| Füge Demirok writes short poem-like inscriptions next to the works in her 2007 catalog. The third poem, placed next to an image of The Seal, reads, “Sealed, / From past eternity to eternity, / Can it be disregarded? / Not caring, not minding…” It doesn’t seem like the most ambitious request for attention on an artist’s part. Maybe we can safely disregard The Seal, not caring, not minding. The single line “Expression of nothingness” flanks the wood and silver plated sculpture The Reed Flute in Demirok’s catalog presentation. And the show’s title was “No Thing.” | 
|
Füge Demirok – Sarah Dotts
Füge Demirok writes short poem-like inscriptions next to the works in her 2007 catalog. The third poem, placed next to an image of The Seal, reads, “Sealed, / From past eternity to eternity, / Can it be disregarded? / Not caring, not minding…”
It doesn’t seem like the most ambitious request for attention on an artist’s part. Maybe we can safely disregard The Seal, not caring, not minding. The single line “Expression of nothingness” flanks the wood and silver plated sculpture The Reed Flute in Demirok’s catalog presentation. And the show’s title was “No Thing.”
Maybe it’s a problem in translation.
Or maybe it’s a spiritual thing. I think we’re supposed to think it’s spiritual.
If Demirok timidly inched her way into the Broadway Gallery space in verse, the small pieces selected for the exhibition seemed more forceful, dotting the (nearly) white walls of the gallery.
Her biography also suggests a bit more vigor. Füge Demirok taught English at the American-Turkish University Association for ten years. (Our linguist-artist graduated from Bosphorus University’s Department of Linguistics and Literature in 1981.) Demirok has volunteered for a Turkish organization combating social erosion and the destruction of a natural habitat since 2001. Today, Demirok teaches sculpture.
Demirok’s art education has taken her to all borders of Turkey and some others, as well. Demirok gleaned experience in relief sculpture during courses at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey and studied art in America. She took some courses in neo-impressionism, drawing and sculpture at Westchester Community College in the early 90s. For four years, from 1996 to 2002, she worked in Irfan Korkmazlar’s workshop. Since 1999, she has been working out of her own Istanbul studio.
The artist has exhibited her sculptures in Germany, Spain, China, Austria, France and throughout Turkey. This is her second show at Broadway Gallery. The artist’s artwork was displayed at Miami Art Basel in 2005, at ARTSALZBURG in 2006 and at ARTENIM in Nimes, France the same year. Those arbiters of sculpting quality who decide the contents of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Sculpture Catalog selected Demirok’s work Shock as one of the “fine selected works.”
I wish I could have seen Shock.
Demirok’s solo show “No Thing” opened on May 16th and closed two weeks later. Curated by fellow countrywoman Tchera Niyego, “No Thing” occupied the first room of white space of the gallery. Another show not quite matching the earnest sobriety the front room occupied the larger room in the back. (There was a palm tree against a hot pink sunset. There were toy cars that drove themselves around mini-electric-colored tracks. It was best to take in one at a time.)
The sculptures stood on black or white boxes or on stands blanketed in burlap. The bases themselves are uniformly black rectangles or squares, with a signature or sign from the artist drawn in white. There were no moments of questioning whether or not the bases were part of the sculpture, no game of imagining the sculpture both ways, baseless, or with a base, as one might in considering what comprises a fully realized Brancusi. It did not seem that the installers of the show chose to incorporate the bases into the larger sculptures.
Demirok’s pieces are smaller in scale, ranging from about 22 to 52 centimeters in height. They take radically different, full forms, emerging out of very simple but very different original shapes. The Seal works out of a circular slab of wood that looked like an old plate. Thick silver-plated wires rise from the center concentrically, like enchanted spaghetti. Spinning Wheel sees its main form, a wooden stick, encircled by the same silver-plated wires.
The wooden objects that the silver pieces wrap, follow, complement and encircle resemble old, ancient even, household items. The suggested re-use of primitive materials finds a compelling parallel with Constantin Brancusi’s taking inspiration from the “primitive” objects of his untouched home country. With Brancusi’s work, mugs from Moldavian Romania and funeral pillars from Transylvania became reworked modern sculpture. I saw something similar in Demirok’s wooden inclusions. Writer Milton Fletcher mused at the opening about Demirok’s method: she “combines a carefully chosen wooden found object with hand tooled thin silver metallic ribbon-like strands that appear to undulate, creating an elegant grandeur and giving a new life to the original found object.” Demirok re-imagines these rural objects and reuses them in the new context of art making rather than simply for holding porridge.
Demirok also works with bronze. Several bronze casts were included in the show. The two casts Nothing and Humble were among them. Nothing is the first piece listed in the artist’s catalog and lent the entire show its name. The smooth-contoured cast forms a roundabout circle, its bulbous ends sinking into the base. The middle space of Nothing is a peering negative space, nothing inside and nothing behind or outside. In the white-walled space of a gallery, the negative space is more noticeable. There was nothing but white to look at between the dark bronze reaches of the cast sculpture.
Demirok cast Humble in 2006, unlike the others, which were almost all sculpted this year. Humble rather humbly climbs upward into itself as a gelatinous black mass. The cast leans left and grows outward, then comes back in to grow into another bronze bubble. There is something in the form that would imply the impertinent smirk and hip swivel of an adolescent girl. If Humble suggests the curves of an adolescent female, Demirok takes company with other sculptors who simplify but still effectively evoke the female form into mere movements, angles and curves. The slice of Demirok’s oeuvre that I’ve seen does not recommend an artist interested in sculptures that could be likened to Betty Boop. Humble’s title suggests that the artist did not intend to create anything that would resemble some thing, but a conceptual no thing.
Promotional materials prepared for the show described the “no-thingness” as a “blessing in disciplining the mind, body and speech…striving to be reunited with this state.” When I am encountered with art that overtly claims spirituality in art as its raison d’etre, I immediately expect color, movement and something of the sweeping optimism that one sees in Kandinsky’s palette. I look for sweeping anything. I expect the spiritual in art when I am told to see the spiritual in the art. Proposing “No Thing” as the spiritual in art, however, doesn’t seem like enough.
The exhibition provided a glance into a short period of Demirok’s long career as a sculptor. Removing the frames of intended meanings, the bulk of texts that accompanied the pieces and considering the sculptures on their own finds a stronger collection of work that signifies some thing.
Füge Demirok’s “No Thing”- Tchera Niyego
 |
 |
(Image 1: “Humble”, 9” x 2.3” x 2.3”, bronze cast on marble stand
Image 2: “Sealed”, 6” x 12” x 11”, wooden found object, silver plated metal)
Sealed; we are,
From Primordial Past to the Ultimate Future,
How is it possible to think it as nothing,
To wander around without a care, without a cure…
…Writes Fuge Demirok. Although in Turkish. This is my translation as opposed to the artist’s that was in Demirok’s ’07 catalog accompanying her solo exhibition I curated at Broadway Gallery in May.
Sarah Dotts, although still writing an article published in the previous Sept/ Oct issues of NY Arts on Demirok’s works exhibited; thinks that the problem might be in the translation. Dotts writes that the audience is deemed through this exhibition to think that it’s “spiritual”. Meaning after she obviously concluded it’s not. Spiritual…I can see that as a problem. To be made to think that something is spiritual when it’s not, I mean. Not that the translation is. A problem. Obviously translations are not ever free of being bound up in problems. It’s between the lines that we must read to comprehend the meaning and we’ve got to hear what’s not said out right but left unsaid for us to make an effort, even struggle with, in the case of reading translations. Especially so when we are reading devotional material like Demirok writes. If we’re going to be able to derive any meaning out of some most opaque devotional texts at all really, such as Rumi and Kabir who were also quoted in Demirok’s video presentation shown during this exhibition as well as in her catalog; we’d better be among the luckiest to have a teacher intimately familiar with the material to correctly interpret those lines. Chances are we simply won’t “get it” as the more dense the material gets which makes the translations of such, such double troubles.
The symbolism in Demirok’s work is somewhat more open to me than it is to Dotts as ideas, names and shapes become familiar from being exposed to Sufis while growing up in Turkey. From those great masters of the mystical tradition the artist quotes. I ask Demirok if she has a teacher giving her practice. She mumbles something blowing me off which can be interpreted as a yes, or a no for that matter. I take that, putting together with her body language; as a yes.
While in the ripening perception that “no-thingness” is what one can grow into, and being aware that it is a blessing in disciplining the mind, body and speech; Demirok strives to be reunited with this gnostic state. This is an ambitious attempt indeed as anyone involved in such pursuits would know only too uncomfortably well. Such an attempt to nullify one’s self in the Unknown and Unknowable and to seek no-thingness; may understandably seem quite peculiar to us, as it was to Dotts, being accustomed to much more conventional patterns of thinking/ feeling / acting. We are indeed accustomed to a screaming and yelling request from artists however unfortunately more often than not for attention to themselves.
Demirok wants us to pay attention as well to be certain. However here the artist is asking us to pay attention to the seemingly empty space which is inseparable from the “thing”, that is also her work, that is the seemingly solid bulk of bronze or sometimes wood matter. Yet Demirok asks us to pay attention to that which fills and surrounds all things through that matter she places before us. The “no-thingness” that Fuge Demirok points to with these works does not refer to a void or to an absence of something. We’re not asked to look at no-bronze phenomenon as opposed to bronze for its own sake. This “nothing” is in fact so absolutely and ultimately full that it cannot be articulated by our senses. It is, so to speak, what makes things what they are and not anything else.
Demirok’s works suggests that this -seemingly- empty space specifying the “thing” to exactly what it is and thereby enabling us to have a perception of any thing at all; if allowed, will slowly and surely creep into our mind stream and put it out of its business of convincing itself of nicely packaged little rationalities.
We cannot solidify this “no-thing” into an existing being, nor can we write it off as a non-existence. Non-duality beyond extremes is not going to conform into yet another well-defined pretty little concept we can then wrap our minds around and think we’ve got it figured out. We will never figure it out. Through surrender and immersion into this mystery we progress to the point of self-nullification and self-nullification becomes the ultimate creative act.
Demirok’s sculptures are the means, the tools, for the artist to communicate with us on paying attention to this. Demirok is not asking us to pay attention to herself as an autonomous, so-called individual being. Niether is she asking us to pay attention to the beginning, the end or a bit part of any thing. The artist is asking us to simply pay attention. Not to a thing.
After all who would be paying attention and to what, if we were, but for a moment, be free of our habit of constant self-referencing in desperate need for validation?
Material objects such as Demirok’s seemingly ever-so-solid bronze sculptures,
(one of which – the piece that lent its title to the show!- wisecracked to everyone’s astonishment during its shipping journey to New York!) and yes even human beings, are the empty space that surrounds them.
Spirituality is fundamentally a cognitive issue.
As Alan Brill, my dear beloved teacher David C. Smith tells us, put it once -and for all-; “ We get what we get!”
