society screwing balance, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on paper, 42 × 59.4 cm (16 ½ × 23 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
Red stick figures multiply below, more than fifteen, all from a single mould: a round, a vertical line, four sticks. A form repeated this much ceases to be a person and becomes a sign; among them none sees another, some hold hands, some are alone. At centre left, though, stands a single red face eight times larger than they, filled in, shaded. It is the only full face in the scene. That one person is drawn like a human and everyone else like a sign is no accident; in the press too the subject is one person, the others the background, if one person dies the story is told, if a hundred die the number is read. The difference of scale says, without need of any writing, who will call to account. Only the large face is not looking at the crowd, its eyes slid upward; the bond between centre and periphery seems set up but is cut at the last moment.
At upper right a white body hangs upside down from the ceiling on a rope, its eyes closed with a cross. Right to its left a stick figure with arms flung to either side holds in its hand a ring resembling a noose, so the hanging is done by someone in the scene. That the punishment is a spectacle is its true function; one person is punished, the crowd watches and the message is received. The public square is gone but the work continues, the image enters circulation, everyone writes their small contribution and no one sees the sum. The word balance in the title is thus a bitter joke; there are no scales, no pans, the balance is not upset but was never set up. The noose in the middle hangs idle, gone round no one's neck, as if a second place were prepared.
Red circulates as line over the whole painting, nowhere filling a field; the small figures are without fill, the black ground passing through them and working like holes opened in the darkness. The large face, on the contrary, is filled thick and thick, covering the black beneath entirely. The black frays out at all four edges, a border finished not by cutting but by emptying. The green and red crosses drawn over the two windows above carry a silent sign of cancellation. A green ladder rises from below upward, a few figures clinging to it but at the top there is not one who climbs but one who hangs. At lower left a flame burns in its own corner, no one turned toward it.
Form and Composition
Dozens of thin stick figures, scattered across the lower half at the same thickness, crowd in the lower right corner while being wholly absent in the lower left, setting up the painting's smallest tier of scale. The large face in the left centre, as the largest single unit, makes a one-to-eight ratio with these sticks.
In the lower half dozens of thin stick figures are scattered. All as if drawn with the same pen, all of the same thickness and close to one another in height. Their number exceeds fifteen. Their distribution is not regular: they crowd in the lower right corner and are wholly absent in the lower left corner. The densest cluster is in the right central region, and from there is a flow towards the bottom edge. This crowd is the painting's smallest tier of scale and fills the voids between the large units.
In the left central region a large face stands. Its oval form has entered inward from the left edge, its width about a third of the crop. The eyes, nose and mouth inside it are built with round patches, all gathered in the lower half of the oval. This face is the painting's largest single unit; its ratio to the smallest stick figure is about one to eight. Below it there is a horizontal plane, stretching to the right and cutting across the middle band from end to end. The front edge of the plane is straight, its back edge slanted; it stands like a table and separates the lower half from the upper half.
In the upper band there are two light rectangles. One a third of the way in from the left, the other a third of the way in from the right, both at the same height and the same size. Inside each a plus sign, at their corners a fill each. The distance between them is the width of two rectangles. In the middle of this pairwise order a figure drawn with a stick sits; its arms open to either side, their tips stretching as far as the rectangles, setting up a horizontal line near the top edge. Beneath it two loops droop down.
In the upper right quarter a separate mass hangs. Its head stays above, its body made of interlocking roundnesses, and a thin line coming out of its peak stretches to the top edge. Its height is about two thirds of the face. In the upper left corner, meanwhile, there is a winding extension, descending by turning twice, its tip connected to a thin stick.
The ground is dark and the brush marks irregular. At the edges the white of the paper shows; the paint ends at all four edges with an irregular boundary, that is, the painting's own frame is drawn. The thickness of this inner frame is greater at the top and less at the bottom. In the lower left region a bundle of short, sharp lines opens upward. In the middle band thin, straight sticks cut across one another. Some are horizontal, some slanted; the longest goes from the left edge to the right and cuts across the middle of the oval. None of them passes behind the forms lying beneath; they are the frontmost layer. The points of intersection are irregular and none of them makes a right angle. In the right central region two sticks close off a triangle, and a cluster of small figures has settled inside that triangle. That is the place where the crowd is most crammed.
Colour and Light
The signal red carries the whole drawing, changing according to the ground beneath it, lightening to pink over the white and descending to dark blood over the black, so it reads at two separate registers. The second voice, green, is the opposite of the red, but because the paint has dried they nowhere mix, and this separation hardens the contrast.
The black does not go all the way to the edge of the paper; a white margin is left on all four sides and those edges are serrated. The black itself is not a single layer either. In some places it is thick and fully opaque, in others the brush has gone dry and the white beneath seeps through in line after line; there the colour rises to lead grey. On the left edge and in the lower region these grey bands cover broad areas. The red carries the whole drawing. A clean and saturated tone close to signal red; drawn with a thin brush, in most places in a single stroke. Where it is laid thick it darkens and slides to morello, where it is watered it drops to pink over the white. All the small figures in the lower region are drawn in this red and none of them has its interior filled; the black passes through between the contours.
The large face at the middle left is the place where the red is a single broad mass. Its interior is filled, but the white beneath is not fully closed off everywhere; and so there is an undulation on the face that goes to pink at the centre and to dark blood at the edges. The rings around the eyes are darker, while the inside of the mouth is lighter. Three separate intensities of the same paint are gathered within a single form. The green is the second voice. It comes out inside the two rectangles above, in the horizontal band in the centre, in the diagonal beams and in the lower corners. Its colour is between grass and emerald, the exact opposite of the red. Only, the two nowhere mix into one another; even at the few points where the red passes over the green the paint has dried and the colours have stayed separate. This separation hardens the contrast.
The white is gathered in three places: the two windows above, the hanging figure on the right and the sheaf of rays at the lower left. The white of the windows is laid with the brush, grey mixed into it. The white of the figure on the right is cleaner and thicker; the highest lightness over the black is there. Nowhere else on the surface is there so bright a point. Red rings are drawn over the hanging body at the upper right. That red standing over the white reads lighter than the red standing over the black; the same paint appears at two separate registers because of the ground beneath it. The same situation is present in the curling red line at the upper left too, where the black comes out dominant and darkens the colour.
An imitation of light has been made, but not carried to the end. The windows stand like bright squares, and yet the black around them opens nowhere; no brightness spills out from within them. The red and white rays at the lower left are drawn as though spreading too, but they do not change the colour of the neighbouring areas. In the lower right corner a signature has been thrown in red over a green patch; the two colours come one over the other in a single place there, and because the red does not fully cover the green the tone beneath turns to brown.
Iconography, Myth and Title
While the ladder represents the ascent between sky and earth, at the top there stands not one who climbs but a body hung upside down, and the empty ring beside it announces that the queue will continue. The difference of scale between the enormous face on the left and the small crowd marks who will call to account; the balance in the title, meanwhile, is without a scale, as if it was never set up.
Below, red stick figures are gathered in a crowd. Round heads, thin arms, splayed legs; some have crosses on their eyes, some have blank faces. Among them a green ladder rises and a few figures who have climbed onto it can be made out. At the upper right there is a larger body hanging upside down by a rope from the ceiling. At the middle left stands a huge red face; it has two eyes, a nose and an open mouth, but no body. Red cross marks have been drawn inside the two white quadrilaterals above. No one's face has been fully drawn.
The ladder is the backbone of this scene. It carries climbing upward, rising step by step, and the possibility of falling all at once. The narrative of the ladder set up between sky and earth is very old; angels descend and ascend, no one can skip the rungs. The ladder here is green and thin, and a few people from the crowd below have grasped it. Skipping a rung is forbidden and the one who falls goes all the way to the bottom. As one advances upward the number of figures decreases; those remaining on the ladder are very few beside those below. At the top, on the other hand, there is not one who climbs but one who hangs.
The hanging body is in an inverted state; its head down, its feet up. Its eyes closed with crosses, and there are rings on its belly and chest. Being hung upside down is a position that appears in both punishment and purification narratives; the person is left that way so as to see the world upside down. Another ring hanging from the end of the same rope also stands in the middle, empty. As though a second place has been prepared; that ring left empty says that the queue will continue. Right above it there is a red stick figure with its arms opened to either side; that posture is the shortest drawing of the cross schema.
The large face on the left is the only element that has stayed outside the scene. Its scale is many times above the crowd below; its mouth open, but to which side it calls is not clear. Beneath the face there is a thick red arc, standing like a collar of clothing or the rim of a tray. This difference of scale directly repeats the distinction between the great god and the small human in temple paintings. There is one who looks, one who is watched, and the distance between them is measured by height. The difference of scale marks who will call to account without any need for writing.
The word balance in the title and the order in the scene do not match. There is no scale, no pan, no measure. This absence suggests not that the balance has been broken but that it was never set up. Instead there is a ladder, a rope, and windows marked with crosses. The cross on the windows is both a sign and a gesture of closing; there will be no looking out from inside, no seeing from outside. In the upper left corner there is a red strip descending in a curl; it stands like a snake, like a cable left loose. At the lower left a cluster resembling fire burns, and the tips of its flames are curled upward, toward the direction where the ladder is.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The red stick figures have multiplied downward and ceased to be persons, turning into the repetition of a sign that does not see one another. While the single full face on the left is painted with the care reserved for oneself, everyone else has stayed a stick, and in the upper right the body hanged by a figure holding the noose shows the thin boundary between play and cruelty.
Stick figures made with red lines have multiplied downward. Some hold hands, some stand alone, some have a cross on their face. All have come out of the same simple template; a round, a vertical line, four sticks. A form repeated this many times ceases to be a person, becomes a sign. The crowd here is not really a community, it is the multiplication of a sign. There is no one among them who sees another. Their heights are not different from one another either; there is no small one and large one, all have been set at the same measure.
On the left stands a large face. Its eyes big and round, the lower lids swollen, its mouth open. It is the only full face in the whole scene. While the others are line, this face is painted, filled in, shaded. Like the difference between the care a child gives to itself when drawing itself and the care it spends when drawing others. It is detailed, everyone else a stick. This face does not look at the scene, it has slid a little to the side, its mouth left open. A red line has been drawn around its head, separating it from the rest.
In the upper right a white body is tied to a rope, swaying in the air. Its breasts and navel are drawn, with two crosses in place of its eyes. And directly to its left a stick figure with its arms opened to either side holds a ring resembling a noose. That is, this hanging is being done by a figure in the scene. The boundary between play and cruelty is very thin in a child's drawing; with the same speed of the same hand both a house and a gallows are drawn. Here the two stand side by side and neither is more emphasised than the other. The legs of the hanged body hang down, the toes turned inward. That detail could have been left undrawn; it has been drawn.
Above there are two white squares resembling windows, their insides filled with green and each with a cross drawn over it. In the middle a green table or bench stretches out. The ground is closed off with black and coarse brush marks. The whole scene gives the impression of having been made on a blackboard or a wall. These are things standing on a surface that can be wiped; if it is wiped tomorrow, nothing will be left behind. On the green table a few figures stand as well; that is the only flat ground in the scene.
In the lower left there is a cluster in the form of red rays, it could be a flame or a plant. It stands like something burning in the lower corner of the room and no one has turned towards it. Everything is drawn with the same red; the hanged, the hanger, the crowd. This is a scene in which a single hand has taken on all the roles. The thickness of the lines is the same everywhere; nowhere is there a trace of pause.
Society, Power and Technology
The crowd below and the figure hanged above carry punishment's function as spectacle; the square is gone but the image is put into circulation, and the owner of the single line ten thousand people wrote is treated as though there were none. That the crowd is drawn like marks and the single face like a human shows to whom attention is distributed and who falls to a number.
In the lower part there is a crowded group of small men, all in a few lines, all drawn at the same speed. I did not count how many there are, they go past fifteen. Some have a cross on their face, some have opened their arms. Above, a white figure hangs by a rope, its feet lifted from the ground. The crowd below, the hanged one above. There is no need to describe what this arrangement is; for centuries the squares were set up this way.
That punishment is a spectacle is its real function. You punish one person, hundreds look on and get the message. Today the square is gone, but the work goes on. The image is put into circulation, the name is exposed, the recording is shared. The crowd no longer gathers in a single place, everyone watches from his own screen and, while watching, writes a comment. As participation grows, responsibility shrinks; the owner of a sentence that ten thousand people have written beneath is treated as though it had none. Everyone writes the single line that falls to his share and thinks that line is small. No one sees the sum. The man in the target, meanwhile, is left beneath the sum, and a result emerges that no one individually intended. This is why the word balance in the title stands like a bitter joke; what upsets the balance is not one side, it is everyone's small contribution.
Above there are two windows, a cross drawn over each of them. Marked places. The history of placing a mark on a building, a door, a neighbourhood is long and none of it ended well. Once a mark is placed, the intention of everyone who passes through that door changes; some keep away, some find courage. Beside them there is also a staircase descending, its steps drawn, but no one stands on it.
To the left of the crowd a huge face sits. There is no one else in the scene whose face has been worked out, whose identity has been made clear. Its eyes large, its mouth open, its neck thick. It looks. That a face drawn in this much detail is set on the same paper as the tiny men below is, to my mind, the harshest part. That one person is drawn like a human and the rest like marks is no accident. It is like this in the press too; the subject of a story is one person, the others are the background. Whoever is included in the crowd, his fate too becomes the fate of the crowd. If it is one person who dies, the story is told, if it is a hundred people who die, a number is read out. This is not the journalist's malice, it is a rule to do with how attention is shared out. And there are not many who ask who set that rule.
In the bottom left corner there is a red flame, opened upward. It does not touch the rest of the scene, it burns in its own corner. The hanged figure's feet, meanwhile, still seem to sway, both of them turned downward.
Art History and Comparison
In rock painting the centre is large and the periphery is dispatched with a few lines because what matters is their number; here the difference of scale has been preserved but what the crowd is doing is unclear, and the large face does not look at them. The gallows in the popular print was an instrument of admonition; here the one hanged is a toy doll, there is no writing of a crime, and only the arrangement of the admonition remains.
At the lower right a crowd has gathered; small people drawn in red with a few rings, some with a cross on their face, some with their arms open at the sides. In the middle left, much larger than they are, stands a red face with overlapping eyes and a mouth. Above, two white windows, in the middle a stick-like figure with its arms opened to both sides, and on the right a white doll hung by a rope, its eyes crossed out, swinging. At the lower left something like a bundle of flame rises.
To arrange a crowd of small figures around a large figure is one of the oldest devices of painting. From Anatolia to North Africa, hunting or ceremonial scenes in wall and rock paintings are always built like this; the animal or person at the centre is kept large, the people around are dispatched with a few lines, because what matters is their number. On this paper there is the same difference of scale. The difference is that what the crowd is doing cannot be understood. In rock painting the crowd runs in one direction, surrounds something; the small figures here stand scattered, some holding hands, some left alone. The large face does not look at them either, its eyes having slid upward. The relationship between the centre and the periphery seems to be established and is then cut off at the last moment.
The desire not to leave the surface empty brings this paper close to the art brut vein. On Wölfli's pages every gap is filled, musical notes, faces, birds and writings pile one on another; filling is like a compulsion. The fullness here is sparser, the black ground breathing in many places, but the same compulsion can be sensed. The marks come one over another at different scales and different thicknesses; some placed with a thick brush, some with a fine nib. In Wölfli these layers would be bound to a system, to a calendar he made up himself. The overlappings here seem to come not from a system but from the same surface being returned to at different times.
The figure hung by a rope, meanwhile, connects to the subject of popular prints. In cheap newspaper and marketplace prints the gallows scene was an instrument of admonition; the hanged person was depicted, his crime written beneath, and a crowd of spectators was always present. Here there is a crowd, there is one hanged, but there is no writing of a crime, and the one hanged is not a person but a toy doll. Of the cautionary scene only its arrangement remains. The red crosses drawn over the two windows above carry the same silent sign of cancellation.
In the series' 2019 paper group this work is one of the most crowded scenes. While in the canvases of the same year there are one or two figures, here close to fifteen beings can be counted. The series' small onlookers that sit at the edges are here not in the minority but in the majority; the large face is left among them. The noose hanging from the hand of the stick figure in the middle stands idle, having gone round no one's neck.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
All four edges of the black area end not by being cut but by running out in a fringe as the brush empties; its border is determined not by the size of the paper but by the paint's own ending. Because the red moves about over the surface always as line and does not fill in an area, the small figures stayed without filling, and the black ground inside them turns them into holes in the darkness.
All four edges of the black area end in a fringe. The brush there was roamed almost empty, each bristle leaving its own mark separately, and the white of the paper got in from between these marks. Not a cut-off border but a border that ends by running out. The edge margins are not even either; on the left side three or four centimetres, on the right side coming down to a centimetre. The white of the paper thus stays as a band enclosing the whole picture, and where the black area stops is determined by the paint's own ending.
The inside of the black is not uniform either. It is filled with a broad brush, with horizontal and vertical drags; because the paint is scant the white beneath breathes a little everywhere and the area is not a true black but becomes a grey-veined covering. The darkest place is the upper middle region, visited twice. On the left edge, on the other hand, there is a single pass and the paper stayed open almost halfway. You see this difference only up close; from a distance it is all the same darkness.
The red moves about over the whole picture as line, nowhere filling in an area. Thin and fluid; the brush touched the paper and ran, the rings closed with the turn of the wrist, the arms lengthened in a single pull. All the small figures below are in this way, without filling. The black ground inside them stands as it is, and the figures work not as things on top of the paper but as holes opened within the darkness. The large red face at the centre, on the contrary, is filled in; there the paint is thick, overlaid, and covered the black beneath it completely. The light pink patches inside the face were laid while the red was still damp, their edges scattered and no border left between the two tones.
The white rectangles are laid over the black after it had dried. They stayed thin, the black beneath them strikes up from within and the white falls to grey. The green and red marks over them are of the same fineness. The green drags, on the other hand, belong to another tool; broad, flat and transparent, as they passed over the black they did not lift it but could not cover it either. At the lower edge of the green band at the centre the paint gathered and made a small ridge, the brush stopped there and changed direction.
An A2 paper is a size worked laid flat on a table and bent over. There is no run in any of the red lines, which suggests that the surface was standing horizontal. Looked at from a metre twenty on the wall the black area stands like a window and the white edge frames it. As you come within half a metre the frame falls apart, because that edge is not a line but a comb left by the marks of hundreds of separate bristles. As the paper carried this much paint it humped up in some places, and those humps make their own shadows in a light coming from the side.
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