HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Can Altay

Minibar, 2001
Can Altay
Courtesy the artist, Ankara, Turkey

Can Altay

Can Altay b.1975 (Turkey)
lives and works in Ankara, Turkey

launch interview with Can Altay

An architect, artist, designer, and scholar, Can Altay is interested in unorthodox appropriations of the built environment. Influenced by Georges Bataille's ideas on transgression, Michel Foucault's ideas on power and non-nor-mativity, and Henri Lefebvre's conceptions of social space as well as by art history, Altay approaches his subject matter from a number of discursive directions. His current project, the minibar projections, is an exploration, documentation, and exhibition of the transgressive use of semipublic spaces by young people. Minibars, named by the youth who create and use them, are impromptu gathering places around and in-between buildings in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. Architectural and geographic "one night stands," they are, in the words of the artist, "a utilisation of physical environment for an event [outside of the intent of] the builders, designers, and residents." These locations become places through occupation, use, and social relations, much as Lefebvre proposed in The Production of Space. Altay's project documents these appropriations in the form of an audiovisual installation--slides, taken at the minibars, are projected in the gallery, along with sound recordings from the events. Viewers are immersed in the experience of the minibars and the space, sometimes casting shadows as they walk through the projected light.

Altay's documentation of informal participants' occupation of the semipublic realm and the resulting architectural and social response (heightened fences, the erection of metal bars) alerts us to the increasing privatization of our surroundings and the almost complete lack of truly public space in the urban sphere. Additionally, his work captures fleeting moments in time, a sense reinforced by the age of the young minibar occupants, who are poised at the edge of adulthood.

Altay was featured in Eve Hediyesi, Oda Projesi, Istanbul, Turkey (2002); Becoming a Place, Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2001); and an exhibition at the Çankaya Center for Contemporary Arts in Ankara (2000).

--Aimee Chang

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

ask if this language is the "language to be transformed" that Hall describes. The key idea of Szeemann's exhibition was without a doubt liberation. Indeed, the exhibition and the artists designed forms that in a nondidactic, nonillustrative way were echoing the liberation movements that emerged across the world at the end of the 1960s. The methods and the results were in many ways exceptional, though one may regret that the protagonists were exclusively European or American.[21]

The current exhibition acknowledges the importance of this predecessor, but at the same time points out that the model it represented is not an exclusive one. If our history is one of "permanent changes," looking back at a tradition started in 1969 allows us to free ourselves from it and to project ourselves in a different direction. This idea parallels the definition that Paulo Herkenhoff provides for the relationship between Brazilian culture and modernity: "Modernism in Brazil reconstitutes the past as a possibility of projecting itself in the future ... Brazilian culture reformulated rather than refused the relationship with tradition and past."[22]

Are we, today, facing comparable shifts in terms of politics, history, and aesthetics? Do those shifts define what could be called the global age? Our research for How Latitudes Become Forms took us once again to Brazil, and to a text by Hélio Oiticica, who was not in the Szeemann exhibition but might be seen as a point of departure for many of the practices we have encountered in our travels.[23] In 1966, in an essay in which he articulated what seems to be the nucleus of his activities, Oiticica wrote:

I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience.[24] This short excerpt contains within it many of the elements that are feeding our reflection today: the notion of proximity and locality; the idea of in-betweenness symbolized by wasteland; the outline of an aesthetic of the slightest gesture; the performativity of audiences and artists across disciplines, which is a possible lead toward multidisciplinarity; the critique of museum authority; the increasing importance of the everyday; and the subversive potential of art. These different concepts might serve as the constitutive elements of a specific aesthetic of "thirdness." The term "third" here does not designate an aesthetic geographically located in the so-called Third World. Rather, its meaning derives from the Third Cinema, a body of film theory that explore show cultural practices driven by political and cultural emancipation can equally commit to aesthetic strategies.[25] Because the aesthetic of Third Cinema does not limit itself to a geographical meaning, it can be extended across disciplines and applied to other disciplines, such as performing arts and visual arts.

The works of Japanese artist Tabaimo--anime films that are bittersweet and seductive, yet repulsive--belong to such an aesthetic (pp. 241-243). Colorful, naive, clumsy, and fragile at first sight, these narrative and poetic playlets achieve a sharp deconstruction of Japanese social systems. Her critique relies on a manipulation of Japanese stereotypes (images of the "salary man," the "Japanese woman," public baths, sumo fighters, and commuter trains) using the form of yet another Japanese stereotype: the underground anime aesthetic. The critique that results from the problematization of these stereotypes focuses on nationalism and its relationship to economic achievement or failure, reflecting a period of deep crisis of values (work, patriarchy) that alters the hierarchical construct of Japanese society. As a result, gender politics (in Japan as elsewhere) come under the gun in Tabaimo's work, though it may appear cute and girlish on a superficial viewing. The complexity of her work is that it reconciles the terms of political struggle with an attention to form and to aesthetic strategies.

21 One exception was Philippine artist David Medalla.

22 Paulo Herkenhoff, introduction to Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos, exh. cat. (São Paulo: XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, 1998), p. 42.

23 "We" includes the Walker Art Center curators who joined me in organizing this exhibition: Douglas Fogle, for Brazil and India, and Olukemi Ilesanmi for South Africa.

24 Hélio Oiticica, "Position and Program," in Hélio Oiticica, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1992), pp. 103-104.

25 See Michael Wayne, "The Critical Practice and Dialectics of Third Cinema," Third Text, no. 52 (summer 2000). In this article Wayne uses Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers as a primary case study for his reflections on the aesthetics of the Third Cinema.

Opus

2002
http://opus.walkerart.org

"We want to create a digital commons, and try to find out if people are willing to share work in this area."--Monica Narula, Raqs Media Collective

Opus, or Open Platform for Unlimited Signification, is an online environment for presenting content and a work space that allows for collaboration, modification and republishing of others' content. According to Raqs, "The idea for the project is taken from the Free Software principle. In Free Software anyone can download something, modify, customize it, whatever you want, and again distribute and share it. And we were wondering if it will work as a methodology also for cultural production."

There are two fundamental aspects to OPUS. The first is simply to allows a member-user to download and upload work. The second is that What distinguishes OPUS from any number of other file sharing projects is a powerful concept that Raqs calls "recension."

"Normally," especially in intellectual property law, but generally in at least Western culture, there is the idea of the original and anything based on it is derisively deemed "derivative." In OPUS, Raqs deploys the notion of "recension."

"A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. . . . The concept of rescension is contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy. [emphasis added] A rescension cannot be an improvement, nor can it connote a diminishing of value. A rescension is that version which does not act as a replacement for any other configuration of its constitutive materials. The existence of multiple rescensions is a guarantor of an idea or a work's ubiquity."

OPUS, then, becomes a digial commons for cultural production by acting as a platform for self-motivated communities of users to freely share their creative work--and build upon the work of others, with specific acknowledgement but no hierarchy of value implied. For Translocations Walker Art Center has taken the open source OPUS kernel--the software code--and created some modifications that are specific to its presentation in an exhibition context. Users of this recension of OPUS, for instance, can modify images online, without having to download them. More critically, all of the texts contained in the exhibition catalog are available directly from the website for downloading, modificiation, and reuploading, to create a channel for alternative and points of view--recensions--of the official institutional voice.

Finally, students from the Minnesota Arts High School have participated in creating a model project using OPUS for viewing during the exhibition of How Latitudes Become Forms.

Translocations
Jeebesh Bagchi, Steve Dietz, Gunalan Nadarajan, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Yukiko Shikata

How, practically, does one create curatorial contexts that are themselves up for consideration? For instance, I'm a little confused by the statement "information artworks and new-media works can take to networks and to networked exhibition contexts in the same way that archaeological artifacts gravitate toward museums of antiquity."

One of the critiques of the museum is precisely the case of the Elgin Marbles, which "gravitated" from their incorporation in a temple of worship to a museum of antiquity for a different kind of veneration, a moment, as Paul Valéry described it, when art and sculpture lost their mother, architecture.

The idea that information artworks can "take to networks" seems to me absolutely correct, but my question is whether there is a fruitful relation between the network and the museum that is not, merely, the expression of an asymmetry of power or of the museum as mausoleum, sav(or)ing things by killing them. How to exhibit translocally, where the context is both the global network and the physical setting?

* * * * *

From: Raqs Media Collective <raqs@sarai.net>
Date: Wed Mar 20, 2002 4:09am
Subject: on networks and museums

There was a certain deliberation with which we put the network and the museum close to each other in the same sentence, and we are glad that Steve immediately zeroed in on it.

It was wicked :) on our part to slide these two spaces that seem so far apart from each other into a space in thought where they seem close, but the intention was to provoke a reflection on conceptuality, and on what belongs where.

Of course, we are not arguing that new-media networks, as exhibition contexts, are analogous to archaeological galleries in museums. The museum, as Steve pointed out, could be a dead space, and the network is, by definition, alive.

But there is a point about the loss of context that we want to stress: whereas the artifact in a museum loses context when it "gravitates" toward or is pulled into a museum, the data object has little or no context to lose. The immateriality of the data object does suggest the possibility of a certain aloofness from immediate cultural geographies and contexts--"above or below" rather than east or west of given latitudes.

If anything, a data object has much to gain by being positioned in an interlocked way and by being embedded in or at least coincident with other data objects. Contextlessness is the context of the data object.

There can be two ways of thinking about belonging: one is to say "I belong to this culture," and the other is to say "these cultures belong to me." In the second sense, one is privileging a notion of taking things, using them, abandoning them, fashioning other things with them, while one is on the move; our belongings then can be said to travel with us as we course through culture. This need not be understood in a foraging or acquisitive sense alone; it can be seen in terms of circulation and the sharing of belongings that never stick to their momentary custodians but rather travel among their custodians in the same way that their custodians travel through the network. We are speaking of agile practices, mobile curators, and floating works, which construct complex matrices of belonging and claims on one another, none of which are based on the principles of mutual exclusivity. This presupposes an art circuit that has something in common with the pattern of conversation and give-and-take that might otherwise be the defining feature of an affinity group. This is a form of practice that presupposes the existence of a network, and thus means that the building of the network is as much a part of the practice as the fashioning of the objects that inhabit it. Because the way the objects are positioned and oriented has everything to do with the architecture of the network--of the living as opposed to the dead collection.

* * * * *

Can Altay

"I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc., and to the very concept of "exhibition." Either we change it, or we remain as we are. Museum is the world: daily experience."

"A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. . . . The concept of rescension is contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy."

There can be two ways of thinking about belonging: one is to say "I belong to this culture," and the other is to say "these cultures belong to me."