33 Artists in 3 Acts (9 page)

Art biennials are often incoherent, amounting to something rather less than the sum of their parts. But the curators of this one—Adriano Pedrosa, a Brazilian, and Jens Hoffmann, a Costa Rican—have adopted an unexpectedly effective premise. Rather than using a theory or theme as a unifying rubric, the biennial has a muse: the late artist
Félix González-Torres. Born in Cuba and educated in Puerto Rico and America, González-Torres made conceptual artworks that were politically sophisticated and emotionally engaging. He died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996.

The biennial is divided into five sections, each inspired by key themes in different González-Torres works. I have arranged to meet Kutlu
Ataman, a Turkish artist, who is in a section of the exhibition that explores gay love and identity named “Untitled (Ross),” after a González-Torres installation of 175 pounds of candies in multicolored shiny wrappers that commemorates Ross Laycock, the artist’s longtime lover, who died five years before he did.

Ataman stands in the middle of a large room that contains the work of some twenty different artists. He looks a bit like a pirate, with two platinum loops in his left earlobe. I introduce myself and usher him over to one of his own works, a piece called
Jarse
(2011), which means “lingerie” in Turkish. Ataman is known principally for his videos, but here he displays a copy of his letter of rejection from the military. In it, a psychiatrist affirms that he played with dolls as a child and has been known to wear women’s clothes. “The Turkish army is an extremely dangerous place for a gay person,” says Ataman, who is now fifty. Mortality is high. “They just say: ‘died in action,’ ‘there was a little accident,’ or ‘it was suicide,’” he explains. In Turkey, many men try to avoid military service by claiming to be gay, so recruiters are suspicious. “Until recently, they might require evidence of anal sex,” he continues. “Even gay men who don’t enjoy it would get screwed for the camera. If you were a ‘top,’ they didn’t think that you were gay. You had to prove that you were a ‘bottom.’” Although the work is an unaltered document (except for a black line that redacts the artist’s national ID number to prevent identity theft), it is part of an ongoing series called “Fiction.” For Ataman, everyone’s personal history is a creatively edited story. “It is not about a political or tragic situation,” he explains. “It is about a character.”

Ataman has only recently focused on himself in his work. He is best known for his videos of others.
kutlu
ataman’s semiha b unplugged
(1997) features Semiha Berksoy, a Turkish opera star, speaking and singing about her life from what she claims was her virgin birth to her equally incredible eighty-eighth year.
Women Who Wear Wigs
(1999) consists of monologues by a cancer survivor, a transsexual, a devout Muslim, and a political activist keen to disguise her identity.
Twelve
(2004) presents the stories of six people who believe they were reincarnated, while
Küba
(2005), which won the prestigious Carnegie Prize, is made up of interviews with forty people who live in a Kurdish ghetto of Istanbul. “My subjects are all artists,” explains Ataman as he pushes a lock of hair behind his ear. “They are sculpting themselves in front of the camera and creating fictions out of their own lives.”

Artists, maybe, but their artistry is a little different from yours, I say. What kind of artist are you? Ataman laughs at the question. “I’m not an interior decorator. I do not make beautiful objects for beautiful people,” he declares. “Art is not a job for an artist, just as religion is not a job for a priest.” He runs his fingers through his hair again. “Sometimes I see myself as almost like an academic. My artworks are not really products; they are papers that you write when you have finalized a strain of thought.”

For Ataman, his credibility as an artist is rooted in his self-assurance. “I never question it in myself but I always question it in others!” he says. “I know what I am doing and know it is genuine. I don’t exhibit the work until I am convinced.” In this vast room, near his military rejection piece, is another work in his “Fiction” series, a queen-size mattress that is nearly ripped in two titled
Forever
(2011). Ataman stares at the work, puts his hand on his neck, and says, “Unlike those in other professions, artists cut the branch they are sitting on.”

Before he became an artist, Ataman studied film at UCLA and both wrote and directed. For him the transition from film festivals to art biennials was fairly smooth. “In today’s parlance, an experimental film is an artwork,” he says. “The difference relates to market forces. Film investors want a return.” Before the arrival of VHS tapes, DVDs, and digitally downloadable films, arthouse and repertory cinemas were packed with people. Nowadays, galleries and museums show filmic
wares, often in multiscreen formats. The benefit of the new environment is that Ataman can, as he puts it, “make works that are impossible to watch.”
Küba
, for example, is made up of thirty-two hours of footage displayed on forty screens. The artist doesn’t know anyone other than himself who has seen the whole thing.

Ataman’s studio, production company, and website are all called “The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks.” Borrowed from a definitive Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar about a man who suffers from an inability to adapt to modern times, the name makes light of the fact that contemporary artists seek to be “ahead of their time” and are more often than not in favor of change. Although the avant-garde is dead, vestiges of its mission live on. Conservative artists don’t tend to be contemporary. “Art that goes forward can take a long time to be understood, whereas art that moves sideways—that is just elaborating—can be very commercial,” explains Ataman. “As an artist, you have to decide which way you want to go.”

Nowadays artists also have to conquer territory, crossing borders to accrue international support. Ataman has spent much of his life as an expat, having lived in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and London for years and Barcelona, Paris, and Islamabad for months at a time. But most of his artworks have Turkish characters and settings. “I want to translate local points of view into a universal language,” says Ataman. “With all due respect to Greenwich Mean Time, Istanbul is degree zero for me.” Indeed, Ataman loathes diaspora artists who pander to a foreign audience by making easy “predigested” criticisms of their own culture. He cites a famous Iranian artist who is very popular in America because her work confirms Western prejudices about Iran. “My work functions within my own society,” he says. “It is distinguished by that.”

Ataman does not see himself as altruistic or even responsible. For example, the artist was at the forefront of creating artworks that looked like documentaries. When he showed
semiha b unplugged
at the Istanbul Biennial in 1997, it was the only work of its kind. Three biennials later, he found that his personal stylistic niche, as he saw it, had been invaded by others. “Everyone was doing documentary-style work . . . but
badly,” explains Ataman. So he decided that he would “do something so big that no one would dare imitate it.” This is how he came to make
Küba
. “It wasn’t because I wanted to give voice to some poor people. That was just a happy outcome,” he admits. “I was being a competitive bitch. I was defending my own ground.”

Although Ataman describes his politics as “rational, democratic, liberal,” the press has variously accused him of being a pro-Kurdish terrorist, a gay propagandist, anti-Turkish, pro-Armenian, and even, remarkably, an Islamic ideologue. Most of these epithets come from the secular press. “I have never got into any trouble with the Islamists,” says Ataman. “I am not a good Muslim. But I’m not a nationalist either, so I don’t believe in the repression of religion in society—as long as they don’t advocate hate.”

Ataman stops to air-kiss an old friend, a Turk who lives abroad but who has flown in for the biennial. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Martha Rosler, a senior feminist artist whom I have been trying to interview for some time. Biennial gatherings are important networking opportunities for artists. As artists age, they can become cut off from the wider artist community, increasingly absorbed in their own work. Ataman, however, is a collector as well as an artist, so he keeps track of others. He owns about fifty pieces, including works by González-Torres, Mona Hatoum, and Gabriel Orozco. Although he doesn’t own pieces by Jeff Koons or Ai Weiwei, he is quick to pass judgment: Koons’s forms are seductive; Ai’s are derivative.

Ataman comes from an aristocratic Turkish family who have accepted his homosexuality. “I think it’s more of a problem for them that I am an artist,” says Ataman. “They would have liked me to get a job in government or to have become a diplomat.” Ataman, however, may be fulfilling his parents’ aspirations in unexpected ways. Art has become an increasingly significant branch of foreign affairs. For countries without major film, TV, or music exports, a dinner for a visiting artist at an ambassador’s residence can be a great opportunity to promote local culture and/or entertain the artist’s rich patrons, who may very well be power brokers in the host nation.

Most of Ataman’s work can be seen as diplomatic in the sense that it creates a dialogue between social groups that rarely communicate. He resists overt polemics, but one confrontational Ataman work is a sixteen-minute video,
Turkish Delight
(2007). Dressed in a gold sequined bikini with tassels and a long black curly wig, the artist performs an inept belly dance, doing hip bumps, arm waves, butt jiggles, and stomach rolls to the sound of a
darbuka
drum. Ataman gained forty pounds in order to emulate the voluptuousness of a traditional belly dancer, but he didn’t shave his stubbly beard or any of his body hair. Even if he weren’t staggering around in gold high-heeled sandals and chewing gum, the result would not be pretty. Belly dancing has come to symbolize the exoticism of Turkey itself and some critics see
Turkish Delight
as Ataman’s critique of orientalism—the condescending, objectifying way that Westerners have often viewed Eastern cultures. However, the video is also a portrait of the artist as a weary performer forced into representing something he’s not. When Ataman was growing up, he claims that he was unaware of homophobia. He never felt his gay identity was a problem until, as he puts it, “I became
the
artist of Turkey abroad.”

Many artists dislike the burden of “identity politics.” Ataman loathes it when his work is filed under “queer” or “ethnic.” The notion of the self in these debates can be flat, inadvertently essentialist and narrowly self-interested. “Identity politics was compelling when it emerged, but it didn’t evolve,” says Ataman. “If that is the only approach to my work, then it is an incomplete story. I’m not interested in ‘identity’ as much as how people construct their characters or personas.” The artist looks troubled; he’s concerned that the term “persona,” which he associates with Ingmar Bergman, sounds pretentious. “Persona” may be derived from the Latin word for mask, I explain, but, in the Anglo-American art world, it is often linked to pop culture or more specifically to artists who are skilled at public relations and self-caricature. Whatever the case, Ataman thinks that the art that emerges from identity politics generally suffers from being glib. “All art is political,” he declares. “But ‘political art’ is often facile. Art is not supposed to repeat what you already know. It is supposed to ask questions.”