Istanbul
Last week, Italian officials covered a number of nude statues in order to spare the modesty of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani during his visit to Rome. The Italians got a fair amount of heat for their pre-emptive act of cultural appeasement—much of it from Italians, including the minister of culture, appalled at the willingness of their fellow countrymen to abandon their own glorious tradition—and perhaps rightfully so.
However, it’s possible to see it another way—in the context of the contemporary art world, the episode doesn’t signal a surrender to obscurantist cultural mores, rather it’s critique. It’s a curatorial gesture targeting not just Rouhani, but the social and political structure he represents. Censoring the art was meant to underscore the repressive nature of the Iranian regime.
Ok, of course this wasn’t the purpose, but it’s a little hard to understand the uproar over the incident since it revealed little not already known about the Islamic Republic. Obviously the clerical regime has very different ideas about the human form, entirely separate from aesthetics and modesty: For them, the body is a weakness, which is why they throw the bodies of their opponents into prisons where they twist and torture them. For decades, the regime’s primary goal has been to secure a weapon capable of incinerating masses of bodies at once. And it’s this weapon that will not only keep the regime safe from internal rivals and foreign adversaries, but also earn Iran the kind of prestige the regime believes it so richly deserves. Not art, not civilization, not industry nor invention—no, what will make Iran respected among the community of nations is a weapon of mass destruction.
The veiling in Rome revealed nothing new about the clerical regime, but it did illustrate more clearly than ever a Europe that doesn’t know itself anymore, neither its own mind, nor its own body. After all, this wasn’t just about statues and Rome’s contribution to world art. The first story in the Western canon is a tale about the body and the recognition of being naked. In this account, the body is where wisdom begins, and ends not by returning to innocence, but journeys further with knowledge as a guide. The body is where love begins, too, as the source of sympathy for the beautiful and vulnerable and perishing bodies of others. The veiling in Rome wasn’t about Europe showing respect to the cultural sensibilities of a Muslim society—it was about a decadent political class deferring to a denatured ruling clique.
At the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the “Bare, Naked, Nude: A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting” exhibition drives home the fact that the issue is not about Muslim countries in general. Rather, it’s about how political exigencies shape particular societies. The show uses the genre of the nude, many of the early efforts painted in secret, to trace the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. The first nude paintings were of men, which gave the artists a way around the cultural conventions that held the female body “was solely associated with privacy and seclusion.” When the artists came to paint the female body, they used it to explore form more generally, and modernism, including virtually every major current of the 20th century, from cubism to Pop Art. What’s interesting is that the most striking piece in the show combines Western and local—or if you prefer, “Orientalist”— conceits. “The Sultan’s Favorite” is of a young woman looking at herself in the mirror, which, as the notes explain, plays on the renaissance theme of Venus at her toilet, which “is not only the symbol of the beauty of a woman admiring herself in the mirror, but also contains an implicit message alluding to her awareness of being observed.” Right, but this piece is about a specific self-regard, not just the woman looking at herself, but the painter inviting the viewer to admire aspects of the Ottoman past, especially its conventions and myths about the body and sexuality—even as the fact of painting the nude points in the direction away from the Ottomans. What the critics of Orientalism never grasped, beginning with Edward Said himself, is that Middle Easterners like Middle Eastern culture.
That’s why I find Istanbul an interesting art city. Istanbullus like their surroundings, from the Bosphorus to the minarets of the mosques of Mimar Sinan, the Ottoman Empire’s greatest architect. There’s no skyline like this anywhere else, and as night falls the seagulls seem almost phosphorescent when a shard of light catches them.
My friend Nuran Terzioglu is the owner of Apel Gallery, where she’s showing me some of the new work she’s just put up. My favorite pieces are several small drawings by Elif Süsler, an artist whose previous show was a large installation of sculptures. The black pen drawings are self-portraits, with two images on each sheet, sort of mirror-images on top of the other that blend into each other like playing cards. “The artist calls them selfies,” Nuran laughs. “I love that the lines are very art nouveau drawings.”
Nuran’s was one of the first galleries in the Beyoglu area, and now a decade since I last visited her here it’s a full-fledged art neighborhood, with plenty of boutiques, restaurants and cafes along with the other galleries. She has high praise for the last Istanbul Biennial, 2015. “There were lots of Turkish artists in it,” she says. “And the work was fantastic. She’s less enthusiastic about other recent developments. “Art fairs are the big thing, just like in the U.S,” she says. “So the galleries have to fight for attention.”
It doesn’t matter to her, she says. She didn’t go into this to get rich, but to surround herself with what the people she likes make. She points to an intricate construction, with dozens of layers of thin cardboard, and then a fish and a bird made of tightly wrapped wire. What really interests her, she says, is detail. I ask her what she makes of the Italians covering their nudes for Rouhani. She hadn’t heard about it—in fact it seemed that no one in Istanbul had. “Why,” she asked, “would they do something like that?”
