After reading Charles Baudelaire’s poem, To a Passer By,1 the Berlin-based philosopher, Walter Benjamin, came upon the concept of Love at last sight in his book A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism.2 Baudelaire’s poem, was the catalyst for Benjamin to think further about the mundane encounters in the crowded streets of large cities. He furthered Baudelaire’s idea by suggesting “The delight of the city-dweller is love – not at first sight but at last sight.”3
It is this notion of living in cities, which are fast becoming the chosen place for millions of people all around the world, co-habiting, gathering together, working, shopping, travelling, seeing, loving and hating. A gross mixture of emotions reflects the pleasures and desires as well as the conditions, which create feelings of alienation and distrust. Benjamin suggests that the attraction we feel in the city is sometimes a flicker of hope in “the final farewell that coincides […] with the moment of allure.”4 A brief moment, a glance, an acknowledgment of the place of desire is surpassed by the next event, for the city is like open doors, on entering the next portal, we forget our last encounter.
It is with these two ideas that the first solo exhibition by the Berlin-based performance artist, Nezaket Ekici, (born in 1970, Kırşehir, Turkey) was convened in London; the idea of the allure in the brief glances in the streets around the world and the place of love or desire as a cultural atmosphere. Her performance works are not illustrative of desire nor an estrangement but rather processes – often exhaustive in their duration – that use humour, lots of energy and repetition to create a vision that unfurls a border. Sometimes the performances verge on the painful to watch; absurd encounters but ones that help her to reach a place that she calls her “creative space”. She states “I aim to create art where all of the elements are connected together to form an absolute work of art.”
The Stuttgart-based philosopher, Andreas Dammertz, has written “Performance is perhaps the only art in our modern Times that is able to describe the fast turning World – Performance, having the same speed as the world today by focusing on the Moment.”5
In these creative spaces many alluring moments can be recognised; secrets are unveiled, fragments released, abject relics confounded, layers of fetish exposed and cultural heritage is disturbed by slapstick. These are the modern times that have no limit to their velocity and maybe it is only snatching the opportunity to encapsulate some of them in the performative realm that will allow us a further understanding of the evolving, revolving realities which we call living. In this way we only have a moment to establish an emotional bond as our muse disappears, seeing it passing by and loving it at last sight. These moments remain as our muse.
The exhibition, (After) Love at last sight, presents over 13 years of performance works as videos, accompanied by varying scale of photographic works including Emotion in Motion (2000), Blind (2007), Madonna (2008), Tube Dolomit (2009), Border Inside (2011), Human Cactus (2012) and Disappear (2013). The earliest work, Emotion in Motion, first performed in 2000, was performed by the artist in the gallery, its residues remaining in the space with a documented video-performance from its latest incarnation. The performance duration was three days, wherein Ekici covered an installed living space, filled with personal objects and accessories with kisses. The trace of the lipstick formed a patina of affection or possibly the veil of consumption that she exposed. The work conveys many layered meanings but what remains embedded in the audience’s mind is an act normally associated with love and greeting being twisted into a never-ending moment of torture in her attempt to cover the whole space. A powerful process reminds one of the pain and often duress of love and its universal worship. The walls, the furniture and the clothes all turn lip red, a triumphant memento mori to desire and the beginning of the end of love at last sight.
The influential essayist, Susan Sontag, once wrote “the only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions”6 and in a further text suggested “Contemporary art, no matter how much it has defined itself by a taste for negation, can still be analyzed as a set of assertions of a formal kind.”7 It is with these two differing notions that I intend to discuss each work by Nezaket Ekici, the two statements require us to think about the place of images as positions or suggest how sometimes answers precede a question. Artistic images are meant to contain content and to be recognised as readings in the contemporary artspeak, a relation built often on unraveling art’s cryptic analysis of society. Of course the second quote reinstates contemporary art’s ideological relationship to taste, its analytical observations and its demands almost always conveyed in a form to be heard, seen, felt and understood within the ‘prescribed’ public realm. The prescription is based on understanding narratives, which inevitably makes reference to meaning, whilst the artist often obscures instant recognition by obfuscating the complete meaning, a second formalisation that Sontag refers to as taste or analysis.
Many of the performances by Ekici fall neatly into the second statement for her works are initiated primarily as performances – a set of articulations wherein the artist often remains central to the image and the body its main focii. In many ways when one views photographic images of artists in the modern era, Picasso, Matisse or even Pollock, the photographs depict them with a brush or a stick with charcoal on its tip or a dripping brush aligning the active body/mind to make its mark on a flat surface. The flat surface is where for many traditional artistic practices the image materialises – in the making from the body and the mind an image externalises itself.
In the case of performance the artist and their body remain within the work or often is the work, turning the making into the medium. They become the medium and the medium’s fluidity helps transcend the borders and boundaries of the studio practice. The studio often expands into the public sphere.
The selected media, the performative, often precludes the presence of the artist and the audience in creating the work. Most performances negate or present the art beyond the object, arriving through its negation into a visually charged space of the spatially cultural.8 The history of the performance in this way controls how we receive the message as part of its discourse or as witnesses in the space. It constructs particular frames of time and access through memory that profoundly shifts the potential of how we understand or comprehend the context.
In many ways, in its production, performance is the contra-management of our consumption in an image-based economy, often experimental in its demands to be released of the burden of a devolved aesthetic. Performance emancipates and resists those liberal markets that anticipate art as an object, is suspicious of products rather than being a process of observation. Interestingly, other traits of late twentieth century works of art, including installation art, have been ambitious in pushing mainstream art to its limits. This systematic transgression, these ephemeral encounters, displaced as site-specific works, comprehensively and gradually adulterate the hackneyed art dialectal.
In selecting the works for the exhibition, a chronology allowed for some of the above concerns to be presented in the works of Ekici. Her steady ambition to commit to re-performing became a central axis of the exhibition. One of her earliest works, Emotion in Motion, first performed in 2000, was selected and, over a period of three days, was carried out in a pseudo living space organised by the artist. Although the space was sparse and mainly white, its domesticity full of daily accoutrements and furniture, including a ghetto blaster and dresses slung against the wall, all inanimately seemed to be waiting for its owner. Ekici approached the space in a manner suggesting finding a long lost friend, leaning against the fabricated dry walls, often prostrating herself on her knees, spreading her hands outwards to gently kiss its mundane surface. Her loving, intense gesture is repeated and, in a short while, the wall is covered in an array of kisses, from whence she moves onto the sofa, sitting against its moulded seat, then onto the sideboard with photographs of her family, all the while kissing their surfaces. The cushions are soon covered in lipstick stains, the objects turning into fetish. Ekici arches over the chairs, tables and lampshade, extending her mouth as far as humanly possible. Sometimes the kisses are like those on a cheek, gentle and swooning, at other times frigid or maniacal. Emotion in motion is an intense, almost great, act of forgiveness that sometimes one wishes would end. After three days it does end – with almost all the room covered in lipstick stains, her mouth in pain and the audience left evaluating their experience of an exhilarating hasty landing.
The second work in the exhibition entitled Blind, has only been performed twice; the first time in Stuttgart and the second time at ArcoMadrid. It is for good reason it has not been performed often as it remains Ekici’s toughest and most gruelling work. With the aid of an assistant, the artist is covered from head to toe in a thick plaster cast. The only parts of her body that remain uncovered are her arms, one hand clutching a short handle sledgehammer and the other a chisel. As a head-cast is placed over her head and shoulders, the joint begins to dry. The artist hits the chisel placed against the region of her chest with the hammer, in attempting to break out of this semi-mummified state.
It is with every beat on the head of the chisel that we become witness to her survival in this adverse condition. We became mass participators, caught in a relationship between spectators and witnesses. In remaining neither and both, we are included in this spectral reality, aware of her arms flagging under this duress, her power to strike decreasing as she tries to free herself from this entrapment. We are roped into this choking sweating reality, a metaphorical battlefield, questioning the very act of spectatorship whilst understanding the symbolic image of suffocation. We witness a moment that will not let go, an opportunity wherein this feminine body and the convergence of self motivation/ breath / freedom could be forsaken any moment and become a postmortem. Her every slam on the head of the chisel releases her body from this captive state, her life eventually freed by hard effort, as she glides over the remains of her plaster cast into the silenced audience.
The third work in the exhibition has a similar iconographic relationship to the efforts of the artist performing in a confined space, within a process that seems painful in a bid to create a joyous light. In Madonna, Ekici stands on a white pedestal, wearing a white satin dress, holding two sticks with candles attached at their ends, stretching over her head, arching at times and cringing with pain she tries to keep a set of 37 candles above her alight.
The protective glasses stop the hot wax entering her eyes, but her arms, her back and her face start to get covered in droplets of wax that land as long as she keeps the candles lit above her head. The thirty minute performance, illuminated by a strong spotlight, disallowing us to escape her every movement, her Madonna moment, is alive with pain as she tries to reach the symbolic sky that lights our World and keeps us warm. There is great strength in this work, strength in her tender act to remain attentive as well as dismissive of the pain displaying the very qualities we mythologically attach to the image of the Madonna. As Sontag had suggested in the earlier quote, Ekici is asserting her formal understanding of Madonna and making it her own version, including the pain and joy of lighting the universe.
The fourth work, Tube Dolomit, is one of her recent works with costume; costume not as a canvas but as the most important aspect of the performance. A red satin cocktail dress finally covers her full body, including the head with over 2 meter long sleeves, that she twists and flings from herself into the air. This performance is based on Otto Dix’s painting of Anita Berber, painted in the heyday of the Weimar Republic’s reign of 1925. The painting was, and sometimes still is, considered to be the embodiment of the femme fatale in the heyday of the twenties; the dancer and actress are painted in a tight, red dress. The cultural significance remained with Ekici and her silent observation created a singular act, committed to wearing the red dress and in a sense consumed by its allure and history. The performance starts with Ekici wriggling into the dress, disappearing within it and the performance reminds us of the celebratory form riddled as the history of art and its particular penchant for the femme fatale figure.
Border Inside, is another performance like Emotion in Motion, that uses the mouth and lips as the central site for the work. Border Inside requires 11 hours of chewing gum, to make a map of the United States of America against a pane of glass. The action defines the work and the image – in chewing the gum, turning its constituency from a solid form to a greater plasticity, it provides an iconic way to visit one of the United States familiar exports, gum. Although gum has been in existence for thousands of years in North Africa, it is the consumption of all things American, its lifestyle, its products, its culture and its attitudes that Ekici is interested in exploring. In making a map of one of the most known outlines on the world map, she allows us to understand how at ease we remain with its borders and the USA as an image and a cultural form.
The American satirist and novelist, Gore Vidal, once stated “Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.”9 It is with the encroaching aspects and greater effects on global youth culture that its boundaries seem porous yet, on an infrastructural level, it remains bounded by conservative values backed by a collective nationalism that has made it more morally indifferent than exceptional as a collection of states.
The penultimate work in the exhibition, Human Cactus, is not so much a political project as the stylistic adventure of a determined plant. Ekici, dressed in a fantasy tight dark velvety green dress, high collared and covered in 4,000 toothpicks, walks onto the stage. Holding stones that make an instant desert-scape, she starts to walk with tiny steps to climb into the awaiting terracotta pot. The popular plant is best found domesticated in its terracotta pot where it is watered and grows in a desire for the light of the strong sun.
Ekici mimics the plant’s life, watering herself with a cold shower that spills over her head from an aluminium watering can. Her performance literally destroys the answer to the serious question embedded in its Chaplinesque slapstick treatment of our ignorant treatment of nature. She demonstrates the controlling drive to domesticate that which was created to be segregated and independent from our civilising desire to cultivate everything within our reach.
In encouraging us to examine our records in detail, in this case by caricaturing a desert plant found in many suburban homes across the world, Ekici directly speaks to us about the absurd, speculating that in our laughter is a guilt tinged with dead and abandoned lives, both mobile and made immobile.
The final work in the exhibition, Disappear, performed in 2013, is a reminder of the poetic desperation expressed by the German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his East West Divan “…finding oneself in eternity, the individual will not hesitate to disappear…”.10 In Disappear, the eternity allows us to revisit the Benjaminian notion of the muse in the urban sprawl, its fleeting glance, the loss in the multitude and a sense of one’s own melancholic life. Disappear finds many symbolic moments as it turns from a vivid boat ride into a macabre mis-en-scene. The performance emphasises choreographic movements of entrapment as the final aesthetic turns into a suffocating end to the sense of time and lack of space that she composes and within which she drowns.
The rise in the obsession with our psychic lives, the perplexing realities of the wounded and serious mediations on our current asymmetry with nature are all part of Disappear. The performance begins with Ekici paddling a small plastic dinghy into the middle of a vast, deep lake, where she changes her sporty outfit into a fine dress and a pair of brown stockings, donning a pair of killer stiletto heels, applies a foundation cream and rouge make-up, stares in the mirror and dresses her hair, in a surreal scene reminding one of an East European film. The performance is a portrayal of a character, a desperation that had seeped into her relationship to her surroundings. The enclosing waters’ depth seems to trigger a desire to change her life’s narrative.
The performance is both constructed as a narrative with a beginning and a plotted end and is a description charged with a tense plot, finishing with a casualty. We realise the fate of her frustration as she starts to kick the floating craft, the plastic bouncing back to shape, but as the act gets more violent and the heels of her stilettos become more effective, the water seeps into the vessel.
Eventually it collapses from her undoing its buoyancy and we see the figure drowning in her place, which is both her connection to and disconnect from life.
In Disappear, as in other works, we meet the archetypes that Ekici describes so well. Complicated life stories emerge, reflections on life as moments of being. This set of personal mythologies is based on observing the world at the time of the turn of the century. Ekici offers her audience the opportunity to realise in her creative spaces the potential to acknowledge and heal our social and archetypal relationships. These observations granted by muses, the strangers in our everyday that bequeath the twin flames of the imagination with which they grace our lives.
It is in this moment that Ekici’s performances make a composite of the after-effects of love at last sight, as Hannah Arendt once said of “directly speaking to each other” and Benjamin had concluded, all other noise is a distraction when confronted by love, even momentarily with what is actually here now! The moment is all and all is the moment.
1. Charles Baudelaire’s poem, To a Passer By is part of a larger section of his Les Fleurs du Mal entitled “Tableaux Parisiens”. First published in 1857.
2. Walter Benjamin, A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism, Translated from the German by Harry Zohn. Verso, 1992.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Unpublished correspondence, between the author and the quoted party.
6. Susan Sontag http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/againstInterpExcerpt.shtml
7. Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Solitude’ in Studies of Radical Will, chapter 1. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969; Anchor Books, 1981; Picador USA, 2002.
8. “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jaqueline Lesschaeve, 238 pages, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2000 (first published 1 July 1991).
9. Gore Vidal, Rocking the Boat, Vidal’s first collection of essays, gathering many (but not all) of the essays and reviews he had written between 1951 and 1962, 300 pages Published 1963 by William Heinemann (first published 1 July 1962)
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe translated by Martin Bidney, West-East Divan: Poems, with “Notes and Essays”: Goethe’s Intercultural Dialogues (Global Academic Publishing Books).
‘(After) Love at Last Sight..…Nezaket Ekici’ was originally written by Shaheen Merali for (After) Love at Last Sight, Nezaket Ekici, PI Artworks, London, 12/12/2013 – 15/02/2014. Part of the text from the essay used in the Press Release on http://www.piartworks.com/english/sergiler_cc.php?recordID=127