ARTIST TALK with Bedri Baykam moderated by Peter Frank!

BEDRI BAYKAM: POP EXPRESSIONIST

By Peter Frank

Originality is a chimera. Everything has a precedent, not to mention a source. As Bedri Baykam admits — no, declares — in work after work of his, “this has been done before.” It is an ironic proclamation, however: “This” has never been done quite this way before, because the artist’s interventions, deliberate and accidental, have modified and ultimately individuated the work.

The notion of originality, especially as a measure of artistic quality or importance, is the impetus for one of Baykam’s many aesthetic, social, and political crusades. He revels in these arguments, taking risks with his art, his reputation, even his life to foment creative thought and resistance to intellectual and societal tyranny. His vast appetite for the world, as it manifests in art and as it manifests in life, allows him to do nothing else: he is a committed provocateur on the international stage.

Such expansive focus belies Baykam’s position in the world. A Turk, he tirelessly propounds the need for Turkey to be a site of experiment and enlightenment. This was the clarion of Mustafa Kemal, founder of the modern Turkish state, and Baykam considers himself a Kemalist. Indeed, his father was a longtime liberal member of Parliament, and the artist son himself stood for president (in party primaries) as recently as 2003. Since then, Baykam has watched as democracy has waned and religious fundamentalism has all but overwhelmed his country. He was himself left for dead in a 2011 attack. Damaged and discouraged, yet he persists.

Baykam’s voice in the art world has been more effective, at least in broadening the perspective of a realm freighted with cultural prejudice. He took his undergraduate degree at the Sorbonne and his graduate degree at the California College of Arts & Crafts, so his exposure to Western art, especially contemporary art and its minutiae, has been thorough. Baykam’s art evinces this, adopting and reflecting modes of thought and style prevalent in post-modern Europe and America — and attenuating these modes so that they address contemporary practices and conditions elsewhere in the world.

For years, Baykam has railed against the West’s condescending, often dismissive regard for art produced elsewhere. Non-western manifestations of styles and movements (supposedly) formulated in the West, he avers, are not epigonal imitations or mere exoticizations, but re-inventions of what can be regarded as globalized languages. Surrealism is as subversive in Mexico as it is in France. Abstract expressionism is as abstract and as expressionist in Tokyo as it is in New York. Op art is a South American as well as European phenomenon. Minimalism takes on a whole new resonance in India. Conceptual art was political as well as artistic practice in Soviet-era eastern Europe. And in places as diverse as Ghana, Malaysia, Cuba, and Iran, Pop Art and neo-expressionism conflate into a whole new creature. This is the kind of creature Bedri Baykam is: A Pop expressionist.

Baykam’s brand of Pop expressionism is suffused with the visual and the spiritual energies of graffiti and street art. Its debt to a vast array of modern and post-modern movements, from Surrealism to Fluxus to performance art, Is likewise evident. Baykam does not try to hide or digest these diverse influences, but simply employs and coordinates them according to the ideas and images being presented, in whatever piece or series of pieces is at hand. Indeed, the stylistic references become part of the subject of each work. In this regard, Baykam, ever the provocateur, spectacularizes recent art history through a kind of appropriation once-removed, an appropriation more strategic than ironic, admiring and critical in the same breath.

The large lenticular pictures comprising the bulk of Baykam’s first solo show in Los Angeles are a case in point. The images themselves are pastiches, some elements found, others staged, some echoing the vacuity of contemporary advertising, some satirizing contemporary culture and art history, some waxing nostalgic about cinematic fantasies (largely from Baykam’s youth). He conflates European and American cultural markers, as someone from hippie-era Istanbul would be wont to do — quite aware that this, too, is a view through the “wrong” end of the telescope, feeding on Hollywood clichés even as Hollywood, and the art world, fed (and still feed) on Orientalist ones.

Even as the lenticular pieces (all dating from around 2008) conjure Pop art— a rather Francophone Pop, tinged with wit, romance, intimacy, and a sense of marvel — the more recent painted and collaged works here give clear evidence of Baykam’s responsivity to latter-day painterly modalities, namely neo-expressionism and street art. But street art itself is a neo-Pop phenomenon, and neo-expressionism is nothing if not a reclamation of a notion of painting as theatrical gesture, the dramatization of the ongoing struggle between the artist’s hand and the autonomous image.

And that is what keeps Bedri Baykam in the game, constantly switching gears and tactics and constantly tweaking conventional notions of artistic dialogue, artistic relationships, artistic distinction, and the role of art in life. Even as he teases us like some jester in the court of Art he takes on official positions — World President of the UNESCO-affiliated International Art Association, for instance — with great and solemn purpose. Baykam is at once inside and outside the establishment, exactly where an artist whose vision extends beyond art should be. He takes himself very seriously and not at all seriously, as the empty frame hanging in the middle of this show, stamped with that declaration “this has been done before,” attests.

Testimony, too, to Baykam’s simultaneous embrace of and challenge to art’s sacrosanctity is his new “Art History Map,” a flow chart tracing intertwined art and human history from the caves to the cellphone. This, too, has been done before, by the likes of Museum of Modern Art Founding Director Alfred Barr and Fluxus mastermind George Maciunas, among others. But not like this. Indulging his subjectivity, championing artists and events that may be all but unknown to most of us, Baykam “re-sets” the story of humankind a little bit more to his liking, bringing the West more in line with the East and loosening the dialectical rigidity of the colonial mindset. This map subverts the perception of cultural dominance — of anyone by anyone — by allowing in the vagaries of art and life alike, as Baykam sees them.

“Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” said Fluxus artist Robert Fillliou. Bedri Baykam keeps it all interesting by making art out of life, and vice versa

Los Angeles

December 2019

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND :

Bedri Baykam : "VISUAL ADVENTURES (Dimensions + Time)"

Exhibition Dates: December 7th, 2019 - February 1st, 2020

Art Walk: Thursday January 9th from 6pm - 10pm

VIP Reception in the presence of the Artist : Saturday, January 18th, from 5pm - 10pm.

Artist Talk moderated by art critic Peter Frank with small  Reception to follow : Sunday, January 19th from 3pm - 5pm.