The 'Neresi? Burasi?' of Similarity and Difference - Miyuki Aoki Girardelli
(Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Istanbul Technical University)

A few years ago, I began attending a university on the ‘European side' while living on the 'Asian side.' Every morning, as I crossed the strait on the ferry, I enjoyed reflecting that I was going back and forth between two continents.

But once you've lived in this city a while, you realize that Istanbul has this exotic image because we look at it from the outside and imagine what it must be like, Perhaps this is a rather ill-natured way of putting it, but crossing a strait is basically the same whether it's the Bosphorus or the English Channel, For the people of Istanbul, going back and forth between Asia and Europe is a quite ordinary, everyday experience, Even so, my friend, a native of Istanbul, grins as he tells me that there's only one Bosphorus Strait.

Leaving aside the dichotomy of 'Asia' and 'Europe' that has cast its fateful spell on Turkish artists who venture overseas, the fact that these two continents are linked, even though they may seem from a distance to be divided by a boundary, is also connected to the relationship between 'tradition' and 'modernity,' The cliché of discovering your identity in the gap between the traditions of non-western countries and the modernity that is in most cases synonymous with western civilization, while it is a familiar issue on a national level, has only begun to be a topic of discussion between countries or at a global level in the past few years. In Asia, where 'modernity' has been brought about in many countries through imperialism or colonialism, Japan, Thailand, Iran and Turkey (the Ottoman Empire until 1923) are exceptional cases, These countries were not forced into colonial status during the last 200 years and, in the sense that they chose modernization themselves, they have very interesting similarities and differences, However, I will not comment here on the global system that made this choice imperative.

This is the first comprehensive exhibition of Turkish contemporary art in Japan.

What is Turkish contemporary art? How is the actual here and now of Turkey different from, or linked with, the 'Turkish culture exhibitions' that are occasionally held in Japan and the related popular image of 'historic Turkey '? Here I would like to consider how the western concept of 'fine art ' got on with the traditional concept of 'sanat' (art) in Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) and how it was accepted.

If we compare this with the processes whereby Meiji Japan understood 'fine art' accepted it, and made it its own, the similarities and differences will surely become clear.

In Japan, the Republic of Turkey is generally known as an Islamic country, even though it is actually a secular state where religious freedom is recognized. It is also known that Islam forbids the worship of idols and depiction of living beings, and that for this reason decoration such as geometric patterns and plant motifs have developed in Islamic art.

How did contemporary art emerge in Turkey?

To understand this, we have to go back to the nineteenth century, The time is 1851 and the place is London, The government of the Ottoman Empire, having decided to participate in the world's first international exposition, the Great Exhibition, called upon its subjects in a newspaper to participate in the exposition 'to demonstrate the possibilities of the Ottoman Empire from the viewpoints of its abundant national land, agriculture, industry and arts'

What were these arts? Before the Great Exhibition, the Ottoman Empire had sent students to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but this was the first encounter at the official level between the concepts of 'the arts' in the Ottoman Empire and western Europe. At the Great Exhibition, as works of art, the Ottoman Empire exhibited several hundred objects of craftwork, such as embroidery and decorative weaving, hand-woven fabrics, leather goods, inlaid work, and ivory work. In a sense, this was the right approach.

The word 'sanat' in Turkish (strictly speaking, the Ottoman language) does not have the same meaning as ‘fine art ' in European languages, The sort of things that we now think of as 'decorative arts' or 'industrial arts' were also included in 'sanat'. But even in European languages, 'decorative arts' as a new expression differentiated from fine art did not make its appearance in Europe until around the 1860s, and at the Great Exhibition in London, there was no category titled 'fine art/ From then on, however, the Ottoman Empire's understanding of what was meant by 'fine art ' came to follow the categories of intellectual fields in the West.

In the Paris Exposition of 1855, the first exposition to have a 'beaux-arts' category, the Ottoman Empire did not participate in the painting or sculpture sections, submitting works only for the architecture section. This also provides a very Interesting insight into its official view of art at the time, The 'art' that was exactly in accordance with a western category was architecture. It should also be noted that the Ottoman Empire was the only non-European country among the 12 countries participating in the architecture section.

The Ottoman Empire eventually exhibited oil paintings at the London Exposition of 1862, For those who might object that Islam prohibited depictions of living beings, it should be mentioned that the list of exhibits included not only still life paintings but also portraits of women, If we view the exhibition of oil paintings at an international exposition as a criterion of acceptance of western art, the Ottoman Empire was ahead of Japan in this respect, The Ottoman government first dispatched students overseas in the fields of art and architecture in 1839, while In the same year it started an extensive program of westernization.

It is Interesting to note that while the overseas students of painting from Japan, which was officially westernized In 1867, actively absorbed the styles of painters influenced by the Impressionists, Pleinairists and Post-Impressionists, students from the Ottoman Empire, because they studied in Europe in an earlier period, encountered first the painting style of Academicism, which was characterized by Its strong emphasis on history. Among them is the very interesting case of Osrnan Hamdi Bey, who studied under the French Orientalist painter Leon Gerome, deconstructed his own traditions by reversing the Western orientalist vision of the Ottoman Empire, and created works that may be described as 'anti-orientalist.' It was only very late in the day, after the beginning of the 20 th century, that Impressionism became the mainstream in Turkish modern painting.

What we really need to know is the kind of artists who were at the center of these western-style artistic activities, In the Ottoman Empire, architecture was originally viewed as a military technique required to measure topography and build bridges and fortifications in order to defeat an enemy. With the establishment of a powerful empire, these techniques were refined into arts and architects became associated with the army within the Intellectual paradigm of the Ottoman Empire, Western painting techniques were initially taught at military academies as an extension of the technique of accurately depicting objects. Here we cannot overlook the activities of non-Muslim painters such as Armenians and Ottoman Greeks, Jews and Levantines (Westerners who resided permanently in the Ottoman Empire), many of whom were influential persons or high-ranking officials in the Ottoman Empire.

But what about the indigenous, traditional art (sanat) of the Ottoman Empire? Calligraphy (hat), miniaturist painting and court music (saray muzigi), which were considered orthodox arts at the Imperial court, continued to be the main categories of art. While a court opera house was built and Beethoven was performed In the palace harem, the traditional court music and musical instruments were being highly acclaimed at international expositions - a situation that may sound familiar to the Japanese.

Nevertheless, full-scale modernization came of course with the founding of the Turkish Republic. Under the influence of westernization, the movement to purify the Turkish language abolished the word 'sanat' because of its Arabic roots and replaced it with the French word 'art', but the movement subsided and 'sanat' was finally revived, The Turkish Republic was born in an age when it was felt throughout the world that art should make a break with the past. Compared to the essentially classical Ottoman era, artists from the founding of the Turkish Republic followed western movements such as Impressionism, Secession, Fauvism, Cubism, Naive Art, and Abstract Art. Just as in Japan, these trends in Turkey were not simply the adoption of western currents of thought but also a serious intellectual movement that divided artists into groups according to their views. Needless to say, Turkish artists had to face the challenges of evaluating their modernizing society and looking back upon their own cultural and spiritual roots. For Instance, artists of the 'D' group such as the painters Nurullah Berk and Bedri Rahmi Eyuboglu depicted women of Anatolia or traditional 'props' while using the techniques of Cubism or Pointilism. Of course, a 'Turkish art' that overturned global trends in painting never saw the light of day, but most other on-western countries surely experienced a similar history. Similarly, Yuichi Takahashi's painting, "Salmon,” is an immortal masterpiece in the history of Japanese painting, but it is rarely viewed as such in the history of world art.

(Translated by Richard Sams)