Summer Readings 2014

Summer Readings (July–August 2014)

Typologies of collectors in literature, July 5, 2014

Moderator: Elmas Deniz; Participants: Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Ayşe Umur, Duygu Demir, Özge Ersoy, Tankut Aykut 

Our conversation started off with the following question: how could we interpret collections and the act of collecting through literature, if we step out from the familiar language of contemporary art? The talk continued with examples from two books: Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (1988) and Danovan Hovan’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, 2011. The latter tackles the beach combers that collect materials that wash ashore, and the former portrays a man called Utz who collect Meissen porcelains during the Second World War.

In the meeting, we discussed what type of a character does the contemporary art collector might be, and how is he/she different from other “passionate collector/gatherers.” We also spoke about how we create value as we collect artworks: what is the collection’s value as an archive that holds knowledge and culture? After musing about how living artists relate to collectors, we concluded with two questions: how does the collector support the freedom in artistic production? How does the art collector—as opposed to other types of collectors—help preserve the culture? —Elmas Deniz

Pleasures in drawing, July 26, 2014

Moderator: Tankut Aykut; Participants: Deniz Asena, İz Öztat, Nazan Maksudyan, Özge Ersoy, Reysi Kamhi, Yeşim Akdeniz

Inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s short essay “Painting and Family Happiness” from his Istanbul: Memories and the City, our conversation was chiefly about the pleasure derived out of producing art and what the products of this personal pleasure mean to their beholders, and mainly to their buyers. Touching the issues mentioned by Pamuk, such as childishness, creativeness, mind vs. body dichotomy, art encouragement and the desire for being approved, the contributors approached the different aspects of making and appreciating art on the axis of both their personal experiences and professional backgrounds. —Tankut Aykut

Dams, swamps and artworks, August 2, 2014

Moderator: İz Öztat; Participants: Aslı Seven, Berin Gönölü, İbrahim Akıncı, Özge Ersoy

We don’t often consider art and water in relationship to each other. By doing so, we imagined the different possibilities where the collector becomes an actor in the ecosystem of artistic production. We started our conversation by discussing the temporality and speculative potentiality of metaphors, as we read excerpts from Hans Blumenberg’s “Swamp” in Care Crosses the River (1987), and Michel Serres’s “War, Peace” in The Natural Contract (1995). We talked about the analogy between swamps and artistic production, as well as the following question: is there a similarity between the desire to dominate nature by draining swamps and limiting them with walls, and the collector’s participation in artistic production—as an ecosystem—with financial resources and the power of ownership?

Following this question, we focused on the relationship between art and water, and discussed whether arts and culture constitute a basic need like water. If we consider water as a being with agency, could we experience art as a commons with a different articulation of authorship? So what are the similarities between the tendency to collect water and art? If water could be protected through social negotiations at the local level, what role could the collector assume in the ecosystem of artistic production?

Our conversation also tackled the similarities between collecting and dams as one of the most apparent symbols of modernization and development: is the technocratic attitude to create dams akin to social engineering that leads to museums? According to growth and progress oriented discourses, we need dams to produce energy, although they have negative ecological and social impacts. So do we also need the energy that is produced by collections that accumulate art? If water loses oxygen as it sits in dams, how does the nature of the artwork change when it is held as part of a collection? —İz Öztat

Collection of Sand, August 9, 2014

Moderator: Aslı Seven; Participants: İnci Furni, Leyla Pekin, Özge Ersoy

Italo Calvino’s book Collections of Sand opens with a short text that includes his thoughts on an “exhibition on private collections” that he visited in Paris in 1974. In our discussion, we drew from this piece as well as the excerpts from the catalogue essay for “Ils Collectionnent” at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, written by th exhibition’s curator Francois Mathey. These texts allowed us to steer a conversation about how art collecting differs from collecting in general, in terms of motivations and social relationships. We posed questions as to how the art collection relates to the subjective and autobiographic qualities of its collector; how private ownership could be reframed if artworks are to be considered as part of the commons; and what kind of a role private collections and museums have on the dissemination of artworks. Focusing on past and contemporary examples, we discussed the collective ownership of artworks as well as the expanding models of dissemination of art when collectors partner up with museums.

This post is also available in: Turkish