Prinzenbad 2004, Kunstverein Hamburg

This pioneering retrospective, curated by Yılmaz Pziewior, is named after the great public open-air swimmingpool in Berlin Kreuzberg. At my first inspection of the premises of the Hamburger Kunstverein, a year before the opening, that glorious space, resembling a modern day Alhambra, was unencumbered and pristine. But when I returned a second time, I was confronted with the unpleasent fact that I would have to cope with recently installed room dividers, leftovers from an Andrea Fraser show, which not only concealed those slender soaring concrete pillars but which for budgetary reasons were here to stay, I was told. It meant that the notorious artist from America had been worthy of expenses I was not expected to see being lavished on me. My first vision had been mutilated. There was nothing but to get over that insult and to find a possibility to repair the damage. And as often is the case, pliability and improvisation in the face of facts can lead to surprising and simple solutions, things that without adversity would never have come into being and at the end of the day leave everyone smiling and satisfied.

I could use, it dawned on me, a primitive form of trompe-oeil, the old technique of spatial simulation, and some Josef Albers colour theory, to recreate what had been lost. By coloring all the pillars, the fully visible as well as the partly concealed ones, and then painting a band of the same width and colour on top of the white plywood room dividers into which some of them had been forced to disappear, I could visually resuscitate them, if only illusion. I had chosen pistaccio-green and bustier pink for their bases, a formerly ubiquitous, now defunct Turkish colour combination. The effect was astounding : wide, spiritual, unclustered, islamic. ( Okay, after all I have to admit that in the end we needed some walls to hang pictures on - so pace Andrea hanım efendi). Still there’s a final assessment to be made : the pillar-question and its resolution through trompe-oeil and the spatial valeurs of cold and warm tints had projected the basic and contested tricks and tools of representational art into architectural space, a space usually considered to be pure abstraction, if it is not simply taken for granted, yet equally susceptible to vision and its poorly understood marvels, namely the workings of colour.

The following text which I wrote for a promotional brochure of the Kunstverein is a fictional interview, but turned out to be a self-fulfiling prophecy. For better or worse, no catalogue was ever published and the show closed its doors without ever so much as receiving a reasonable review. Well, don’t ever expect someting from the carps.  

An extract from an interview by Victor Simonelli, to be published in the forthcoming catalogue: 

V.S : It appears to me that often you have shone through absence. Was that a result of deliberation on your part, or of some form of structural neglect ?

L.D : There was a correlation of both. You know, for instance, how disheartening I find that recent surge of a slick celebratory stance in and around painting. I've never been a painters' painter and hope to have made that clear. But to call painting a vitamin isn't funny. It shamelessly serves the patronizing gourmandise of certain art lovers and their endlessly re-established partitions. Well, I don't want to be an ingredient in that mix of over-exposure and obscuration ; it reminds me of my background ...

V.S : Would you mind describing it ?

L.D : I'm a child branded by the prudish, parsimonious and masculine aesthetic canons of the "Wiederaufbau", which persisted far into the eighties and are unabashed today, albeit challenged. In that obdurate climate homosexuality was seen as the yeast of Fascism, death and doom, inimical to the hasty sanitization, once again based on family-values. Vestiges of "effeminacy" had to be expurgated at all cost. A pond in a park, heavy with solemn carp - and no goldfish. "Structural neglect", there you have it!

On the other hand, the very ideologies, which thrust you, again and again, into a space of abjection and shame, and nowhere as hurtful as in the "sophisticated" realm of art, cast a shadow in which different articulations could take shape unchecked. Sinful elaboration, suspect palettes, configurations and references questioning concepts of autonomy, and opaque frivolity, nostalgia, and awareness of the preying epistemologies of mastery, control and domination ... they are blooms of penumbra. They didn't grow in the glare of "empowerment".

The distinguishing characteristic of the letter Ğ in the Turkish alphabet is its unpronouncability. It is a silent intrapolation placed between two vowels (like in Uğur) or between a preceding vowel and a consonant (like in Çağrı), thereby changing their sound and duration. As I wrote in the text on “Probleema”, there has long been a rumour that it had been Kemal’s personal contribution to his language reform, a codified insertion of his unspeakable desires into the soon to be implemented new language of the republic in the making. If this were true, it would mean that through Ğ he made them an intrinsic part of everyone’s body, a soundless element in everyone’s communication. If this were true it would be … well … unspeakable.  

Ğ, the rumours attached to it and the fact that, whether true or not, they had become an ingredient of a not-so-sub-culture, touched upon long-standing concerns of mine : the deliberate manipulation, or denial, of “common knowledge” . 

The group-show for which ‘Ğ – An Interior’ was conceived, bore the title ‘Pişmanlıklar, Hayaller, Değişen Gökler’ (Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies) and constituted my first official invitation to participate in a local art event since I had taken up residence in the city. It was curated by Fulya Erdemci and assembled works of twelve artists of whom I was the only foreigner. It opened on the 22. September 2001. While the 1999  Biennial, called “Tutku ve Dalga” (The Passion and the Wave) had miraculously taken place in the shadow of a devastating earthquake which had claimed the lives of 20.000 people, “Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies” opened in the wake of 9/11, an entirely different affair, you might say ; yet if you come to think of it, both incidents, measured by the toll they took, were results of human greed and malfeasance : in the earthquake the corruption of the construction industry, in 9/11 the hubris and violence of imperialism, camouflaging as democratic mission. And they had something else in common : Unleashed by seemingly incompatible sources, they nevertheless sprang both from a fitful, restive underground – one natural, local, geological ; the other man-made, far away, notional – bringing about far reaching, devastating consequences. 

Unlike the clashing tectonic plates which you can neither blame nor apprehend nor kill, you can do so with a rebel ; not only was Osama Bin Laden killed, to wide (Anglo-American and French) applause, but an entire innocent population along with their religion, culture, economy and history got subjected to the bloodthirsty wrath of the humiliated super-power. The earthquake left people stunned, dejected, disconsolate, feeling helpless but also guilty ; 9/11 instead elicited incredulity at the daring of the ‘Orientals’ ; if not, as in the case of Fulya Erdemci, undisguised admiration. Fulya Erdemci, herself a member of the upper crust where oppression does not mean exploitation and invisibility but sulking indignation and rancour at Western snobbery, and where the suffering multitudes are of as little concern as the goings-on in the world of mushrooms, was almost jubilant. Like Karl-Heinz Stockhausen who, living in the Christian West, got subsequently excommunicated, she called it an unparalleled manifestation of insurgent technical prowess, a masterpiece challenging the masters. Her sudden outburst, brimming with a baseless, instant-solidarity and therefore all the more fervent, was certainly at a far remove from the languid, inane, all-purpose title she had bestowed on the show, so similar to the one Mr. Colombo, her curatorial idol, had previously bestowed on ‘his’ Biennial.  

Whatever their final manifestation, underground forces always reach visibility by erupting from dark, hot, forbidding places – unpenetrable by the light of day ; or by reason, where our subconscious is concerned. The bellies of ships filled with the roar of the engines and the agony of slaves ; the labyrinths of mines where in unsufferable conditions the riches of a primordial earth are wrested from their slumbering storages at the behest of ‘luxe, calme, et volupté’, miles above in the sunlight. The sewage system inhabited by an untouchable population of rats and the wretched of the earth ; the smithy of Volcan where giant blacksmiths, white as marble and glistening with sweat, clad only in the dripping black wool of their beards, are lit by the redhot molten ore ; the catacombs of persecuted creeds ; the cellars of hotels where stateless unpaid servants coat the laundry of their hated masters in poison ; the worlds of roots and funghi, so immeasurably powerful as to imbue their fragile sprouts with the force to crack open asphalt and concrete to reach the light ; a creature as soft as a mushroom that, after appearing in a place as improbable as a highway you might just carelessly squash with your boot or your tire is, after all, in comparative physics, as powerful as the eruption of a volcano. Even the silence of our graves is ominous, far from lifeless and cold. This is why the epitaph on Lady Troubridge’s gravestone is so true. And finally, next to mushrooms, another peaceful vision of the underground may come to mind : hibernation. To the delight of children who never wanted to come into this world to begin with, the image of an animal coiled up inbetween the roots of a big old tree, in an embryonic state, until spring brings back the pleasures of life ; or like the dwarfs in the fairy tales. But these uterine dreams are mostly discarded when notions of the underground come up in the popular imagination : there it is a region of inhumanity, suffering, violence, death and toil – energies whose enclosures can burst any minute. These places, removed from anything airy, wide and bright have been commonly allocated to maleness. Were women instead given feathers and hence the ability to fly, like in the classic revues or in fashion, as a symbol of unattainability, volatility, liberty, beauty – and therefore made an object of desire, to be captured and made to sing in a cage ?  

I wonder to this day if those underground events made me scrutinize the floor of the room assigned to me so closely or if, having myself uprooted so radically, I wanted to anchor myself ; or if I simply happened to be on the look-out for something new,befitting the extraordinary surroundings I was lucky enough to have been admitted to. In any case, floors had never held much fascination until then, I am ashamed to say, given their all-defining importance, as well as my incomprehension of Carl Andre’s work, and my sudden interest, resulting in the discovery of that hole, was surely unprecedented. Or had it anything to do with Sigmund ? That room was set in a sprawling apartment on the piano nobile of a magnificent early 20. century building which had been constructed fusing so-called neo-ottoman style with the latest technological advances of its time (reinforced concrete, central heating). This remarkable structure accommodated shops and a theatre on the groundfloor, offices in the mezzanine, and from there to the top, luxury apartments and servants quarters. The theatre, called ‘Kristal’, was actually built a hundred years earlier, in 1830, one of the first in İstanbul to host international performers, before being encircled by the new complex, contributing to its fabulous appeal. The heat in the form of hot steam feeding the cast-iron radiators through pipes was produced by a coal furnace in the basement; and, lest I should forget, it sported of course one of those sumptuous wooden elevators with windows. True to its splendour it had been baptized “Elhamra”. It is located in Turkey’s most famous thoroughfare called İstiklal Caddesi (Liberation Avenue), just across from the French cathedral St.Antoine which despite its Venetian appearance is a reinforced concrete structure as well, therefore granting a view from its frontside windows completely alien to the desolate fracas so characteristic of the rest of the city. 

The apartment had been turned into a non-commercial gallery, a privately financed foundation, called Karşı Sanat (Contrarian Art) by Feyyaz and Sevgi, a couple whose unpretentious excellence can hardly be overstated. They were former art students turned into highly successful entrepreneurs in advertising. Their beaux-art training had equipped them with the necessary skills to airbrush cathedral-high publicity for Marlborough, Coca Cola and the likes – in short, the enemy – from whence they branched out into an ever more labour-intensive expertise in product promotion. By the time we met and became friends they ran a small factory in the outskirts of İstanbul. The satisfaction of their customers had made their business bloom and their reputation grow. Yet, as I came to feel, a gnawing sense of having struck a faustian pact with commerce may have led to their foundation, dedicated to the advancement of mostly contemporary, hopefully contrarian Turkish art and the presentation of archival documents testifying to the darkest times of republican history, at immense risks. If so, their humility and generosity, girded by the realization of once having betrayed a true calling, made them also vulnerable to the parasitic superciliousness of art cons like Fulya Erdemci, secretly deriding their amateur good will and lack of hack

The hole I mentioned before was at most five cm in diameter and had a metal lining inside, indicating that it had been a pipe once serving a purpose but of no use any longer. I found a broom and stuck its stick into it ; it was not clogged and, as I moved the stick around in circles, I could tell that the pipe was intact on the floor below, uncut, unobliterated – but why? I decided on the spot to go down, in that dark building of former majesty maybe populated by entrenched secretive people hostile to any novel intrusion. I rang the bell of a lawyer’s office. The huge, black, forbidding door, glistening from countless layers of oil-paint was opened by a stone-faced female cerberus, who, detecting my innocence, led me into an ante-room before ushering me into the inner sanctum of the patriarch, with a smile that years of training in fending off the litigious, petulant patrons who brought in the cash, sometimes lots of it, but certainly were not any longer what you would have called respectable, suited to the surviving dignity of a republican lawyer since long undermined by the rapacity of an emerging class he had always despised … a smile embossed as on Renaissance leather, without the Renaissance. 

The line I wrote in my text ‘Confluences’ years after that encounter – ‘Oh give me the times of yore, the brandy trays and yellow fingernails’  - unfolded before my eyes : an immense desk like a funeral monument, blue drafts of smoke and cigar smells, expensive and repugnant to any child, air you need an axe to cut, a wall-sized portrait of the father of all Turks, and, in the twilight of that wallowing gloom, a ghost of a man equipped with the essentials of the rock of time : monumental ashtrays, stacks of documents gathering dust, cristal decanters, a computer the colour of rotten teeth - an object disdained by the traditional clientele used to ink, handshakes and brothels.

I had hardly finished to bring forward the cause of my visit when, with a cough shaking his tiny frame, he disentangled himself from inbetween his throne and sarcophagus, to glide, in shoes so slim as to make you wonder about the shape of his naked feet and so polished that they flashed improbable reflections of a lightsource undiscernible to the human eye. His gazelle-like movement, entirely unexpected considering his shrunken entombment just seconds before, befitted his glinting, jetblack eyes and were equally astounding. His sudden ebullience rendered the question of age irrelevant. He wore a tailored suit in beige, combined with a white shirt and a silk tie diagonally striped in pale blue and powder pink. His skin was wax white. The destination of his dance-like propulsion was, it turned out, the pipe whose obliteration on the floor above had made me so inquisitive. Upon reaching it, he started to caress it with his exquisit hands while speaking the following words : “Monsieur, you don’t know how much your curiosity delights me! … When they came to cut the old pipes – the advent of natural gas had made our old system obsolete – I refused to let go of this section. Everything must change, as I can see, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep it in my office as a reminder of our considerable achievements back then, our youthful enthusiasm, our unfettered strenght, as we arose from unfathomable misery and attempted to catch up with the West. This is my personal monument and fills me with pride whenever I look at it. It was a pleasure to meet you . Please take a seat – Let’s have a cognac on that!” 

By the time I got back upstairs, elated by these relevations, filled with echoes of a defunct world and a vision of what a monument could be, something entirely unforseen had already taken shape in my mind : I was to make a plant sprout out of that hole, pushing up into the space and, while bending forward, performing a beautiful loop, before, on an ever diminished tip, producing a flower whose chalice was to illuminate an informational conundrum in the form of a replica of a newspaper called Ğ – therefore unsayable – dropped on a table as if by the hurried member of a household with other things on her mind. Next to this newspaper a bunch of rusty keys – always ominous – waiting maybe to unlock mysteries, shattering or life-giving. 

The single-footed hallway table completes the arc begun by the giant sprout. It seems to emerge from another kind of underworld : the deep sea. This is symbolized by details reminiscent of Ernst Haeckel’s maritime studies in ‘Kunstformen der Natur’. The construction of the sprout was to follow strictly botanical rules ; in this case the engineering and chemistry of large tropical grasses like bamboo or sugarcane whose culms are essentially hollow tubes regularly spaced with slightly bulging nodes. These objects were built, after precise instructions, by the fabulous blacksmiths still persisting in that neighbourhood back then, thus relating the work to the countless embellishments so rewarding for anyone with the capacity to appreciate the exuberance and skill of the great craftsmen who produced them.  

The technique of forged iron, employing heat for bending and twisting, was, together with glass, especially suited for the botany-inspired style which came to be called Art Nouveau  -  but not everywhere : in Spain it was called Modernismo. Catalonia was its center and the office of Antonio Gaudi its vanguard. Gaudi, far from being the hermit of lore, a man of action, not of words, expressed his pride in his heritage as follows : “I have that quality of spacial apprehension because I am the son, grandson, and the great-grandson of coppersmiths. My father was a smith, my grandfather also; on my mother’s side there were also smiths; her grandfather was a cooper; my maternal grandfather was a sailor, who also are people of space and circumstance. All these generations of people give a preparation.”   

As it happens, just when I set out to work on Ğ, Gijs van Hensbergen’s biography of Gaudi caught my eye; a brandnew publication in 2001, it was displayed  prominently in a by now vanished bookshop, apparently catering to the interest and tastes of people I’ve never had the occasion to meet. Whether here or anywhere, Art Nouveau  -  or Modernismo  -  doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda, except in redoutable cafes.  Indeed so much brushed under the carpet of ‘modernism’ that artists like the late Ull Hohn could bring it up as a code for homo.                                                            

But looking back, it strikes me  that the appearence of the book signalled one of those miraculous coincidences which you talk about when you say that something is “in the air”. I didn’t buy it for bolstering up my work, but because I sensed that it could reconnect me with a long-lost-past which nevertheless, and to my own surprise, still lingered on. Antonio Gaudi had always been a subliminal presence, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in the shadow of (my) father’s post-war predilictions, feared and honored at the same time. Not only was their inventiveness based on budgets erased by the disappearance of the tycoons of yore; their unblemished faith and joie de vivre, bound to die with the elimination of the crafts they depended on, made intimidated, moralistic austerity the rule.                                                                                                                                                                    Antonio chose to remain impervious to the evident collusion of the Catholic Church, big business (colonial plantations and mines, railways, slavery, military) and the drive for the aesthetics of total control by his patrons (the garden city, the workers colony, churches) for so long that some of his contemporaries called him evil. Only after the “Setmana tragica”, 1909, an anti-clerical, anti-capitalist, secessionist uprising violently crushed, another rare statement escaped his lips : “When I think about what has happened it bothers me to think that we are going up a dead-end alley and that a radical change must definitely come.” This he was not going to see.   

Ğ has always been more elusive than other works of mine, even to myself. It has never been sold and lingers on in crates, banished from visibility. Yet it was shown in the most diverse and farflung places, and contrary to the extreme specifity suggested above, it was always easily adaptable, since cut pipes of obsolete heating systems are actually ubiquituos, once you pay attention  -  at least in old repurposed places ; the kind of places in which my works, to their advantage, were mostly shown.                 At this point I should also mention that some details were refined and added over time while others remained sometimes unused when not adaptable (like the peasant rococo curtain) or had to be discarded when they were too integrated with the specifics of a building (like the recess in Hamburg).    

In any case , I’ve never known what people thought about Ğ, not even in a conversation, and as I said before, I hardly knew it myself. This complete absence of a valuable criticism or self-scrutiny contradicts in a very noticeable way the significance of Ğ as the first manifestation of my brandnew status as an immigré artist confronted with surroundings at once attractive and antagonistic, as well as a link in the chain leading to the “Celestial Teapot”. It is a work of a deep, all-shattering crisis, infinitely removed from the protocols of an art career, let alone a career in identity-formation. First of all, Ğ not only was not a painting, but it was produced outside the grip of what came to be called the “power engine” of the EU, Germany, and certainly not in the ignominious twilight of, like, you can indulge in your Turkish delights as long as you don’t relinquish the benefits of your German health-insurance or dealership. Second, I swiftly realised that I was expected to represent certain approved aesthetics of the ‘German Sprachraum’ like let’s say, Gerwald Rockenschaub to feed the never-ending inferiority complex of the German-educated Turkish elites whose servants put  on the video when you come in, but not if you happen to wear a poncho by Anni Albers and they mistake you for a rug dealer, as in “Mon Oncle” by Jaques Tati ; and third, I had no interest in pounding over the vulgar avalanche of “orientalism” as opposed to imperialism-free electronics. Not that I had an option, mind you. I knew too well that my queer childhood attraction to the workers who built my family’s showcase villa had made me come to the frightening, damp, city of İstanbul; that to be exposed, shunned, disenfranchised, excluded, lonely and confrontational was to be my fate; a repentance , maybe  -  but without arabesques. The fact that plumbing, or chimneys (like on the roof of Casa Mila, shaped like flows of lava) are pornographic mainstays tells us about the desire of transubstantiation  -  the belief that something can become something else. Black poisonous sludge transformed into lovely warmth; in penetration, a canal is opened to replace icy individual segregation with the fulfilment not to be yourself, but an indistinct force belonging to the world. Any attempt to go to the moon is denying this given and is doomed.  

 Back on earth, thirty years ago in a bar in Cologne the incomparable Ariane Müller of ARTFAN told me : “and you want to put all that stuff into 45x65 with a brush, give me a break and let’s have a drink, or are you impecunious ?                                                                                                                           Exactly, but then, if you come to think of it, it’s not even you! 

İstanbul 23.03.2022                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

The single-footed hallway table completes the arc begun by the giant sprout. It seems to emerge from another kind of underworld : the deep sea. This is symbolized by details reminiscent of Ernst Haeckel’s maritime studies in ‘Kunstformen der Natur’. The construction of the sprout was to follow strictly botanical rules ; in this case the engineering and chemistry of large tropical grasses like bamboo or sugarcane whose culms are essentially hollow tubes regularly spaced with slightly bulging nodes. These objects were built, after precise instructions, by the fabulous blacksmiths still persisting in that neighbourhood back then, thus relating the work to the countless embellishments so rewarding for anyone with the capacity to appreciate the exuberance and skill of the great craftsmen who produced them.                                                                                                                                                   The technique of forged iron, employing heat for bending and twisting, was, together with glass, especially suited for the botany-inspired style which came to be called Art Nouveau  -  but not everywhere : in Spain it was called Modernismo. Catalonia was its center and the office of Antonio Gaudi its vanguard. Gaudi, far from being the hermit of lore, a man of action, not of words, expressed his pride in his heritage as follows : “I have that quality of spacial apprehension because I am the son, grandson, and the great-grandson of coppersmiths. My father was a smith, my grandfather also; on my mother’s side there were also smiths; her grandfather was a cooper; my maternal grandfather was a sailor, who also are people of space and circumstance. All these generations of people give a preparation.”                                                                                                                                                          As it happens, just when I set out to work on Ğ, Gijs van Hensbergen’s biography of Gaudi caught my eye; a brandnew publication in 2001, it was displayed  prominently in a by now vanished bookshop, apparently catering to the interest and tastes of people I’ve never had the occasion to meet. Whether here or anywhere, Art Nouveau  -  or Modernismo  -  doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda, except in redoutable cafes.  Indeed so much brushed under the carpet of ‘modernism’ that artists like the late Ull Hohn could bring it up as a code for homo.                                                                                               

But looking back, it strikes me  that the appearence of the book signalled one of those miraculous coincidences which you talk about when you say that something is “in the air”. I didn’t buy it for bolstering up my work, but because I sensed that it could reconnect me with a long-lost-past which nevertheless, and to my own surprise, still lingered on. Antonio Gaudi had always been a subliminal presence, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in the shadow of (my) father’s post-war predilictions, feared and honored at the same time. Not only was their inventiveness based on budgets erased by the disappearance of the tycoons of yore; their unblemished faith and joie de vivre, bound to die with the elimination of the crafts they depended on, made intimidated, moralistic austerity the rule.                                                                                                                                                                    Antonio chose to remain impervious to the evident collusion of the Catholic Church, big business (colonial plantations and mines, railways, slavery, military) and the drive for the aesthetics of total control by his patrons (the garden city, the workers colony, churches) for so long that some of his contemporaries called him evil. Only after the “Setmana tragica”, 1909, an anti-clerical, anti-capitalist, secessionist uprising violently crushed, another rare statement escaped his lips : “When I think about what has happened it bothers me to think that we are going up a dead-end alley and that a radical change must definitely come.” This he was not going to see.  Ğ has always been more elusive than other works of mine, even to myself. It has never been sold and lingers on in crates, banished from visibility. Yet it was shown in the most diverse and farflung places, and contrary to the extreme specifity suggested above, it was always easily adaptable, since cut pipes of obsolete heating systems are actually ubiquituos, once you pay attention  -  at least in old repurposed places ; the kind of places in which my works, to their advantage, were mostly shown.                

 At this point I should also mention that some details were refined and added over time while others remained sometimes unused when not adaptable (like the peasant rococo curtain) or had to be discarded when they were too integrated with the specifics of a building (like the recess in Hamburg). In any case , I’ve never known what people thought about Ğ, not even in a conversation, and as I said before, I hardly knew it myself. This complete absence of a valuable criticism or self-scrutiny contradicts in a very noticeable way the significance of Ğ as the first manifestation of my brandnew status as an immigré artist confronted with surroundings at once attractive and antagonistic, as well as a link in the chain leading to the “Celestial Teapot”. It is a work of a deep, all-shattering crisis, infinitely removed from the protocols of an art career, let alone a career in identity-formation. First of all, Ğ not only was not a painting, but it was produced outside the grip of what came to be called the “power engine” of the EU, Germany, and certainly not in the ignominious twilight of, like, you can indulge in your Turkish delights as long as you don’t relinquish the benefits of your German health-insurance or dealership. Second, I swiftly realised that I was expected to represent certain approved aesthetics of the ‘German Sprachraum’ like let’s say, Gerwald Rockenschaub – and why not Hito Steirl – to feed the never-ending inferiority complex of the German-educated Turkish elites whose servants put  on the video when you come in, but not if you happen to wear a poncho by Anni Albers and they mistake you for a rug dealer, as in “Mon Oncle” by Jaques Tati ; and third, I had no interest in pounding over the vulgar avalanche of “orientalism” as opposed to imperialism-free electronics. Not that I had an option, mind you. I knew too well that my queer childhood attraction to the workers who built my family’s showcase villa had made me come to the frightening, damp, city of İstanbul; that to be exposed, shunned, disenfranchised, excluded, lonely and confrontational was to be my fate; a repentance , maybe  -  but without arabesques. The fact that plumbing, or chimneys (like on the roof of Casa Mila, shaped like flows of lava) are pornographic mainstays tells us about the desire of transubstantiation  -  the belief that something can become something else. Black poisonous sludge transformed into lovely warmth; in penetration, a canal is opened to replace icy individual segregation with the fulfilment not to be yourself, but an indistinct force belonging to the world. Any attempt to go to the moon is denying this given and is doomed.                                             

Back on earth, thirty years ago in a bar in Cologne the incomparable Ariane Müller of ARTFAN told me : “And you want to put all that stuff into 45x65 with a brush, give me a break and let’s have a drink, or are you impecunious ?                                                                                                                           Exactly, but then, if you come to think of it, it’s not even you!  

İstanbul 23.03.2022