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During the last few years Gülsün
Karamustafa has been investigating the subject of orientalism
seen from a "oriental" point of view. Her specific
concern in her most recent works has been that of the representation
of woman in orientalist imagery, emphasising at the core of this
concern a complex conception of outside/inside. A dichotomy,
which is being dissolved in the questioning of who and what is
inside and who and what is outside.
Her first step into this specific field of representational criticism
was taken in 1996 with the picture "Presentation of
an early representation" showing a slave market from
the time of the Ottoman Empire. A motif frequently chosen by
the 19.th Century orientalists. A traditional scene with
all the implication of cultural values, morals and norms, and
questioning its own identity as a bearer and witness of culture
of the past. A past, however, which is still quite dominant in
the conventional and stereotyped understandings of the East in
the Western world. As Karamustafa has stated herself that "the
gaze on the orient has never changed since the 16th Century until
today". 1
This remark must be seen at the basis of the analysis of her
tripartite new series on the representation and self-presentation
of oriental woman in orientalist painting and oriental writing:
"Double Action Series for Oriental Fantasies", 1999;
"fragmenting/FRAGMENTS", 1999; and "-from the
outside-", 1999.
"Double Action Series
for Oriental Fantasies" is a piece consisting of three tableaux'.
It is female figures cut out from reproductions of orientalist
painting from the 19th Century. A school of painting originating
at the French Academy, but popular in most of Europe and also
in Turkey, where this type of painting was practised till quite
late in the 20th Century's Modern Turkey.
The display of women in Orientalist paintings is here a significant
issue as it departs from the usual representation of women in
19th Century painting in many ways. She represents the objectified
woman (or the woman-as-image) as she often appears in representations
in Western art history, but is still implying something different
or something more in terms of sexuality and the male gaze. The
often presumably innocent female nude in Western painting, the
Venus figure, has a counterpart in Oriental painting, who is
her opposite. Using the term of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, she is
the "Other side of Venus"2.
Not a goddess of love, but a goddess of desire as the representation
of woman in pornographic imagery. The pornographic connotation
of the female nude in Oriental painting is based on the studies
of pornographic imagery in 19th Century by Solomon-Godeau in
which she shows, how pornographic prints and photography can
be seen at the basis of the objectification and commodification
of the female nude in popular representations. There is an obvious
similarity between the pornographic image and Oriental painting
in how the female nude appears as an unquestionable object-of-desire.
This makes it possible to point out, how the female nude appears
as a pure sexual body and how the power structures are displayed
as almost sadistic sexual domination in the fantasy of the Western
male.
Looking at the female nude in Orientalist painting one sees a
woman displayed in front of the eyes of the beholders not only
outside the frame, but also inside the frame, often as a centre
of several men, who are mastering and measuring her with acknowledging
and appraising gazes. She is represented in a fantasy world,
either in a women-only world of equivalence or as a sex slave
being judged by serious looking (but still desiring) men, judging
her body as though she was cattle on the market.
Unlike the Western female nude she is not woman-as-ideal in terms
of beauty but rather in terms of sex. She is something forbidden,
something to be used and something other than the well known.
She is an Other, since she is not only woman, she is the exotic
stranger of desire, a sexual creature, obtainable and accessible,
she is simply to require as a commodity; a sex slave in its real
sense. She signifies a desired loss of innocence, because she
is beyond Western norms and standards, welcoming to the Western
male who displays his own desire (unknowingly), projecting his
sexual fantasies onto the canvas.
In the images of oriental woman, one discover not only a loss
of innocence but also a loss of history: the loss of history
is to be discovered in the glossy imagery, very often confused
in its historical punctiliousness in costumes and interiors and
in the nakedness of woman. The loss of innocence is obvious in
the representation of the Oriental nude as she is heaped with
the signs of desire, subjected to the male gaze. Another aspect
comes into account considering this loss of history and innocence:
the deprivation of culture. The image of the Oriental woman is
quintessential of Western patriarchal gaze, as she is woman as
pure nature, deprived of any kind of culture of the Western world.
An object of desire and even a commodity as she is often shown
as a kind of slave (sometime even in chains), with her black
maiden at her side, taken care of her body as though she is the
most precious object to obtain and preserve. Thus lacking the
slightest bit of culture, she is the sublime object of sexual
desire, a pure fantasy based on the fascination of the possibility
of possessing women as was the case at the Sultans court. In
fact, the fatamorgana of the Western male's desiring gaze.
In "Double Action Series
for Oriental Fantasies" Karamustafa places these problematics
in a contemporary perspective. The tableaux are mirrored, so
that the images are repeated as their own double. A mirroring
which indicates a complex construct of significances relating
not only to the image of woman, but to the overall image of the
Western understanding of Oriental culture. One could see that
in the perspective to Luce Irigaray's theses of women's place
in Western society in "Women on the Market", that the
participation in society demands that the body submits a mirroring,
which make woman an "utilitarian objects and bearers of
value" , a standardised sign, an exchangeable signifier,
a "resemblance" with reference to an authoritative
model. 3
Despite its exclusively feminist impact this thesis can be comparable
to contemporary attitude towards Eastern culture, which demands
the non-western world to mirror the patriarchal morals, neglecting
cultural differences as respectable, and makes prejudices against
the order of things in Middle Eastern, Islamic cultures. Especially
when it comes to the understanding of women, women are indeed,
and still today, understood as deprived of cultural importance
in the stereotyped understandings of how contemporary Muslim
women live their lives. This submission from the Western world
is not only directed towards women but Islamic culture, which
is very often misunderstood or not understood at all, since the
whole aspect of modernisation is not taken into account. This
goes especially for Turkey, which should actually not be compared
to Middle Eastern countries, because it is not, since a part
of Turkey is geographically European, and culturally very influenced
by Western European modernisation through the reign of Atatürk
in the first half of 20th Century.
When Karamustafa states that the gaze on the Orient has never
changed since the 16th Century, it is a remark on cultural ignorance
and stereotyped understanding of a culture, that might be living
with split identities in the confrontation and differentiation
between countryside and city and the whole aspect of immigration.
Immigration problematics is very present in cities such as Istanbul
and Ankara, where cultural differences exist from one neighbourhood
to another. When it comes to the female figure and female identity
relating to history and culture, these problematics becomes very
relevant in relation to Karamustafa's work. Partly in the reference
to women's history, and partly in reference to an identity crisis
which is implied in this history of oppression, that today has
become a broader cultural phenomena in Modern Turkey. Within
the country as well as from outside (especially Western) the
country an ideological oppression takes place, which is based
on patriarchal structures of domination. In this mirrored ideological
battlefield stands women who has been denied her voice by history
construction, searching for cultural as well historical understanding,
enslaved by patriarchal society in a double sided conflict of
being exoticized woman.
The exotic female figure still exists in people's minds when
they are confronted with Turkish women, who often experience,
Karamustafa notes, a surprised attitude from Westerners, who
believe them to be wearing scarfs, be faithful Muslims, and to
lead a completely different life from women in the rest of Europe.
The lack of cultural understanding has seduced people to believe
that Turkish women live in an exoticized world apart from our
own, and mirrored their fantasies as a projection of the exotic,
or psychologically speaking, the Other. This "othering"
is the double exposure suggested in "Double Action Series
for Oriental Fantasies", which implies not only the
typical "othering" of woman in patriarchal society,
but a culturally "othering" of non-Western (in a very
limited sense) cultures.
"fragmenting/FRAGMENTS"
"fragmenting/FRAGMENTS" is another piece in this line
of work, that develops the idea of prejudicial expectations of
Oriental woman and the objectification of woman. The fragmented
body implies the idea of "woman-as-image" as did the
image of woman in "Oriental Fantasies"4.
The body parts constitutes a fragmented view of the body in such
a way, that attention is particular made at the sensual zones
of the body: hands, breasts, armpits, feet, mouth, ear, as well
as body clashes, skin against skin, in a very sensual manner.
In the fragmented images one spurs the hand touch sensibility,
the attempt to visualise the utmost tactility of skin and soft
material, that arouses the atmosphere in the paintings. The woman
is no longer a woman but body parts. An almost sadistic and murderous
attempt to visualise the absolute control over woman, who has
no longer got her own identity, but is deprived of any subjectivity
and transformed into pure objectification. This exposes a veritable
murder of the female subject in the harems, where she became
a collective, a giant female body, without individual identity,
at least seen from the point of view of ottoman society and admired
by men from the Western world. (It should not be forgotten, that
Orientalism took place at the same time as the modernisation
happened in Europe and early capitalism and consumerism turned
woman into a product of desire.) This lack of identity and subjectivity
of the odalisque, confined in her luxury imprisonment, is shown
in its extreme through the cutting up of the images. She is shown
as nothing but flesh and blood, and ultimate commodity or an
animal kept in her golden cage. This degradation of the female
subject was the fascination of the Western world, implied in
the concept of the Odalisque and the various representations
of this "woman-without-subject" (that have appeared
with a high frequency in visual arts of the 19th and 20th Century)
was the patriarchal fantasy of domination over women, clearly
practised to its extreme in the Harem, and fantasised by the
Western man with great envy, because of the fact that he could
not practise this domination to the same extend in his own world.
"fragmenting/FRAGMENTS" is installed like a mosaic
using the fragmented images as tiles. The aspect of decoration
and reference to decorative arts, which needless to say is the
art of the Islamic countries, put together the double aspect
of this work: on the one side the representation of woman seen
through the desiring Western male gaze, and on the other the
traditional, non-representational art of Ottoman Empire. This
juxtaposition of Western and Oriental arts exposes the objectification
even "deco ratification" of women in Western art, and
the character of pure fantasy of these paintings, which could
not have had a correspondent in the Sultan's empire.
"-from the outside-"
To whom belong the history of Turkey, who are the constructors
of history? This seems to be one of the questions in the piece
"-from the outside-", placing at the core the identity
crises of the female subject in her contemporary split position
between if not Turkish culture and Western European culture.
In this piece, Karamustafa places herself as the outside voyeur,
who looks at her own history through the gaze of the Western
male and in opposition at the same time places herself by the
side (in prolongation) of the historical voice of the Turkish
woman who experienced the (traumatic) life at the harem.
The piece consists of a row of Orientalist images from the hamam
(in the harem, presumably), where women with their black maids
drift around, naked and with strange phallic form all around
them (from shoes! to water pipes). One image shows a woman at
her den flanked by a small deer. She appears as a satisfied odalisque
with her maid and her child on the floor in front of her. She
is represented in a traditional odalisque pose, accentuating
the idea of passive woman in waiting in her hedonistic paradise.
And Paradise it also seems to be, in the beautiful and seemingly
pleasant surroundings of the hamash, something to wish for and
something to dream about, either you take part as a woman or
looks at it as a man.
And then the horrifying opposition
of the history told on a monitor which shows the interior of
the Sultans palace. The text is from "The Memoirs of Leyla
(Saz) Hanimefendi; The Imperial Court of Sultan", and tells
the sad story of a situation at the Sultans court: Leyla tells
the story of a party at the Sultans palace, where "All the
young girls were gay and radiant but on the faces of older ladies
one could see the sadness which were in contrast to the brilliant
festival". There is European dance and music, but suddenly
everything breaks to pieces, when it is found out the the Sultans
newborn daughter has died. "The baby born to the sultan
a few days earlier was physically deformed and had died a few
hours later after her birth. This sad news was hidden from the
mother to avoid exposing her to dangerous emotions... That evening
the sultan asked with insistence to see the baby but everybody
was trying to gain some more time. She took the advantage of
a moment, leapt out of her bed and dashed into the baby's room..."5 .This inside story from the harem shows
the opposition to the romanticising, fantasising paintings. A
hard core reality of suppressed emotions, psychological violence
and great despair among women in this kind of luxury enslavement.
Taken away from them every right to decide their own lives, even
the rights to know their own tragedies, and in strong opposition
to the hedonistic paradise in the Orientalist paintings. Reality
and fantasy are split apart by strong emotional contradictions,
that tier down all representational systems and attempts to historicize
and romanticise the Harem of the Sultan in every possible way.
This questioning of history is important as a part of the representational
criticism in Karamustafa's works. In this criticism a double
exposure towards representational structures takes place: on
the one side the Western fantasy of the Oriental woman on the
other a comment on history as representation in Turkey and the
place of woman within this field. The outside/inside problematics
inherent in this piece poses the question in relation to representational
structure within and from outside Turkey. Where does contemporary
Turkish women position themselves in relation to these representational
systems? The mixed histories of the 20th Century with the Europianization
of Turkish culture in the Atatürk days and still remaining
with all its conflicts, places the modern woman in a strange
situation, as she relates her life to contemporary more or less
European standards, but still must relate to the history/reality
of her own culture, with very different female identities.
This does not get any easier by the false and stereotyped reality
expected from the Western world toward a contemporary Turkish
woman, who has experienced quite a lot of the sometimes traumatic
recent history of Modern Turkey. On the one hand the stereotyped
expectation of "Turkish woman" that sets up a conflict
which is possible to handle through communication (by breaking
down stereotypes) and on the other, the reality of being a modern
woman in Turkey today with its history of fast cultural changes
within the last 100 years. Specifically the history of woman,
going from a genuinely suppressed woman figure, to the "woman
on the market" within the big cities in a modernised society.
And then the present conflict in contemporary Turkey of immigration
and modernisation, that put together oppositional cultural identities
within one quite limited culture. The woman from the countryside,
positioned in her old-school Islamic female role, next to the
liberated woman of the big cities, who might have been a part
of the 68-student rebellion (like Karamustafa herself) at the
universities of Ankara and Istanbul, tell the story of women
and worlds apart within one but very ambiguous culture.
read about:
Keep Quiet-Hold On
A Project for Liesbeth Lips Gallery.
Rotterdam
2000-2002 |
