Setting the Scene/Mark Wallinger

British artist Mark Wallinger is in Çanakkale for the second time to explore potential sites and participate in meetings with the city mayor and local authorities about his My City public art proposal. As we discuss his ideas for the work, a large cargo ship, the British Curlew, heads north up the strait towards the Marmara Sea. Mark takes a photograph and explains some detail about the curlew's (the bird) distinguishable bill, a knowledge he acquired when he was a young ornithologist many years ago. The name of the boat seems familiar and Mark thinks he saw the same one on his last visit, a repetition that seems more than relevant to our conversation as he later goes on to talk about his ideas for a public artwork in Çanakkale.

Mark originally considered himself a painter, but during his M.A. and a period of teaching in the art department at Goldsmiths, University of London in the 80s, he was left with a different appetite for his own artistic practice. He goes on to explain that, “as a painter one could happily work within the confines of the form whilst also having the satisfaction of doing a day’s work. To work in a variety of forms requires patience. You have to wait and trust the ideas will come.” His infamous commission Ecce-Homo, a life-size sculpture of Christ that occupied the “Fourth Plinth” in London's Trafalgar Square in 1999, set a new tone for his work, and afterwards he started receiving numerous commissions for public artworks, but while many have been asked of him, not all are realised. One of the projects that did make it to fruition was commissioned by Andrea Schlieker (the curator who also nominated him for the My City project) for the 2008 Folkestone Art Triennial in South England. Mark describes Folk Stones (2008) as “not being a commemorative piece, or about making a grand statement. It was inspired as something more intimate and embedded in the locality of Folkestone.” Folk Stones is a collection of beach pebbles laid out in a massive square, each one individually numbered from 1 all the way up to 19,240 to correspond to the exact number of British soldiers killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The work is inspired by the one million soldiers who left from Folkestone Harbour to fight on the battlefields of France and Flanders. Mark describes the numbering as “a significant yet pointless act... a modern-day recalling of the labour of Sisyphus.” Folk Stones is now a permanent public artwork, which clearly engages with the city of Folkestone, and as Mark points out it does so “without being commemorative, or celebratory and without using languages of imperialism.” For him, these aspects are some of the most important when thinking about what a public artwork should be and do today. Iconic sculptures are often based on photographs and hence are forms of commemoration that are merely three-dimensional versions of found images in bronze or stone. Such public artworks simply send the viewer back to the photograph, they are symbols of the past and identifiers of glorious or tragic moments in this history. At this point Mark proposes that, “Perhaps Picasso's painting Guernica was truly the last major public artwork (in terms of art in a new expanded field).” He goes on to say that, “There is nothing for the people in Çanakkale. There is the horse of Troy – a desperate request from Hollywood to insert some kind of touristic reminder, and then there is the text on the hills of Gallipoli that also speaks to the passer by.” In a sense, both the horse and the text act like promotional materials, created only for those who come and go too quickly to absorb the two main historical memories that this city holds – Troy and Gallipoli; on the other hand, there is really no public entity or statement that has been made for those who live here. In contrast, Mark's work in Folkestone was successful in that it did something quite quietly. The emphasis and context directed the local audience's attention to something in the past without stating facts of history. In this story of public art, Mark wants to create for Çanakkale an artwork that is heartfelt, visceral, and that is both a response to how the locality affects him and is also made for the city's people. With these thoughts in mind, Mark recalls that when first invited to the My City project and on being given the site of Çanakkale, he started thinking about the knowledge he already had on the area, the little he knew about Gallipoli, the history of Troy, and the confluence point of the Dardanelles as a place for both trade and conflict throughout the ages. His initial thoughts for Çanakkale became an extension of the work he produced in Folkestone. He says he liked the notion of having thought about a “Western front on the one hand (Folkestone) and that he was now looking at the ramifications of a front at the other end of Europe.” Excited by this prospect, but also nervous of the intensity of the history of Çanakkale, the next concern of his was, “Where does one start when there is so much to address?” While London has been Mark’s main inspiration as it is his base, he has, over the years, worked in a number of divided cities including Lefkosa and Jerusalem. He says that, “Somehow these places feed into all the following work. While a new context can be daunting, by accepting the gifts a place has, new inspirations feed you.” Yet, he also realises that he is recognised for having made several important works that refer to wars and their historical legacy, and that here again, this could be what is expected of him. Although he does not have more than a few experience of Çanakkale, he says, “I feel I have some legitimacy to be working on a public artwork here, given the involvement of Britain in the battle of Gallipoli and the fact that this needs to be a history that is taught more in the UK. What is the meaning of Empire, what could they mobilise?” He also mentions other related references such as English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe's unfinished minor epic based on the legend of Hero and Leander, as well as Lord Byron's poetry, and first ever documented swim across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia in 1810. With so many potential inspirations, it was in fact the sea, its persistent use and the people’s connection with the “back-forth motion of the Dardanelles,” that detained Mark for a while. But, he says, “at the same time, the idea of a Camera Obscura or a similar system felt right. He is thus working on a proposal that will create the opportunity for its audience to notice or identify something that makes a spark and at the same time presents a stately and mythological phenomenon that is relentless. Closing the conversation with a reference to Joyce's Ulysses and the mythology of Cyclops, Mark says of the view across the strait, “Here, yesterday suggests tomorrow. Sometimes something momentous takes place, on other days nothing seems to change and the differences are imperceptible. My work will offer a contemplative excuse to keep looking. Sometimes it is nice to simply frame something.”