{"id":25896,"date":"2010-11-16T07:22:02","date_gmt":"2010-11-16T05:22:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=25896"},"modified":"2023-07-26T12:13:55","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T09:13:55","slug":"west-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2010\/11\/16\/west-point\/","title":{"rendered":"West Point"},"content":{"rendered":"

ISTANBUL
\n<\/strong>11.15.10<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"Left:
Left: Artists Julie Ault and Mario Rizzi. Right: BAK artistic director Maria Hlavajova with BAK curator Cosmin Costinas. (All photos: Kaelen Wilson-Goldie)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WITH SO MUCH HAPPENING<\/strong> elsewhere in Istanbul\u2014an opening at Rampa for the painter\u00a0Ahmet Oran, a very VIP preview of\u00a0Kutlug Ataman\u2019s retrospective at Istanbul Modern, a new project by the critical darlings xurban_collective at Sanat Limani, Banu Cennetoglu\u2019s first solo show at\u00a0Rodeo, and a timely debate at Depo on the often violent relationship between art and gentrification\u2014it was slightly frustrating to spend three full days stuck inside the Istanbul Technical University\u2019s Architecture Faculty for a \u201cresearch congress\u201d organized two weeks ago by Former West. I\u2019m sure there were worse places to be. Built as a medical school and military barracks for the Ottoman Army, the campus is a neoclassical jewel, with four pink fa\u00e7ades lining a leafy courtyard with a reflecting pool and a lion fountain in the middle. But still.<\/p>\n

Like a discursive sequel to Manifesta, Former West is a peripatetic platform investigating various histories of the post-1989 period. At the heart of the project, initiated by the BAK center for contemporary art in Utrecht, is the proposition, or maybe the hope, that the fall of the Berlin Wall didn\u2019t necessarily signal the end of communism but rather the beginning of the end of capitalism, and with it, the hegemony of the West. Through seminars and symposia, Former West is trying to nudge that process along, or in congress-speak, to produce the West as former, and to posit that as a horizon for our time. The gist of the Istanbul gathering, titled \u201cOn Horizons: Art and Political Imagination,\u201d was to say that the collapse of the Cold War system didn\u2019t make utopian projects bunk; they just needed to be rebranded as horizons for anyone to take them seriously again.<\/p>\n

In her opening remarks, BAK\u2019s artistic director\u00a0Maria Hlavajova purred a warm welcome to the digital masses following the live stream online. But for all the delirious talk of social media, by the time the congress ended, only one question had been posted on Facebook, followed by a note from the organizers saying, in effect, sorry we missed this, but someone will get back to you soon.<\/p>\n

Hlavajova also struck a strange note when she quoted a headline from\u00a0The Economist<\/em>\u2014\u201cTurkey, turning its back on the West?\u201d\u2014and then said, \u201cCalm down, the answer from the editors is no.\u201d Was anyone in the audience really unhinged by the prospect? At this point, an artist I know was so turned off by the organizers\u2019 tone that he got up, walked out, and never came back. The next defection came when a curator opened his freebie bag and found a box of Dutch sweets. \u201cEven the fucking cookies are imported,\u201d he said, and likewise went on with his life.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Former West set itself a difficult task with the research congress\u2014a preposterously pretentious name for a gathering of academics, a few curators, and the odd artist reading prepared papers. Most of the talks were devoted to splitting semantic hairs and theorizing concepts of horizon, horizonal, and horizontality into being. The different approaches of philosophers (Peter Osborne,\u00a0Gerald Raunig), sociologists (Caglar Keyder), political theorists (Ernesto Laclau,\u00a0Jodi Dean), and architectural historians (Beatriz Colomina, Wouter Vanstiphout) were completely irreconcilable. Eventually, even\u00a0Simon Sheikh, a Former West researcher who had organized the congress, said the various discourses were \u201ctotally incoherent\u201d together.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say there weren\u2019t moments of drama and debate, as when Dean gave a Sarah Palin\u2013style stump speech, albeit from the far left rather than the far right. Vanstiphout called her mocking and sneering. \u201cI\u2019m glad you were uncomfortable,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m not going to apologize.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was missing from all of this was any grounding in artistic practice. The anticipation for Laclau\u2019s lecture was nearly messianic. But after giving a dense interpretation of the horizon, he shot down the idea of addressing contemporary art. \u201cI can\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not my thing.\u201d\u00a0Julie Ault, Shuddhabrata Sengupta of the Raqs Media Collective,\u00a0Robert Sember of Ultra-red, and\u00a0Dmitry Vilensky of Chto Delat? tried to redress the balance by speaking vividly of their work (as did Colomina). But the longer the congress went on, the more it seemed to fold in on itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a little confused,\u201d said Ault on day one. \u201cWhy is art so central to this event? How are you connecting it to the larger political stage?\u201d To which Osborne replied: \u201cArt is the institutionally funded space for the displacement of political discourse.\u201d That may be so, but it fails to recognize how or why contemporary art made that space to begin with, which is also like interrupting an ongoing conversation by giving a speech.<\/p>\n

By then, some spiky rebellion had entered the room. On day two, Sengupta questioned the post-1989 fetish. On day three, Sember urged the organizers to reconsider the configuration of the event, arguing there were better ways of being in the same space together to work and think. \u201cTo be able to get to know one another would have nice,\u201d he said. Maybe next time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ISTANBUL 11.15.10 WITH SO MUCH HAPPENING elsewhere in Istanbul\u2014an opening at Rampa for the painter\u00a0Ahmet Oran, a very VIP preview of\u00a0Kutlug Ataman\u2019s retrospective at Istanbul Modern, a new project by the critical darlings xurban_collective at Sanat Limani, Banu Cennetoglu\u2019s first solo show at\u00a0Rodeo, and a timely debate at Depo on the often violent relationship between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":25897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2939],"tags":[4337],"class_list":["post-25896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultureart","tag-istanbul-modern"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}