Bourgeoisie, in other words the “human”, lives its own destruction as an aesthetical pleasure in Ata’s legacy.
Let’s remember Ata’s speech at the Tüyap Book Fair where he received the 2013 Honor Award. As a modern artist he expresses his concerns and hardships:
"It is important to know why the shape in the cave of Altamira was drawn. Whatever is your imagination with the backing of your experiences and knowledge accumulation, that is the meaning of the shape we would draw on the wall(…)
“I consider the point that Turkey has come to in terms of commercial transformation in artistic field as a threat to the artists. This concept has gone so far that, the aesthetical ideology is almost set by the intermediaries and things that are produced by preparing the infrastructure are submitted to a fast consumption. The artists, gallery owners, auctioneers and collection owners; unfortunately has become the subjects of this progress that raised eyebrows for the future. We have to fight with the forms of relations that abuse us. The supernatural violence of capitalism, has shown itself with all its relentlessness in all the relations and subjects of the art market, as it did in every field. I believe that FORMATION of a NEW PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION ETHICS at every field of life is necessary.”
Even in its most derogatory periods, the most anarchic manifestos, the most rebellious or iconoclastic / liberalistic demands, the most open invitations to direct democracy, the subject of art is mingled with its object. It voices the norms of the global order within the standards of the covert interests. Everyone is in the game that is played; no one is outside the circle.
The most distinctive common point with Mustafa Ata and me is to be born in 68. We were a generation that believed in the fantasy of the existence of another world. We plunged into the Istanbul side of the tense story that appeared in different parts of the world by paying different prices. We were the first to experience the concepts learned from the books, the virtues/tortures of life. We are the primary witnesses of the history written with the ones that are no longer with us. Augustine says "socialis est vita sanctorum / the saints live together". Our friends, brothers and the young souls no longer by our sides, with their contributions in the writing of the history of our democracy, have ascended to a higher form. They have the harbingers of the doom that is yet to come. They have for seen the massacre in Sabra and Shatila in the likeliness of a foreseer in Palestine. We have become the timeless witnesses on the conscience in Ata’s painting SABRA AND SHATTILLA of 1982. Then we understood that the word ‘freedom does not refer to infinity but limits; we saw that the freedom in content was encircled in language and form. ‘Wisdom’ was powerless against dominance. The words of the big story, our definitions of justice/equality, the unending struggle between us and the rule was the sanctuary of our dreams; our belief in humanity, our love for the nature have been a shelter for our personal anxieties... Words, most of the time, were not words of agreement but words of dominance on others or de/solving. When people put the words into figuration, rather than telling something about fixed forms they conserve the old foundations and doors they have passed to come here; they choose to reorganize their praxis. In situations where the facilities of language are cruel, ruthless and desperate the various disciplines that use the symbols skillfully, with the different options they offer as a life form, they remount the construction of the old body. What should be thought about meticulously is “By ‘whom’ , to which ideal’s servitude and ‘why’ are the new bodies are offered as labor?”. Attention should be paid to the ones who synchronize the disciplines by putting it under time’s order, what they repaired by conformity and coordination and what ides they have reconstructed. There is no one that sees by himself. The collocutor of every signifier is another signifier rather than a abstract signification; the principle of self is the violation of will. To understand what the words are hiding, what they want to deny we look at the face, eyes of the collocutor. To track how words plea, how they legitimize the offense and with what threats and bribes they coerce or persuade the person in front of them is like a hunter tracking its prey. When they are defending something, telling the truth, they can give the hints of what they held back; but a little more has always been veiled. Face to face ‘action’ is indirect. During Gezi or times like now, right in the middle of the storm or in times of turmoil, when the rule’s boundaries that block the questions that has been known but not told, has always been unanswered, has been lurking at the deeper recesses of our minds have been overcome, the boundary of ‘modesty’ is put in our way by the rule... The individual with the potential to grow and develop to a point where with his own power/Potenza, the skill of his humor power and the awareness of his youth, might desire brand new loose, inexplicitly liberating boundaries when they stand side by side with people like them. What the grandfather took upon himself to hide might be heavy for the grandson that finds resoluteness irrelevant. We have seen times when the ‘knowledge’ in our hands is too rigid to adapt to the mobility of life, new ‘judiciary’ demands appear abruptly. The Indignant have organized similar uprisings in Haymarket, Wall street, Hamburg, Madrid, Athens, Tahrir and Rome with one cause. Before the reality they have sewn us loosely, we need oxygen; just like serotonin, endorphin, ‘liberty’ is our constitutional value. The physical bodies belong here but the chemical bodies, organisms are stateless; the souls have no passport. Goodness is sustainable ‘yes’ but evil and cruelty is not. With the reaction they give People is people everywhere.
Adorno in Minima Moralia says that after seeing that existence is evil, to accept it as the truth, just because it exists, is the biggest untruthfulness!.. Is 'Today' real, is the nightmare real?
The accursed tin gods have been taken back from the metaphysical hell... Objects have been turned into public indicators that have spiritual moral values rather than physical entities. Consumers are gaining their privileges through objects that they embed in their souls in modern rituals. Brands have become badges of social individual that has become ‘things’ through the myth of fetish with the image of the goods, not its use value. It is normal for the ideologies that promote the sacredness of labor to stay as captives of the regimes established by objects that they created.
In the political field categories are fixed. The organic components for a new intellectual discovery are missing. In alternative radical content against the current curriculum, the courage that could allow us to question the demands of the machines and the subject that got alienated through hybridization is not present. The scientific progression of thousands of years, today’s technological developments and the accumulation of knowledge; have depleted our hopes for the future and wounded our imagination, even more than before.
Although the concepts of Equality, Justice and Peace have been uttered, we know that only inequality, injustice and wars have integrative and constructive effect on the civilization. People find the peace needed for the society to improve highly boring! As Benjamin says all civilizations, in essence, have been established by an act of barbarism...
We should shake ourselves off the lies and the enslaving ownership of art that normalizes the institutional violence of the production regime and the urban life! All the dominant forces in the world have to sublimate its violence in the legitimate universal form to protect its power and rule. We wear our fears like a jacket on ourselves. It is enough to keep an appropriate distance to the culture that ceaselessly creates inequality, hierarchy and anxiety. Art, beyond the ‘beautiful’ and the pleasure, is vessel for political and economic schemes and when the time comes a tool for the international hierarchy plot. Despite knowing that it is a parody, we look at the subject’s position in the big or small picture or the purpose in the social division of labor. The tricks of the ruling mind are most of the time incapable of coercing the objections of the mind. They might stop the tongue that speaks but they can’t stop the tongue that thinks. The mind, initiating from the rational, with puns and metaphors, is distinguished from the abstractions that hide the system. Allegory is the moment with which we lasciviously synchronize ourselves; it is the smooth surfaces of production, the ownership of law, the polemic in politics, the power of the things replacing the sea, the earth, the sky, animals and trees, the unchecked curiosity of neighbors, the portable images of sellers, the upturned balance of people, and the simultaneous interpretation of culture. There have been wrong decisions we made and situations of impasse by having the delusion of having power and saying ‘I can do it’ without having the necessary capacity. Protest conscience resides with its sublimely unprepared appearance in the scenery. As is its nature the words that take form, created forms that are both provocative from the revolt and where extraordinary risks are taken. Symbols are frozen and the morality is filled up beforehand. When DİRENİŞ/RESISTANCE 1983 81 x 100 cm was said to be oil color on canvas, in the picture, the rule of the given names begin. The things that create the window we look through and the pressure inside are the ideas behind Ata. The state of restlessness that creates the values is contagious. Yet, how much can the acquisition of the exchanged claim the message, how much can he make the product his own? They want to levy the word in the name of ‘desire’ ... This is not strange; joining the game, joining the talk from the collectors’ side, is sharing the customs without being on the same side of the persecutor. Magnificent art is for everyone. Or with YANILTICI ÖZGÜRLÜK/ DECEPTIVE FREEDOM 1985, he is discussing the possibility of a given request. The guide that leads to creation: principle. And Turkey is a country that went through bitter experiments. Just like Oğuz Atay Says ‘where is the soul of this country?’.They are all inside us, the memories are in our bosoms. We gained the understanding that we show in fair from the deserts of truth or the battlefields. They have buried the ones they hung to death at the nights of September of 12s and Marchs in the morning; buried them in the graves of spring. We have witnessed; lived through long hours. After the losses, we put our heads in our hands in the ruins and delved into thoughts bitterly; alone and aggrieved! No one is good/wicked without the events unfolding. The vital pleasure for us is the gem placed in the core of the truth; the place where the truth should descend. The deep chaos that is imbedded in the order of the obvious ‘things’ has made the boundaries between inside and outside, dystopia and utopia unclear. To create a welfare society is the promised paradise of every ideology. The crisis in the object/meta does not stem from the issues in the power of labor, the lockdown of production, depravity of goods, etc. It is the other way around: The process that gave birth to the negative dialectic is in the reflex that seeks the excess in everything including artistic production, cruelty and ideology... The Causative is the missing part in Lacan. Conversely to castration the sick body of capitalism that created the residual value and exploitation in the colors/sounds in the world came up with the mystery of life by multiplying in metastases, not growing less... The antidote to the poison that the civilian alchemist could not find can be found by the chemistry sector wherein the blue and white colors are put to labor, that is organized as a crime syndicate. Its Audaciousness, ideas, obscenity becomes evil with the awareness of having monetary value. The capital is entrepreneurial, passionate. Its holes are fixed by crises. Is it possible to find the good/beautiful we are looking for in the disposition of the ‘things’ created by the excess of goods, in the art of the ones that find witnessing other’s pain or pleasure to be adequate or in this storm where the values of change and daydreams are flying around? Is this what is wanted? “The right to criticize in the evening / ‘To do this work today, to do another tomorrow, as you like it, hunting in the morning, never being have to be hunter, fisher or critique, to fish in the afternoon, to do animal husbandry in the evening, to criticize in after the diner’ he said in his first manifesto. Yet if we pursue this demand, should it be called wasting our lives in vain or drifting aimlessly? We would be at fault if we did so. That is because, the aim of socialism, that millions have died in its name, is to create this situation and the exhilarating prosperity. For a life like this a person should go through a ethical transformation and leap in conscience in terms of production/consumption and responsibility. The reason for it is that Karl Marx in page 60 of his book ‘German Ideology’ describe the lifestyle of the utopian society there is no class, exploitation, division of labor (thus jobs) with these words. The connection between political power and violence of body in power has made people forget the innocence in the starting sentence in which no one can say ‘it can’t be’. Society is the fields of sovereignty of the consecutive and different bodies (violence, profit, good/evil, etc.) in power. It is not a monolithic organism. The life of a society that has been organized in a faulty theoretical basis cannot be comprehended correctly. Plurality protects its differences, inclinations, specific production and cultural production. Just like the exhibition of freak bodies in circuses in the 19th century it is a commercial action. The disappointments of the artist, are produced with meta values by the culture industry that causes the fit and grown to be stronger in convenient conditions. The reason for the large and small autonomous powers to come by each other, the relations and conflicts between transmitter/transporter and subjects, the coordination of society and the superior/inferior hierarchy in the war that everyone has against everyone is economy of which we normalize its existence and competitiveness. The producer earns its revenue, savings and earnings from this war, not peace. People who are in the position of application center for everyone with an agenda, also known as the Consumers, are like the grandsons of Midas who turned everything he touched into gold. With one difference; Midas turned everything he touched into gold, the modern people turns everything into ruin...’No one will approach to where you are except the Levites’ ( Çölde Sayım 18/4). To indicate that the economic privileges are given to the chosen people by the Lord, the duties and responsibilities are distributed to 12 tribes is nothing but desperate whispers and wearisome repetitions!
The power of the king comes from the fact that he is the king; proloteria gets it from being politer... The ambition of the dominant power and the strength of power, the theoric potential of ages, comes from the position of the one that needs and the impotency of the civil individual. Stories fulfill the consolations of the the subject that has become a soldier in the socially organized prison. Subconscious; is a more irrational field than the anxious, obscure, hasty conscience…
Sublimation is the wishes that have been socially suppressed or obstructed by laws. Desires and extraordinary demands that are thought as unacceptable by people are redirected to courses that is acceptable by the system. In terms of forms of expression all the jobs that are done as in division of labor of the many, like art, politics, commerce, legal power and service sector make the subject prosper. We preserve our condition of self and put the subject (and the sublimation) into parenthesis. Identities, job choices that veils the individual are honored. While it rehabilitates with the therapeutic power of being useful for something, it helps the individual to be excluded from the society because of his instincts. The network, friends, money and reputation that is earned becomes further benefits.
We watch the storm inside from the outside; whichever aspect you look from there will be different pathological balances, sociological waverings, reputational anxieties, psychological phases being lived through inside. The collector completes the missing piece in his life with you. You might think that you should keep your distance. All the rules in the world are ‘ugly’ and all the dissidents are ‘beautiful’! Why? If what we walk through is life, art is the result of this. Despite this, we know that all the people that are involved in the representation are disgruntled. None of us posses a situation, enchanted message or calling, a wisdom that comes from the beyond that would allow us to tell someone how to live their lives. Although it is true, the little bourgeois that have shaped the history and the revolutions in practice are the ones that are criticized most because they were the real leaders in the Russian and Turkish Revolutions as well as the driving power and compatriots of Hitler and Mussolini. It is about the compulsion to bless the ‘bourgeois’ character of life rather than about how education teaches what. In the universities this tragedy is turned upside down and given to the students as a bad forgery under the name of social sciences. With the fait accompli and prolonging we fail to leap to the category people that produce their material life with culture. Despite this, genuine drama prevails over tasteless humor in useless art history seminars dictated to the hapless rentier class caught by swindlers. Although there is a congregational narrow grouping explanation of the tragedy that haunts us in the name of ‘knowing’, there is no rational explanation… The call for enlightenment is totalitarian. As the funniest trusted person of the financial science T. Veblen says “The rich, to take pleasure from their wealth, want their fortune to be known by the society”. So we should look for the supremacy of the work of art in the manipulative laws of the market, the codes of the system of exploitation, the reputational power of the ideal in the society, sass of the bourgeoisie, aw of the brands or in the ragged solitude of the bohemian; not in our culture, knowledge, infrastructure born from the face of the society that was shaped by its social history or somewhere else. We don’t eat the food on our table out of the appreciation we have for the butcher at the corner, the market that gathered all the goods on his counter or the baker that bakes various breads. A hazy simulation where merchants roam around appears after each show. Adam Smith has a similar paragraph; eventually what he wants to say is that all the good/bad things that are done in the society are results of the division of labor we share. After saying “whether it comes from the stomach or the dream it will not change” on page 49 of Capital, in the footnotes he shares Nicholas Barbon’s sentence: “A large proportions of things are valuable because they meet the needs of the soul”. He continues on page 86: “However the analysis of the meta shows that it is a strange thing full of metaphysical subtleties and theological ornaments”. Despite this it is imperative to see that our expectations are met; in places where it is the ‘law’ that obstructs this, it is a strange fight that is lost from the beginning. Philosophers, to melt away the ominous essence in their minds in their presence and existence ask, in and out of season, the question ‘what is this thing?”. Negri’s evaluation is correct: “art not only can expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order but also can present the conceptual tools to invent a new order by making what seemed to be impossible in the past completely real.” And it should do it! ‘this’ that the philosophers are trying to find is the life that meets the needs of the obsessed soul! In other words ‘this’ is the ‘it’ at the moment.
A critique calls him ‘the artist that looks for everything in people’. Although at this time there is nothing that has not been said, in Mustafa Ata’s hands art becomes an unrepeatable act and the artist in his body is an elegant and unique shaman, a modern activist...
Mustafa Ata says : “ The function of art is asking questions, getting answers, making suggestions in the relation between the objective reality and the ‘people’. It is to offer a world vision about the ethical values. While doing this the artist should take the world view of his lands that was shaped by the social and historical conditions into account. Through history the world view that east and west has offered, most of the time, brought conflict along with it. While one suggests the dialectic philosophy the other speaks of metaphysical world. While one is adamant on the unchangeability of the object, the other accepts the changeability, in other words spiral evolution. The ethical suggestions of both life styles have helped the world of art to produce masterpieces. What is the duty of the artist at this very moment? The artists should always direct this question to himself.”
While, the closest person to him, Gönül Karakan was talking about him, said: “Ata who had an obligatory relation with the material world, in my opinion, lived his life to make others happy. The somberness inside him is his inspirational flame. The manifestation starts here. Milena, in one of her writings about Kafka says: ‘No, he can’t understand the world we had to know. He is a stranger to life. He will never have salvation. It is because he has no tools to turn to. This is why he is so bruised this much by things that we can protect ourselves. He is a naked person among dressed up people’. Near the late eighties the atomic mystery the figure carried, came to an end with the colors exploding in the body. Now he is depersonalized, nullified and equalized as if revolting anarchically against any form of comparison”. In Ata’s pictures, more than his style that he state, there is, as Karak pointed out, a progressive sense of being trapped in the emptiness and the target/destination he located himself. It is sorrowful as Turgut Uyar who couldn’t breach the siege said in Sonsuz ve Öbürü (Endless and Other): “You spared your most valuable times for me ; thank you dear sir; You thought me that the sky is endless; I learned! You thought me that the earth is endless; I learned! You thought me that life was endless; I learned! You thought me the endlessness of the dimensions of time and that sometimes the air turned into a bird; I learned dear sir! But dear sir you didn’t teach me things that were not endless; Oppression, tyranny, slaughter, hunger, being trapped in a place, being silenced, happiness of love and even arithmetic… You left these for me to find out… I thank you”. If we are acquainted with Uyar’s verses we can envision Karakar’s description of Ata’s pictures as a depiction of being trapped in a world where he barely relates to. The maze, with the desire to break the walls that define the rules of the game that institutes our fates, is full of anarchic day dreams. The person lives its own destruction as an aesthetical pleasure through Ata’s works.
The instinctive will that was passed on from Nero, Caligula and Sade ; Deo juvante / With the help of God! ..
During the times when we need someone’s correction, our lives call for change, going through hardest and toughest experiences and become pessimistic for it the principle of hope that keeps the humans/society standing steps in automatically. The artist rehabilitates the person that is inclined to the ethical field. As Ata puts it, this battle-like action he plunged in like ‘zen’ that breaks the ground strengthens this determination. GİZEMLİ GÖVDE, YÖNETİCİ, IŞIK FORM, KURALSIZ OYUNLAR, HABERCİ, KÜÇÜK BİR HİKAYE, BOŞLUKTA DOĞUM, ATIN ÖLÜMÜ… According to Aristotle what is ‘seen’ is color. What sometimes becomes dark and sometimes light, as per its nature the same thing. The artist, as a creator allows us to go through his own Altamira face our consciences that will plunge from one color to another, until the catastrophic moment we will stumble upon the names he gave to his pictures.
The story that Somerset Maugham tells about the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, is an example of a fatalistic story that can be seen frequently in the Islamic mysticism ; Because it attracted the attention of Baudrillard and became known in the West lets repeat another version of it:
“While the Caliph was sitting in the balcony of the palace in Baghdad, the grand vizier runs towards him with great anxiety and says: “I was just passing through the grand square to come to the palace. While I was walking, I felt someone was looking at me. I turned around and I saw Death right behind me!”
- “You saw Death?” asks the Caliph curiously
- “Yes it was Him, I immediately recognized him… He was dressed in pitch black, he again had a black scarf… He fixated his eyes on mine like he wanted to scare me… I am sure he was looking for me. Please allow me ; I have to run away from here! I will take the best horse and directly head to Samarkand… If I ride out now I can be there before the evening.”
-“Was it really Death you saw, are you sure?”
-“ I am very sure” says the vizier. “I saw him then just I see you now. I am sure that it was Death as I am sure that you are you. Please allow me to go now…”
The Caliph who loved his vizier very much allows him to go although he was not convinced. The vizier prepares his horse ; rides out of the city with full speed. He intended to reach Samarkand before nightfall and escape death... After his vizier left the Caliph feels uneasy and calls Death.
-“I want to ask you something” he says “My grand vizier is still young, health and as far as I know a respectable and honest person. I have heard that you scared him a lot before he came to the palace today… Why did you look at him like that?..
Death answered in a calm manner:
-“ I did not want to scare him. I did not stare him in a scaring way. We came near each other by chance among the crowd in the square, I wasn’t looking for him but when I saw him I was surprised and couldn’t contain my shock when I looked at him. He saw the astonishment in my eyes...
-“Why were you so surprised?” asks the Caliph…
-“Why were you so surprised?” asks the Caliph…
Death answers :
-“I didn’t think that he would be here in Baghdad. I thought he would be in Samarkand because I was supposed to meet him in Samarkand at nightfall… That was the reason he barrowed your horse and hurried to go there.”
When we read the story of Samarkand we feel the breath of the angel called Azrail, the Grim Reaper, on our necks. The feeling of eeriness creeps out of the story and settles in the place we are in. This situation gives the person a feeling of hesitation. What seems permissible in the morning might be scary at night. The human is the subject but does the subject posses its own object and time? If we read the question backwards, is subject the agent of the object? Is the individual really the owner of its body, master of his soul? If we feel uneasy thinking that someone is interfering what is the eeriness in the alienation of the modern men in psychology. For that we have give an ear to the Freud. The two articles he wrote in 1919 are still primary sources of reference.
Hegel calls it ‘synthesis’ but in the dialectic of nature there is neither an ‘enemy’ nor an ‘antithesis’ that can come out without the human thought. As we look at his works we notice that there might not be a significant between the ‘cause’ and the exchangeable ‘effect’ that makes this cause eager. Is such a reading that happened over Mustafa Ata a mistake for the academic world, a production casualty in their ranks, or a heavy lesson which happens to be the answer itself? ; it is not known! Nevertheless what is known is nature’s ability that can abruptly disturb the line, see what can’t be seen, hear what can’t be heard and prepare the ground for unique capricious souls. Because of the fact that the knowledge of the industrial society can’t explain the intuitions of the people with clairvoyance with rational ways, it has livened up the undefined field that is called ‘art’ by leaving it to brokers, commissioners, traders, psychics and self-appointed critiques. It is a joy to see that, in the recesses of this world known for its ruthlessness there are eerie creatures that reside among us.
It is impossible to understand how artists can’t find any subjects in such a fast moving world. Even if they tell the naked truth, they will already have exposed the big truth. The despair of the ordinary artist or the subjects that is trying to hold on to the present simple tense is an miserable act of seeking compassion by making every nonsense into a tragic play, just to be seen. And this is a sinister trap laid for the audience.
Every reading we will do on Hegel is a repetition that has been defaced by people who wanted to create a new word, exhausted by overuse, oversimplified and compiled into three words. We have called dialectic walk to obtain a positive concept out of the conflict of two concepts, one positive and one negative. If we repeat the commonly made mistake, we can continue by saying that this is the triadic steps that consist of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
In the Science of Logic, Hegel tells the dialectic view that has been attributed to him by revising it. If we take the Thought from his movement as a thesis, it is an opportunity that has not happened. For it to happen there should be another field parallel to it and the grounds where we can harvest the truth is the nature. Nature is also the antithesis of the concept of thought. From the conflict of these two concepts springs the cultural products. Culture is not a pristine composition but a suspicious formation.
Especially, as the soul of the individual detaches from the society more uncanny movies gets aired. Freud published his work The Uncanny in 1919. He looks at the Hofmann’s story ‘Sandman’ again to make useful for himself. Before him Ernst Jentsch wrote the Psychology of the Uncanny in 1906. Freud, starts by criticizing Jentsch’s views, with his language and evaluations, enriches the concept of uncanny. He says: “The German word unheimlich is the opposite of the word Heimlich which means familiar, and it compels us to conclude that the uncanny is absolutely scary because it is now known, not familiar. Of course not everything that is new and unfamiliar have to be scary, but this correlation can’t be reversed. We can only say that everything that is outside the familiar can easily be scary and uncanny. Something should be added to the things that are unfamiliar for them to be uncanny. (…) (Jentsch), relates the main factor in the formation of the uncanny feeling to mental ambiguity; this way, uncanny becomes something that we don’t know if it at the place it should be or not. People who already identify themselves with their surroundings will fell the sense of uncanny about the objects or events less”(1). However as we said before, in the blurry journey of the mind there would be countless gems in the sea and in the pristine ambiguous atlas there would be continents to discover. Mustafa Ata, with all his uneasiness, defines the holes of the world from equal distances to negative and positive. In his works such as İLKSİZ VE SONSUZ, KIZILAĞAÇ'TA FIRTINA, ARİS he can hold conflicting ideas, antithetical aspects and figures together by working in the subconscious. He prefers to show things in his own transparency rather than synthesis that would be created. Just like the sons of Jacob that, on their way, meet the sons of Esau after leaving Egypt, it is the confrontation of the aggrieved with the grievances and its own past.
It can’t be claimed that the human mind is open. Its operations are often collusive. The mind is hazy and misty. Every ideology at its final stage offers an irrational, uncompletable and incomplete experience. The prototype that pursues ideals, is in the rush of inventing the fixed truth. Some progressive ideas want to expose and dispose of the older ones and this shouldn’t be considered as something bad.
There is nothing missing in nature. Incomplete, is born from the unfinished duties of the parts of a society that has been organized in a symbolic way. What are the opportunities and conditions of ‘art’ to create an alternative world to the hideous scenes created by the mankind who pursues even more power in parallel with the humans’ overperfomance? There is a need for the ‘uncanny!’ demonstrations of artists that asks this question ‘now’ more than ever.
Plato’s Meno is a well known example. The dialogue begins with Socrates starting to talk with Meno the slave. Meno asks ‘Can virtue be taught?’. Socrates replies ‘Can we know how to acquire something without knowing what it is?’. Whatever we are looking for shows us the shortest way an individual can choose with his own reality. Although we don’t know its name, if we think that it exists we can’t continue without setting goals. Before Darwin’s theses, Hegel who considered the universe as a materialized idea claims that the progress of thought was born from the entities’ interaction with each other. He calls this the process dialectic. Dialectic is a walk born from the conflict of two opposite sides; ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ that maintains its progress with the existence of the opposite.-If we exclude history- has always been experiencing a world he didn’t create, independent of humans. Like Tarkvsky’s Solaris, this world is completely in our minds. It is apparent that philosophy was inspired by Greek stories that attacks seminal life with all its magnificence just like the annoying tyrants that hold the power. All the objects of the knowledge we use in the world and thus all the universe is embodiment of an absolute subject. Hegel claims that the essence of the spiritual entities consisting of soul, geist and idea can be penetrated by the human mind. The reason for that is the fact that the absolute emerges as the ‘substance’ in the materials of the human brain, effects of the action that creates the sins and good deeds, at every attempt of the nature and in every meaning of the purpose. Regulation means both to arrange and interfere. In the Philosophy of Jurisprudence, Hegel’s trio of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis allows us produce the postulate that would confirm the (a mistake also done by Marx) Salvationist and Masonic gospels. Its capacity is wide enough to provide ‘power’. The possibilities of the ‘synthesis’ that can decide on the truth are vast. The vessel that would take us to the metaphor of paradise is the handmade dialectic. The power of the king of comes from the fact that he is the king; proletariat gets it from being prole. As a follower of Hegel, Marx creates the standing point of the theory of controlling Life with the omnipresence of ideology. Then he sees the power that can be organized as a central concept; it results with him drowning the experience of nature whose aims is itself in the dark of the Enlightenment. Although the technological connections have sympathetic networks, there is no repairing synthesis for the relations that the industry created or no end to the distortions of the mind that is brave enough to think. The ambitious ‘human’, is so enslaved to the concept that he created that he doesn’t give other lives any chance. The panoptic view, is the look of Power or God that sees without being seen. When we enter Mustafa Ata’s workshop we see that he has created a screen by turning this look backwards to voice the omnipresence of tyranny and the monad of pain and inequality. He returns the symptom to the tender authority where the issues are reported to. He glosses the word to color and shapes. He makes a notional statement without accusing the society that is the target of it. It fixes the rift in the perception. As if trying to patch the tear in the mind, he examines the sameness of what creates cause and effect, similarity of humans who made the offence featureless faces and dressless bodies. In his every piece his ability to create metamorphosis, because of his inclinations, changes and forms. His panoptic view in his anxiety, with its self fulfilling prophecy, can turn into an expostulation to god who seized the power. How ironic it is that supremacy, in the universal history of lowness is remembered by ‘humans’!
As the codes are untangled, life becomes something that is expressed by words; the call of literature, provokes the narrative forms more than the modern art’s protest part. The question is this : Yes it is bought and sold but how much can we discuss the contents that art provides us?
The product of the artist empowers the pathology of the capital rather than spurring the thought. With all its steadfastness it strengthens the power of the privileged. By putting the images and the daydreams that enlarges the nobility he gives the message that even the soul of the subject can be captured by the associates of the capital.
Does his work force us to negotiation by pulling us to the center or force us to a trade off where we can not take the miserable conditions of producing goods? The subject of popular culture can be understood as a sub-problem of the artist coming through the concepts of power and manipulation of power not as the main problem coming through the concepts of subject and consumption. Does he make others desire his object and provide an opportunity to what is already in circulation just by creating the urge to own something? Is the fake up-to-datedness an invitation to a non-present need? At this stage the art piece that gets in to the circulation with the image of its producer, the desire of its consumer, appetite of its architect attains a meaning with its meta value. For the destructive creativity of the world to be able to continue without being tainted by the unpleasant forms of capitalism it desperately (superior to change, with the use value) needs art; but what do we mean by ‘art’? Is it the rediscovery of the political passions, a tool for the intellectuals? Lets remember Kant’s ‘reasonless reason’ principle and reverse it. The purpose of a painting is not to change the world but to reach the capital holders. The art pieces have no other purpose than getting into circulation as a meta. Although it uses the skepticism of hard sciences, bourgeoisie, has negative attitude with its vulgarity. To count the public structures of modernity as values of essence, a metabolic reality, to accept is rationality and confirm it is to accept the main structures of injustice as a natural phenomenon. This approach approves us to accept the extraordinary power of the capital that made our lives a nightmare. The painful truth behind what is seen is the defect of the ominous truth that we are inclined to deny. We can’t say that the aspects of capitalism are thankful to the objective truths. It can’t be said that it is returnable; you can’t return the civilization you don’t like back to its owner either. The Enlightenment era of Capitalism of which we are customers to, provokes the hysterical masses with unsophisticated emblems and reasonless reasons. It sends out the flares; continuously and tirelessly uses misguiding direction signs; makes the word implicit. Hegemony, maintains its sociological dominance not through enforcing ideologies but with the essences of rules that it has violated, cultural leadership it has debased and oligarchic structures that hire leaders that think they know everything. The distorted situation is morbid and lost its originality. We encounter a frightening solitude here. Freud reduces the concept of alienation to the alienation of a person to its own existence by turning Hegel’s concept of alienation towards society or Marx’s concept of worker’s alienation towards its own ‘product’. ‘The uncanny’ is a term that is frequently used in the game we join voluntarily/knowingly where the conditions are prefabricated. According to his description, alienation leaps from a natural state to a sublime, exaggerated state. ‘Let them be in good health’ is like confirming ‘everything I think is real even if they are imaginary’. Inanimate objects coming to life, repeating events, miraculous coincidences, sleepwalking like having been hypnotized, a state of trance when you are open to voices from beyond, madness, suspicion, hysteria, being unsure of sexual orientation, the fear of being buried alive and Kafka-like government or friends… All the neurotic hallucinations, organized institutions and commissions of Capitalism surrounds the subject. It is the upside-down, inside-out version of life, it is the matrix of the world of emotions via the things of the usual opportunities of the moods. The differences between the picture drawn on the walls of the cave in Altamira and the ‘piece of art’ on the walls of a manor are the imaginary ‘central’ perception and the illusion of object’s ‘power’. Fear not only disturbs the body but also the mind thinking of profit. If we go back to Marx, he says “Real criticism solves problems, not answers”. If humans don’t live with right, anger and rebellion, criticism of today, of which day will they live with integrity/virtue; with which carbon copies will he leave his mark to the future? Pragmatic approach follows a ‘everything is in its normal way’ kind of method. Its analyses, opposite to the critical approach, don’t follow a historical explanation style and it has an over-experimental perspective. If we come back to the definition ‘the Abject’ that was entrusted to us by the psychologists, we can ask what is ‘psych’ology and its contribution when we encounter social behaviors of which we can’t identify what it is made of or its shape/color. When understanding by touching is impossible, we comprehend the behaviors with indefinite contacts and intuitions. There might be things where rejected emotions that at the beginning, in the effervescency of describing, might be seen as inferior and disgusting, absorbs us. ‘The Abject’ is the term Julia Kristeva uses to describe the act of throwing a monkey wrench, tampering with the excluded. This term was conceptualized in her essay called Power of Horror she wrote in the early 80’s. Kristeva’s text should be read in full and correctly (2). The meaning in the word ‘rejecting’ that an individual uses to describe anything that he ward off anything that he doesn’t want to identify with himself can mean from anything such as things that doesn’t irritate us when inside but does so when outside to critical secretions that are seen as “excrement” in the society. When ‘The Abject’ is used what we understand are the people who are the isolated, quarantined, deferred, punished, disqualified and cruelly discharged from the society. If we say it in a creative involvement and think that the society is a single collective body/mind, ‘The Abject’ is always an artist.
(2) Julia Kristeva, Powers of horror, http://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art206/readings/kristeva%20-%20powers%20of%20horror%5B1%5D.pdf
Whichever identity he is using, it is a must that he enters the game in a political way with his influence. Is it something like gifting a performance with signs of madness to expose the deferrers who defer others or is it an honorable and alternative suggestion to the immoral capitalism; maybe! Just like any artists that show unrest, similar concepts legitimize Mustafa Ata’s mission. If we land an ear to Kant, if the mind doesn’t make laws of its own, it will have to abide by the laws of others. The reason for it is that, nothing, even artistic criticism can’t play its own game where there are no laws. Capital and Labor; in Marxist theory they are shown like two foes, two enemies that when exists the other can’t, two opposite rival sides of a story. In Capital, Marx says ‘frozen human labor’ when describing meta. After this description we see that, when the composition of the Capital is given, it is made up of ‘living’ and ‘dead’ labor. The dead labor is the raw materials, machines, place of production and tools of production. With the combination of living and dead labor forms ‘capital’. In the capitalist society ‘capital’ means equal labor, in the socialist or communist societies it means ‘capital’ means labor. Changing the name of capital won’t change its characteristics. In all the social models that constitute the rule, capital’s power comes from making the labor under its power in factory order; the power to buy a person’s life activities that obligations made fertile is indisputable; including art. We should think what is political as both a part of the power we share the benefits and a form of resisting it. To have failed Dream Sciences, requires an accurate accounting of our activities of our abused arms/legs and many areas of our reflex biopolitics. The egalitarian, socialist society that the humanists have been longing for is not life organizing as ‘life’ but, for it to organize in a factory-like manner that will create the surplus of goods. It carries the delusion of the individuals who were turned into things for goods must work with assignment of duty.
There is no real and absolute solution for the exploitation of the blood and the sweat of the labor from Marx or any other utopist builds their system in the organization of tyranny.
Now we come to the contents of the sentence “depersonalized, nullified and equalized as if revolting anarchically against any form of comparison”. The thing that creates this situation that Karakan mentions is the ‘nakedness’; for Bakunin who defines freedom as being the society itself rather than socialist, the nakedness that is liberated from all uniforms is the basic principle of social equalization. The reason for it is that the one who builds the proprieties has clothes on him: the intervention that breaks the free will of another always includes a ‘command’ word. “Every command is a slap in the face of freedom!” The evolution of the fig leaf, shows similarities with the modern human’s progress. Dressing up is the state of ‘existence’ by exerting force. ‘Girding on’ is to obtain symbolic armors that prove our state of existence. In the oligarchies and despotisms behind all social masks, the destructive character of capitalism, its traumatic nature and greed for profits defines the oppressive and moral color/form of the art of exploitation through uniforms, official epaulettes and ‘clothes’ with secular brands. Like the laborer in his overalls, the subject in his mediocrity is alone in the exploitation society; but he is not ‘steadfast’ in his knowledge and understanding of solitude. Being naked among the people with clothes remark that Karakan made for Mustafa Ata doesn’t stem from powerlessness but from the merit in the enlightened free mind.
Mustafa Ata says “The tendency to use violence to hold on to power since the early times, unfortunately has become a way of ingratiation. Being sensitive towards this kind of behavior is the sole condition of being human. To stand against it is the duty of the artist”. We concur Ata’s paragraph and resume where he left…
Diversification of the technological networks, increase in communication opportunities with the simultaneous omnipresence, implementation of ideas in the creativity and information convection has now changed desperation of the subject.
Although politics contain a lot of anger, involves very little options. We normalize ‘violence’, the principle that establishes states, even in the modern world. The tutelage in the structure of social contract, makes the promised representational system to the subject a ‘play’. Whereas the envisagement that would make democracy a close target has to come from the imaginations of the artist. In this insanity that the world has come to, we need to forget what we know and break free of our past not go back and learn; but the dialectic that obstructs our way is the memorization that shadows our merit to the nature.
Before delving into the subject once more, we should say this for Mustafa Ata as the person who triggered thought and provoked the established to provide a general evaluation: The fact that the first demands of freedom against the monarchic rules are first voiced by you is because you can differentiate the difference. The ordinary person after the artist enlightens with the same awareness. Nevertheless if the fundamental dynamics of the society is founded on exploitation in spite of the enlightenment, it is an unsustainable progress in the regime of labyrinths… The poet says “but you haven’t taught me things that were not endless, my dear sir!”. We should reassess the burden that the old accounts have put on us with the maturity of the age we reached; however the culture regime that organizes our production did not teach the life we live and our syndromes, the conflicts and it left it to us to find the inconsistencies in the system. We can only object with art pieces not with gratitude! There is ‘human’ at the center of his drawing; to make the figures he enlarged more visible, he exaggerates his declaration and emphasis. There are simple answers to the political irrationalities for that we outburst and troubles that unbalances us. Inequality and hierarchy, the organic compounds of capital that creates anxiety and inorganic compounds of culture, had already existed before with the labor becoming an exchangeable ‘value’. We fear the panoptic look, the look of the Supreme that can’t be seen. The absence of God is chaos. As speculated from Gezi, the politics can use twisted fantasies and paranoiac perversions. Just like replying in kind to Parmenides’ words ‘whatever I think exists’, dreams and sexual fantasies can become tools for political campaigns. When the people decides for the future, a person decides for the society, a lead for the majority and the majority for the leader, we know that the ‘I’ inside us dies. The ‘representative system’ that is thought to express me, instead of doing that lives with my symbol and grows with the statistical information that will absorb my labor force. When he says SONLU SONSUZLUK, /SONSUZ YOLCULUK, KURALSIZ OYUN, ÇELİŞKİ, ELİF'İN YOK EDİLEN KARDEŞLERİ 1984 etc. he seeks a target and his gaze directs us to the meaninglessness and immorality of the of the incessantly increasing game that increases its effect on the victims and the other. The society has already, starting from this point, created irrational categories. Ata, while holding the psychology of the son in his hand or being in the world of conflict with his humanism, he provides of disassembling perspective. Based on the names he gives and the paintings we can find the difference between the intellectual ‘value’ and ‘price’ in the market everywhere; from the production/consumption relations, museums of capitalism, law of the culture industry, the act of marketing the pain in fairs, and everywhere the passion to consume art is provoked. It is not only Turkey’s joy, and fair enthusiasm, the world , if we weren’t in it, is a very enjoyable tent; one single country. Although everything has opposites in numbers, Art is a pursuit too complicated to be called ‘beautiful’. We are continuing a reading/writing practice and production using the nominal values. The reason the managed to convince is that we have digested the extraordinariness of the paradigm of ‘art’. The incapacity that was born from the command of being free has enslaved us. The normalized exploitation and accumulation of the labor that has fallen apart from the body is the dominant reason. Because of the products clinched nature to finance, the indication of freedom is no more, the consciousness has been broken. It is not hard to rip an idea from its nurturing roots in the nature and then to associate with a different idea in the artificial reality of our lives and the economic contacts that our obligations created. Despite this, what is important is where we stand; which compromises we make in life to live, what we exchange in our soul in return. All the trick is to ask society the right question at the right time; how many people can answer the questions they ask themselves when they are alone with integrity and without pain? Whatever we do, the artists sees this discomfort, this act of asking the startling questions to other people as his duty in the troublesome mission that was given to him. Jean-Luc Godard states that we should look for criticism in the movie not the director… Deprivation is in the shady area that we are deprived of, it is in the climate of the uncertainty of the economy; it is not in the pieces of the artist. The threshold is passed with a look towards the direction he points. While we are doing this we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that there is only one ‘truth’ that can be reached in life. Hegel, being the most quoted person, is today’s main actor. His dialectic that consists of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is the disorder of the socialist progressive thought as well as the capitalist, post modernist perspective; The accepted fact of the world that doesn’t have to be proven. We can’t build the faultily built life correctly. The reinforced Hegel philosophy is functional as a commonly used software program. To leave the axiom at the uncanny point where it transfers to us and create the truths that will be reached in life requires a skill of hands. What creates the phenomenon of humans is the faultily evolved, crooked mind. History is written by the freely victorious. In his writing of 1879 Engels, while criticizing Hegel says “ The fault is not taking these thoughts out of nature and history and trying to patch them to the nature and history as laws of thought. He says so but…
“I am talking about the person in a vast eternity. The subject of my pictures contains all times because the historical stop in the life of the world doesn’t interest me. What is important is what a human does, how he does it and where he stands. Human is a creature I admire anyway. Liveliness has always drawn my attention. The human is energy, the only creature that challenges death, the only creature that is capable of everything. Art is always a synthesis that the artists create based upon himself (..) with the aid of color I include my own journey to the figure…”
Doubt is the reason for occupations that are uncertain about their knowledge to reassess their situation; unstable grounds are tested by decent researches. The subject is not aware of the ritual that he is being sacrificed with his stimuli. A conscious experience is realized by subliminal nudges. The interest of the privileged for other fields, the initiation of art into all fields of life through them, for them to coincide with the economic prosperity and opportunity of the coterie that owns the country is inevitable; the results are predestined. Ata who says ‘you pledge your whole life for one event’ is aware of the possibilities and the unchangeable constructs.
As much as the Capital, Marx’s Manifesto of 1848 is a text that contains pages of praise about the existence of bourgeoisie because for a revolution to happen, a conflict between the system of values created by bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the thesis and antithesis is necessary. Against the thesis of bourgeoisie, the proletariat provides its antithesis. The synthesis that would come up is the socialist revolution that would be accepted as suitable postulate without much tampering. So, is it possible to say that the world creates a synthesis through the conflict of opposites against Engel’s claim for extraction of dialectic laws from the nature? With the from taken from Hegel Dialectic Materialist theory, the thought of negating the negation results in affirmation and it is known that this affirmation aims an imaginary result (Marx calls it the communist society).From this we can see in dialectic that the evolution in nature is seen as a progress and it is aimed for the change in nature to be shaped by the human hands. However materialist it may seem it is a structural disinformation of the consciousness that is against nature’s ontology. In the world’s ontological dynamics and the knowledge of material there can’t be thesis/antithesis, synthesis negotiations, identities and morals. As Kant says the physical laws have necessities, natural laws of its mass and movement. Morality and freedom; the laws of politics, metaphor of ideals by virtue metaphysical ; they can be transformed into will. Against the formation of the synthesis, we emphasize the preservation of contrasts. Like the act of thinking we are performing here it is not possible for speech, writing and art to come to a conclusion. Thereby synthesis is also indefinite; the result is imaginary. The miraculous process for everyone provides an experience without the final word, more valuable than the metaphysical utopic lies. When we pass from discipline society to control society, these things we say have practical value in an age where the words are needlessly repeated and tautology and dominant discourse is theorized. Synthesis is not the success of the dialectic thought but on the contrary is the sin of capitalism and all its derivatives (namely socialism, communism and anarchism) and if we want to express it in a way everyone will understand it is the curse of God. Mustafa Ata’s call above on ‘the condition for existence is opposing violence’ should be heeded. The perceptive ‘formation’ that Hegelian dialectic creates in synthesis not only distorts one’s world view but also ‘violence’ will be the main paradigm of all the classes who aim to have power. The ‘modern’ human that presents his own interest as everyone’s interest, will accept violence as his basic ‘nomo’ (in its general meaning from tradition to law) in his social organization and institutional structure. When the case is violence that creates hierarch, the ‘recklessness’ and inconsideration in the capital/labor paradigm maintains its uncertainty in the social law. Our minds that are shaped by the weak regime that is called capitalism, became a rival for the nature. Art although adopts the law of the ones that confiscated the world it can share other’s pain. This uncompromising conflict, as is its nature must be understandable; because the message at its collocutor. Overcoming this paradox is not done by strengthening the boundaries but by starting to question the secret, the privacy between it and humans and remove the dramatic obstacles that was provoked by the inequality in ownership; things are hard for the daring mind.
Tarkovsy “we discuss the event, not the reasons. We are talking about the most important thing. If humans are living without knowing the reason of his existence, without knowing why he came to this world and why he has to live a given amount of time then the world should be in the condition that it is today. Since the Enlightenment, humans are busy with the things they should have discarded. It has turned its face towards material things. The hunger for knowledge took a hold on them. “Women are not as hungry for knowledge as men. Thank God” he said in his interview with Irena Brenza in 1984. Culture is not a pristine composition but a suspicious formation. The rebellion against drudgery that every thinking person has is the reason of our writing process. Gothe says that if you want a clever answer, ask your question cleverly. Mustafa Ata succeeded in it with the questions he asked.
Ata, has the skill to oppose the dominant discourse and violated bourgeoisie’s right to peace with the manifesto of the generation he was in as well as with the paintings he painted. Adorno says ‘wanting to come out right in philosophy is a inappropriate behavior’. Although he had common points, with the criticisms that he directed at the power of the rule, paved a way for contradictory opinions. The artist gave the chance to the people who wants to think through his works and contributed to the audiences’ out of purpose reflexes and intellectual processes of unbecoming suspicion and doubting the system. Ata, with his works, opposes the human’s desperation, art’s partnership in sharing the universal victimhood with its status quo and oppressed rebellion.
***
