Making a painting from a photograph is not a very artistic attitude at all. For one thing it’s contrary to the mythos of “artist-as-creator: An artist idealizes. An artist fictionalizes and adds his own interpretation to the “schema”. An artist changes, transforms, finds new formulas. He even rejects imitation in art. The artist needs to make “discoveries” for the sake of “newness”. At least that’s what theory says. The artist regards photograph as a vehicle, a form devoid of flavor or content. Thanks to his identification with the ultimate “idea” in a work of art he produces, the artist’s “aura” is captured in it. What is supposed to be on view is the Creative Artist, whereas in photography, looking is an act of passive viewing.

It’s believed that photography copies nature with an objectivity that is no longer subject to being interpreted. This is why authorities regard photos as documentary evidence. A photo is held equal to “reality”. The documentary nature of photography–its convincingness and truthfulness–are thought to be sufficient proof of any assertion. In the Information Age, the newsworthiness of a photographic image made its value accepted as a “document bearing information”. Information today has become much more visual than ever before in history. Tagged, classified, and archived, every image assumes its designated place in the collective memory as a datum of information.

With the support of technology, Nature can be conceived of with all the objectivity that a photographic image permits. In a digital environment, Nature can be reconstructed making that environment a virtual alternative to Nature itself: this “Cultivated Nature” has become a domain of artificial realities, an Artificial World in which the electronically fragmented bits of the light of every image are encoded and stored, again as visual information.

Does Art derive from Art or from Nature? The answer to that question may be sought by thinking of the Cultivated Nature that is the manufactured output of urban living: newspapers, TV, computers, signs, a host of things spewing forth light, a host of visual signals of information intended for advertising or promotion, objects carrying these signals–contemporary icons all.

Defined as an endless stream of tiny particles, each one of which spontaneously comes into existence and disappears, Time has mutated into a notion of despair with its sense of advancing into an unknown that is devoid of a future. Utopias have been everywhere overthrown. “One day at a time” has become the objective. Helplessness summons Judgment Day. Ideology hides behind the endlessly repeating particles of Time that preoccupy minds with fragmented images of life, mini-documentaries with newsworthy content, and images as convincing as photographs. Even the time in the course of the flow of day-to-day life in which a mind under such continuous assault can stop and ask what’s going on is threatened. “Free time activities” are designed according to every imaginable liking. It is here that an artistic personality best reveals its talents, offering the consumer new creations as a life-designer. In a “shop-till-you-drop” society, the stream of new models is inexhaustible. Artistic individuals have pretty much dedicated themselves to innovation. Every product comes with its own promotional headline. The slogan “taste and consume” has become the viewer’s ideal: Experience Heaven on Earth!

No news image deviates from the caption that interprets it. Every photo is an object forming a concealed surface between its viewer and the photographic image. Its authenticity is questionable of course. The photograph is a transparent “veil” between an image and its viewer. And when information is involved, that veil is as ideological as it is aesthetic. The same is true of our historiography.

Painting (or art) is not a way of verifying the universe: it is a mode of behavior whose concern is human beings.

Producing a painting from a photograph is fraught with problems that are different from the logic of “I came, I saw, I synced”. You can’t witness everything there is in life; neither can you claim to empathize with everything. Watching the news, the act of viewing a battle in progress from the comfort of your armchair torments your conscience. It’s a treacherous situation, one that disturbs the peace and quiet of the home. After a hard day’s work, the channel gets changed and you chance upon sparkling, feel-good images: beautiful young women, handsome men, whatever. Even if you don’t stop thinking about it, tomorrow’s lap of the rat race will make you forget it all. However the habit of peering behind life’s veil will remain. If you’ve ever had the thought “I just wish everything could be like it is in those magazines”, that means you’ve already begun to grasp life with a photocomic sense of reality. The materialistic allure of the trendy image has become entrenched in our minds. The materialized identities of the photographic image stem from the objectivity of the photo itself. Objectified, the images also close in on one another. Of course in real life you can change the channel by reaching for the remote. That guy on the news could be anywhere: right beside you even. This one might be a rapist. That one a purse snatcher. The other one a white-collar criminal. Even the streets start to be perceived in the objectivity of the news and once everything starts becoming objectified in this way, you’re done for. The epidemic of materialization has stricken every where and every thing.

It is a gaze from an alienated distance. Every painting made by looking at a photograph will also bear the imprint of the photographic veil, provided that it also bears some suggestion that there is a photograph in its origins. This also means that it will be fraught with a feeling of alienation as well. A feature of every news photo is that it conveys a warning about the perception of alienation. It is an triggering of a forgotten connectedness, a being reminded of alienation.

Painting from photos. This is “photo-synthesis”, in fact: Embodied in it is a reproachful reminder of laziness. It is an example of passivity that is unbecoming of an artist. It is despair.

To use a photo that was printed in a popular object of mass culture–published in a newspaper–is to repeat something that already exists. It is the forcible reuse of something that has already been consumed. As a matter of fact, newspapers are popular objects that we may see affixed to the panes of windows whose frames are being painted or used as packaging. Cheap consumer goods. The product of mass production, like many other things. It’s not just the most appealing things that are popular: the cheapest ones are too.

At the same time that it offers the individual a domain of freedoms, capitalism also creates an alienated and atomized society as well. While art theory may express a fondness for the “genius” archetype in art theory–genius possessed of an idiosyncratic madness and the personality of a unruly child yet nevertheless tolerated–that very tolerance domesticates the raging ego. Every work of art that once may have been avant-garde becomes domesticated and loses its shocking destructiveness once it gains acceptance. Cyclical theory predicts it. Even advertising takes the same principles of shock value and newness as its point of departure. When the theories and formulas of art take their place in academic knowledge–when their products become “museum quality”–the process of domesticating is over.

Any work that an artist creates based on the idea of “I” may easily become the counterpart of the internal knowledge of high culture or into a closed-circuit dialogue, or rather a monologue since there can be no dialogue. In a knowledgeable society, a person may sense that he is becoming objectified as an artist. Using an object with such indicative powers as a photograph–putting it back into production in other words–may unblock the monologue, make reference to something else, signify some other idea, and result in the emergence of an “open work”. Here the notion of completeness that is capable of reduction to a single idea may be broken as may the ideas of wholeness, oneness, and uniqueness. Rather than exalting a singular and central “I”, the multifocality of a work of art may imply seeing the “I” not as a goal of a multiformative identity and subject but rather as a condition within multiplicity. Technically the brushstrokes that are the vehicles of personal expression may be perceived as indicators of one thing or another. Creating a hand-made copy of something produced by technology is in keeping with the existing technological environment. Indeed the notion of repeating that which already exists–a form of conservatism–signals behavior that is not unoriginal. All that remains is whatever is left over from the orgy of consumption.

Every fiction is a sign of intelligence but any fiction may also be inspired by a skewed architecture. It may be abandoned for purposes of spatial illusion, formal language, or iconographic narrative. Expression is nourished not by thoughts dedicated to a single meaning but rather by dualisms such as irony. Photographic memory makes connections with cinematographic thought but also with comic books and cartoons. A multifocal linear perspective and sense of space dream of multicentralism in thought. And in meaning too.

Hakan Gursoytrak

As Hafriyat, our common point is urban painting. Images of the city are moments and memories we experience individually. They enable us to communicate with the viewer’s and society’s memory. Our eyes are focused at issues, spaces and traces that are kept unseen, degraded or falsified by Art. Art reveres itself so highly that the sparkling often causes blindness. In that sense Hafriyat became “alt-culture” (sub-cultural) movement, by thematizing “daily” realities pushed aside by Turkish Art, and by exiting the elite space of the studio for the street. Instead of painting shantytowns for the sake of their pretty colors, we attempted at formulating an insider’s view –in any case, the street is a much too complex multiplicity to be reduced to the symbol of a shanty. Thus, we preoccupied ourselves not with what ought to be, but with what is. We are after explorations, not inventions. We make exhibitions by collecting lost toys, as treasures from the streets, like the “flaneur” wandering through the crowds.

The examination of the city is not just a question of subject mater; it is also a texture and a feeling. The speed of life in the city is equal to the rate of consumption of the TV zapper. In the fragmented space of contemporary life, events consumed too quickly. In addition to the painting’s subject, Hafriyat’s insistence on the “Moment” also marks this speed. We whiteness the new taking the place of the old and its constant disturbance. The chic appeal and extravagance of the new perceived against its environment reveals a tragic “dichotomy”. That the new is already a jerrybuilt imitation creates in us an image of itself as already worn out and frayed. Urban plans, architectural arrangements, jerrybuilt attachments, the continual mending of the buildings and never-ending excavations (hafriyat) are signs of our industry of assembly and our make-and-fix mentality. The city is the setting of modern life, and Hafriyat traces the process of modernization in Turkey. Thus, we base our works on this oblique geometry, change at the threshold of speed and incompleteness. Instead of clean-cut formalism, we try to develop a tone that is messy and patched, yet one with an insider’s voice.

Light and color is a natural outcome of our reflections on the possibility of a style that is specific to this geography. Photography is primarily a means of documentation. It freezes the moment so as to constitute our collective memory. What is captured by photography is, in fact, light rather than form. Considering that the new technologies of our age are based on the photographic image, –from cinema onwards- we can say that its icons, the TV and the computer, are sources of light themselves. The illusion of this technological artificial light can be found in Hafriyat paintings. What this Cezannist approach produces, pushes the painted surface away from the underlying canvas, and is also similar to the landscapes painted from photographs by Şeker Ahmet Paşa. This illusion makes the painting look like it too is a light-emitting object.

Glorifying the real is the essence of realism. I am not after such a glorification. Reality has been a point of reference for many artists. Some try to elude it, or deny it, and some claim that art is the only reality and thus, perceive and present it solely as a kind of simplification. They take the subject or the psyche as the only reality for art. In fact, everyone -not just the artists- has an idea of what reality is. Today, illusion and reality have become highly confused. While illusion is perceived as reality, reality is presented as an illusion. I am aware that the pieces we paint are not real; they are merely images. The space we share the images of daily life in our collective memory is social as well as cultural. Photographs from newspapers are shared everyday –and often, used as wrapping paper. These documents that constitute our memory are signifiers of the mundane. The reaction against these signifiers has become automated because they provoke that which is real. This reality becomes the reality of the viewer’s stimulated mind. That is the natural outcome of facing social reality. The social reality of our era can also be called capitalist reality. We can include the art of today within the mechanism of communication called the Culture Industry. This mechanism is formulated upon the idea of “populist utilitarianism” gathered around the ideal of communication. The more reality becomes fragmented, the quicker it can be consumed; in the end one’s hold on reality and all belief in reality is lost. It also becomes easier to make a person, who has abandoned his questions against life, believe that the more “products” he/she consumes, the more of a person he/she will become. Social schizophrenia dominates life. My regard of such a reality is suspicious. Skepticism is the manner of examining reality.

It is natural for an attitude that focuses on dualities to contain black humor, for humor feeds on dualities. My interest in caricature comes from my affinity with comics and caricature since childhood. I have been introduced to the art of painting through these. But most importantly, it is rooted in the fact that caricature is the furthest-reaching language of visual arts in Turkey. It is the truest sub-cultural mode of production. In societies of constraint, people have often found escape in satire. There is also a considerable body of work in this area in Turkey. Black humor distinguishes itself from the sit-com due to its very nature, and assumes a critical position. It is necessary to pursue one’s life experiences internally. The duty of art is not to come up with solutions; let’s leave that to the engineers of life. In our global world, it is possible to trace the failed or incomplete project of modernity. In that sense, we can talk about an affinity that contemporary art has with sociology. An artistic persona that prefers to be the “observer” as opposed to its ideal of being the “observed” like a mega-star must be furthered contemplated.

As Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar who talked about the psychological effects of discontinuity in our reality since the administrative reforms of 1839 (Tanzimat Fermanı) and the resulting inner crisis of the individual, wrote in 1951:

The reason for the crisis that causes us to doubt not only our own acts, but also, the principles that govern them, that preoccupies us with light trifle instead of vital and more important issues, or that turns these crucial and vital issues into a joke is the duality caused by our transformation from one civilization into another.

Hakan Gursoytrak, 2004

Translated  by Sibel Horada

Collective Marriage:

The fragmentation of time and the continuity of repetition are being stressed here. No matter how varied different lives may seem, their raison d’étre looses meaning to similarity. Where needs and dreams remain within the limits of what is already at hand, subjectivities melt into duties and acts of calculated benefits.

Marriage is the public face of secretive private lives. Since the “marriage ceremony” is the signifier, as well as the official consent of this phenomenon, I assumed that the collective marriage ceremony depicted in this painting –where the couples are most possibly already married- would fit into the concept of “Secret and Time”.

Gürsoytrak, H

Translated by Sibel Horada

Article written for the exhibition, Art from Turkey and Corea, October 2003

Short Circuit

The short-circuit reflection Clean Hands develops in the name of a clean society provides protection for naïve expectations and contemplates the proposition, “Hope sometimes means foreseeing the future;” and broaches the question, “Will this exhibition supply a solution to the crisis?” It points out that valuation, and the system which determines what values are is “speculative.” It proposes a series of thoughts on authenticity, plausibility, objectivities, reality and realism. Departing from a realism which has remained alien to a remedy, it looks not at the victim but the vainglorious.

The “Phis-kos” series, presented to the gaze of the viewers in an exhibition format inspired by official parades, is composed of 9 depictions. 9 depictions of a socio-psychological “official parade” looking at the “new-man brothers” syndrome of the desperate, global-scale crisis. They disrupt a pattern of rote; they are oil paintings, showpiece depictions made from imagination rather than painted from a photograph. These depictions which seek shelter within their own outlines on the whiteness of the canvas, are placeless. They will probably become a part of the space they are exhibited in. They are paintings without text, but they are related to “text-image” in that they evoke words. Because the outlines hold the colour within, they resemble transparent shadow-play figures in inverse light. They are nobility resembling Karagöz, they are the gentlemen.

They are an imitation of an archaic gaze, or the hand, arm and foot movements and postures of holy depictions in ancient religious sites like “Yazılıkaya.” They represent the idea of translocation between the hero in ancient war and victory monuments, the arrangement order of narrative reliefs in mausoleums of the human-god or in similar modern monuments, graphic design which constructs a glorified idea of power using kitsch adaptations with the relatively symbolic depictions of contemporary authority. They are depictions of official power in civilian attire: civil servant, supervisor, judge, soldier, imam, sheikh, boss, even a legal entity; a company, a ceo, an appointee, a groom, a man, a stockbroker or a teacher, domestic or foreign. They are global, they are everywhere, they are individuals, they are good, exemplary citizens. There is a further paradox which should not go unnoticed: “Power” is present even in the smallest unit; is not the torment inflicted on the wife by the husband or on an animal by a child, the construction of another field of power, the repetition of power? The suit is the universal caricature of this situation.

Their gaze, instead of the classical Hero, which stands erect, staring profoundly, is fixed on the eyes of the viewer, causing disquiet, evoking the evil eye. The eyes are blank; you search, in vain, for what lies behind them. They are the eyes of a figurine which cannot be entered, in other words, with no content, which cannot reunite with its spirit. They are not what it shows, but showpiece depictions of it. None of these paintings are portraits; they are masks, personas, to use the concept proposed for the capitalist individual by modern thought: They conceal the “I” inside from the external gaze, it is impossible to know what lies within.

Once the creator of the object is no longer the determiner of the labour or need value, the source of information becomes obscured, is trivialized and the historical leitmotiv is lost. Speculation defines value and inflates its own bubble. The weighing of net reality with the gross weight of ideas indicates a nausea of the mind. The crystallized doubt of a pessimistic, despairing world defines the idealized system of values. Speculative knowledge is delusion and unfounded suspicion. Trustworthiness depends on preference. It is followed by typical moves and short-term scoops. Hope comes to mean profit, and charts mean fate. The bubble bursts and the crisis returns from the dead. This is the cycle of events.

The word codex denotes a data base and it serves to establish trust. The Turkish Language Assoication dictionary explains the word as “the formal book indicating the formulae of pharmaceuticals.” Nutriment codices are also published to describe legal chemicals. Codices are the first manuscripts, documents on which holy knowledge is recorded. The word is also used to mean an index of rules. Ironically, a codex is the meeting point of science and officialdom. Trust is established with the approval of official authority, or the notary. This exhibition is about formality, officialism, ceremony.

This “illustrated parade” reveals individual psychologies. Informal friendliness within formal intimacy… Whispering figures. The formality of society in a state of consideration, chatting, communicating, transmitting knowledge and reports, informing each other. A football commentator on TV, recalling his source of intelligence, says, “I was so close, I eavesdropped on them from a distance.” If intelligence means the gathering of information, then communication is the topic. Information forms another piece of information. This is then called commentary. Trust in information as news is nominal and depends on choice. One word leads to another, the grapevine begins to buzz, the source of information is obscured and becomes irrelevant. Information turns into news, and news turns into everything that we hear to forget later. And this is what alienation is about.

Hakan Gursoytrak

Translated by Nazim Dikbaş

The popularity of painting in Turkey is undeniable and has evidently a lot to do with its modernist relation to the verbal culture and the age-old commitment of the artists, when not to mention the market-oriented manipulations. The profession of applying paint on canvas is still the most appreciated category of art making. The collectors and commercial galleries respect true painters as “real artists”, even if they are flamboyant and brazen. However, for the connoisseur and art professionals, painting is still a vehicle to think about the resources of art as well as a wealth of expression to decipher the unconscious and behavior of humankind.

In the current art making and art scene, video-computer-art or photography seems to shadow the painting, but it is also evident that consequently the same media has improved the content and form of painting with a different dimension and impetus. With its neo-conceptual, neo-surrealistic and somehow neo-abstract direction the painting is still a significant category of mediation between the artist and the viewer. Today’s paintings when conceived conceptually and ideologically, are not a production of pleasure-seeking, harmonizing, academic or decorative activity. It is an act in accordance with inevitability, namely contaminated by the electronic media, the public desperately needs this kind of different visual involvement with a critical, intellectual and emotional aspect. If we cease to think that painting is the age-old thematization of representation, we can enjoy and apprehend its insinuations and its immediacy.

The paintings in Turkey since the late 90’s convey this kind of involvement based on a vocabulary practiced in the late 70’s and in the 80’s by a group of artists who committed themselves to the social reality aspirations. Since the 90’s, another antagonist group of painters have followed the same path, but also borrowed generously from journalism and other photographic sources, and aimed to utilize the plainly represented truth in a highly subjective way and loaded with genuine daily experience to inform and inspire the visual thinking of viewer.  Combining the comic, kitsch, popular culture and adding a jigger or two of surrealism, these painters undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on pictorial subject and style than they have ever dreamed. Each of them has taken the high road in painting, building on popular culture, art history and the belief in the inevitability of paint on canvas over and against the assault of digital and video art works that currently dominate the international scene. Hakan Gürsoytrak feels attached to this group of artists mainly based in Istanbul, who with their paintings, photography and activist events address directly or symptomatically, the sense of rupture and fragmentation that pervades present day experience, particularly as lived across the Istanbul cityscape, which possesses an extremely ambiguous urban culture. The anxious times of the last three decades with political and economical turmoil and transformations find their sublimated form in paintings that acidly express the breakdown in post-modern signification that fractured the public’s sense of reality. The modernist burden of meaning has shifted from the social body as the space, in which identities are severely mutated, to the vulnerable individual body, which is under all kinds of pressure – from poverty, discrimination, emotional overload, to the invasion of global capitalism and electronic media.

In this sense, Hakan Gürsoytrak’s paintings should be categorized as paintings that still have mental and social function. They unmistakably create a signifying chain, which is necessary in our era to overcome the culture crisis. We definitely need this kind of painting as we have lost the capacity to grasp and represent the overwhelming complexity of contemporary social and political relations. The excessive reality supported or manipulated by virtual reality also opens a gap, which should somehow be filled by the imaginary. We have reached a stage where we cannot confront the collapse of symbolic representation necessary of taking our distance to the real, the distance which is necessary for critical thinking and interpretation. If the symbolic structure of the real has collapsed, psychosomatic behavior becomes the norm. At this point, Gürsoytrak’s paintings illustrate for the viewer the ways of exploring the edges of sanity and normalcy.

This is a familiar territory to Hakan Gürsoytrak, whose canvasses and collages have always been populated by familiar and satirical figures and crowded scenes about the trivial, the marginal, and the crossroads between deviance and despair. The figures are placed at the imaginary intersections where social and political codes are disrupted by the implication of the bizarre. The invisible and the repressed are reflected in images, where the society’s nightmares become the transparent articulation of political manipulations and desires. The viewer feels discomfort and contentment at the same time when faced with these representative and confrontational paintings of current public actions, daily events and street realities.  The series of paintings with their familiar but stimulating scenes display sequences of everyday life, political events and social satire, which evidently run counter to the dominant post-media representations of global capitalist imagery. In his narrative images, recalling photojournalism or comic strips in content reflecting all aspects of daily life, local events and cityscapes becomes a contemporary legend.

He creates across the picture plane a descriptive scene for the viewer; scenarios, which establish a dialectics of, gaze and points to an ethics of seeing. These paintings invite the spectator who can be also the maker of meaning. This form that is generally associated with photography and the cinema both privileges the viewer with responsibility and subverts him/her with guilt. For him, this is a certain programmatic rebelliousness, a quality that had its beginnings in the paintings of the 70’s and early 80’s in the post-modern history of painting in Turkey. However, this assessment is in danger of implying an old skepticism toward the so-called socialist painting, the particular style of painting of the cold-war period in the third countries. Obviously, Gürsoytrak is quite sure of his quest and is not after a great noise in the process; he holds on to traditional virtues of his trade and pronounces a narrative will.

Gürsoytrak is at work on the specifically familiar notion of the image. His subject matter is clear: the contestation between the individual, the society and the state. His works function as signals of a disturbing realm beyond these struggles. They imply many definitions of this content and expose themselves fully. Using journalistic photography as an impetus, Gürsoytrak delineates the smooth outlines of the depicted scene directly onto the canvas, thereafter letting himself be guided by the intrinsic demands of painting the image. He clearly aims at a painterly high standard but also at an interplay of free forms, expressive flecks and cumulative repetitions.

His figures are always in the middle of a work, an activity or involved in an event. It is not difficult to make out what exactly they’re doing or why; it is very much related to economical and daily political issues. Because of his continuous interest in the working class, capitalist issues and the marginalized masses, Marxism reflects itself under the several times filtered implications. Even if it is loaded with black humor, this is an ideological element which will be received by the sophisticated audiences of post-ideological trends with skepticism. Gürsoytrak is determined enough to confront this kind of skepticism.

All the hard work going on in Gürsoytrak’s paintings, the driving of trucks, filling of tanks, the repairing of machines or automobiles or even scenes of weddings or feasts seems to be within the sphere of criticism on capitalism indicating social good or individual profit on the surface; evidently all imagery is enhanced with black humor. Gürsoytrak has steadfastly acknowledged that he is interested in the ambiguous behaviors of individuals or groups of people within these processes of capitalism and nation state modernism. In this sense, the paintings which at first glance look like ordinary street scenery are disturbing in the most comfortable way imaginable. In an age done with ideologies, Gürsoytrak picks up the remains of that aesthetics they left behind to remind us of a truth more discomforting than it might look at this first glance: Socialism is not trendy now, but globalism also requires solutions.

Beral Madra, November 2007