Protest In Western Art – Bringing It Home, Baby!

I painted this four years after the violent suppression of peaceful protests at Gezi Park in Istanbul, which had started on May 23, 2013, and spread to other cities. Those arrested, especially the women, were humiliated whilst in jail and continued to be persecuted in the courts on charges of sedition, etc. Others, mainly outspoken journalists and intellectuals, had since joined them, and continued to do so on the slightest of legal pretexts. Even those who ‘liked’ the wrong thing on FB, let alone dared to comment, now found themselves in court on charges of insulting the President or members of his family, if not sedition.

What was different was that in the past those who’d objected to the existing regimes had been killed, or incarcerated and tortured by the military coups that seemed to take place every decade – 1960, 1970, 1980… This time the crack down was being carried out by a civilian government who’d done nothing but complain about these coup d’etat to get elected.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même, the title of my painting.

The liberal consensus, which included ‘archival’ left-wingers, was that Turkey had fallen into the hands of ignorant money grubbers who under the guise of religion were in the process of corrupting all the institutions of state, never mind filling their pockets. Their banner was the President’s seeming inability to produce a viable copy of his university degree, a constitutional prerequisite.

While the literati continue to regard those from the provinces and city slums as ignorant, if not illiterate money grubbers who want to get rich quick, they overlook their own sad ignorance.

In the Koran the Prophet is described as “illiterate”; just as in Christianity Mary has to be a virgin in order to produce an immaculate vessel – the word of God made flesh – so in Islam the Prophet is a vessel unpolluted by “intellectual” knowledge.

And thus the two main characters of Turkish puppet theatre found their way into my work, in effect my witnesses to this ‘theatre’.

Traditionally Hacivat, who’s on the left, is portrayed as an illiterate day labourer who has a predilection for get rich quick schemes. The one on the right, Karagöz, is a shopkeeper with intellectual pretentions who mercilessly belittles Hacivat with his education.

I summarized this relationship in a painting from 2018, entitled İrfan ile İman (Knowledge and Faith). The poem that forms the background, Kızıl Alma, is by Ziya Gökalp. It declares, very much in keeping with Atatürk’s reforms that knowledge is in the West, young man, go forth! It goes a long way toward explaining political Islam’s outspoken hatred of Atatürk and modern Turkey.