Since the 1990’s in particular, the Turkish artist has been caught up in looking inwardly, and the work produced is an expression of a personal situation capturing a look at self.
In clarification of this, it is doubtless necessary to explain the conceptual context of the words I have used here. When talking about the Turkish artist, I do not just refer to the art of painting, but also cinema and poetry. In this era it is becoming increasingly common for directors to make the own personal world of the director or actors into the subject matter of cinema. The same applies to poetry. However, the most powerful and common realisation of this situation is evident in the medium of painting, possibly due to the fact that it is our eyes we use most in this situation. But here it is a question of a certain mood of the spirit that observes events through what the eye can see, and the inseparable fact that such a mood is becoming more prevalent.
I should mention that I use the words “look” and “seen” in the sense of Jean Paul Sartre’s concept of the look of the Other. According to Sartre, human existence has two characteristics; the states of transcendence and facticity. Transcendence is the ability to conceive human possibilities, to make choices and realize them. Man continuously imagines possibilities that transcend his existence in a certain situation. The possibilities of what man wants to do transcend the current existential situations. However, man is always in the process of planning how to achieve that transcendence. Man is the design. This is why man is always in a state of existence sequenced with the energy of doing and acting. Facticity, on the other hand, has the meaning of being defined, being identified and being realized. Effectively, being defined, identified or realized also implies being restricted. Facticity is a non-design situation. According to Sartre, being caught in the look of the Other means being tied to a certain facticity situation. In this situation the look of the Other is a definition and every definition relating to man is a limitation, a restriction. The look of the Other, and accordingly the definition, reduces us to the moment we are seen and makes us consist only of that moment, invalidating our possibilities and our continuity within the design. This makes a person lack-lustre, freezes him and turns him to stone. This is a moment when we are alienated from our possibilities. Having our possibilities taken away from us means being deprived of our future possibilities. In such a situation, man, who has different possibilities of existence, becomes an object or is objectified.
Sartre is undoubtedly talking about the look of the Other. In recent years, the look of the artist has, as it were, become the other as far as his own existence is concerned. The way this manifests itself as a phenomenon is in a style where the artist becomes a problem for himself. The paintings in İmren Tüzün’s exhibition entitled Attitudes and Moments present us with an opportunity to view her work within this context.
It is no coincidence that the title of the exhibition of these paintings is Attitudes and Moments. Attitudes and Moments is in an inevitable relationship with its contents, and to the same extent shows a static existential situation. This is for two reasons; from the perspective of the ‘subjects’ seen in the common spiritual universe in the paintings in the Attitudes and Moments exhibition, and from the perspective of the subject that shows us this spiritual universe. As regards the subject that shows the painting, because even though the painting is after all done with the body, i.e. the hand, the spiritual unity in the paintings is conveyed to the painting by the spirituality of the subject doing the painting. But what is important here is the spiritual universe in these paintings and the ‘subject’ seen in this universe.
The figures in the paintings in this exhibition of İmren Tüzün consist of the attitudes of people at a particular moment in time as well as various objects such as a hat, sandals, shoes, glasses, closed book, open book, large umbrella, small umbrella... In these paintings the object figures have little importance other than to be displayed as background or to point to the fact that the season is summer. What is interesting is that the ‘subject’ is painted in the same way as the object. I am referring to the situation termed as the objectification of the person. To use the terminology of Sartre, this ‘subject’, as it were captured in the look of the ‘Other’, is reduced to the moment of being seen and is encapsulated in the attitude of a moment that has been stripped of the possibilities of self-existence. In this expression the term Other is in inverted commas because the intention here is to talk about the artist herself as the Other. Subject is in inverted commas because we are talking about a subject that is not able to become a subject, because we cannot talk about a ‘subject’ in a situation where there is no verb; about a subject that is in an anti-design situation. In an anti-design situation a subject is not a subject; it is not a subject that can be used with the verb “to be”. Time is obscured, objects are frozen and the “subject” is, as it were, turned to stone. Even if we can talk about a certain light on the horizon, it is more fitting for this subject to be interpreted as a field of possibility external to itself rather than a field of possibility conceived for its own existence. Even light, even the motion of the sea is subdued. This can be interpreted as unhappiness from a psychological perspective. But unhappiness is not a one-sided situation. It is external to the object field of psychology and not unconnected to existence. Unhappiness is an internalised state of the subject whose existence is nothingness in the paintings of İmren Tüzün. If we take into account the fact that the artist lives in Antalya, that is to say the Mediterranean, it could be said that İmren Tüzün has a certain spiritual resistance to the region she finds herself in and its climate, for the Mediterranean is synonymous with light and motion. It does not mean darkness but night. For when the subject is the Mediterranean you cannot talk about an obscured or frozen situation.
In this context, the meaning of the situation of the artist being caught in her own look is descriptive of the current state of the artist. It is common knowledge that the art design of today is through the consciousness of the artist’s perception of self in a globalising world. The paintings of İmren Tüzün in this exhibition are not external to this design.
Yücel Kayıran
Translation : Valerie Needham