Transcendent Materialist Philosophy: Art Collecting as Pathology at Arter in Istanbul

The first floor of the year-long, 400-artist Arter exhibition, “Suppose You Are Not,” unfolds denuded in all of its prolific pop, pointing Roy Lichtenstein’s Pistol (1964), a tapestry of a gun, directly at the viewer, sensational to a fault, conveying the show’s underhanded gut punch. Occasionally, such historically canonical names are nestled between a garden variety of more obscure and anonymous artists who deal in naked humanity, as the deformed, struggling against conformity, biological and societal alike. Not least among them, Natural History Ambra 1 (2011) by SANTISSIMI (Antonello Serra & Sara Renzetti) displays the whole, unsightly body of an aged man’s likeness sunk in formaldehyde.

The crude, scientistic objectification of the modernist nude continues throughout “Suppose You Are Not,” Arter’s inaugural curation of a single private art collection, which happens to be that of its parent sponsor’s chairman, Turkish billionaire Ömer M. Koç. Its outward appeal is derived from the nature of exposure, namely to disrobe the plutocrat for a fraction of what he’s worth in the eye of the public, to give the people a glimpse of a mind who lords over them. What they might see are traces of a man captivated by the myth of the tortured artist as visions of death, violence, poverty and other horrors of isolated bodies face off with unforgiving modernism.

I Am Mortal (1988) by Valeriy Gerlovin, Rimma Gerlovina and Mark Berghash poses a photograph of a balding man whose forehead is inked black, spelling out “immortal” while he holds up his pointer finger to replace the second “M” with a red “A” at his fingertip. This beside reams of macabre, commiserative self-portraiture, Nan Goldin’s swollen-eye battered Self-Portrait (1980-1992) or Tania Bruguera’s The Burden of Guilt II (1997-1999), in which the artist faces the camera with a gutted animal over her body. Yet, these profound self-examinations are then littered with sardonic kitsch like Ceylan Öztürk’s Happy New Fear (2012), the title in the form of an eyesore, all-too-common holiday ornament, or the comically profane Exit Jesus (2014) by Nancy Fouts, picturing a neon Christ holding up the “X” on an exit sign like a cross.

The unevenness of these sporadically aligned motifs is cacophonous amid the graphic din of the collection’s feverishly cringing curation, platforming the calling of one who appears to have long lowered himself into a nihilistic pool of unreflective vanity by each of his extraordinary, scattered acquisitions. The abject disdain for human beauty is devoured by gratuitous scenes of asexual monstrosity. Decontextualized of the social histories from which they were made, these works are grosser in the frame of the show’s consumerist, aesthetic redundancies. Contorted limbs are placed square before genital voids, as in Horse’s Tale (1999) by Julie Rrap, of a rump bent over, whiskery underneath, or Gog and Magog (1965) by Pierre Molinier, reducing a quartet of spidery legs to an unsightly optical illusion holding up a displaced head. That, next to How Did I Come to Be Here? (2013) by Eylül Aslan conveys youthful angst before the truth of human procreation, spread-eagle against a phallic yellow pole.

Searching for what makes Koç tick by roving through his eclectic acquisition of art objects, curator Selen Ansen concluded that the collector himself, or rather his invisibility, is the core principle that inspired what is one of Turkey’s grandest individually owned contemporary art collections, seen for the first time, bluntly unadorned. In her catalogue essay, Ansen concluded, “I had reached a point where the collection and collector become indistinguishable […] That he himself is part of his collection. That he is even its missing object: that which we do not see, even though every object points toward it.”

Much of “Suppose You Are Not” feels like walking through the rooms of the collector’s home, only the interior architecture is reduced to Arter’s white cube, museological modern art space in the urban core steps away from irregular basement factories where refugees slave away. Gaudier halls are bedecked with contorted sticks of furniture in true modernist fashion, one of his supposed obsessions, lined with the craze for niche interior decoration affordable only to the elite rich. Some are functional, like Arne Jacobsen’s Giraffe chair (1957), others less so, like Keyhole chair (20th Century), also anonymous, though attributed to William Fetner.

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Added to the sheer quantity of status symbols, curated by Ansen to place a hard accent on their dysfunctional order of divergences, there emerge whiffs of taste, the faces of Hockney, Self-Portrait (1982) de Chirico, Self-Portrait (1932), Picasso, Head (1928), or body parts of Warhol, Feet (1950-1962). “Suppose You Are Not” represents the world’s largely Eurocentric art history reduced to the personal, aesthetic whims of an individual, exhibiting unearthly privilege ad absurdum. If the show is a success, it presents the seamlessness of Turkey’s contributions to global modernism vis-à-vis the eccentricities of one of its homegrown collectors. Warhol is in good company. There are many depictions of feet, Untitled (2015) by Rasim Aksan, of soles as a fruit platter, demonic from a service-demanding billionaire’s perspective, benign beside The artist’s foot (1897) by Bernard Adrien Steüer, an anatomical study, or Untitled (Feet) (2004) by David Haines, more realist in its shadow play of charcoal mastery. These works run parallel to sculptural evocations of steps throughout the show, with multiple anonymously fabricated staircase models from the 19th century curiously on display.

Although unanticipated, the fact that “Suppose You Are Not” is devoid of a sense of public good deepens its almost jeering tone of flagrantly decadent posturing before the parade of work that the impoverished masses must endure, repetitiously, as depicted in Eadweard Muybridge’s Hammering at an anvil and using a hatchet, saw (Self-portrait) (1887), foregrounding an early film reel of a naked, muscular man, striking and cutting metal. One 20th-century Turkish artist known for painting ruthless anti-capitalist critique is Yüksel Arslan, whose work appears in “Suppose You Are Not” to darken the mood ever deeper, as his exhibited piece Arture 85 (1965) obscures his erudite visual commentary, apt in the context of the show, with mere shock value, depicting a necrophilic threesome between a brainless female accosted by an erect horse roped in BDSM-style by a skeleton.

Koç’s collection, as exhibited for “Suppose You Are Not,” appears to reveal the hints of psychological strain that are perhaps exaggerated in the life of a man with extreme means, aloof from the problems of daily life much in the way that the artist is often held, exotically, as the persistent Other from within Western society. There he is, as the subject of Bases for Thinking (Utilisation) (1989-2002) by Philippe Ramette, standing atop stilts while on the summit of a mountain, painting the lily of his anthropocentric supremacy, or listless before the traumas of worldwide depravity, as in Murat Gök’s Untitled (Border) (2010) of a young man, smiling and reclining on a hammock, languorous between the posts of an ominous territorial barricade. These contrasts, often posed within the medium of photography, that mechanical bridge from the premodern to contemporary in image production, are clearly emphasized by such works as Aysel Bodur’s Untitled, Self-Portrait (2001) in which the nude artist stands between the rails of a train with smokestacks fuming in the gray, colorless background.

Reflected in the mirror of modern art, polished by industrial technologies, whether a billionaire, collector or artist, the individual is his own doppelgänger, and the doubled figure recurs with surrealist abandon, as in Reading a Book (2000) by Gürbüz Doğan Ekşioğlu, of nighttime scans into literary wonder, or Thomas Ruff’s Self-Portrait (1991), as intellectual, bespectacled twin in identical blue. “Suppose You Are Not” portrays cross-sections of the body in relation to domestic architecture, extrapolating visually on the nature of confinement within the skin itself. Take the work Untitled (2005-2008) by Tom Bell, of a man with a docile expression gutted of his innards, staring blankly in front of a black matte facade. Its realism is ghostly, striking fear in the heart of the viewer, who might feel that they’ve trespassed in the haunted house of a man of mythical stature, surrounded by the grotesque and morbid in his high, ivory castle, i.e., Arter.

Defending Koç’s idiosyncratic practices as a collector, Ansen’s plea to the visitor is not to see “Suppose You Are Not” as the mindless heaps of a compulsive hoarder but as a man who lives by a particular materialist philosophy in which he overcomes his ego through the transcendent, self-dissolving appreciation of art objects. If the viewer is invited along to partake, it would be by virtue of merely seeing the works that some effect of this metaphysical approach is reached. But in the halls of the show, the degree of cynicism is jarring, a la The World According to Cowboy Roy Kelly (2015) by David Buckingham, in which the letters “ART” hang on a wall, while before it, the letter “F” has fallen to the floor.

“Suppose You Are Not” teases in its devotion to the irrational impulse to possess things, approximating the possession of bodies, if by their representation as art, with the audacity of its collectors’ accumulation of private wealth. The show is rife with anonymity, books that cannot be read, seats that cannot be sat on, copious plastic works of the imagination looking out from within as the eyes of hundreds of artists leer back at their younger peers with whitened gazes, betraying a general sickness with the glut of creativity that modernism inspires from art school abstraction to social media feeds.

The collector shares this disease of mass-objectifying greed, not because he is a billionaire but as a fellow contemporary. With its heavy stress on themes of biological anatomy, architectural interiors and toxic individualism, all with an affinity to depict the terrors of realism, it is hard not to see “Suppose You Are Not” as a provocation to the public, asking everyone to embrace universal humanism across the class divide. Arter has set up a long overdue introduction to Turkey’s billionaire collector, who counts as one among the greater society. And it is through his love of art, feeding off the collective passion of hard-earned creativity, where he expresses his social critiques and humanist philosophy while protecting himself by remaining invisible in this decorative flurry of sheer quantitative diversity, supposing he is not.

“Suppose You Are Not” is at Arter in Istanbul through December 29.