UNDOOLAY – ELECTIVE AFFINITIES, 2016, ARTIST’S SPACE, NY

 A retrospective, if it happens while an artist is alive, comes with a warning : it can lead as much to the disintegration as to the consolidation of her potential. Besides the ever-lurking danger of puffing her up, it can create an irritating disconnection inbetween a before and an after, like a cosmetic surgery gone wrong, a break, to be sure, implicit in every show but here monumentally enlarged. The fatalism, renunciation and self oblivion of the artist are exchanged with the role of a hawkish impresaria mulling over the effects and affects of her displays. Certainly an artist witnessing her work unloaded from trucks in fortified crates and forklifted into the premises by a phalanx of workers eager to get the job done better sooner than later, and the concomitant signing of shipping documents kept out of her sight with benevolent disdain, requires her to face the material turmoil her prized achievement has unleashed, beyond the bespoke sphere of thought and autonomy out of which she is not supposed to stray and in which it will inevitably be presented. 

 To have one’s works gathered in one place under one’s name as an achievement worthy of such a huge enterprise can mean to be lifted out of the natural flow of time, action and circumstance in which a working artist’s life is anchored. Rather than being relieved or flattered by the honourable recognition, the artist might well recoil from a coherence and stringency the show seems to suggest ; against her awareness that her practise had always been a zone of conflict, to a large extent intractable, as opposed to the expression of an immutable, never swooning self, she now is confronted with a polished gem dragged from undergrounds in the back of her mind that Sharon Stone, for one, never wanted to enter.       

  Here, tough lucidity and self-criticism are de rigeur, because, at least in the absence of vanity, the creeping realization of having become a museum herself, cleansed of all the indeterminate and tentative states of mind which gave rise to her works, she is possibly made to see that all this was happening with her consent, that it was she who wanted those walls to close in around her. Contrary to the more adventurous Arthur Rimbaud, for example, she welcomed or accepted a recognisable romance plot, redeeming pointless, shapeless days with purposefulness. In any case, she has to confront the fact of being branded ; embalmed ; and that the necessity to disarm the compulsiveness of this outcome is not limited to Andy Warhol’s strategies as described in Blake Gopnik’s massive biography which I’m currently reading, maybe the ever lasting damage.    

 I think we can call these two surveys most accurately a retrospective in two parts. Nor would it be far from the truth if we called it a ‘travelling exhibition’, but in this case we would have to acknowledge that, far from touring a great range of exciting locations, there was only one stop and the distance travelled – the Atlantic Ocean – was culturally shortened to the span of the leash connecting a mistress to her poodle.                                  

 Neither would we do justice to their considerable distinctness. On the one hand, a transplanted exhibition, even when including a perfectly identical number and selection of works, will always feel different and generate different meanings in a new location, with a different arrangement and amongst a new audience ; on the other hand a retrospective is usually understood to be the presentation of an individual artist’s most defining works and as such may be apt, through the amassed denseness, to radiate a unique atmosphere so strong as to become almost independent of its surroundings.                                                                                                               While a lot of works had indeed travelled from NY to London and would have induced numerous déjà-vus in a person with the opportunity and interest to attend both of them, and both of the venues were of a character most conducive to the often noted unabashed nostalgia of my work    (a qualification which I never had a reason to dispel), the similarities ended there.  

 The differences resulted from the specific architectural features of the respective premises, posing significant installational challenges, as well as budgetary restrictions and curatorial selections. For example, the video “From Cotton via Velvet to Tragedy”, 1989, with or without “Le Mani Sulla Città”, the “Blessing of their Gentleness”, “Rust at Rest”, “Celeste”, “Tending to Their Feet”, never made it to London.  

 Artist’s Space comprised two unconnected spaces located in different streets of the same neighbourhood. Both were former inner-city sites of production dating from the 19th century. The main one, in Greene Street, a vast open-plan floor, distinguished by two majestic rows of columns hewn from entire tree trunks and a frieze of windows running along two sides of it, flooding it with light and David Hopper-like views of the surrounding facades, required free-standing display walls. Here I reverted to the tried and tested paravents which could be arranged in ways so as to maximize daylight illumination and, given the early summer season, to dispense with electric lighting altogether ; indeed the poster I designed proclaimed : ”It closes at sunset”.  

 This time the segments of the folding screens were constructed from welded steel frames with inserted mdf panels since they were to be hung on both sides with paintings, but again, like in “Slowly Please-Kelaynak”, I unified them through a horizontal colour division, thus emphasizing their temporal and alien presence as a room, or rooms, within a room. And again, the contrasting colour combinations, different on both sides of the screens, were chosen for the same reasons : for their associations with superseded bureaucracies, neglected train stations, hospitals, provincial schools and police stations, employment and social welfare offices, in short where state-sanctioned, nationally implemented colour schemes might seem at first glance bafflingly cheerful but only as long as you didn’t have to suffer within their enclosure and they might become a symbol of violence and abuse. The shades of the colours, delivered by Benjamin Moore & Co., were titled 1438 Lavender Blue / 858 Athena on one side, 1250 Magic Potion / 873 Baby’s Breath on the other.  

 Raven Row, by contrast, was a complicated agglomeration of an ancient multi-storied townhouse dating from the 17th century and later adjuncts. It included two stairwells which turned out to be especially propitious to the display of “Kaspar”, “Melchior” and “Balthazar”. Absent from the show in NY, “Probleema”, “A Little Cantata” and “Innuendo” were all reconstructed here in novel and ingenious ways, and the paintings “Portrait of José Mujica” and “Promises, Promises” added a note not rung before.  

 Considering all of the above, we should probably say something about the diverging principles of these two outstanding organizations. While Artist’s Space developed out of a collective grassroots initiative echoing the western European secessionist models of the late 19th century, Raven Row was based on the private magnaminity of an English scion. Both institutions ceased to operate after my shows : Artist’s Space after the last wave of gentrification and Raven Row for what reason … I’m fishing for the correct term : maybe spleen ? 

P.S : Both institutions have restarted their operations since then. Artist's Space has found a new location Cortland Alley NY, 001-212-2263970, and works under a new excellent curatorship (the former curator having left like the rats on a sinking ship) , while Raven Row had turned during its spleenish sabbatical into an artist's residenceand is expected to exhibit again at the start of the coming year.  
 

İstanbul 05.08.2022