Before examining the AKP Government’s ten-year cultural policy, it is appropriate to review the recent history of modern arts in Turkey, which has progressed in line with Westernization, and to make a comparison based on this review. To understand the story of the next generation in Turkey, it is essential to know the story of the previous generation.
The cultural gap that emerged during the complex modernization venture of the Ottomans, attempted to be filled through “exports”, leaning further to the West. Essentially, what was exported was positivist bourgeoisie culture, not going beyond a certain class within the boundaries of the Empire. The export of this conservative and elitist ideology was consistent with the ruling elite.
The intellectuals of the Tanzimat period (reformists) who formed a new group in contrast to the Ulemas (academics, scholars of the sciences and Islamic law, members of the ilmiye –the scientific community), were the principal actors in Westernization on the political–administrative plane. While the Ottoman Empire came under the influence of capitalism and its original foundation was eroding, various inconsistencies were emerging between the ideology of reformists and reality. An economy and social dynamic compatible to new ideological references was not forthcoming and the existing traditional foundation was gradually decaying. In this respect, the intellectual transformation that sought to be represented as a “reformist movement” swiftly evolved into an auto-colonization process. The reformists, a fraction of the ruling class, were not able to analyze their society. Just as in many other dominions, they were made to pursue the function of colonial powers.
When the Empire was on the brink of dissolution, masses (rightly) saw “Westernists-reformists” and their “reforms” responsible for impoverishment and loss of identity. Thus, the alienation between the ruling class and people (which was, in fact, deep-rooted) in the Ottoman Empire reached a dimension of mutual hatred. While the masses, that had to defend themselves against the system, continued embracing traditional ideology, the reformists did not have much to say against this resistance. While the traditional ideology of the Ottoman Empire was eroding, it was standing against the reformists as an opposing “new discourse”. When viewed through the “modern-traditional” alienation that Turkey has been experiencing to the extreme in the last 10 years, a highly familiar tension was preparing the end of the Empire.
This social disengagement reflected a dilemma that extended to the last minutes of the Empire. Sait Halim Pasa wrote, “While on one side the high and intellectual class, which agrees to everything and sees everything allowable, is internalizing and imitating various foreign nations in the most extreme manner, on the other side, certain intellectuals and the rest of the public are opposing any kind of innovation… Creations of the violence, hatred and panic against innovation are revealing themselves everywhere”.1
The Republic was the most significant gain for “certain intellectuals and the rest of the public”. It created a public sense of forward movement by preparing a convenient basis on which this new system could quickly generate itself. It was as if every intellectual dynamic became mobilized, cultural reforms, one after another, began to determine the course of a new era. As a symbol of this new ideology, art was going to be revised along a nationalized line without being alienated from its modern foundations. This was dependent on creating an official history of Turkish art based on interest.
Republic intellectuals were responsible for forming an official ideology, which was more rounded and with sharper boundaries. The first ideologists of the Republic adopted a conception of art that would complement official ideology in every sense, instead of the libertarian art of the West, which increasingly adopted a critical outlook. “Soviet Propaganda Art”, successfully implemented by the USSR following the October Revolution, demonstrated the best example of this.
Thus, the notion of art in Turkey settled on a new course of progression lead by a certain mentality, modernization and class. To this end, whilst different mentalities were being represented as “anti-art”, modernist arts, which were seen as an extension of official ideology, were embraced with a national sensitivity. While their legitimizing basis and ideological references changed in comparison to the Tanzimat intellectuals, the Republic intellectuals displayed no principal changes with respect to their position on arts and function. They remained “State Intellectuals”. As they unable to form a couche of intellectuals as opposed to intellectuals in capitalist societies, the knowledge they created could only serve to protect and legitimize the interests of their caste.
Together with the Turkization of the economy in the Republic era, the notion of a “national bourgeoisie” emerged for the first time. Thus, as opposed to “state-shaping” deep-rooted bourgeoisie culture in capitalist countries, this was simply the foundations of a new structure in which the state “shaped the bourgeoisie”. The bourgeoisie was idealized by families of Turkish origin that were army based and consolidating their class position with the exceptional means provided by the army. A “general grandfather”, “officer uncle” or at least a “commander relative” was a prerequisite for this new bourgeoisie.
The army-based “national bourgeoisie” was not only responsible for security, one of the primary missions of the army from the early stages of the Republic, “embracing art” would direct the history of official art. All branches of modern arts, from theatre to sculpture, photography to opera, which in fact owe their evolution within Ottoman territory to the efforts of non-Muslims, suddenly “became Turkish” and the army took on responsibility of this historical task. Therefore, until World War Two, which we refer to as the first quarter of the Republic, the ideal of reaching the level of contemporary civilizations, being one of the absolute ideals of the military tutelage, determined the direction of cultural life. The army also had significance in terms of a model – a leader – to close the artistic deficit of an underdeveloped nation. The total deterioration of cultural engineering and its inability to replicate itself in the aftermath of World War Two created a serious decline in art.
The haphazard modernization project that encountered three military coups, settled into a completely different course in the 2000’s. A new page was turned together with the AKP government. Many undebatable issues become openly debatable, liberalization found a political equivalent, representation of different segments comes into question, and most importantly, military tutelage is perceived as a risk factor for society and culture. AKP kicked off its mission by contributing to democratization in Turkey. Accordingly, this meant a period of economic stability through which public wealth would multiply. For the first time, a political party was embraced by the public in this manner, the prime minister was breaking numerous international taboos, requests from the left wing, such as minority rights, were being placed on the Grand National Assembly agenda, a deliberative tone was being adopted even with respect to the most difficult issues such as terrorism and our country was entering into a climate of reconciliation never before experienced.
However, two fundamental questions have not yet been replied to fully by the AKP government and have been simply waiting in the freezer. The first is how a government with conservative roots would establish its distance from science, which in this respect was emerging through the perspective of its relationships with academic and scientific circles. The second question focused on the attitude of this new mentality vis-à-vis culture and art policies. This government, which encountered occasional crises regarding cultural sanctions of modernism and embraced traditional lines such as miniature, calligraphy, ornamentation as opposed to modern (and successive) arts - the fruits of the army based modernization process – and which was the first government in the history of the Republic to distance itself from the army, in my opinion had no clear program in the cultural arena.
Plastic arts had no place in the culture of Turkish society, but this cannot be an excuse. Many things with a place in society today were not so ten years ago. If wanted, we could have found a point of negotiation. When speaking of a major transformation, we first need to determine the course of change. But we were not able to do this properly. Turkey evolved and progressed economically, not culturally. We cannot see a minimum amount of the government’s success in other fields in the last ten years in fields such as engineering or culture. On the contrary, these fields, in particular academics, experienced a regression. Leading universities have been callously dissolved, some seen to be fit to be converted into convention centres or hotels. When it seemed no art academy would be left, staff of the remaining academies changed, budgets were cut and in the last ten years, art was left to the mercy of the private sector as simply a “branch of commercial activity”.
In my opinion, “more privatization” did not have significance for an artist receiving no state support. As the state’s interest in certain branches of art meant “control” more than support, it would be hard to say such an expectation existed. For example, the cinema industry and plastic arts in particular experienced advantages by depending on the private sector in the 1990’s; in a way, they learnt to take care of themselves. In the same period, popular culture was active more than ever with globalization and social media and Wikipedia. People of the 2000’s had wholly different logistics. Cultural institutions were established one after the other. Istanbul’s international appeal was increasingly rising, the appetite and curiosity of the post-80’s generation, who grew up under much more comfortable conditions compared to the preceding generation, were reflecting on the arts. A wholly extra-government dynamic was forming..
When AKP came to office for the third time, increasing votes in the 2011 elections, as in all other areas, it adopted a more controlling (stringent) policy towards the arts distinct from their preceding periods. Before disputes climaxed, the first major breaking point occurred when the Prime Minister personally interfered with the “Monument of Humanity” being constructed in Kars by sculptor Mehmet Aksoy. Everyone, including the Prime Minister, had the right not to like a work of art produced on behalf of the public. However, giving a demolition order connoted a different authority. After weeks of discussions, the unfinished sculpture was removed. Subsequently, debates on “conservative art”, the famous “backyard” themed speech of Minister of Internal Affairs Idris Naim Sahin defining terror and the arts, and restrictions imposed on state theatres, caused the emergence of a new phase where, perhaps for the first time in Turkey’s history, “art-artists” from all disciplines were disputed intensely.
The third term of office of AKP, which stated almost nothing regarding the arts during the first two terms, came on like a cold shower. After ten years, the government, which did not have the slightest contribution to the arts, came out and stated “conservative art”. Well then, are schools of art based on statements of politicians? If we do not take into account humorous examples that occurred in some dictatorships, in which country do statesmen decide to attempt to direct art? As a constitutional state, is it the responsibility of the Republic to support and protect its existing art heritage, or put a cover over its existing potential and design art of the future? All of these are debatable and have been debated.
Parallel with the growing capital, it was inevitable that branches of art wholly dependent on the private sector gained certain momentum. Together with the 2000’s, visible changes began to occur. To a high extent, discussions around art arose at the same time from the linking of art with the terms “customer”, “market”, “product”, “and sector”. However, when we consider that art develops not only as a result of the market, but at the same time, as a result of liberation in the political area, it was apparent that we were facing an inversely proportional situation. The state, which is responsible for the protection of art and its agents, sought to protect itself from it. They did not recognize artists as a party and closed all channels of negotiation, imposing sanction after sanction.
Thus, Turkish art circles (it should be recognized that Turkish art circles are dauntless supporters of democratization) took a poised stance against AKP. In short, AKP failed the art test and lost credibility in the eyes of artists. Instead of questioning the mentality, ignoring social reality, dictating the intellectual world of a handful of elitists, imposing an “ideal life form” by ignoring different cultural values, it was unacceptable to take a role within this mentality in Turkey in 2012. This tension caused artists, who were close supporters of the government until a few years ago, to adopt a new stance.
The tendency to expect public gain from art, to undertake cultural engineering in this way and instrumentalize art came to a complete end with the dissolution of the USSR at the end of the 1990’s. AKP’s current approach was an argument of an essentially highly totalitarian and communist-origined official art theory, which completely ignored individualities and was aimed to be practiced on Turkish society in the earliest stages of the Republic. However, this argument had already collapsed. Today, we would prefer to present a criticism of this mentality. To pursue the discussion from this point not only made the art produced in Turkey in the 2000’s, conceived through the Cold War years, it identified a political party with liberal tendencies with a system that it never represented. AKP necessarily became more Kemalist and was thrown a curve in such an open field that it had been criticizing.
Therefore, art created the big test for Turkey to pass. It is against the cultural history that lies on this thin boundary. Art created in Turkey will either be a follower of certain political traditions (conservative, dysfunctional, self-enclosed, communitarian, lobbyist) and will be destined to become marginalized in its own restricted domain and go no further than being a magazine-ish copy of the traditional structure, or it will choose the hard method of transforming the system it actually seeks to criticize and prepare an intellectual basis for the next generation.
Likewise, it is hard to understand the contradiction between criticizing the correct decision to cancel 19th May parades and the statement that ideology is being imposed on society through art. The current system we are criticizing is the ruins of the never-succeeding structure based on the scheme of creating the “ideal society” through art. “Public servant artists” are there exactly for this reason. We all know that Turkish society has showed a reflex against the state-imposed ideal of art. Whatever you may do in the name of art “for society” will receive a reaction and you will eventually become elitist. These are the ongoing discussions today, but not in the way of the government.
In conclusion, just as “social benefit” bears importance when we talk about physics, biology or chemistry, “social benefit” could have that much importance when we talk of art. Art contributes to society in the same way as sending an astronaut into space or winning a football game. Art increases a society’s respectability and confidence, which cannot be bought. However, every discipline has its own responsibilities in reaching this point. Even if art benefits society, this benefit is not so pragmatic as to be analyzed by lecturing in Kahramanmaras.
What we call “art” exists for constant questioning and renegotiation of the social agreement. Art has a responsibility of movement. All areas in Turkey encountered movement, however, the intellectual area became stuck because it could not enter into a negotiation with this new process, as this government to some extent feared its intellectuals. This should be read as mutual action and reaction. So far, no efforts have been made to normalize the situation. However, this would be worth the effort.
Footnote
S. H. Pasa, “Our Depressions”, Tercüman publishing. p.118.