Fourth Table, also known as the Bastard
I have settled down to the task of writing and have drawn up my chair to my table. My fourth table, aka the Bastard.
Caveat emptor.
Viruses are perfect parasites. It has been known for decades that once a virus gets inside a cell, it hijacks its genetic instructions. They rely on the cells of other organisms to survive and reproduce because they can’t capture or store energy themselves. In other words, they can not function outside a host organism, so they are often regarded as non-being. Humans die. Pencils die. Apple MacBook Pro’s die. Frogs die. Nail files die. Tickets die. Les statues meurent aussi. Viruses can’t die for the simple reason that they aren’t alive in the first place. I’ve been living with an ancient virus in my lips: herpes simplex. I must have gotten it from my mother. It can persist in an inactive state for varying periods and then recur spontaneously after undefined physical or emotional stress stimuli. It’s just waiting for the right moment to pounce. So you see, I’m a pillar of support for my herpes. I’m thin and tall. Think of my head as the capital, my torso as the shaft, and my feet as the base of a column. I have shallow grooves running along my body. My fluted torso. Such a torso, being conscious merely of its own endeavor. They say bodies are built for motion, not for stillness. I must stand up now. I have been stationary for a very long time. This state of being reduces blood flow and the amount of oxygen entering my bloodstream through my lungs. My capital and my shaft agree with my base for once. I stand up now. I can’t dance with my capital and shaft alone. For truth to tell, my base dances with the backlit Magic Keyboard. The first position requires the feet to be flat on the floor and turned out. Yes, heels together, and toes going outwards. Now move into the second position: The feet point in opposite directions, with heels around twelve inches apart. For the third position, start in the first position. With your feet facing opposite directions, slide one foot directly in front of the other. Touch the heel of your front foot to the instep of your back foot, and bring your front calf directly in front of your back calf. Fourth position: legs are both turned out equally, toes pointing away from the body, one leg directly in front of the other, about a foot and a half apart. I’m ready to pirouette.
I am a great gambler. I’ve always thought roulette is for morons, whereas poker is a game of skill. Poker players love to have regular sips of their favorite drinks while playing. The poker table is covered with baize or speed cloth to help the cards slide easily across the surface. The color poker green with the hexadecimal color code #35654d is a medium-dark shade of green-cyan. In the RGB color, model #35654d comprises 20.78% red, 39.61% green, and 30.2% blue. In the HSL color space, #35654d has a hue of 150° (degrees), 31% saturation, and 30% lightness. This color has an approximate wavelength of 518.57 nm. The edge of the table is usually padded and raised slightly for the players to rest their arms, and this section is called the "rail." There is often a section of wood between the rail and the playing surface, called the "race track," and often features cup holders. Therefore, the cup holders are stainless steel since it'd be silly to let them get rusted from spilling drinks.
I walk into a dirty, dingy room that is sealed off with yellow police tape. Inside, a woman is lying dead on the floor. Other detectives who had examined the body before I arrived concluded that the woman committed suicide based on their deductive reasoning. I think otherwise. I never use deductive reasoning to assist me. Instead, I use inductive reasoning. I observed the scene and noticed the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand had been recently removed while she wore all other kinds of jewelry. There was a distinct ring mark on her ring finger. Other detectives told me they’ve found no ring so far, even though they had searched everywhere. People usually fail to notice that things are in plain sight. I went through all her pockets, and voilà, there it was! Her wedding ring is 20 years old, at least. There is an inscription on the back of the ring. Three letters A R T. What could it mean? What’s A R T? Is she married to A R T? Where’s A R T then? And why, why would she remove her wedding ring but nothing else? I know that objects tend to continue doing what they are already doing.
Suppose there were no external forces; the wedding ring would not have been removed. Look around. We are in a painter’s studio. Plaster écorchés stood about the room, and here and there, on shelves and tables, lay fragments of classical sculpture-torsos of antique goddesses. The walls were covered, from floor to ceiling, with countless sketches in charcoal, red chalk, or pen and ink: canvases, overturned stools, flasks of oil and essences, and the easel.
Back to the question, what, or rather who, does she remove her wedding ring for? From whom is she hiding A R T, What the fuck it means? Lovers? Is she having an ill-fated love affair? Is she cheating on A R T? With whom? Not one lover - she'd never afford to be single over that amount of time - so more likely a string of them. I know that not even a puzzle, whose pieces, when fitted together, would constitute a whole. Something is missing in her death or someone! We’re going to need an autopsy to find out!
I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which the easel stood and upon which lay some vitamin bottles, a painter’s palette, an hourglass, a MacBook Air, and an apple. I found beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of still life. At length, my eyes, in going the circuit of the studio, fell upon a card rack of pasteboard that hung by a green ribbon just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. This rack had three or four visiting cards, overdue bills, and a note: “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for’’ written on it.
After graduating from art school in the late 1940s, Irem found herself pacing her studio, unsure how to produce work as a professional artist. She breathed through her nose, with her mouth closed, which she believed to be excellent for the body while walking. Don’t breathe through your mouth: you’ll waste saliva. Don’t try to think simultaneously as walking; so much multitasking might cause the system to short-circuit.
“How do you think not-thinking?” the artist asked. “By non-thinking,” Buddhist answered.
This was a deliberate means of not producing an object. She resists the production of physical objects in an extension of the logic of Western conceptual art and as a part of her commitment to ecological politics of production. In her works, such unproductivity is figured through the confined space of the walk: Irem paces back and forth, never reaching a destination. Irem’s walks have no results: no products made, no destinations reached. She awoke each morning at four o’clock, never later. She breakfasted on two bowls of tea and then smoked a pipe. On teaching days, she would go out in the morning to give her lecture, then resume her dressing gown and slippers to work and write until precisely a quarter to four. Then, she would dress again to receive a small group of friends to discuss science, philosophy, and the weather. It’s okay to have guests around, but always the right number. If you eat alone, you might end up thinking, which will interfere with your digestion. There were invariably four dishes and some cheese placed on the table – sometimes with a few desserts – along with a small carafe of wine for each guest. The conversation usually lasts until six o’clock. Always be sure to calibrate the intellectual level of the conversation so that it’s not too boring but not too arousing.
We all have a central support structure within us. It keeps us upright. It provides the necessary stiffness and strength to resist internal forces such as vertical forces of gravity and lateral forces due to wind and earthquakes. It carries the weight of your head, torso, and arms, allowing your body to move in every direction. I started having a problem with my central support structure, which I have relied on for 185 years. I can’t sit, walk, stand, twist, or bend. My doctor recommended to me the Superman exercise. My lumbar spine shows wear and tear as the discs dry out and shrink. Only true artists can do Superman, the doctor said. Squeeze your glutes and lower back as you raise your legs and arms off the floor. Pause at the top. Then, pull your elbows down and backward while squeezing them together. Then, reach back overhead, mimicking a pull-up motion, and slowly return to the starting position. However, if you’re no true artist, you won’t be able to return to the starting position.
Denim is a great example of a material that ages gracefully when the quality is good. The cotton softens and conforms to the wearer as it slowly breaks in, and the threads are dyed so that the outer layer of indigo wears off to reveal a white core, creating denim’s signature fade. Jeans, by nature, do stretch. The fabric is meant to morph and form the body.
I’m running out of collagen.
Whiskers, also known as ‘mustaches,’ fade on the thighs of jeans. They are relatively thin diagonal or horizontal creases that form as you wear your jeans. If your jeans are made from raw denim, you will create the whiskers you wear in the jeans. So, you see, the information of one’s past can be present through these whiskers. The dead artist was wearing a pair of denim jeans on which an enormous number of whiskers were on the inner thighs. She must have been a great sitter.
I’m running out of collagen.
She must have sat tight and waited forever. I always find denim whiskers similar to the wrinkles on one’s face. The more you wear it, the more they appear.
I’m running out of collagen.
Irem started to perform a post-mortem examination on the dead artist’s body. Firstly, she laid it out carefully on the autopsy table. First things first, high-quality gross photographs should be taken. All of the important details of the artist’s dead body should be present in the photograph. It’s okay to look into the eyes of the dead artist through the camera lens. It protects you from turning into a stone. The dead body of the artist should not touch the border of the frame because this leads the eye out of the picture. Usually, it is best to position the area of interest in the center of the frame for composition and autofocus. Often, both an overview and a close-up photograph are necessary. Irem, the forensic photographer, pays particular attention to the depth of field and the increased illumination requirements of close-up photographs. Specular highlights, the reflections of light from the surfaces of subjects, provide special problems. The number of techniques reduces or eliminates specular highlights. Drying the body, eliminating surface contours, changing the illumination angle, illuminating through diffusing screens, and using small reflectors may reduce highlights.
A ladder or step stool may be necessary for some overhead views. Writhing snakes were entwining her head in place of hair. Therefore, it’s not easy to capture a still picture. It is helpful to drape areas such as the face and genitalia of the dead artist to maintain decency and lessen distractions. Irem, the forensic pathologist, made a cut on the body to examine the chest and abdominal organs. Oh shit! The minute the rib cage is removed, the truth is revealed. The first truth is “Suffering,” which teaches that everyone in life is suffering somehow. The second truth is the “Origin of suffering,” which states that all suffering comes from desire.
The third truth is “Cessation of suffering,” which says stopping suffering and achieving enlightenment is possible. The fourth truth is called ‘’Fourth Table’’ which takes its inspiration from the work of a physicist and a philosopher. In his Gifford Lectures in 1927, British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington talked about two tables. First, the table of everyday experiences is tactile and substantial. It supports elbows and holds objects. Second, the table of science is mostly empty. There is nothing substantial about it. It is the only one which is there wherever there may be. Sometimes later, the physicist’s writing was taken up by Philosopher Graham Harman, who wrote an essay called “The Third Table,” in which he thinks both humanists who insist on the everyday thing and physicists who care only for quantum reality are mistaken. He posits the existence of a third table, the only real one, exists between the first and the second table, deeper than all apparent (scientific or everyday) objects…. A decade later, Irem wrote the “Fourth Table, also known as the Bastard.” Her table is neither legit nor authentic. One can think of it as the bastard sibling of the other three tables. Her table is not a table. If it is not a table, what is it?
Rakı is an anise-flavored alcoholic drink popular in Turkey, often served with seafood or meze. The making of rakı begins with the arrival of the grapes. Meticulously selected grapes of the Aegean are pressed to must and left to ferment. At the end of the fermentation process, the first distillation begins. The fermented grape juice is distilled to make “suma,” a highly alcoholic grape spirit. Then, the second distillation begins when the suma, water, and anise are added to the copper still. This is how the process of conventional, double-distilled rakı works. Later, triple distillation became a competitive element in meeting consumer demand for high-quality products. Thrice distilled rakı! Some described it as the core of the core. Rakı is a ritual. The ritual of drinking rakı actualizes around the rakı table. Therefore, the first requirement to drink rakı is a simple table. After it is found, do not think of opening a rakı bottle and sitting at the table alone. The best meze for rakı is conversation. That is to say, you need at least one other person to sit at a rakı table. A bunch of people would be better, but that changes if anyone in the group talks too much, boast about themselves, or is humorless. Rakı never goes down well if a pleasant talk is lacking. However, pleasant talk doesn’t mean you should be unnecessarily cute or try too hard. During the first glass of rakı, people usually listen to subjects concerning daily life, but three glasses later, the talk moves on to matters of the heart, and on the fourth glass, it turns to politics. Everyone saves the world in their own way at the rakı table.
The Buddhist chef believes that the ultimate cooking comes from this intimate connection with fruits and vegetables, herbs and beans, mushrooms, and grains. In her mind, there should be no distance between a cook and her ingredients, from farm to table. ‘‘That is how I make the best use of a cucumber,’’ she said. ‘‘Cucumber becomes me. I became a cucumber. ‘’ Shortly after the artist arrives at the temple, at a 1600 m altitude, she’s served slices of Korean pear, glazed with a tart citrus sauce, and pickled herbs, handmade dumplings, and mushroom caps filled with diced tofu, and rice that has taken on the yellow hue of gardenia seeds. Also, Kimchee, buried in a hole in the ground for years, was put on the table. The Buddhist chef grates potatoes by hand for her pancakes, which she layers with chopped leaves of fresh mint from her garden. They say the warmth of the hands affects the flavor. The hand is used in each step, from gardening to the table. The Buddhist chef cooked rice wrapped in lotus leaves and stuffed into round knobs of cut bamboo that were boiled in a cauldron. The artist watches how the Buddhist chef relies on alchemies of smoke and steam, soil and water, bacteria and air. One day, the artist and the other guest, the mountaineer, are given a cup of lotus-flower tea by the Buddhist chef, symbolizing the Buddhist enlightenment's blossoming. ‘’When you are in the mountains, you find out who you really are. You climb so you can live every moment of your life. When the pain forces you to go down, you keep going up. You are really on the edge of possibilities, the edge of life and death,’’ said the mountaineer while sipping the lotus tea. The artist drank the lotus-flower tea, heard the mountaineer, and burst into tears.
Casino carpets come in three categories: geometric ones, dots, orbs, and metastasizing lattices. Then, the organic ones feature curvilinear elements: underwater ripples in turquoise and cobalt and gilded tendrils that seem to be derived from plants. Then, carpets often have themes such as sphinxes at nicer hotels. The camouflaging argument makes sense—the more curlicues, the less noticeable the dirt, Coke, and vomit. Carpets’ primary function is psychological. A lot of the busyness of the patterns may be about keeping people active, as too much relaxation may not inspire gambling. Some people do urinate on casino carpets. I remember seeing one lady going down every row of slot machines and letting a little tinkle out on each seat and the rug. Some loser gamblers do it spitefully, and some have genuine bladder problems. Some die-hard gamblers don’t ever want to leave the table. There are people playing poker for four days straight, eating cheese sandwiches. Checking the chair before you sit at a casino wouldn’t be a bad idea.
In the universe, space and time are invariably linked within four-dimensional spacetime. For simplicity, you can think of spacetime as a blanket suspended above the ground. It inhabits stars, planets, and black holes. Each object weighs down the blanket where it sits: the heavier the object, the bigger the dip in the blanket. A dip in spacetime is a gravitational field. The gravitational field of one object can affect another object. The other object might fall into the first object’s gravitational field and orbit around it, like the moon around Earth and an artist around an apple. The apple perfectly balances the insatiable appetite of the artist with a hint of sweetness and acidity. As this happens, they create ripples in spacetime.
2022, Istanbul
FLASCHENPOST: I OWE YOU THE TRUTH IN PAINTING, AND I WILL TELL IT TO YOU
SIEVE: Separating wanted elements from unwanted material or characterizing the particle size distribution of a sample, typically using a woven screen such as a mesh net or metal.
Dearest
Call me Irem. I’m a rather younger person – never mind how old precisely-. It is as an artist that I’m writing this letter to you. The nature of my work for the last five years has brought me here, writing to you in the middle of the night (not exactly at ten o'clock, not even at eleven sharp, nor on November eleven as opposed to the tenth or the twelfth). This is a long letter, but it’s not at all bound to be answered. Possibly, if it’s answered and directed to Irem Gunaydin, it might be missed.
The other one, the one called Irem, is the one things happen to. She’s been working as a front desk clerk, then as a foreign exchange operations specialist, and finally, has become a very important person at the foreign exchange office. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that ours is a bizarre relationship. I live to contrive to make my art, but she’s the one who makes a living for us in an office. Don’t get me wrong; I’m extremely grateful for her job. Our story is not a mix of pulp fiction and tragedy. I must confess that she has achieved a lot, but those things cannot save me. It seems unfair, though, on her to make her pay for everything. What if she dragged us for a job in an art organization, such as auction houses? I know that she wouldn’t do that to us, not in a billion years. But then I remembered that we must give up trying to know those to whom we’re linked by something essential.
The pears, peaches, apples, onions, Pine, Ash, Oak, Walnut, acrylic, charcoal, oil, vases, bowls, baskets, bottles, ceramic, metal, aluminum, marbles, cast polyester resin, powder-coated steel, fire clay, polyurethane rubber, fiberglass, glass, silicone rubber, engraved aluminum, epoxy, PVC, plywood, C-type print, vinyl, 16mm film with sound, neon, embroidered fabric, Formica, rubber, engraved brass, oil paint on paper, terracotta, hand-thrown glazed ceramic
Once upon a time in the ancient world, all the gods were invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis except one goddess for her troublesome nature. Upon turning up uninvited, she decided to cause chaos by throwing a golden apple into the midst of the goddesses, with an inscription on it: to the most beautiful…Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Once they saw the apple, all three goddesses wanted to know who the apple was for and, ultimately, who was the most beautiful of the goddesses. Wisely, the gods decided it was best not to intervene and instead nominated a human delegate, Paris, the Prince of Troy, to choose. Choose the most beautiful. Choose the true owner of the golden apple.
MACERATION: A process of breaking down and softening various substances.
"Therefore, the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple." There’s no evidence to suggest an apple actually landed on Newton’s head, but (he wondered what force made the apple fall downward instead of simply floating away) his observation inspired him to develop his law of universal gravitation eventually: Every object in the Universe attracts every other object with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. To put it simply, all objects tend to fall toward the Earth's surface. The other Irem is my gravity. She is the one keeping me from falling down perpendicularly toward the Earth’s surface. She pulls me down to the ground, and I launch her high into the sky. Ours is a foot on the ground, head in the sky sort of relationship. Besides, considering the fact that writing takes up a lot in my practice, I can’t imagine writing in a weightless state: for this purpose, I would have to be secured to the tabletop, for example, by means of leather straps in order to remain at the table at all (without having to hold on).
I recently went to a gig, and I met with a Disc Jockey there. Disc J. was playing all three records simultaneously. If the beat on the new record hits before the beat on the current record, then the new record is too fast. Choose Hera, says DJ to Paris, the Prince of Troy. I saw three turntables in front of the Disc Jockey. Disc J. was playing all three records simultaneously. If the beat on the new record hits after the beat on the current record, then the new record is too slow. Choose Aphrodite, says the DJ to Paris, the Prince of Troy. Something’s been troubling me about the pill scene since I watched The Matrix. Neo – the protagonist- is offered by Morpheus the choice between the blue pill and continuing to live in a synthesized, fictional world or taking the red pill and joining the “real world” and escaping from the Matrix. And Neo chooses the red pill. He chooses his future. He chooses a purpose. He chooses a love story. I bet you’ve been just there, on a couch or a chair, maybe with your bosom buddies, cat, or dog, perhaps drinking coffee or a beer, filled with hope, joy, and curiosity when watching the burned-out asteroid protagonist had to make do with what’s he got.
Yes! Disc J. was playing all three records simultaneously. Paris, the Prince of Troy, asks What if you don’t align the beats so the rhythms do clash when played together? You definitely choose Athena to answer DJ to Paris, the Prince of Troy. The DJ provided the audience with a three-deck ride unrestrained into unknown territories. In one of these territories, the place is unroofed. There are no bodies but draperies, no sumptuous buildings but colonnades, and no whole numbers but numbers with decimal values. There is the disparaged ‘other hand’ that does not write but picks the nose, holds a cup, plays with a mobile phone, itches ears, and wipes mouth with a napkin when one squeezes. Because it’s the one that does grasp. There are niches, shelves, and half-open cupboards, but no objects are placed within. An elephant, a goat, a reindeer, a donkey, a chamois, a camel, an ox, a bear, and a dog cast a light on the wall, but we see no hand that makes the shadow. In cutting vegetables, the disparaged non-knife hand is the hand that grasps, while the knife hand’s only job is to keep the tip of the knife down and cut with a circular motion. Up, down, forward, and return. The non-knife hand becomes the brain of the operation. And the knife hand becomes the dumb hand. There is a woman with the laundry, a mountain, the seated man, early morning strollers, the boy leaning over and plunging his two arms in the water as if to wash his hands or pick up a stone, the pedestrian hurrying along the path, trees, and a rock that lies here and there but there’s no choreography. Only the landscape is leading the gaze. There is a tabletop, but no flowers, no fruits, no hourglass, no skull, and no other printed ephemera are lying on it. I’ve been repeatedly re-enacting the pill scene from The Matrix in my mind with every possibility, and something very bizarre emerged from these repetitions: Paul Cézanne, the painter of a painting of Dish of Apples, René Magritte, the painter of the painting This Is Not a Pipe, Nicolas Poussin; the classicist who ended up remembered as the landscapist, and finally one and only Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts: a Flemish-born painter who makes things that do not exist appear to exist. The reason for this bizarreness was immediately apparent: my workstation, my mind, and my heart belonged to these guys for a very long time.
FOLDING: Combine ingredients together gently without stirring and beating.
In one of my visions, Cézanne is expected to make a choice between the blue pill and the red pill, as in the case of Neo from The Matrix. The narration continues like this: Cézanne kindly asks if he’s allowed to take both pills and since he is Cézanne, of course, he gets yes as an answer. He blends the red pill with the blue one on his tongue, checking on the mirror to see if he gets the perfect violet without any gradient. He gets it, but the more he looks at it, the more he hates it. He remembers how much he hates gradients for a moment of unsettling silence. Then, he starts breaking down colors from gradients into their simplest forms. The colors that now come out are not precisely the same as those that just mixed on Cezanne’s tongue: the blue became cobalt, and the red scarlet. Then he spits them on a camera, and voila! The phrase appears, “With a cobalt next to scarlet, I will astonish Matrix.”
In another vision, René Magritte appears in his bowler hat –as usual-and is explained explicitly about the consequences of his action, as in the same case with Neo and Cézanne, and finally asked which pill he prefers to choose. He takes off his hat and says, “Do not try to convince me. That's impossible. Instead, they only realize this is not a pill. Then you will see that it is not the pill that changes the state of Matrix; it is yourself.” Then, he pulls a flatly painted bird out of his hat; the bird eats the pills and transforms into a bird filled with clouds. Meanwhile, Mr. Magritte carves out a space behind the screen, and the bird fades in there.
I’d want you to meet with the Flemish painter Cornelis Gijsbrechts, a good friend of mine from 1660. Mr. Gijbrechts is a guy from two point-five dimensions. He lives after the right part of the decimal separator. His relation to the real goes back to the oil on canvas and some odd surfaces. And last but not least, he can travel between the dimensions such as one point five or two point nine. And finally, the same blue or red pill question is asked to Mr. Gijsbrechts. ‘’You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland,’’ said Morpheus while Mr. Gijsbrechts was chilling in his cozy atelier. He started to tell of competition as a response, which took place in the second half of the fifth century BC between two famous painters from Ancient Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes that were so realistic that the birds flew down to peck at them. Parrhasios painted a curtain that was so life-like that when Zeuxis came to inspect the finished work, he asked Parrhasios to draw the curtain aside and show him the painting hidden behind it! Zeuxis then had to admit defeat: he had fooled the birds, but Parrhasios had fooled him. Then Mr. Gijsbrechts smiles and says, “So you see, nothing is what it seems. Now, I’d rather you leave me alone, and don’t forget to take your meds.” Morpheus never found his way out. Neither the curtains nor the doors and windows in the atelier were three-dimensional. As a last resort, Morpheus took both pills and waited for something to happen. Unfortunately, nothing happened.
Then Nicholas Poussin goes onstage.
Dear reader, consider the following passages as a series of zig-zag and curved pathways that gradually lead the eye from foreground to middle ground to background. Stick to the path and try not to go astray.
I want you to imagine a small hillock that slopes sharply to the edge of the painting on the left side of the painting, Mr. Poussin says. In front of it, there is a man who is seized by a monstrous snake; the snake binds his body and intertwines his arms and legs by several turns, squeezes them, and poisons them with its venom. This man is already dead. We see the stiffness of all his limbs. His skin is already greenish-grey.
“The body cannot live without the mind,” says Morpheus.
There is another man, the running man. He sees the snake around the dead man; he stops suddenly; one of his feet remains suspended; he raises one arm above as if to make a sign, and the other falls below, but both hands open. His gestures and movements show his fear and surprise.
“Welcome to the desert of the real,” says Morpheus.
Behind the small hillock, there is a woman with laundry who sees the running man but cannot see the dead man, and the landscape makes a kind of curtain between her and the dead man. The fear of the running man makes him immobile, whereas the washerwoman can’t hold anything back. She lets herself show what she feels. She’s terrified of the running man’s gestures.
“You have to let it all go. Fear, doubt, and disbelief. Free your mind.” says Morpheus.
There’s a group by the shoreline: three men. On the left, two men face to face: one sitting, one kneeling, and the other stretched out full length on the grass, his torso propped up left, and two bare feet kicking idly. He’s dressed in a blue robe, and he’s looking back!
“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more,” says Morpheus.
Three fishermen in the boat are not far above the running man. One of them leans forward and seems ready to fall; it is because he is drawing a net; two others, leaning back, row with effort.
“There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path,” says Morpheus.
There is a pair of tiny figures standing at the top of the hill by the farmstead. Over their heads is a clump of dark leaves. The red and blue of what they’re wearing are electric.
“You've been living in a dream world,” says Morpheus.
SEPARATING EGGS: The egg yolk is removed from the egg white.
This is the moment when the image of Bugs Bunny on Mr. Poussin’s atelier wall occurs according to the light. He looks like an outline trace. Bugs Bunny is wearing a toga in the manner of the ancients. His whole body centered within a frame, his right arm stretched to one side of the frame with one finger getting to the outside of it. Bugs Bunny looks stern and formidable figure, one obviously not given to compromise or deviation from his chosen path, just like Mr. Cézanne, Mr. Magritte, Mr. Gijsbrechts, and Mr. Poussin. This is apparent in the erect pose of his body, the fixity of his gaze, and his sticking out finger from the frame. He looks more like black ink impregnating the surface layer of the wall paint. The slender traces of bits of legs, the head, and the torso would maybe come off in due course with a few strokes of the eraser. But the finger, oh the finger which sticks out of the frame, would require a more extensive rubbing. The hard eraser passing back and forth over the outer finger wouldn’t have much effect. One must scratch the finger with the corner of a razor blade. Even though the concave shape that the frame took after the finger sticks out, it remains there forever.
Bugs Bunny popped into my mind as I was writing this. ‘’What’s required to change the world is not choosing one pill over another, but rather being able to say I would prefer not to. Being here no matter how many times we get told we don’t belong and believing in the finger which sticks out of the frame. Because that finger is the one not to budge and fall in line because that finger is the one that will leave a palimpsest of inscriptions even when scratched.’’ said he.
Dearest, I wonder, as an artist, dare I manage to build my own game like Mr. Cézanne, Gods in the Troy story, DJ, Mr. Magritte, the other Irem, Mr. Poussin, Bugs Bunny, Mr. Gijsbrechts, and every finger which sticks out of the frame or will I fall into the ocean of infinite mediocrity just like Neo, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Morpheus, and the Paris the Prince of Troy. I will tell you that I recognized in myself the right to have this fear, and yet my existence is cheered by a naïve hope.
Let’s discover simple forms behind the glimmering veil of appearances
Let’s break down colors from complex gradients into their simplest forms
What if we don’t choose to smooth the transition from one song to another
What if we don’t bring the beats back in sync again
I suggest we get our priorities right
First things first, let me astonish myself with an apple
As this letter is undated and consequently might have been written at any time, it also follows from this that it may be read at any time. As soon as this letter has been put into orbit, none of this will be important. It’s as an artist that I wrote and signed this letter.
2020, Istanbul
A PROPOSAL FOR A FUTURE EXHIBITION: SCRIPTED EXPANDED MOLDED I
Scripted Expanded Molded I consists of three works. They are all gleaned from Irem’s written work titled ‘’Fourth Table also known as the Bastard’’, which takes its inspiration from the work of a physicist and a philosopher. In his Gifford Lectures of 1927, British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington talks about two tables. First, the table of everyday experiences is tactile and substantial. It supports elbows and holds objects. Second, the table of science is mostly emptiness. There is nothing substantial about it. It is the only one which is there, wherever there may be. Sometime later, the physicist’s writing was taken up by Philosopher Graham Harman, who wrote an essay called ‘’The Third Table’’ in which he thinks both humanists who insist on the everyday thing and physicists who care only for quantum reality are all mistaken. He posits the existence of a third table, the only real one, existing in between the first and the second table, deeper than all apparent (scientific or everyday) objects…. A decade later, Irem wrote the ‘’Fourth Table also known as the Bastard’’. Her table is neither legit nor authentic. One can think of it as the bastard sibling of the other three tables. Her table is not a table. If it is not a table, what is it?
I want you to imagine a relatively big space for exhibiting at a street-level gallery. Epoxy flooring, high ceiling, and some white walls. Imagine the following phrases, FOURTHTABLE, ALSO, KNOWNAS, and THEBASTARD, which derive from the title of Irem’s written piece, getting a fair amount of volume and turning into a set of fine-art wooden shipping crates. These letter-shaped crates frame the space of a gallery and act as a passe-partout through the exhibition. The crates are not designed and manufactured to meet the needs of works of art, nor have they traveled the world before arriving here. They are not built to accommodate a particular fine art object. They neither have foam cushioning nor labeling on them. They seem to want to weigh nothing but themselves.
According to the legend, Medusa is one of the three Gorgons, the female monster of the underworld in Greek mythology. Medusa, the snake-headed one of these three sisters, has the power to turn onlookers to stone. There are two Medusa heads in The Basilica Cistern that lie beneath the city of Istanbul and one Medusa head that sits in the garden of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. However, they do not belong to the place where they are now. They are both spolia! Besides, these two Roman Medusa heads are casually used as column bases at the cistern’s northwest corner. One is positioned upside down, and the other is tilted to the side. No one is sure why this is, but a popular opinion is that they’re oriented upside down in order to negate the power of the gaze of Medusa. Irem invented a character named Fourth Medusa, the bastard sibling of the other three Medusa statues, who also manifested in the written work in multiple versions of herself, such as an artist, a gambler, a chef, a detective, etc. Given the excessive repetition of the same fucking concepts throughout this exhibition proposal, Irem must have had a hard time distinguishing between artist, bastard, and the number four. Eventually, I produced The Fourth Medusa. I really did! It is represented by a fiberglass mold, which is supposed to welcome you at the entrance of the gallery. The mold that the Fourth Medusa inhabits has twenty pieces fixed by stainless steel bolts. One can reproduce her one thousand and one times using one thousand and one materials. I just can’t resist imagining that she could even be reproduced out of butter! Fourth Butter Medusa. LOL. Who wants to spread the Medusa butter on bread?
Imagine that you are in the gallery space, encountering the Fourth Medusa – especially as a mold; I can’t convince any sponsor to fund the Butter Medusa- at the front entrance and the crates at the back of the space. You are here because of Scripted, the first out of the four-part performance series, which takes place each week. Irem has collaborated with one of the leading figure composers in the Turkish jazz music scene. The composer writes a *graphic notation to be performed by different musicians once a week, including the composer herself, to accompany Irem’s written work, ‘’Fourth Table also known as the Bastard’’. Four weeks, four musicians. During the performances, particular passages from Irem’s text, sampled by the composer beforehand, will be triggered from pedals at certain points of the notation by the musicians. Each performance takes approximately twenty minutes. The exhibition opens with Scripted; the composer plays her notation on multiple synthesizers that are scattered around the space. The second week of the show hosts Expanded, in which a musician is invited by the composer to play the notation on bass clarinet with *extended techniques. For the third part, Molded, another musician is invited to play the notation with the cases, bags, and covers of the musical instruments that were used during the previous performances. The fourth part, I, houses a musician who plays the notation with their voice.
See the ‘’Fourth Table also known as the Bastard ‘’translated into Turkish as Dördüncü Masa, Nam-ı Diğer Piç in the manifold. press
* Graphic notation is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation.
* Extended technique is a term used in music to describe unconventional techniques of playing musical instruments.
2022, Istanbul