Şener Özmen with Erkan Özgen, "Tate'e Giden Yol (Road to Tate Modern)," video, 7'13" (still), 2003. Courtesy the artist and Outlet-Istanbul.

While preparing to travel to Diyarbakır, the largest city in southeastern Turkey, I discovered that telling Turkish people who live outside of that region that you’re going to visit Diyarbakır is akin to telling an average suburban American you’re going to hang out in an inner city housing project or along the wall dividing Israel and Palestine. Their eyes grow big, there’s a lot of gasping and “ooooh”ing, and they ask you, incredulously, “why would you want to go to Diyarbakır? It’s very dangerous there, you know.” Some treated it a bit like I was going on safari–a worthwhile, possibly exotic and educational, endeavor, as long as I had the proper guidance–and protection. Because Diyarbakır is not only the largest city in southeastern Turkey but also the capital of Kurdish culture in Turkey and the epicenter of a significant amount of violence throughout the 1980s and 1990s, inevitably the news of my travels sparked conversation about “the Kurdish question”–that is, the question of what freedoms and rights ethnic Kurds living in Turkey should be granted. For example, since the founding of the Republic, teaching Kurdish in schools and printing or broadcasting media in Kurdish has been outlawed, and celebration of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, was forbidden. In the past five years some of these restrictions have been eased, but the subject remains controversial, with many über-nationalistic Turks remaining opposed to the reforms.

So why would I want to travel to Diyarbakır? The art scene in Turkey is famously concentrated in Istanbul–what interest could a formally war-torn and politically unstable region of the country hold for a yabancı (foreigner)? In fact, Diyarbakır has produced some of the most active, intelligent, and influential figures in contemporary Turkish art. These would include artist and curator Halil Altındere, Berat Isik, Ahmet Öğüt (who, along with Banu Cennetoğlu, represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009) as well as Suat Öğüt and Mehmet Öğüt, Erkan Özgen, and Cengiz Tekin. (Fikret Atay, another well-known Kurdish artist, actually hails from Batman, a smaller city located about two hours from Diyarbakır.) All of these artists have exhibited extensively both throughout Turkey and internationally. But the godfather of the Diyarbakır art community is undoubtedly Şener Özmen. For the past twenty years, Özmen has worked not only as an artist but also as a poet, art critic, translator, and teacher. He collaborates constantly with his fellow Diyarbakır-based artists, has nurtured a new generation of artists, produces texts for exhibition catalogues, designs covers for Lîs Publishing (a prominent Kurdish language publishing house based in Diyarbakır), writes fiction and poetry, and supports the work of the Diyarbakır Arts Centre. In an essay included in the recently published monograph A Sener Ozmen Book, critic Süreyyya Evren describes him as “an artist who cannot relax.” When I visited Diyarbakır, I was honored that Özmen took the time from his busy professional and personal life (he is also a father and husband) to serve, along with Cengiz Tekin, as an attentive and wildly entertaining host. At one point, while we were riding a dolmuş (mini-bus) from Diyarbakır to have breakfast at Hasankeyf, a historical site located on the Tigris River (which, sadly, is likely to be destroyed in the near future by a hydroelectric dam project), Özmen casually remarked that this was the first day off from work that he had ever taken. It sounds like hyperbole, but given his extraordinary output, I am inclined to believe this was true.

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Gregory Sholette, "Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture," Pluto Press, 2011

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). A graduate of The Cooper Union (BFA 1979), The University of California, San Diego (MFA 1995), and the Whitney Independent Studies Program in Critical Theory, his recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson for University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson for MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006, 2008), as well as a special issue of the journal Third Text, co-edited with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.”

Gregory Sholette's books

Sholette recently completed the installation Mole Light: God Is Truth, Light His Shadow for Plato’s Cave, Brooklyn, New York, and the collaborative project, Imaginary Archive, at Enjoy Public Art Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand.

Gregory Sholette and collaborators, "The Imaginary Archive and Wellington Collaboratorium," Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, 2010

Sholette is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, and teaches an annual seminar in theory and social practice for the CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design.

Gregory Sholette, "Mole Light: God Is Truth, Light His Shadow," still, Plato's Cave, Brooklyn, New York, 2010

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Gregory Sholette speaks about “God Is Truth and Light His Shadow” at Plato’s Cave, NY, 2010

Being familiar with the angle of Sholette’s work, I picked up Dark Matter and read the Preface and Acknowledgments. Yet before I was done with page 1, I got up to sharpen a pencil. You want to give this book the appropriate attention; it will alert your conscious while enlightening you on the structure of our creative universe. Dark Matter is a metaphor for “amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices – all work made and circulated in the shadows of the formal art world, some of which might be said to emulate cultural dark matter by rejecting art world demands of visibility, and much of which has no choice but to be invisible,” in Sholette’s words. The mechanics, tactics, and power of art activism and politicized practices are unveiled with direct references, drawing out the behind-the-scenes of the art world within today’s economic landscape.

It’s an honor to present Gregory Sholette to you today. Sharpen a pencil and pick up Dark Matter.

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Three things this week…

Maika Pollack recently wrote a wonderful review in The New York Observer about the current Glenn Ligon show at the Whitney Museum. As I visited the galleries about a week ago I kept coming back to questions around ways to teach about race and even perhaps making sociopolitical statements through the use of beauty. I mean, really, this is a beautiful show and it should be seen by teachers and students, as hard as that may be in late spring with the proverbial “testing period” hanging over everyone like an anvil. Yinka Shonibare MBE came to mind immediately. Not since Shonibare’s participation in the group exhibit, Ahistoric Occasion, just a few years ago at Mass MoCA, had I been confronted with work that was so simultaneously tough and gorgeous. The mammoth work, “Hands”, greets viewers stepping from the elevator- an obvious protest image (in this case, from the Million Man March) that needs no wall text to explain its connection to dissent. The text pieces in the adjoining room quietly pelt visitors with quotes about being black in America. Legible passages at the top of each work become muted and ambiguous as they return to the floor- much like fireworks as they explode and disappear. Even the installation, “To Disembark”, inspired by the story of Henry “Box” Brown, a former slave in a Virginia tobacco factory who literally arranged to be mailed in a wooden crate to Philadelphia in order to escape slavery, pulls you toward each piece in order to hear artists such as Billie Holiday and KRS-One. By the time you come full circle and are confronted with Ligon’s recent neon works, including “Rückenfigur”, America is literally turning away and facing the other direction. Being black in America- past and present- is shared through music, text, painting, installation and sculpture. It isn’t pretty, but the initial beauty of this show is what gets us to consider the works thoughtfully in the first place.

This brings me to my second item for the week, since we’re discussing turning away and facing the other direction.

Judith Dobrzynski (Real Clear Arts) and Lee Rosenbaum (Culture Grrl), among many others, have taken a stand regarding the Milwaukee Art Museum’s upcoming Summer of China show. Both authors, as well as this one, feel that museums have to begin making some kind of statement about the two-month detention (kidnapping) of Ai Weiwei. Museums that put together shows at this point with art on loan from China, without making any kind of attempt to address the issue surrounding Ai Weiwei, run the risk of appearing indifferent to the whole situation. Mary Louise Schumacher really sums it up in her May 20th Journal Sentinel piece which got Judith and Lee going in the first place.

Finally, a public service announcement… of sorts.

A few posts back I took on the idea of teaching graffiti in the classroom. Just thought everyone might enjoy this follow-up from The Art Cops. Priceless. Also kind of wondering what these two would dig up on a trip to China. I mean, why stop in L.A.?

"Tate Modern: Tomorrow Is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)" installation produced by Not An Alternative for the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary show “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents.” The work implicated corporate sponsor, Morgan Stanley, for its role in the economic crisis. The piece was accompanied by an essay situating the work art historically as in intervention on participatory art, while simultaneously linking it to other local campaigns targeting Tate sponsorship. May 14-16, 2010 Photo by Not An Alternative.

I encountered the art group Not An Alternative for the first time about a month ago in Corona, Queens, where Tania Bruguera (featured last month in 5 Questions) had assembled a panel on “useful art.” What immediately impressed me was the group’s ability to articulate its ongoing project, which aims both to create new spaces for cultural production and to question the ways that various participatory structures (social media, election processes, relational aesthetics) exclude certain subjects and amplify social and economic inequalities by means of participation.

Through their highly engaged work, work that functions somewhere between political activism, social service, and institutional critique, Not An Alternative confront the limits of what political theorist Jodi Dean has called, after a variety of critical theoretical debates, “communicative capitalism.” In a time of communicative capitalism, our political and social participation is increasingly exploited by the use of new media. Not An Alternative foregrounds this fact, presenting ways of navigating a relatively new digital landscape in which values once cherished by the militant left and avant-garde alike–participation, reflexivity, interactivity–have become corporate watchwords for how neoliberalism manages consent in a networked age.

Networked for some, but obviously not for all. Not An Alternative’s work is also crucial in the ways that it foregrounds exclusion, offering ways to visualize the limits of participation in a society in which obviously one’s ability to participate is largely determined by social and economic privilege. As Not An Alternative said during their presentation in Corona, referring to their collaboration with a homeless advocacy group in the Bronx (discussed below), they recognize the important of “desubjectifying” themselves, where to draw attention to their efforts may work against the causes of the community groups with whom they choose to work.

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Photo by Daniel Tucker

I’ve known Daniel Tucker for about five years now and I’ve always thought of him as a true Chicago artist, somewhere in between artist, organizer, writer, and administrator and always interested in collaboration and bringing in multiple perspectives to any given situation. For anyone that’s worked with him, they know that Daniel’s candor can be both disarming and challenging. When one gets involved in Daniel’s projects, like I have in the past, he’s straightforward and conscientious in his process. Is that a Chicago thing? I’ve come to think of it that way, probably because of him.

He’s done a lot of amazing work, like founding AREA Chicago six years ago and then, when he wanted to move on, gracefully stepping back from the project to be taken on by new energetic group of organizers. What I love about AREA (which stands for Art Research Education Activism and is a publication about culture and politics in Chicago) is that it gives voice to what people are actually doing to transform their city, not a theoretical discourse about what might be possible. And there’s big changes happening on the ground here, with Rahm Emanuel handily winning the mayoral election after Daley decided he was done. I’m new to Chicago but I know that this is a really, really big deal.

And so Daniel is using this opportunity to create a platforming project called “Visions for Chicago” for Chicagoans to articulate what they want to happen next. Starting in November 2010 and lasting through the beginning of the mayoral term in May 2011, Daniel is giving out hundreds of handmade election-style yard signs to politically-engaged Chicagoans throughout the city to tell their own vision for the future. Photographs of the signs and their makers will be published in a book by Green Lantern Press to be released May 16, 2011 at 6pm at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. We talked about how the project started for him and where it’s going.

Abigail Satinsky: Let’s start out with a bit of a background question. You have a lot of experience making work in public space and an interest in graffiti. How does this all fit together for you?

Daniel Tucker: Since I was a teenager, I’ve been interested in the political conflicts surrounding people’s access to and definition of public space. That drew me to be a graffiti writer, which was really my introduction to art making and all of the considerations of concept, audience, context, and formal design that come along with art making. And that stuff is really particular and important when you think about graffiti, street art, or more antagonistic forms of public art. Pretty soon after my initial interest in graffiti and its sub-cultural (think hip-hop and punk rock youth culture) as well as aesthetic traditions (bubble letters, characters, and “wild styles” as well as the more recent “artschool” graffiti that involves putting lots of objects and forms not traditionally associated with hip-hop graffiti into public space), I began to get bored with the general questions associated with making work in public and wanted to deal more with content.

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The rain finally stopped this past Sunday so that 1001 chairs (or at least a good few hundred of them) could be set up outside Chinese embassies across the globe to protest the detention of artist Ai Weiwei by Chinese authorities. Last seen on April 3, Ai’s forced disappearance is deeply troubling but hardly surprising given China’s record of human rights violations. While the eyes of the world were relentlessly trained on the unfolding events of the Arab Spring, the Chinese government saw a perfect opportunity to make sure activists like Ai weren’t able to galvanize their countrymen and women to similar action, a “jasmine revolution.” This isn’t news to you though. The media coverage has been huge and the level of attention that the situation has garnered is both impressive and necessary. And yet it makes me pause for thought.

A phrase similar in characters and sound to Ai Weiwei’s own name, “Love the Future,” or “Ai Wei Lai,” has become a way to bypass Chinese censorship for netizens. See the Hyperallergic blog (www.hyperallergic.com) for excellent pictures and coverage of the 1001 Chairs protests.

While I wholeheartedly support every column inch generated on his story, I was conflicted about going to the gathering at the embassy in New York. It’s going to sound like intellectual handwringing, but to do so seemed almost like I was taking part in another Creative Time “art event,” a happening, like getting the key to the city or sending off the BHQF on tour. To be sure, the momentum behind Ai Weiwei’s specific case forces broader scrutiny of China’s crackdown. Creative Time, and the many individuals who left their Sunday activities to pick up a chair and head to midtown, acted with integrity and commitment. The photographs, blog posts, tweets, and news reports about this act of solidarity fan out and and echo into the very cyberspace in which Ai has conducted his own activism. Online, his name has morphed into the coded “爱未来 Ai Weilai” to slip past censors, close in look and sound to Ai’s name but meaning “love the future.” It’s this breadth of sentiment that resonates, and also becomes the most powerful iteration yet of Ai Weiwei’s collapse of art into life. As a friend whispered, pained, aware of the non-negotiable nature of being arrested for activism in China, “do we even know that Ai Weiwei wants to be released immediately? This response is more powerful than anything he’s experienced to date.” This is an artist who has always been acutely aware of the parameters he works within in China, and the response his work garners in the West. There is no doubt he wants (and we want him) to be released. But did he also want to be arrested? Can an artist use the political strategies of his government as his own medium, or is this question reaching past the more pressing concern of human rights? What is the wider context of Ai Weiwei’s story? Aside from this meaningful and symbolic gesture, what else can be done in this situation? Who else is impacted by his actions? By ours?

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Vija Celmins, "Time Magazine Cover," 1965. Oil on canvas, 22x16 in.. Private Collection c/o Ms. Laura Bechter. Courtesy LACMA.

Last Saturday, March 19—the day that the US began air strikes in Libya—I passed an anti-war demonstration while driving to LACMA to see Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966. It was a few minutes before I realized that it was also the anniversary of the war in Iraq and these protests had been organized across the country on March 19 for the past eight years.  I almost considered canceling my obligations for the day to indulge my political leanings and join the throngs of protestors.

Protestors in Los Angeles on March 19, 2011. Photo by Travis Wilkerson, image courtesy answercoalition.org.

I rationalized my decision to continue with my day as planned, telling myself that I would be showing solidarity by visiting Celmins’s show. Each of the 20-odd pieces in the exhibition capture moments of either horrific destruction or potential destruction—frozen first by photography, and then re-captured by Celmins’ careful hand.  The intersection of art and politics is rarely successful, and often artists who attempt it fall into the realm of didacticism and propaganda, or worse, aestheticizing violence. But Celmins’s images of conflict and destruction, painted during the Vietnam War, avoid these pitfalls while retaining their own kind of force and power.

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“Justice and Punishment”: The symbol of the escrache of HIJOS. Courtesy Colectivo Situaciones.

* This interview has been translated and co-edited by Brian Whitener.

I first heard about Colectivo Situaciones about a year ago, when I received a publication in the mail titled Genocide in the Neighborhood, edited by the scholar and poet Brian Whitener and translated by Whitener, Daniel Borzutsky, and Fernando Fuentes . This book, published by Chain Links and available through Small Press Distribution in Oakland, focuses on three organizations that emerged during the mid-90s and early 2000s in Argentina: Colectivo Situaciones, HIJOS [Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence], and Mesa de Escrache. Though a series of conversation and interview transcriptions as well as collaboratively written documents, Genocide in the Neighborhood tells a story of how these groups came to work with various neighborhood communities throughout Argentina in the interest of bringing the crimes of both the Argentine dictatorship (1973-1983)  and subsequent governments that granted immunity to many who had committed crimes against humanity during this period to light. As the children of the “disappeared,” those who were executed for their political sympathies during the dictatorship, Colectivo Situaciones and their colleagues have sought a kind of justice through a social practice that emerges through their efforts: the escrache. As Whitener writes extensively of the escrache, a ritual performance situated within specific communities that attempts to exact alternative forms of justice in the interest of community building and healing:

Like all truly innovative practices, what the escrache is is rather difficult to define; it’s something between a march, an action or happening, and a public shaming. The escraches are a transformation of traditional forms of protest and were developed as a means to address two problems. The first was the problem of “impunity” [the granting of legal immunity to criminals of the dictatorship]; the second was the loss or suppression of historical memory that this legal reality created.

The escrache, then, as a practice looks like this: HIJOS selects someone who, during the dictatorship was responsible for or complicit with the torture and murder of people, to be escrached.  When they first started, HIJOS targeted high-ranking members of the dictatorship, who primarily lived in the center of Buenos Aires. Later, a decision was made to escrache lower ranking members in part to begin to work in other parts of the city, but also to demonstrate that members of the dictatorship  were living as if nothing had happened. Once a genocidist is decided upon, a date for the escrache is fixed and members of HIJOS and other related organizations spend months working in the neighborhood where this person lives. They work with neighborhood organizations and go door-to-door to discuss with individual residents and families what that person did and the need for denouncing it. They also discuss the theory and practice of the escraches. Next come months of flyering in order to invite and secure participation of the residents of the neighborhood in the march, which is part of the culminating action of the escrache. The march leads the neighbors to the criminal’s home, where there are theater performances and a symbolic ‘painting’ of the house. This ‘painting’ usually involves throwing paint ‘bombs’ or balloons at the building in order to mark it as the genocidist’s place of residence. The idea is to once again transform the space of the neighborhood, to make visible that genocidists still walk free.

As Whitener goes on to say in his introduction to Genocide in the Neighborhood, the organization of such public and communally immanent rituals, while it takes on aspects of the “happening” or “situation,” is in the service of exploring inter-actions and relations within specific communities that may help to transform those communities positively, towards productive expressions of political and juridical power. Where the state judiciary has failed the people of Argentina (much as our own public officials now fail us in the US), Colectivo Situaciones and their affiliates seek forms of justice and politics that are not a priori but rather are conceived through a rigorous and extensive social process. The result is a practice of “social protagonism” and the construction of “plane[s] of social transversality,” a space in which individuals and groups can explore forms of subjectivity and potentiality autonomous to the seeking of state power. In the wake of Colectivo Situaciones, one can start to imagine how art and performance can serve politics through commitments to the local, particular, and relational — which is to say, through a commitment to working with the people whom their art would be for, whom it would serve.

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Following is the second half an interview Elizabeth Wolfson conducted with Vasif Kortun. Read part one here. — Ed.

Photo courtesy of Vasif Kortun.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the trajectory of recent Turkish art history. As Chief Curator and Director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial  in 1992, Kortun completely changed the spirit of the event, shifting its focus from a national to an international one. By inviting artists from around the world to participate, Kortun facilitated the introduction of a great number of foreign artists to Turkey and of Turkish artists to the international community.

In addition to his groundbreaking curatorial work both within Turkey and abroad, he is also the founder and director of several contemporary art spaces in Istanbul that provided unprecedented research and exhibition resources to the Turkish art community and nurtured an entire generation of artists. This work began with ICAP Istanbul Contemporary Art Project (1998-2000) but was primarily conducted in the two institutions he opened in 2001, Proje4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. In 2007, Kortun began work on a new, even larger institution, scheduled to open this April, whose details he discusses in this interview, continued from Part I.

Elizabeth Wolfson: So obviously these archives, your library, are a very important part of the work of this institution.

Vasıf Kortun: It sits at the core of what we do.

EW: Where do you think the impulse to devote so much of your resources to these types of activities comes from?

VK: Well I know where it comes from personally—my father was in press distribution, so I grew up coming home to piles of printed materials. In high school we had an amazing library at a time when nobody had books in their homes—maybe some people did—or the idea of libraries in a high school was just unthinkable. I was a horrible student, but I spent most of my time in the library. And that was just great.

The lack of databases in Turkey, the lack of networked materials, it leads to the kinds of mistakes that I made as well. When I was starting out I thought “Oh I’m the first this, I’m the first that,” this kind of youthful arrogance, is actually the result of this erasure. You can do this because no one’s contesting you. Three dictatorships, three coups d’etat…. It makes it easy to make mistakes.

EW: Because with each regime change, erasure takes place.

VK: A very serious one, each time. So all of these things combined, I don’t know, from the early 1990s I really wanted to have a space in Istanbul where I could have a library. These days it’s not as critical, because the library is not a space anymore.

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Eduardo Villanes, "Urdimbreas de Luz," detail, 2007. Courtesy the artist.

As I am grieving the disappearance of the Minimalist from the pages of the New York Times, I am also pondering Mark Bittman’s statement from his farewell column, “the continuing attack on good, sound eating and traditional farming in the United States [and elsewhere in the world, I want to add] is a political issue.”

“Relational art” and especially the stardom of Rikrit Travanija, has made food one of the hot topics of contemporary art. Food has been re-discovered and celebrated as a means of bringing people together and creating experiences of genuine sharing and fair exchange. These optimistic notions and projects tend to overlook – to paraphrase Eric Schlosser – “the dark side of the contemporary meal,” which persists even despite the efforts of the Slow Food movement or First Lady Michelle Obama. Even more rare are artistic proposals that try to engage the dangers and inequalities lurking behind what and how we eat.

Peruvian purple corn.

One of the little-known exceptions is the recent work of Peruvian artist, Eduardo Villanes (born Moscow, 1967), whose projects ponder the loss of the incredible biodiversity of his native land, the ancestral home of more than 600 varieties of potatoes and endless amount of other plant and animal species. Especially fascinating about his case is not only the content of his current enterprise, which puts genetic modification and patenting of crops by transnational corporations at the cross-hairs of attention, but also the particular tension that exists between Villanes’s recent work and his earlier proposals developed in the 1990s. This peculiar conflict offers an opportunity to consider two important issues: first of all, how we get acquainted with art, what we see, when and why we see it; and secondly, how complex and ambiguous the process of historicization of a living, producing artist can be.

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