Vahap Avşar

Vahap Avşar's isn't the classic story of an artist travelling abroad to study or to spend time on a residency program only then deciding to plant roots and stay away. Nor is his relocation simply the result of a foreign love affair; a desperate need to escape and be somewhere else; or a specific desire to experience a major art scene to find that this new context is more supportive for artistic development. Of course, at some point, all these stories played a role in Avşar's decision to leave Turkey and to move to the U.S. in 1995, where until the last few years he lived continuously except for one single return to Istanbul in 1997 to participate in the 5th International Istanbul Biennial. After this trip the Turkish government suspended Avşar's passport and added his name to the list of those being chased for avoiding compulsory military service, meaning that it was impossible for him to return again without confronting this legal requirement. Yet, despite even this last very specific constraint on his personal trajectory the more concrete reason for his long years abroad and seeming abandonment of his home country and also of art is that Avşar found another niche for himself: in 1997 along with Lexy Funk (who he later married) he began to design apparel and they together launched the extremely successful American clothing store Brooklyn Industries. This dynamic shift from a burgeoning art career to the creation and ownership of a company that opened stores in the US, Japan, and Europe, is one that makes his recent reborn love-affair and return to Turkey, and to art, all the more prominent and intriguing.

Aside from a scattering of exhibitions during the ten years he lived in New York Avşar mainly focused on the growth of his company Brooklyn Industries. But in 2007 the fact that he could not return to Turkey for a presentation of his video “Growing Watermelons in Gordion” at Karşı Sanat Galerisi in Istanbul irked him and he arranged to undertake a month's military service in January 2010. On completion, this would not only allow him to freely return to Turkey but it would once again give him the opportunity to consume firsthand the inspiration of a country that his art had always fed on. If we jump to the present, having now completed his military service, we find Avşar dividing his time between Turkey and the U.S. In 2010 his return to art and his relationship with Istanbul's art scene blossomed. He completed a residency at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, had work included in exhibitions at Depo and Arter, and began working with the commercial gallery Rampa who hosted his first one-person exhibition the same year. His sudden return to his home country and to art after so many years cheered former friends and colleagues and he was warmly welcomed back into an art scene that was experiencing a rapidly growing list of exhibition spaces, artists and collectors. Avşar's timing was pertinent, almost calculated, but most off all inspiring in its exposition of how with drive and ideas it is possible to return to a former discipline and talent so auspiciously.

If we look back to 1992 Avşar's departure from Turkey does indeed begin with a residency:

Vahap Avşar: … the break/fissure in 1992 was the international studio program Ateliers Arnhem. There I had the opportunity to meet many international artists and talk to them about my work. Following an exhibition invite from W139’s director Dominique Pelletier during one of the studio visits, my exhibitions at artists’ initiatives in the Netherlands were instigated....this period was an adventure in personal exploration for me. Come Whoever You Are responds both to Europe’s expectations from a Turkish artist and conveys the irony of the artist’s loneliness, how he rotates around himself. The subject of the artist is at the core of the story, and as in ancient metaphors, is desperate and whirls around himself with his own combustive energy.

“Come Whoever You Are” (1993) consisted of five life-size hollow plastic figures modelled with the head profile of Avşar and the clothing and poise of a swirling Dervish. Each one was placed on a turntable that gently rotated as their torsos glowed red from a light placed within. Avşar's first work in a foreign context did not shy away from obvious clichés, and yet why should it; he had been using other locally famous motifs in Turkey since 1985, such as the repeated portrait of Atatürk in works including the paintings “Atatürk / Alphabet” (1991) and “My Weak Body Will One Day Become Earth” (1995 – 2010). While the portrait in “Come Whoever You Are” was his own, the repetition here is akin to that lavished on Atatürk and hence promoted in stark contradiction with the ideal of the Dervish as a symbol of humility and modesty. These iconic references were for Avşar more fundamental than clichés or fetishised images, they were all models of the power of cultural reproduction. In particular, the symbolism of the Atatürk portrait, bust or figure cannot be devoid of its political, state and mythological implications, and so Avşar's early allusions to this key figure and the dance of the Dervish were the beginnings of an obsession with logos, brands, labelling and the media's embrace of popular imagery and repetition - methods that converge in the act of product design.

VA: My first days in New York were interesting and what you [Vasif Kortun] mentioned about my work led to not a “decline” but a shift. [Yet] after I realized that the art world is the same everywhere, I began to lose interest in art and take up the manifestations of pop culture in design and commerce. I was more impressed by the power advertising and New York life, or let’s put it this way, for me the motorbike couriers were more impressive than the art I saw at galleries in SOHO. Especially after meeting with a few galleries, I decided to stop following the art trail. Lexy and I decided to start a production company to both continue producing videos and to explore new fields.

Brooklyn Industries was essentially born from one idea that saw Avşar appropriate Marlboro billboard advertising campaigns on to bags. What he had been imagined as an urban art project, which would litter the New York cityscape with a repeated appropriation aback messenger bikers, spawned to become a production line. While the art world is incredibly referential, the design world is so on an expanded scale, and likewise, at the moment Avşar's personal statement was out-done by the scale of consumer demand for its replication, for him the role of the idea changed.

VA: The difference between art and design is the notion that art is what the artist makes for himself and design is made for a customer, and this is roughly accurate. In addition the most significant difference for me is that art has the luxury of being merely an idea.

The other factor that repositioned Avşar's role was that he could not imagine how his art practice that was so heavily influenced by a culture and political context completely at odds with that of New York could find its place.

VA: For example it is quite difficult to see the work I made in the 1990s in the context of Western art, if you were to make blindfolded gourmets taste it, it wouldn’t rank top. Maybe this is why I did not (for the most part) make or show art during the time I lived in New York. I didn’t feel up to imitating Western art and acting like an American artist to compete with them, and at the same time I couldn’t bring myself to tell my story because it was so long and foreign. Perhaps that’s why I decided to make design rather than art and try out my ideas, inventions in that sphere, because it contained no social or cultural reference and wasn’t concerned with issues like the local and global.

It was likely that Avşar's loneliness in New York, his lack of a community that could comprehend his references and their deeper meanings, but also his severed relationship with Turkey (the division between his old home and life and that of his new one had become so defined by the distinction between art and design), deeply influenced the next ten years.

It was not until 2008 that Avşar produced “Supreme” (2008) a work he describes as a serious endeavour to return to a focused artistic practice.

VA: I had postponed my return to art almost until I felt I needed it like oxygen. When I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I started making art again in 2007 and in the beginning of 2008 I made Supreme/ALLAH as my first serious work. Yes, even though it wasn’t an oath, I stopped designing in the beginning of that year and devoted myself again entirely to making art.

We become ever more dependent on televised expressions of conflict, and while local historical and cultural references are lost on the majority, their appropriations by the media to create easy to read gestures and signals take on re-localised meanings that are the makings of paranoia, control, producing cycles of misunderstanding. Particular words, signs and imagery haunt us, for example the word Allah is marketed as a brand of fear in the U.S. as much as it is one of supremacy in the Islamic world. Several contemporary artists have explored the 99 names of Allah in their works, for example Kutluğ Ataman’s multi-channel video work “99 Names” (2002) in which the repeated image of a praying man increases in velocity and determination; or Shezad Dawood's series of neons (2007) that spell out the names attributed to Allah in Arabic, each one entangled in a symbol of the American frontier, tumbleweed. Yet, Avşar's work is simplicity itself – only the word Allah is presented, two simple sounds or syllables that hold some symmetry share a pure white neon in a basic capitalised font. By using Latin script he rids the word of its decorative appeal to the western eye but makes its reading unavoidable – a combination that is at once rudimentary and contradictory. The word is rendered in such a pure and banal form that it is almost impossible to respond to and ultimately this is its aim.

The clean statement “Supreme” and its numerous connotations, especially those expressed by the relationship of the U.S. with Islam, seems to have instigated a period of momentum for Avşar, in which once incompatible references were now imbued with international consternation. At the same time his return to Turkey allowed Avşar to once again form connections with his personal heritage within his artistic practice and to understand how these references were now relevant beyond their origins.

VA: I don’t know exactly what has changed now and why my desire to return to Istanbul and to make art emerged concurrently, but of course they are related. If we are to accept that the art I make is inherently connected to Turkey, it is evident that the former cannot exist without the latter. Just as it is difficult to interpret my works without knowing Turkish history, moral codes, work ethic, military, the infinite trinkets of Tahtakale and the high tech cheap sign maker of Galata. It gets harder for me to make such works the further I go away from Istanbul.

Acknowledging some of the earlier motifs explored in his works of the 90s Avşar began again to play with repetition, text and symbolic 'brand-like' references. “Wings of Terror” (2010), a series of strung up emergency siren lights that alternate red and white, could seem to be drawn from Avşar's time in New York or Istanbul. He was hounded in Turkey to complete his military service, but if you are not familiar with this story you would first conjure the ultimate Hollywood police squad the NYPD (a citation bolstered by the content of an earlier work “NONEISAFE” (2008) in which an NYPD car, one of the ultimate brands of macho invincibility, is the target of an explosion and sits blackened amid its own debris). Yet the title references the idea of a state of emergency far more than the installation, which on second observation is a rather attractive lighting display - one that could easily be found in the back streets of Istanbul's Galata district that Avşar sources as a place of production. Again the simplicity of the physical work allows multiple readings and the terror that Avşar refers to is determined by how quickly a string of bulbs can be associated with distress and concern. Another work, “Eye of the Beholder” (2010), sums up these acts of assumption within its title, and the work again plays with repetition, this time of bright green plastic fuel cans stripped of their labelling. Stacked and strung together twenty-one cans long, ten across and at the highest point six high, their form resembles a jeep but also a row of war bunkers. Either way there is no escaping the militarian and powerful air that this installation exudes. The green stain of the plastic is pungent and bright, the rhythmic pattern made by the cans likens its surface to camouflage and the red caps appear as hints of blood. The international craving for fuel is the composing element of this work – wars over oil, overriding systems of control, the structure that links the oil trade and international pipe lines together – a world order composed as geometric progression.

Avşar's references to power, military and State control continue to employ his preference for forms of branding – oil cans, emergency lights; text as logo – NYPD, ALLAH; and clear associations to consumerism – the quest for oil, his nods to Hollywood. The compositions also allude to design aesthetics and yet have no intrinsic use value. If such works form one leg of Avşar's return to an artistic practice, there is another direction that complements these statement pieces by means of a more personal voice that carries emotional resonance. Before completing his military service Avşar made the painting “Marines resting in grand mosque of Falluja” (2009). Falluja, a town in Iraq that experienced one of the highest civilian death tolls during the Gulf War in 1991, later encountered major military interventions during 2003 and 2004. Many American soldiers were killed in service at the time, while the U.S.'s use of white phosphorus left the people of Falluja battling ongoing birth defects and high cancer rates. Avşar's painting presents a peaceful scene of American soldiers in full military gear camouflaged with the mosque carpets they lie sleeping upon. While other works of Avşar hint at the overall 'packaging' of war and military symbolism, as well as its media branding, this painting is the first to unravel a picture of the individuals the system involves.

After his month-long military service Avşar continued with the series of paintings “Swearing Ceremony” (2010) and the video “Tekmil” (2010). The first depicts rows of temporary soldiers being sworn in during their first weeks of service. The vanishing point is located at the centre of each painting and suggests the infinite repetition of these events, it shows an endless conveyer belt of men available to take up these positions and how disposable their individuality becomes in this context. The question of individuality is brought into play again in the video work “Tekmil” which was made as a response piece after Avşar was picked out of the parade due to his incompetence at completing the Tekmil (a standard solute that identifies you to any army superior). Avşar invited his then superior to Istanbul and in a play reversal the artist videos his army drill sergeant being commanded to recite the soldier's salute, G3 weapon specifications and more personal responses to every question thrown at him.

When Avşar arrived in New York the city inundated him with new ideas and inspirations and these resulted in him redefining his whole approach to creative practice by experimenting and being highly successful within the world of design. Even if it is too simple to say that New York provoked a different kind of productivity, whereas Turkey remained the source of Avşar's intuition to create art, this is how his relation to each place has panned out. Ironically his return to Turkey is also not such a classic tale and is imbued with details that crave to be explored through his art. Not only did Avşar spend time in the military, an obligation he had shied from for over ten years, but Turkey presented itself to him in a new light. The economy had become strong and proud of itself, the population had revitalised, and in Istanbul the contemporary art scene had formed a network of spaces and artists. It seems possible that Avşar could sense this energy from afar and gradually the desire in him to produce art, in relation to his home, drew him back. “Tekmil” is hence a defining work of his return – asked to state his name and family background on command was difficult for Avşar in 2009, but in 2010 it was already a source of inspiration.

Interview extracts from a conversation between Vasıf Kortun and Vahap Avşar that took place in 2010 and is printed in full in Vahap Avşar, Rampa, 2011.