UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title To Walk on Worn-out Soles: The 2005 International Istanbul Biennial and the Global Drift of Twenty-First Century Art Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/52d4t989 Author Schum, Matthew Robert Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO To Walk on Worn-out Soles: The 2005 International Istanbul Biennial and the Global Drift of Twenty-First Century Art A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory and Criticism by Matthew Robert Schum Committee in Charge: Professor Norman Bryson, Chair Professor Teddy Cruz Professor Michael Davidson Professor Grant Kester Professor Sheldon Nodelman 2015 © Matthew Robert Schum, 2015 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Matthew Robert Schum is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 2015 iii Dedication For Robert and Lee, wanderers before I. iv Epigraph It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist v Table of Contents Signature Page.............................................................................................................iii Dedication....................................................................................................................iv Epigraph........................................................................................................................v Table of Contents.........................................................................................................vi Vita..............................................................................................................................vii Abstract of the Dissertation........................................................................................viii Preface Istiklal Çadessi................................................................................................1 Introduction Dériville...................................................................................................8 Chapter 1 Walking in the City: The 2005 Istanbul Biennial.......................................22 Chapter 2 Anti-Social Drifting...................................................................................32 Chapter 3 The Biennialism of Perennial Critique......................................................44 Chapter 4 Contemporary Art & Audience: Exhibition Sites for the 2005 Biennial...68 Chapter 5 The International & the Everyday: Select 2005 Biennial Projects...........86 Chapter 6 Encounter Before Object: Drifting in Time.............................................132 Chapter 7 Siting Optimism After 2005: The 2007 & 2009 Istanbul Biennials........ 151 Chapter 8 Viewership & Shadow-Work....................................................................190 Conclusion At the Margin........................................................................................249 References.................................................................................................................254 vi Vita 2004 Bachelor of Arts, Simon Fraser University 2015 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego Field of Study Major Fields: Art History (Contemporary Art and Criticism) vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION To Walk on Worn-out Soles: The 2005 International Istanbul Biennial and the Global Drift of Twenty-first-Century Art by Matthew Robert Schum Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory and Criticism University of California, San Diego, 2015 Professor Norman Bryson, Chair This dissertation draws upon the curatorial tenets of Istanbul, the 2005 Istanbul Biennial. The dissertation aims to make observations about visual art reception in the early twenty-first century. To this end, the focus is audience: namely, how it collectively absorbs and formulates meaning when faced with art in offsite exhibitions removed from the traditional enclosure of the art museum. Audience members in urban exhibitions such as 2005’s Istanbul Biennial resemble older forms of urban wandering central to history modern art, embodied in the figure of the flaneur. As Istanbul exemplifies the globalized visual art distribution system by the cultivating an ambulant and recurrent audience, it also characterizes visual art’s progressive elements. Istanbul stands as a model for how itinerant communities and unconventional exhibitions can displace artworks themselves as primary resources. Unlike art movements defined by historical objects, the affective dispersal of reception has redefined contemporary art in the last two decades. viii Preface Istiklal Çadessi If an outsider visiting Istanbul wishes to find where East and West meet, it is surely at an intersection somewhere along Istiklal Street. From the sheer, narrow streets meeting at the base of Galata Tower to Taksim Square, draped in crimson and crescents, strung with banners bearing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s ageless face, this one street in Istanbul’s central district of Beyoğlu blends impressions of the Ottoman’s chief stronghold and imperial department stores, fast food, and fast fashion. The tourist will find the same implacable ruins of Empire as can to be met with across Europe, from the Bosporus to the Thames. The worldly traveler will notice capital flourish here as it does everywhere. The city presages its own peculiar version of a future where we can expect that nothing “East” or “West” will survive distinctly. An Istanbul removed from the myth, firmly of this world and familiar with the dominant world economy has been on the rise for many years now. Antiquity figures as a sideshow. An outsider disabused of Eurocentric notions of decline in this East would, on a casual first stroll, begin the slow process of absorbing the past on Istiklal. This outsider may well arrive at a conclusion that finds our capitals devoid of exoticism and yet sees how spectacle-culture awaits them everywhere. In this way of seeing things, everything belongs to the contemporary moment, and remnants of history, even as they linger, exist only to be synchronized in the service of a global scheme. Like many places, Turkey is a republic of the free-market, one that has remained in a state of endless modernization and redevelopment since its first 1 2 government was formed after the Turkish War of Independence in 1920. It now belongs to a consortium of non-places whose reach spans territories greater than any country. Turkey has many of the same problems facing other major economic powers. Istanbul is a prime example: it can change quickly, adapting and harnessing the latest wave of development as a commercial center. The city has been retrofitted with boutiques that fill shopping malls in America, pedestrian plazas in Western-European styles, and all the features of gentrification that have been imported here. Name brand stores are incorporated indiscriminately into local architecture, whether the ornate vestiges of the past or the drab cement facades so hastily constructed across the Greek and Turkish Mediterranean in the second half of the twentieth century.1 My first research trip as a graduate student was in 2006. A recent phase of redevelopment was cloying its way through the European side, high and low clothing? outlets had arrived to serve the fashion hungry. The impression of walking Istiklal included the pervasive sound of slamming jackhammers. Bustling throngs of shoppers, commuters, and loafers from across the city muffled the noise of new construction echoing in alleyways.. This trend of redevelopment has continued with remarkable pace by any standard, and has generated hostility and unrest. A standoff at Gezi Park rocked the country in 2013, as violent protests broke out between rioters and the many police 1 It is ironic that Le Corbusier’s flexible stacked cement “Dom-ino” facades found across the region, including Greece and the Balkans, were inspired by wooden pillar buildings found in Turkey (and now largely missing in the parts of Istanbul where they used to stand). Introduce quotation with a signal phrase. “In the Dom-ino model, flexibility is not only a positive quality, but also a fundamental apparatus of social engineering that controls the economic development of supposedly spontaneous settlements from the Brazilian favelas to the Turkish gecekondu. First of all, while it exploits the cheap informal labour force, Dom-inos are also based on industrially produced raw materials that drive the profit back to larger scale corporations.” For more see: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S. Giudici and Platon Issaias, “From Dom-ino to Polykatoikia” Domus, (no. 962, October 2012). 3 officers standing ready along Istiklal on a daily basis. International problems surface occasionally, proving the extent to which Anatolia remains a geopolitical focal point. Beyoğlu’s restless corridors have long attracted recreational travelers and people living in exile. They come from the region and from afar. In 1958, Henri Lefebrvre asked, “[w]ill there ever be anything great which is not dehumanized–or a form of happiness which is not tinged with mediocrity?” as he established his Critique Everyday Life.2 For Lefebvre, mediocrity concerned a Western- style of capitalist exploitation versus a Soviet