Prostitution

1. It is not merely the oldest trade, it is eternal! Eros is the force in the very core of Life and existence, which keeps the Universe together... Eros and love are safe business. And you don't even need to be tough, only have some money and good will. You should avoid street prostitution because it is dangerous, both for you and for the girls, while elite prostitution is inaccessible to you, so you should settle somewhere in the middle. Girls in an apartment bring more work and more money, but increase the probability of the police breaking in. For establishing a legal massage parlour, you need a large sum of money. The most simple and the least dangerous form of business is to take girls to the clients' apartments.

2. Publish an ad in which you announce that you are looking for girls between 18 and 35 years of age for escort services. Buy a cell phone and a SIM card only for this business. Promise good money to the girls, but don't exaggerate. Make a list, collect contacts, arrange meetings, try out those girls who haven't done escort before. Avoid using words such as "prostitution" and "whore." Those who have done this sort of thing before and look decent can be employed immediately, since they aren't likely to give up after the first job. Choose the prettiest and cleverest ones, those who are willing to work.

3. (gives instructions about buying a phone, etc)... Your girls should be nicely dressed, preferably wearing erotic lingerie, and they should smell fine. Buy them condoms, mouth water, and a lubricant in case they end up with too many jobs in one night.

4. Work from 4 p.m. until midnight. After midnight, you will have mostly drunk, drugged and problematic clients. The price list should be agreed with the girls in advance, such as: 100 EUR per hour, 60-70 EUR for half an hour, 40 EUR oral sex only... bonus for anal sex, SM, and other specialties.

5. Take the girl to the appointment, park in a side street and wait, read books, educate yourself, learn a foreign language. Split the earnings: 60% to the girl and 40% to you. She will be happy and work better, which means that you will earn more... Friends and acquaintances are the best clients. Steady clients should not receive any discount, but have the girls stay longer, be more attentive, etc.

6. If you are good to the girls, they will not snitch on you... The main problem could be guys who beat up prostitutes. If the girl doesn't return in time, phone her... Policemen and dangerous guys who want free sex should be best handled by the girl herself.. Another problem may be lazy, fastidious, irresponsible, and rude girls.

7. In summertime, take the girls to the seaside. Tourists, especially Italians, will pay twice the usual fee.
When your business has taken off, you can extend the offer and, with a bit of luck, launch an elite trade.

You can take the other way -- keep the girls as slaves, use minors, and take all the earnings -- but that way is paved with stress and mostly ends in prison.

Be kind to the girls. If you are honest and some luck, you will have both money and sex. You will live happily ever after.

Above text is from the poster “Postgraduate Education” by Croatian artist Sinisa Labrovic. Read about him here. I find this work both devastating and funny in its matter-of-fact honesty. With our economy in shambles now, like much of the rest of the world, how easy is it to turn to darker pursuits to survive?
A bit of background on the Biennial. Many artworks, including posters, diagrams, and pamphlets, had text, always translated into English and Turkish. All videos were subtitled English and Turkish. A ticket into the three biennial venues was only 10YTL, or about $7, less for students (Documenta was very expensive). The sites I visited were well attended, both by Turks and foreigners.
Visiting the Biennial sites, my friend and I came away exhausted and down. The political nature of the work was relentless, never relieved by beautiful abstraction or historical distance. However, thinking about it now, I am impressed with the consistency of the curation. They didn’t waver. All these tiny voices, mostly railing against injustice in their native countries, but occasionally against the “machine,” were somehow cumulatively enervating. Like artists really can make a difference if they just tell their small personal stories.

“How can we live now?”

So, the other main reason I came to Turkey, besides curating the Trade Show, was to see the 11th International Istanbul Biennial. That Istanbul can pull this off is quite a feat (the Southern Californian attempts at regular biennials have been a failure). I saw two of the three sites, in a warehouse and a decommissioned school.
Every biennial is different. Some, such as Documenta, include big-name regulars on the international circuit. Some have big budgets, erecting buildings and large-scale sculpture/installation. Istanbul had neither of these this year. I recognized very few of the artists, most of whom were from the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and Asia. The artwork was temporary in nature: drawings on paper tacked to walls, cardboard sculpture, unframed photos. There were many videos resembling rough documentaries, without special effects or computer graphics.
The curation was extremely consistent—all about politics, strife, violence, poverty, economics, sexual and racial issues, etc. And it was generally bleak, although with a thread of black humor running through many of the works. The question asked was “How can we live now?” A friend commented to me that there weren’t a lot of answers, but many examples of how not to live.
In the next few posts, I’ll show you some specific artworks.

Joseph Beuys, Artist, Activist, Teacher

The museum presented Beuys' 2D works, a few video documentations of performances, and work of many of his students. I have never cared for Beuys before, turned off by his cult status. But this exhibit made me appreciate what a magnetic teacher he must have been.
From a wall label:

Joseph Beuys, drawings from 1974
Paper as a medium is of key importance for Beuys, who regarded drawing as “an extension of thought” that directly reflects the creative process… the fleeting drawings, words, and diagrams lend immediate visual form to Beuys’ teaching as a process in flux that sets discussions and thought processes into motion. For Beuys, learning was a matter of finding one’s own personal content, one’s goals and the paths one needed to attain them. He became involved only after his students presented him the results. Beuys’ group critiques were legendary—and anticipated with fear. “Beuys was very strict and very definite,” recalls Walter Dahn, “He delivered clear and definitive judgments concerning the works presented to him. And they really hit home.” For Immendorff, Beuy’s judgments were absolute: “It was like a stamp of quality.”

Imi Knoebel, Grace Kelly, 38 pieces “The icon Grace Kelly is referred to in an abstract repetition of total unreachability.”
Katherina Sieverding “… thematizes consumerism, glamour, mass media, and gender…”
Sabanci Museum in Sariyer is beautifully designed for seeing art, and surrounded by lush gardens. Restaurant prohibitively expensive.

Contemporary Art, Ancient Place

Sight-seeing in Sultanahmet, went into the Cistern, a Roman aqueduct that supplied the water for Byzantium (which became Constantinople, and then Istanbul). It’s held up by pilfered Doric and Ionic columns, and two Medusa heads.
This contemporary video projected hands into the water underneath a stretched screen. I don’t know if it’s part of the Biennial, but it certainly added to this lovely treat of a museum.
Threads by Lara Mezzapelle and Giacomo Deriu. 09/09/09

Planning my Return among the Turks

Finally getting excited about my upcoming trip to Turkey. Have started to collect the gifts to bring to my friends there and organize where I’ll be staying. Will start out in Istanbul, then travel to Eskisehir, then maybe Izmir (many artists from the Trade Show are from this city, and I’ve never been), then back to Istanbul for the opening at Isik University on September 23. May have to get over to my gallery in Ankara too, but time will be short for that much bus time.
I imagine walking in my neighborhood, the sounds and smells. It will be hot. The Istanbul Biennial will be in full swing with fantastic shows, I hope. But mostly I’m looking forward to seeing the friends I’ve missed so much.
Image: Trade Show, Edgar Varela Fine Arts, Los Angeles

The Next Istanbul Biennial will be POLITICAL

The September 2009 Istanbul Biennial is being curated by a Croatian Group, all women, called What, How & for Whom. The theme of the Biennial is “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” from Brecht and Weill’s “Three Penny Opera” (which I recently saw live, dark and fantastic).
I’ve edited WHW’s essay on how the Biennial will address the Opera’s themes:

The 11th International İstanbul Biennial takes its title from the song 'Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?', translated into English as 'What Keeps Mankind Alive?'. The song closes the second act of the play The Threepenny Opera, written exactly 80 years ago by Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill.
...
Isn't the question (What keeps mankind alive?) posed by Brecht equally urgent today? And is it not true that we live haunted by the fears of approaching global changes, consequences of which could have lasting disastrous effects, not unlike those that transformed the world after the economic collapse of 1929? And aren't today's questions about the role of art in instigating social changes equally pressing as they were in the 1930s, when the Left confronted fascism and Stalinism? ...
...
The Threepenny Opera thematicizes the process of redistribution of ownership within bourgeois society and, through a literary narrative, offers a still valid 'representation of capitalism itself—how to express the economic—or, even better, the peculiar realities and dynamics of money as such'.1 ...

'What Keeps Mankind Alive?' will serve as a trigger, as well as a certain script for the exhibition, allowing us and the artists to pose questions of economic and social urgency today. Even a quick look at the lyrics will discover many possible themes, such as the distribution of wealth and poverty, food and hunger, political manipulations, gender oppression, social norms, double morality, religious hypocrisy, personal responsibility and consent to oppression, issues certainly 'relevant' and almost predictable, which many exhibitions—especially contemporary biennial exhibitions—set out to engage with.
Today, biennial exhibitions are elements of cultural tourism through which cities attempt to use their benign and internationally communicative regional specificities to position themselves on the map of the globalized world; they are manifestations tending to 'cultural shopping' in which art is often presented as cool, fun, entertaining... Brecht was certainly critical of what he called a 'culinary' treatment of art solely as a means of entertainment, but he did not shy away from the entertaining role of art. In the popular and mass culture, as Brecht warned us, the problem is not pleasure, but its function...

Brecht invites us to rethink our position again and again, to see the world as amateur actors, without dulling our critical faculties or our potential for intervention and change by learning the rules all too well. As a writer and a director, Brecht continuously sought to slice open and display, then deconstruct and transform the theatre's 'production apparatus'—it is this approach that should lead us out of the current deadlock of 'contemporary art apparatus.' At this time, the question of 'usability' of Brecht means first and foremost a repeated need to observe the interaction of art and social relations. And in İstanbul and Turkey, where 'the conflict between an orthodox left position and contemporary art plays a critical role today in the understanding of contemporary art,'4 to exit the impasse of double-bind discourses of global neoliberalism and local ethno-nationalism seems to be the only endeavor worth all the trouble.