Probleema

 İnvitation for " Probleema ", Daniel Buchholz Galerie ,1995, again designed by Lukas Duwenhögger. İn both designs the position of the eyes refers exactly to their position in the painting of the same name by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Produced from 1993 to 1994 in Berlin for a small solo show in Helsinki, the installation “ Probleema “ was the summation of what I thought back then to be the specific demands of a given space, not only due to its dimensions, shape and light, but as a historical, cultural and national location. 

Helsinki was far away, dark, cold and strange; I felt called upon to come up with something substantial, cohesive. Yet it was not all site-specific dictation : I had my own agenda as well. But in a way, I planned the work like a monument; something removed from, even opposed to, individuality. 

The work as it is now known, developed thanks to a couple of incidents, that the following text attempts to elucidate. İt consists, roughly put, of five canvases strategically placed within a wooden cabin. İt not only derives its name from Akselli Gallen-Kallela’s gruesome painting of 1894 ; but is based on a replica of it which, style and some minor changes apart, reproduces exactly the configuration and poses of the four male characters depicted in the original and the sense of festering dread haunting them. 

Like other fin de siècle group-portraits of an all-male cast of an artist’s friends, sometimes including a self portrait - Henri Fantin-Latour, Vilhelm Hammershoi or Felix Valloton come to mind - “Probleema“ depicts the men, all of them towering cultural producers, gathered around a table. But while the other examples show their characters in dignified restraint, “ Probleema “ shows them in an uproar of dejection in front of blood-soaked clouds and brushed by the ominous wing of premordial goddess Isis. 

What is brewing ? The first, discarded version of Gallen-Kallela’s painting included the apparition of Christ crucified and a cowering naked woman, symbolizing ‘ inspiration ‘. After its public rejection, we are told, the artist used the canvas to wrap up a telephone in need of repair, whence it was saved, restored, and later inducted into some national hall of fame. Mr. Gallen-Kallela must have been therefore one of the first to own a telephone in his country, a technical detail which, need it be, can illuminate some salient features of his times, namely unprecedented colonial violence, driven by newly avaible, state-of-the-art weaponry and rapacious trade, and the birth of what has come to be called the “ Humanities “, with their concomitant categorizations, including the ‘ Homosexual (“Heterosexual”, maybe not needing description as urgently, or being more difficult to explain, joined the list ten years later)

Georg Lukács described the spiritual condition of those times in his early work as ‘transcendental homelessness’, an intriguing and dangerous coinage for the latent energies paving the road to ‘Verdun, Auschwitz and Algiers ‘ ( Tony Judt ) 

The Fall of the Wall and the years in its wake had not yet regaled Berlin, or at least parts of it, with the windfall of an inexhaustible influx of the creative sector’s rank and file, its commercial outlets and pleasure-haunts. İn the prevailing darkness long-simmering distrust of everything by anyone tainted all social interaction; AIDS, the Grim Reaper of those days, stalked a city where, if you found yourself at the wrong time in the wrong place, your face might be disfigured for the rest of your life. It happened to a friend of mine and explains why I was ready to confront the brooding, creeping origins of what came to be described as ‘ homosexual panic ‘. 

If I am not mistaken, I came across “ Probleema “ in a show called “ In Northern Light “ in Düsseldorf at the end of the 80ies, not long before I moved to Berlin. For the discerning mind, the title hinted at the 19th century revolution of plein-air painting that came to be called “ Impressionism “. These shows, heavily subsidized as EU propaganda, while riding the wave of the resurgence of figuration spearheaded by the unabashed Gare d’Orsay in Paris, were designed as blockbusters, but did not yet achieve their goal. First of all this post-modern phenomenon was viewed with utter suspicion by the stripe-crowd, and second, the electronic media were still far away from exerting a power as all -enslaving as to produce a nostalgia for the autonomous, undigitalized touch of the master’s hand and the rush to see it. The maligned art of the 19th century was an excentric preoccupation, pursued in suspect solitariness. The reek of doom inherent in this art had to be covered up, with a betwixt blanket muffling anything for a long time to come. 

The people in Helsinki who for unknown reasons had invited me to create a show for their place, were, as far as I know, a group of artists claiming independence and a wider horizon of continental, if not international connectedness. I’ve never met anyone of them in the flesh. Their institution was called MUURY, and maybe, like in the historical models of the ‘Salon des Indépendants‘ or the ‘Kunstverein’ there was, beyond self-promotion, an idea about a possible role that painting could play in society.

What they thought about me coming up with Gallen-Kallela was never expressed. The extent to which they were possibly involved in what here I just ruthlessly call ‘ Gay Theory ‘ was unbeknownst to me. Actually I took it for granted because somehow they must have seen SOMETHİNG, SOMEWHERE. I was blithe. Confident.

As it turned out, the deepest probleema added by MUURY to the problems of “ Probleema “, lay not in the financial and curatorial disagreements, but in their perception of me as an emissary of a powerful and frivolous artworld they judged in pejorative terms while aspiring to be a part of it ; a spoiled, şımarık gay guy clad in the mantle of some velvet mafia and wielding the sceptre of unstoppable recognition : in short, all the misapprehension and resentment of what they mistakenly called the ‘periphery ‘.

This led to the cancellation of the show. The work remained unfinished until Nikolaus Schafhausen wanted to show it in the ‘ Künstlerhaus Stuttgart ‘ alongside Ketty LaRocca’s post-humous retrospective. Good company. I mean Ketty LaRocca’s work. But since the work had been made-to-measure for MUURY’s tiny space, the 5 paintings could only be hung in a fixed order on 2 walls facing each other; and to achieve the denseness necessary to draw you physically into the trajectory of those vengeful, surreptitious glances of masculine domination in turmoil, as well as sufficiently close to their targets, the distance inbetween them could not exceed 3 metres. 

Thus the new temporary home for “ Probleema “ was to be the “ Künstlerhaus Stuttgart “, a former factory turned into an art-venue, with vast open-plan floors supported by concrete pillars. Out of necessity, the wooden cabin entered the logic and transformed the work into an “ environment “. Actually it dawned on me only much later that this enclosure of a carefully composed pictorial order came to resemble, in its immutability and implicit violence, the Stations of the Cross in a remote rural chapel. 

Gallen-Kallela’s men, perfect embodiments of the paranoia about immigration and identity stripped of purpose, an assortment of four as I said before, tightly bonded, look across the aisle at four single men in different settings, each of them occupying a single small canvas ( measuring the quarter of the malicious quartet ). All of them turn their backs towards us and the Symposion, as “ Probleema “ was also known, meaning that they can hardly be conscious of the hateful resentment in the eyes of their beholders. That is, until we come to understand that the latent violence enwraps them so continuously as to render a life on constant alert unliveable unless you are courageous enough to defy it. But the very show of defiance will add to the vexation of those who feel intitled to be the saviours of a civilization they forfeited time and again.  

The settings are all in Berlin, picked for their in-between significance : the fork of a road in an affluent suburb, a place where streets are empty and no one would ever come to your rescue ; the stacked containers where disenfranchised slaves toil to rebuild the new capital of reunification, next to the Springer building, the golden temple of disinformation; a well-to-do man next to a hold-out from the 18th century and a cable drum, the harbinger of total electronic connectedness ; and a gardener at the end of his shift in a privately owned paradise. 

Who are they and on top of it how dare they to grab the white flesh underneath the cathedral ? !

As the modern nation state put masculinity, a doctored version of it, to the forefront of its sustainability, a line of movements of the male body came under scrutiny, if not persecution. Under Kemal in Turkey, for example, you were not to sit cross-legged, the hips must be deprived of any swagger, stabilized by Western Civilization’s broom-stick, a dancerly gait, the sprayed little finger holding the glass, a sense of good looks and chic had become signs of subversion of the nation’s strength. Whereas Mahatma Gandhi, ever so much cooler than Kemal, said : “ Western Civilization sounds like something worth to try “ Kemal himself, voted one of the best-dressed men in the world next to the Duke of Windsor, was always under suspicion, and his alleged contribution to the latinization of the Turkısh alphabet, the unpronouncable letter ğ, called yumuşak ge (in English soft gay), was an under-the-counter joke for generations to come. Not any longer. Still, it’s worthwhile to recollect that the draconian laws against homosexuality in the former colonies, persisting in many places to this day, were introduced by that imperial civilization, now called christian democratic. 

The cabin, saddleback roofed and measuring 200 x 300 x 280 cm, was a simplified copy of a cabin I had built with my younger brother back home, in 1973, on the steep slope of our family’s garden, on stilts, under the centuries-old beech trees. We were boisterous teenagers, and even though our daring project – given our lack of experience – had been born out of sheer joy, we soon became aware that there was a darker undercurrent too. A spirit of rebellion. A rebellion against what we came to see as our father’s stiff all-knowingness, his pedantic, desk-bound approach to architecture. Those ciphers he put down all of the time maybe had to do with his big stuff, but couldn’t he see that we were building a cabin, not a hospital, a church , or a school ? Sure we could use pencil and paper and ruler as well, order the right materials after equally careful calculations, bargaining in the sawmill and the hardware shop. And we were financially independent thanks to a government grant for my first stint in artschool. But above all we would do it ourselves, learning along the way how to construct it properly. 

It took us a long, unforgettable summer and became the talk of the town, at least among the children who had gotten the news of the revolution on the grapevine and transformed the construction site into an everlasting party. You know what gossips children are ! Their unrivalled intuition made them grasp from the start that we had broken the law, as our father appeared everyday at dusk on the balcony of our villa overlooking the slope – a dark, silent, paralyzed silhouette, unable to join his exuberant challengers, licking the wounds of his castration. We had rejected all his well-intentioned advice as impracticable, made useless by the endless precautions of his profession, and must have become a mortifying vision of what he had chosen, or had been made, to abandon. 

The result was a resounding victory for “ Architecture without Architects “, the title of a book he treated like a bible, but which seemed to mutate into a threatening manifesto when it inspired actions intruding upon what he regarded as his own domain. Nevertheless it deserves mention here, that architects of his conviction were deeply committed to the social good, yet within a framework of paternalistic rule, their reclamation of unquestionable expertise and taste. 

Also, our cabin had clearly developped into a pleasure pavillion. It accommodated 2 beds ( the upper one in the gable, to be reached with a rope ladder and a small window next to it for better air-circulation ), a chest-bench painted Naples yellow in which you could store the linen and blankets, and, when closed, sit upon ; a foldable table for 3 persons attached to the inner sill of the big casement window, a cast-iron stove ( the wonderful contribution of an enlightend and supportive aunt ), with a pipe expertly insulated to prevent burns, ending on the roof in a real chimney. The first puffs of smoke it emitted were as joyous as the sounds of foghorns of ships and trucks announcing arrival after an arduous voyage, the jubilation of achievement. 

On the outside, the gabled front, most prominently visible to the approaching and admiring visitor ( as we hoped ) boasted grass-green shutters with tulip-shaped openings that you could peek through undetected when closed ; and at the summit of the gable a forged iron lily in blue exclaimed that she had left the valley behind to join our sylvan debauchery.  

The shacks in allotment gardens with their ceramic dwarfs and mushrooms, next to the railway tracks, the proletarian caravan, the circus wagon, the construction-workers cabin… nest-like, unsupervised  smallness which allowed for improvisation, was the embodiment of our cravings, not that looming villa on the hill where ashtrays were as wide as platters. Even without that disapproving, forlorn, silhouette on the balcony we understood that we were expected to emulate the superior lifestyle symbolized by the building’s flat-roofed expansion, and that it had become everything we wanted to get away from. 

Yes, our cabin was cute. But that was precisely the problem, since no matter how much pride we took in it, and how much we secretly yearned for the approval of the architect above, our cabin was a demonstration of ‘false consciousness’, mistaken identity, a blemish on his heritage. 

The only legitimate cabin was Le Corbusier’s overlooking the Côte d’Azur ; because it represented the chosen retreat of a genius into an undistracted, limitless space of thought, not the submission to the ruse of material civilization dishing out the allure of liberation, the transformation of the emancipatory power of freedom into the never-satisfied quest for creature comforts ( Paul Betts ). Not the visionless amenities of a life in the etui based on inchoate, suckling desires for protection and comfort and little decorative gratifications, so characteristic of that class – the working class, or were they gypsies ? – with their miniature mimickings of bourgeois grandeur ? Their enslavement was self-inflicted , caused by a lazy aversion to choose, their sensuous lassitude and lack of ambition, belief, commitment, beauty and eruditon ? But maybe their unforgiving toil in those places of hell where they produce all the stuff necessary to build a building, and to furnish it, made them proud and aesthetically independent ? Sexually potent and just playful about having a good time ? After the torment of the shift singing along with people in places unbeknownst to you, monsieur ? 

Heat, dust, toxic flames, enforced robotic movements defying the limits of physical endurance … How could they wash it from their muscles in those steaming showers and then paint their places in pink and sky-blue ?

That was the verdict on shacks and caravans and wagons ; and that is why, incidentally, it raised the stakes for the problems of “ Probleema “.

Ah, the cabin! İt brought long-buried memories back to the surface. And it brought down 600 qm2 to 6 at the stroke of a pen in Stuttgart. Far away remnants of a Liam Gillick installation were on view through its window, an abandoned stage. Whatever you say, those were the times of the eyebrow ; high or low. 

19.04.2022  İstanbul