INSTALLATION

TEXT

These words by an art reporter following the Annual Avantgarde Festival of New York organized in autumn 1971 by Charlotte Moorman and featuring a great number of artists including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Billy Kluver provides clues as to how Tosun Bayrak’s art was perceived during those years: ‘I heard “The Star Spangled Banner.” It was the one and only ultra-sophisticated Tosun Bayrak in absentia. His contribution was sprawled out on a Rinso-white tablecloth –a loaf of Sicilian, chunks of tripe, skinned and bloody lamb heads with popping eyeballs, a piss-filled urinal and bedpan full of fresh, stinking shit. Not very many could get close to his historic avant garde contribution.’ To evaluate the shock of tripe, sheep’s head and trotters (!) Bayrak dishes out in his works from this period within the context of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “abject” might perhaps open a more intelligible window. This concept goes beyond the meaning of disgust, and defines a violation of borders, positions and regulations, or the subject and the condition of subjectivity. What we abhor and keep away in order to build/protect our own physical integrity in the spiritual sense, is in fact ourselves: What we do not regard as ours, is in fact what has been torn away from our body, our body itself. Tosun Bayrak, too, when assessing his aforementioned installations and performances often makes a similar comment: “Our aim was to tell people, we may look fine from the outside, but let’s see what we have inside; veins, blood, urine, flesh, bones and intestines… Look at all that and understand what you are, and set aside your vanity”

He undoubtedly was an artist who managed to puzzle, and in fact, shock. But when we look back today, the truly interesting aspect of his art is not the story of “The Turk in America who shocked everyone”, but the fact that he managed to place on the agenda the relationship between art and certain cultural reflections and representative dynamics about America, Turkey, the formation processes of modern identities and the deconstruction of the traditional, the Cold War psychology in the second half of the previous century, and about how societies are culturally and psychologically founded, divided and how cultural and spiritual reflections shape visual culture.

Ahu Antmen

WORKS

BOOK

Publisher: Millî Reasürans T.A.Ş.
1st Edition, 1000 copies
ISBN: 978-605-65517-6-5
Organization: Millî Reasürans Sanat Galerisi
Text and Interview: Ahu Antmen
Biography of Artist: Oğuz Erten
Graphic Design: Ulaş Uğur
Translation: Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş
Translation Edit: Güzide Celestin, Zehra Lçowenthal, Ken Yarmey
Photographs: Arcan, Tahsin Aydoğmuş, Ricardo Barros
Haseen Hashim, Adem Özkul, Boris Smirnov, David Troy
Colorseparation and Printing: Mas Matbaacılık A.Ş.

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