HARRY KAMPIANNE
THE VOICE OF MUNCH, AS HEARD BY BEDRİ BAYKAM
To give “freehand” (Carte Blanche) to an artist, it is to grant him any creative power and freedom. That goes without saying. One can even add that it is the slightest of freedom to which he can aspire as a creator anxious to approach a truth over the course of its impulses and its experimental reflexions punctuating his career. But when this approach shows through behind the work of another artist, moreover of another century, we attend a game of tracing papers and transfers at least disturbing. The case had already come with Maurice Utrillo and the Carte Blanche offered to Herve di Rosa. The co-founder of the “Free Figuration” movement impregnated himself in the contemporaneousness of his famous precursor, pioneer according to him of pop art and painting from postcards. He worked from shots of numerical view and he offered a rereading of the Montmartrean painter’s key paintings. The alchemy worked. Today, it is the turn of Bedri Baykam to regulate its steps to those of Edvard Munch. Bedri is Turkish, native of Ankara, a celebrity in his country, known also for his writings and his active political activism within the kemalist party, named after its founder Mustafa Kemal said Atatürk (Father of Turks), first President of the secular Turkish Republic. He is also acknowledged for its polemical books against a more and more showy Islamization and radicalism within the government and the boarder Turkish population. Beyond its inseparable political activities of his artistic career, many in the United States or several European countries acknowledge him as one of the originators of the new expressionism of the eighties. A general recognition perhaps a little less obvious in France in spite of several exhibitions. Misunderstanding? Error of judgement? Or simply lack of opportunities? Or rather a neglect due to Baykam’s so often cited pioneering discourses against the hegemony of Western Art, as he so thoroughly explained it in his Manifestos since 1984 (“Modern Art History is a Western fait Accompli”) or his famous book that digs in depth that issue, through his reflexions and activism “Monkeys' Right to Paint” (1994) Today, Pinacothèque of Paris uses its entire strength regarding offering him a window made to order. A screen on which the transposition of his 4D on the traces of Munch will come to cast in time.
A new dimension: the 4D
It has nothing virtual. It is emotional therefore very real since her name is TİME. The factor TİME, father of the truth (François Rabelais) or invention of the movement (Amélie Nothomb), comes to be added to the three other dimensions, namely the height, the width and the depth. As proof, his “The Ultimate Déjeuner”, largely inspired by Manet, turns into a soft head to head between Monica Belluci and Picasso. While in another of its projections, Basquiat will go to merge into a Van Gogh painting. Let us go back up six or seven decades behind, a time when to entertain the onlookers some shopkeepers sold relief postcards, understand sequences of mobile pictures in three dimensions depending on the chosen angle of vision. In turn appeared the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Cœur and vice versa. The origin of this optical magic is fond of a lenticular sheet composed of parallel lenses, principle allowing to release a stream of overlapping images. Today, the format postcard was multiplied by one hundred thanks to a more and more refined leading-edge technology. By re-appropriating on big dimensions a technology somewhat fallen into disuse, Bedri Baykam re-injects it a new light and above all a new spatiotemporal space in which he inserts with a certain delight painting and existent collages of his ancient series such as “The Transparent Layers” (1997/99), “Girly Plots” (2000/02), “Chevaux et Icones” (2003/05), “Lolitarte” (2007), but also references to the history of art or to the Turkish popular cinema confronted with icons pop stars such as James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Rimbaud or Coca Cola. Such as Le Bateau Ivre or the Noah’s Ark, Bedri Baykam world pitches today on much more engaging new visual perception regarding timelessness and fluidity of spaces. “With the 4D”, he adds, “I can make succeed sometimes ten -fifteen or twenty plans while creating footbridges between the 20th and the 21th century”. A melting-pot of parallel worlds that he makes such a intimate museum in transit between “Les Dormeuses” by Courbet, “Les Champs Tourmentés” by Van Gogh, the legends of Istanbul, carnal and transgressif eroticism of its harems, football flights of fancy of Fenerbahçe (his favourite team), the charismatic figures of Kemal Atatürk, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Che Guevara, Obama or even that of Deniz Gezmiş, leader of the “Turkish people’s Liberation Army” (THKO) executed on May 6th, 1972 by an interim Government which was at the head of the country after the Ultimatum given by the army on 12 March 1971 that had caused the resignation of the Demirel’s government. An attempt of revolution forgotten in the eyes of the world according to Bedri “ For the Turkish youth, Deniz became a symbol as well as the “Che” especially for 20 years.” One feels there the seed of antiauthoritarianism that grows, not for the pleasure of demanding but to update a genuineness of what may be the Turkish contemporary art in 2010, an incandescent hearth of creativity far from still recurrent orientalists clichés to certain critics and western conservatives. Here is a work guided by the sense of pictorial investigation, and this from his early childhood on. Certainly, a not premeditated approach which was rather trying to target on the very beginning on an effectiveness of line and colour. The exceptionally gifted child of the sixties crowned with success (he is born in 1957) has turned, having putting down tubes and palette, into a young student attending the amphitheatres of the Sorbonne University in Paris. An ellipse allowing him from 1980 to start from scratch, once installed in California. He will remain there for seven years. This stay is to see as a catalyst for years to come. His American period gave him the opportunity of undertaking a work in constant search. Because according to the writer Roger Vailland “the particular commitment of an artist, it is to go down to the entrails of things and account exactly what it discovered” » And Bedri Baykam does not deprive it. We can even say that he carries in him the deep belief of an archeologist in the field. He is an “experimenter” of the depth of field. He puts down, overlays, re-transposes, glues, peels off skin after skin, layer after layer his cleavages, during his back and forth between sex, art, politics and the imperturbable fluidity of passing time. To his art, he imposes hard-core “strong medicine” (Traitement de Cheval) just as the Norwegian artist imposed on his vibrating canvases the hard treatment of the bad weather of the Big North.
On the traces of Munch
First observation: the thirteen large formats of Bedri Baykam delivered as “Carte Blanche” make all references, in varying degrees, in the flaws and injuries of the one that they consider rightfully as one of the keystones of the expressionism at the same level as Van Gogh. Torn beings by an insurmountable existential anxiety, the heart caught by constant doubt to get lost on the way of the traps of easyness. Edvard Munch is a natural born introspective, rolled by the loss of his mother from the early age of five, then nine years later by the one of Sophie, his elder sister, who was also affected by tuberculosis. Ferments catalysts of an internal scream which will not cease to torment him throughout his career. A scream deafening by its silence and the dark depression which surrounds him. Marc Restellini focused on a “Screamless” Munch, one that lets us concentrate over the experimenter and not over the single tree that hides the forest. “The Anti-scream” that he proposes us is a persistent wave or even shock wave echoing in all his work. “The Scream”, a major piece often seen as the first expressionist painting, paradigm as it is said of the « soul painting », remains for Bedri also, inevitable of a certain awareness of the human condition. He knows, however, that this painting does not sum up in itself the whole of Munch, it gives him nevertheless a new existentialist coloring tinted with his “Internal Landscapes” a series accomplished in 1987 during his late american period. He adds to his referring composition a naked girl lying on a wild beach, a photograph which he took in 1986, then infiltrates in thin layers the masterpiece of Munch with this insurmountable wish to throw a scream, as a bottle thrown into the sea. Cry of despair, frightening, solitary to infinity. Shouting with unfolded throat where the expressionist vein draws all its strength, moving between the auras of the inevitable Van Gogh but also Van Dongen, Gauguin or the “Die Brücke” painters, such as Heckel, Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff… More than a century separates these two artists. We are in the presence of two philosophies in different tonalities but in the end disabused and introspective. They underlie a fecund erotic load but introvert in one of them and rather extrovert in the
younger one. Munch nourishes his phobia of women through a fear of love. He maintains them remote. Remember Tulla Larsen, a young Norwegian girl mad of passion to the point of harassing him night and day. Their relationship was tumultuous; for him to the point of going as far as getting shot with a gun in the hand. Pure tragedy only accentuating his old demons. Bedri Baykam is, as for him, an instinctive, intuitive endowed with a hypersensitive sensuality. The woman becomes a shelter, a matrix in which he removes creativity and he loads it with the necessary adrenalin for his energy. Nevertheless, and in it the second observation dwells, that both of them are fascinated by the trinomial: LOVE, DEATH, SEDUCTION. A somewhat taciturn equation and exacerbated at the Norwegian artist, and all just the opposite, blazing and explosive as regards to our Turkish one. His “Orgasmic Death” refers to a mental crucifixion at Munch. We have on both sides the symbolic figure of Madonna completely lascivious in the foreground which joins down left to the painting his hidden face of vampire woman sucking the blood of his lover greedily; and on the other the photo of a bared heart recalling a question of life and death through a tormented relation or even a sadomasochistic one. Munch is crushed, choked by the vampire woman who is destructive and castrating of him and his art. “Love, women, blood, death, uncertainty, everything works together for him”, underlines Bedri Baykam, “he is very similar to Van Gogh in his personal commitment”. Somewhere, Munch thought he was doomed, surrounded by insurmountable barriers to the point of believing that illness and madness watched over his cradle since his birth. He tried unsuccessfully to feel perpetually a hair’s breadth away from a bottomless precipice (except perhaps at the end of his life), his self-control quickly regains the upper hand: “ My art is a personal confession, it is like a telegraph SOS of a boat that sinks. But this anguish and this illness are necessary for me.” He considers them with good reason as essential oils to impel the mechanics of his creation. He goes to the point of conceiving them as a fate: “ What is art? Art is born of joy and sorrow. But especially from sorrow. It is born from human life.” Are they also vital for Bedri Baykam? In his own way yes. The emotional load is probably less dark but just as exalted. Doesn’t he transcribe again in “Puberty 1” and “Puberty 2” a little of his own sexual tensions through those of Munch? There are certainly no issues of mental disturbances in the true sense of the term but soul remains a powerful emotional reservoir capable of fireworks as violent storms. And Bedri is aware of it. In “Olympia” by Manet, Emile Zola saw “the flesh and the blood of the painter “. Transparency can be found in one and the other without this talk of alter ego. Both of them are linked to an expressionist brushwork without concession. Colours are brutal, the paintbrush sweeps the painting with big lines. “The Mermaid”, seen by Baykam, sums up the zones of influence of each. The women sat in the foreground are from Heckel. We know that Munch has had a big influence on the “Die Brücke” group. To the right, a photograph of the artist in loincloth painting on the beach, the mermaid of Bedri facing him up to left of the painting. Into the background , they find “Orpheus” a painting of the German symbolist painter Franz Von Stuck, while the eyes of Van Gogh weigh the stage top left.
Bedri Baykam goes back patiently, step by step, in the intimacy of Munch to the point of visiting his home in Aasgärdstrand, a small village of fishermen near Horten on the shores of the fjord of Oslo, going until Ekely, where he had his studio constructed so “willingly” vulnerable to bad weather and thus inflicting the worst abuses to his paintings. Baykam immerses himself in Munch’s loneliness, in his isolation, takes numerous pictures of the masters furniture, the whole environment in which he took refuge, visits the archives of the Munch Museum, reads his original writings with a lot of attention. Many snapshots taken live during his Norwegian escapade plunge us into an archeological research formed by various footbridges between his work and that of his precursor. Munch broke away in 1885 from French realism. The cutoff is net, without a hitch. He uses a rough canvas, paints without any alteration the face of his sister Sophie, forever recurrent in what will be called “The Sick Child”. The picture will cause a huge scandal. Bedri Baykam takes back the subject by installing in the foreground the small Edvard sat on his mother’s lap. In fact, we are in the presence of a photomontage. Behind, we can notice the original painted between 1885 and 1886 which caused a scandal, to the right a drawing called “Childhood Memory” (1892) while the grim reaper hurtling down a rocky and abrupt slope glides above. We share the obsessional memory of a sister haunting most of his works. Kind of tabernacle in which he made macerate slightly later his frenzies of persecution, his fear of women, his alcoholism and a chronic uneasiness, pushing him to stay during eight months (1908) in a psychiatric clinic in Copenhagen.
Human too human?
By erasing the question mark, we find ourselves face to face face with the famous aphorism of Nietzsche, title of his first book published in 1878. We can attempt to draw some similarities between both men. A fragile health, crises of paranoia, two tormented minds delivered to the torture of the human condition. But Munch is not cynical enough to adopt a nihilist attitude, not even just to adhere to the theories of the German philosopher, even if by curiosity these attracted his attention. From his standpoint, Bedri Baykam only confirms across the reinterpretation of certain masterpieces of Munch, the gap between being overwhelmed by a tsunami of scattered feelings and the metaphysical conception of the “superman”. He becomes the revealing of his deepest flaws, captures his contradictions and this surplus full of lucidity pushing him near the doors of madness. Besides the true empathy he dedicates to him, he voluntarily thinks forward certain periods, and even sees there similarities. A misunderstood young man at the beginning of his career. He wants « to paint his life », try hard to give a true picture of the sufferings and frustrations of the modern man. The ghostly nature of his characters, the frontal violence of his colours or the impression of “unfinishedness”(scraps, stains, spatters) in his works, cause a scandal and incomprehension to the general public and the old guard during his exhibition in autumn of 1892 in Berlin. They denounced out loud the provocation, the anarchy! A rejection which Bedri Baykam could feel when himself in his own country as early as 1983, he shows his graffitis, his “dirty drips” according to his own expression, to the Turkish intelligentsia. It is obvious that in clearing Munch remains a pioneer, the one by whom (with Van Gogh, let us not forge thim) expressionism became a generational phenomenon untill the end of the 20th century, even if just through “Bad Painting”. We think of Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, Basquiat, Martin Kippenberger, Jonathan Meese… The time allows to establish spheres of influence. It is the vector of thoughts but also of political convictions. At the age of 21, Munch wanders frequently in the anarchist circles and meets Hans Jæger, an eccentric and complex figure, considered to be the spiritual father of the Christiania-Boheme (former name of the Norwegian capital). Still that does not make him feel the soul of an activist unlike who is rather in constant confrontation with the omniscience of western thought in art. His long Parisian and American stays gave him subject to cogitation, in particular through his series “This Has Been Done Before” designed as a mockery faced with the obscurantism of certain institutions. His kemalists beliefs also impact the range of its work. He gets involved, writes, criticizes, becomes polemicist even if it means taking risks with the government and sometimes pipes down his job of artist (never for a long time). His star’s term among his is not too much. The Turkish people worship him. He is before everything a man of dialogue. He cannot do without contact with the other, his brother, his enemy, his rival, it makes no odds, provided that there is opportunity to exchange. All opposite of Munch if we rely on the appearances . He lives as a recluse, ruminates, affords himself overwhelmed by the perpetual gust of his torments. Which leaves not much room to apolitical consciousness you will think. And yet… wrongly considered for a while as a nazi sympathizer, his work is at odds with the Aryan artistic archetypes, if only for his rather dark topics and the unfinished brushwork of his paintings which made his success with the cosmopolitan intellectuals. It is even certified that Goebbels experienced a certain admiration for his painting, a feeling that he should quickly curb following his appointment to the post of Minister of the Propaganda of the Reich in 1933. An unhealthy, tubercular artist, subject to menta disturbance could hardlybe representative of this new Germany. On order of Hitler indeed, Munch was labeled also with the term Degenerate Art, the tragic exhibition of 1937 organized by the Führer himself. His opposition to Nazism was proved many times. He will offer his financial assistance to German artists persecuted by the Nazis, will accept financial responsibility for the exile in Norway of the German painter Ernst Wilhem Nay (included in the list of the degenerate artists) and above all will avoid any contact with the members or affiliated sympathizers to the nazi party. For Bedri Baykam, Munch is first of all a romantic “expressionist”, a painter of soul whom we find in The Ambiguious Resurrection of Mad Love, a very sensual interpretation of his exacerbated sensibility. It is a life tossed around by waters of uncertainty and love. Made Bedri of his painting-homages Munch, A Life, a kind of epitaph enlightening the memories of an old man: “On the central plan, towards the end of his life, Munch sees himself sitting in the gallery Kunstlerverein, where he had exposed in 1892 in Berlin as a young “ struggling “ artist. He seems to assess his life. Behind him, is the tragic memory of his clash with Tulla Lärsen, seeing himself as “Marat” as he liked to mention it. The small bottles of oil and varnish located in the foreground belong to him and come from his home in Aasgårdstrand. To the left Karl Johan, the main avenue of Oslo, Christiania then… Higher, the woman with the child: This is the nightmare of the woman, the idea of the woman who could be his mother, his aunt or any other one. The woman squatted to the right of Munch represents all his conquests which ended in all in almost “worked and definitely wanted” failures. Fingers to the right belong to me. I hold one tube of paint that belonged to him. For me, it is an instant of grace.”
We would like to say an instant of eternity, a synonymous with footbridge across time which only the fourth dimension can make palbable…
Paris le 18/03/2010
Harry Kampianne
About the Author
Harry Kampianne contributes regularly to the art review Art Actuel since 2000. Among his other contributions one can cite Arts Programme and Nos Arts. His main concern is: The artist in situation. This is a central theme that binds successfully most of his articles and books.