despite transgression, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on grey carton, 100 × 160 cm (39 ⅜ × 63 in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
An orange body drawn fibre by fibre, vein by vein, sits cross-legged in the middle of the board; the muscles are outside, no layer covering them over, no surface left to hide anything. Against this the face is closed, a green mask in place of the head and a rayed crown about it. That the body opens out while the face is concealed says that what is shown and what is felt shame for are not in the same place. The whole volume is filled with fine parallel wavy lines, each a separate pull, hundreds of lines; the waves of the arm follow the arm's direction, coiling into a helix at the belly. In Yüksel Arslan's Artures the body is treated just so, like a plate whose organs are displayed, but Arslan would set explanatory notes beneath; here there is no note, the fibres do not turn the body into information, they only open it from inside out.
The navy panel behind, the ray-shedding golden flower, the red curtain above and the doors to either side set up an enthronement scene; a sacred figure seated frontally, a cloth of honour behind. This template, repeated since the Byzantine panels, rests on the name of each element being known in advance, but the dictionary here is lost. The flower glows like a token of sanctity, of what it is a token is not said, and moreover it lights nothing around it. This arrangement works like the emblem on the wall of a government office or a holding company's lobby; let there be a symbol behind you, so that what you say seems to come from higher up. The seated figure's arms cover the whole lower half of the room, whoever wishes to pass will pass beneath them; the door is open but its way is blocked, to show the exit and sit down in front of it is an old method.
At upper right a white, furry toy hangs on strings, two crosses in its eyes, a stitch across its mouth. This is the scene's most disquieting sign; a witness rendered unable to speak, to see, to bear witness. Its paint too is quite unlike the body's, undiluted, of a putty consistency, pressed on as if by finger, clot upon clot; on one side a thread-by-thread patience, on the other a single breath of a stroke. The title says despite the violation, yet in the scene there is no trace of the rule having cracked; the crown is in place, the emblem in place, the seated one has not risen. The one thing changed after the violation is those two crosses drawn across the hanging figure's eyes. At navel height the edges of the red slit are ringed with rays, the place that is blessed and the place that is wounded falling on the same point. Along the bottom edge the unpainted grey strip of the board makes plain upon what surface all this heap is built.
Form and Composition
A vertical central axis, rarely this pronounced, lines up the navel, the stem of the flower and the roundness at the peak on a single line. The symmetry is broken by the white mass in the upper right and by the contrast of the side panels, one full and one a skeleton, and three separate systems of repetition stand side by side on the same surface.
A vertical axis running through the centre gathers the whole order. The navel, chest and head of the figure in the lower central region, the stem of the flower above it and the roundness at its peak are all lined up on the same line. So clear a central axis is not often seen in the series. The figure's two arms rise, each tracing a symmetrical arc, and open outward, and are cut off right in the centre, above the head, just short of joining. The ring made by the arms is the largest single form in the lower half; its width covers almost the whole of the base.
The symmetry breaks at two points. The white, downy mass in the upper right quarter has no counterpart on the left. That mass has entered the blue board, overrun its edge, and by its own scale rivals the scale of the flower. The second break is in the side panels. On the left there is a full surface made of vertical slices, and on the right only a cover described with a line, left empty inside. One is full, the other a skeleton. The top edge of both narrows upward, that is, both slope towards the centre.
On the top edge there is a dark curve, descending from the two corners and rising in the centre. It works like a ceiling and presses down the upper boundary of the blue board. On the bottom edge, as its counterpart, a dark triangular ground comes up to the figure's feet in the centre. Between these two dark masses the light-value middle region is squeezed. The horizontal force gathers most at the lower edge of the blue board; that line passes near the exact vertical centre of the painting and coincides with the figure's shoulder line.
The void gathers within the blue board. The right and left of the flower are largely empty; on the left side green vertical units fill this void a little, and on the right the white mass fills it. The distribution within the board is flat and vertical on the left, round and loose on the right.
Three small units stand at the edges. At the left mid-line a brown extension droops into the board and, curling downward, descends to the lower left corner; its length is that of the figure's arm but its thickness that of a finger. In the lower left corner there is a small spiral, and in the lower right corner a second small unit of a similar scale. Both are very small compared with the main figure, about a tenth. At the bottom edge the crop cuts the figure's feet slightly. The contour is firm everywhere, passing into itself only where the dark triangular ground meets the figure's legs. The texture of the surface changes by region. The figure's body is filled from top to bottom with parallel curved lines; these lines follow the direction of the muscle and produce a continuous rhythm. At the peak of the flower the same rhythm is shorter and radial; bars are arranged from the centre outward. The slices in the left panel, meanwhile, are flat and horizontal. Three separate systems of repetition stand side by side on the same surface, and none of them contaminates another. The eye's route begins at the navel of the figure below and rises, following the arc of the arms, stops at the flower, turns right and snags on the white mass, descends from the right cover and ends at the small unit in the lower corner.
Colour and Light
The vermilion body in the lower half, as the heat source, leans directly against the navy behind it; because the two fully saturated opposite colours do not mix, a vibration is born along their boundaries. The gold flower in the centre is drawn like a light source, and yet there is not a single glow coming from it on the leaves or on the ground.
The white figure, swollen like cotton, stands at the upper right, and that is the lightest place on the surface. The white is opaque, chalky, letting none of the navy beneath seep through. The difference between it and the dark blue just behind it runs almost from one extreme to the other; and so that small body lunges forward as though cut from paper and pasted on. The two crosses on its eyes and the stitching on its mouth are brown, the only dirty point within the white. The rectangle in the centre is somewhere between ultramarine and ink blue, saturated and deep. At its edge there is a finger-thick strip of light sky blue; that strip does not rescue the blue from its coldness but sets a brightness inside it like a frame. This field carries the coolness of the painting on its own. The greens are here too; the vertical row of leaves along the left edge is grass green, the leaves of the stalk in the centre are more olive, and the curled green at the lower right verges on blue.
The orange body in the lower half is the heat source of the whole painting. A colour that moves back and forth between vermilion and cadmium orange, with lines thrown over it in threads of lighter orange and yellowish; the paint laid like rope, in coil after coil. This orange leans directly against the navy behind it. The two colours are exact opposites and both are left at full saturation; no blue has mixed into the orange, no orange has smeared into the blue. A slight vibration forms along the boundary between them.
The mask of the face is the third voice that comes in between this pair. A green face, yellow crowns around it, a dark pair of eyes at its centre. The green's relationship with the orange is softer than the one with the blue, because both are a little dirtied. The panel on the left edge is rust and ochre, touched over with short yellow strokes, with the brown beneath showing through between them. The panel on the right is a whitish orange scrubbed with a dry brush; there the paint has not fully covered the surface, and the texture of the card comes through from within it.
The ceiling above is between burnt terracotta and maroon, dark and matte. Its paint was spread while wet, darker wavy marks remaining within it, and in one place it drops almost to a scorched brown. The ground below is almost black brown. That is, the warms hold both the top and the bottom of the surface; what is cool has gathered only in the window at the centre. The gold-yellow flower and the rays coming out of it are drawn like a light source, but they illuminate nothing around them. There is no glow over the leaves, and no mark on the ground. The rays shine only with their own colour. The same gold repeats in the small scorpion-shaped patch at the lower right and at the tips of the brown curl at the lower left. In the lower left corner the paint of that curl thins, and the grey of the card strikes the surface in one or two places.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The removal of the crowned figure's face and its replacement with a mask turns it into an office purged of personhood and sets up the order of the rite. The doll hung by strings with its mouth sewn shut is a witness rendered unable to bear witness; when the wounded point at the navel coincides with the blessed place, it reads that punishment and grace come from the same hand.
At the lower centre an orange, veined body sits cross-legged. Its arms rise up and open to either side and almost close into a ring above its head. On its head there is a rayed crown, and in place of the face a green mask sits; two almond eyes and below them a cramped mouth. Behind it hangs a navy quadrilateral, in the middle of which a gold-coloured flower has bloomed with thin rays scattered around it. At the upper right a white, soft doll figure hangs by strings; in place of its eyes two crosses, its mouth closed with stitching.
The setup settles into the order of a rite from beginning to end. The crowned figure seated in the middle, before it an altar area, behind it a glowing object. The gold flower stands both like a sun-disc and like the counterpart of the sacred vessel raised in church; the rays issue from exactly that centre. A plant root descends and approaches the head of the seated figure, that is, holiness flows from top to bottom. The green mask together with the crown recalls the faces fitted in place of the faces of gods' statues. What is shown is not who it is but what office it holds. A figure whose face is removed and replaced with a mask becomes an office purged of its personhood.
The hanging white doll is the most disturbing mark of the scene. Its eyes are cancelled with cross-marks, its mouth sewn shut, the strings tied to its arms and body. Puppet, sacrifice, or scarecrow; all three are possible. In folk tales doll-like figures hung in the garden are placed to keep evil away. Here the strings that hold it come toward the area of the seated figure. This relation suggests that the doll is the object of the rite. A witness who cannot speak and cannot see. A being whose mouth is sewn shut is a witness rendered unable to bear witness.
At the edges stand two guards. At the lower right a gold-coloured scorpion or crab with curled legs; at the lower left a brown tail or snake curling upward. Both are positioned at the threshold and take the place of the animal guardians set at temple gates. The animal at the threshold demands that whoever wishes to pass first reckon with it. The yellow frame on the right opens like a door, on the left a heavy curtain comes down. That is, the scene has an inside and an outside, and we stand on the side where the curtain opens.
When the word transgression in the title settles onto this arrangement, this reading emerges: something forbidden has been done, yet the rite goes on. Perhaps the ceremony is set up to repair the transgression, perhaps the transgression itself is this ceremony. On the body of the seated figure, at the level of the navel, there is a red slit ringed with rays; the place blessed and the place wounded fall on the same point. This coincidence suggests that punishment and grace are given by the same hand. The red dome on the ceiling sags downward and keeps the room closed.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
While the flayed body loses the membrane between inside and outside and is wholly exposed, the covering of the face with a mask shows that exhibition and concealment have been placed in separate regions. The toy hanging in the upper right with crossed-out eyes and a stitched mouth carries the abandonment of an object made to be taken into the lap.
The body in the middle is drawn as if it had been flayed. Its whole surface is fibre by fibre, vein by vein; the muscles are on the outside, with no layer covering them. The arms are opened upward, the legs parted to either side, the navel in the centre, a small opening marked at the groin. This body hides nothing. Or rather it has no surface left to hide with. That thin membrane between inside and outside has here been removed entirely, and what remains is a wholly exposed heap of flesh.
The face, by contrast, is closed. In place of the head stands a small, green, mask-like thing, with a rayed crown around it. While the body opens stark naked, the face is covered. This inverted relation struck me as interesting. Usually a person leaves the face open and covers the body. Here the opposite has happened. Before us is a being that hides its identity but wholly exhibits its body. What is shown and what is felt shame for are not in the same place, then. Small protrusions have been set on either side of the mask, they may stand in for ears. As much as the face itself, these too look put-on.
In the upper right, a white toy hangs from strings. In place of its eyes are crosses, in place of its mouth stitch marks. This figure is the scene's most disturbing part. A child's toy, drawn as if dead, its mouth closed so that it cannot speak, and dangled from above. It holds a green snake in its hand, or the snake holds it, I could not tell which. That an object belonging to childhood should meet with such harsh treatment seems to point to a place where play has ended. The large body in the centre does not look at it. The toy itself is soft and plump, a thing made to be taken into the lap. Now there is no one holding it, the strings hold it.
At the edges there are small, curled, crawling things. On the left a brown root or worm body descends, below it another has curled up. In the lower right stands a golden insect with its legs splayed. These are like things pushed outside the scene, but they have not managed to get all the way out, they wait at the rim of the frame. You move something away from the middle of the room, and it collects in the corner. The corners here are full. None of them has turned towards the centre, each advances in its own direction.
Above hangs a flower that gives off rays, standing in for a sun. No one looks at it. The door or window on the right has been left open, the light comes in from there. The ceiling of the room is red and heavy, pressing downward. Despite the open door no one leaves, and no one seems even to think of leaving. The figure in the centre sits in its place, its arms opened, waiting to be looked at. At the lower edge its toes are slightly curled inward. The darkness of the ground has collected right beneath the feet; that is also the room's only shadowed part.
Society, Power and Technology
The crowned body seated beneath the emblem opens its arms and covers the lower half of the room; keeping the door open and sitting down in front of it becomes a cheaper method of governing than placing a ban. The open door produces gratitude in place of anger, and the dangling infant with its mouth sewn shut tells how showing what happens to the one who speaks makes everyone study the lesson.
At the bottom sits a large body with its arms opened upward, on its head something like a crown, in the place of its face a mask. Behind it a rectangular panel hangs, at the centre of the panel a flower with rays drawn out from it. There is no one who does not recognise this arrangement. An emblem in the centre, a body seated beneath it, doors opening on either side of the body. What is hung on the wall of the government office and what is hung in the lobby of the holding company serve the same function; let there be a symbol behind you so that what you say does not look as though it came out of your mouth, but looks as though it comes from higher up.
The seated figure's arms are opened so wide that they have covered the whole lower half of the room. Whoever wishes to pass will pass beneath them. The door stands open but its way is blocked; to point to the exit and then sit down in front of it is an old method. No one tells you that you may not enter, it merely arranges where you go through. The whole logic of the permit system is here. Placing a ban is costly, it draws a reaction; instead you leave a single corridor and people line up of their own accord. Those who line up begin, after a while, even to think that the queue was their own idea. This is why it matters that the door is open. A closed door produces anger, an open door produces gratitude; the difference between the two shows itself not in the number of men who can pass, but in whom the one who cannot pass blames.
At the top right a white infant figure dangles, in the place of its eyes a cross has been marked, its mouth as if sewn shut. The strings come from above and hold the figure in the air. A puppet, or someone hanged, it could be either. In any case the two are very often the same thing; the person worked by his strings is one day left at the end of the string. That the mouth is sewn shut is a separate matter. To prevent speech you do not necessarily have to silence someone, it is enough to show once what happened to the one who spoke. Everyone else studies the lesson on their own.
In the corners of the room there are small things. On the left a curled tail, on the right a gold-coloured creature resembling a scorpion. Neither looks at the centre, they stay in their own corners. In the corners of scenes of power there are always small beings like these; they do not make the decision, the decision is not asked of them either, but when things fall into confusion they are the first to be crushed. Not being in the centre of the scene provides no protection. I have known many people who supposed that standing at the edge was cleverness; when the event was over they learned that the edge too was part of the scene of the event. In this picture as well the creatures in the corner are set on the same ground as the body at the centre, there is no wall between.
In the title it says in spite of the violation. The rule has been defied, but in the scene there is no sign of the rule having cracked; the crown in place, the emblem in place, the seated one has not risen from his seat. The only thing changed in the wake of the violation is the two crosses drawn onto the eyes of the dangling figure.
Art History and Comparison
The icon architecture of the throne scene has been set up in full, but that lexicon in which the name of each element is known is lost; there is no congregation that will recognise a plush toy with its eyes crossed out. Whereas Yüksel Arslan turns the body in his Artures into an annotated plate of knowledge, the body here opens flesh not onto knowledge but onto a tissue.
An orange body drawn fibre by fibre, its arms raised to form an arch, sits right in the middle of the cardboard. On its head is a rayed crown, its face like a mask, its eyes green. Behind it a dark blue panel, within the panel a golden flower giving off rays, above a red cloth curtain, on the right an open door. This arrangement is no accident; the throne scene, that is, the holy figure seated frontally at the centre, a cloth of honour behind, small attendants on either side, is a construction repeated for centuries with the same template, from Byzantine panels to Ethiopian icons. The working of the template rests on the name of each element being known in advance. Who the saint on the right is, what the object in his hand tells, are all recorded in the lexicon.
The lexicon here is lost. The thing dangling to the right of the throne is a toy, white, furry, its eyes closed off with a cross-mark; and in place of its mouth there is a seam. At the lower left a brown coiled animal, at the lower right something like a golden scorpion. The flower above glows like a sign of holiness, but what it is a sign of is not stated. That is, the architecture of the icon has been taken over, while the marks placed inside it are new and arbitrary. The same thing happens in folk painting, for instance in reverse-glass pictures; the template is preserved, the details filled in with local material. The difference is that the detail the folk painter fills in is recognised by the congregation. There is no congregation that will recognise a plush toy with crossed-out eyes.
The body itself connects to a separate vein. The muscle mass is not painted flat, it is built up drawn wire by wire, fibre by fibre; as though the skin had been lifted and the tissue beneath shown. In Yüksel Arslan's Artures the human body is treated exactly like this, as a plate on which the organs and veins are displayed. Arslan does this with a passion for knowledge, almost in imitation of a medical book, adding notes beneath. Here there are no notes, no explanation; the fibres do not turn the body into knowledge, they only open it from the inside out. The breasts are each a spiral, and the kernel form below the belly stands like a seed. The boundary between plant and flesh has been deliberately left blurred.
2019 is the series' year of intense production, and this work looks like one of the most constructed pieces of that year. Whereas in the canvases of the same period the figures most often float in the void, here there is a scene, a backing panel, a ground, even a door. In the following years this desire to set up such scenes diminishes, and the figure is left on its own. The material being cardboard also sets the work apart within the series; the grey of the cardboard is still visible at the edges, and the paint is cut off before it reaches there. The whiteness behind the door, meanwhile, opens onto nothing; the door is open, but there is no room behind it.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
Because the grey card drew the paint into itself, the red and brown areas stayed matt like velvet, and even on the second round they did not cover but let the grey beneath seep faintly through. While the hundreds of parallel waves filling the orange body took hours, the white baby beside it is a single-breath move, in lumps as if pressed with a finger.
Grey card is a ground that drinks the paint; unlike canvas it does not hold it on top, it draws it in. In the red and brown areas here I see the result of this. After the paint dried it lost its shine, stayed matt like velvet, blurring slightly at the edges as it seeped inward. The dark red dome at the top edge is laid on with a broad brush in an arc and, because the card drinks, did not fully cover even on the second round; the grey beneath still seeps faintly through. A horizontal line runs across the middle of the surface, it looks like the card's own fold mark. Even the blue passing over that line could not swallow it.
The orange body is made on an altogether different scale of time. The whole volume is filled with wavy thin lines running parallel to one another; each line a separate pull and the brush perhaps three or four millimetres wide. There are hundreds of them. The waves inside the arm follow the direction of the arm, the waves at the belly make a spiral. This work must have taken hours. The white baby right beside it, on the other hand, took seconds; there the paint is not watered down, of a paste consistency, laid on in lumps as if pressed not with a brush but with a finger or a cloth, and swelling a few millimetres from the surface. On the same card, on one side a thread-by-thread patience, on the other a single-breath move.
The gold flower is a matter of material in its own right. Metallic acrylic does not dry the way other paints do, it glitters in flakes and leaves a crust on the surface. The petals here are made with thick strokes overlaid on one another, deep hollows left between them. Because light goes in and out of these hollows, that region of the picture changes as the viewer moves their head. The fine gold rays around it are drawn one by one, fast, like fingernails.
On the left and right there are white chalky lines. These are left not with paint but by an almost dry material laid on its side and dragged; because they caught the grain of the card they are broken, and the red beneath them shows along their whole length. The inside of the door-shaped quadrilateral on the right is whitened with the same dry dragging, but there the hand pressed hard and the marks came out as a broader band.
A one hundred and fifty by sixty size, that is close to human height. When I step in front of it the belly of the orange figure stands at the level of my own belly. A work at this height you cannot read from a metre, you have to go back at least two metres. But from that distance the wave lines vanish and the body becomes a single orange mass. As you approach, the mass dissolves, leaving only lines set side by side. On the lower edge there is an unpainted strip of the card; there the ground shows in its own raw greyness and gives away which surface the whole of this heap was built upon.
Back to despite transgression
