Cells, Cells, Cells… The Latest Works by Deniz Ayg�n
Selma Stern
In Prison
Wearily, drearily,
Half the day long,
Flap the great banners
High over the stone;
Strangely and eerily
Sounds the wind’s song,
Bending the banner-poles.
While, all alone,
Watching the loophole’s spark,
Lie I, with life all dark,
Feet tethered, hands fettered
Fast to the stone,
The grim walls, square lettered
With prisoned men’s groan.
Still strain the banner-poles
Through the wind’s song,
Westward the banner rolls
Over my wrong.
William Morris (1834-1896)
In the 17th Century, the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza
observed that “Man is a social animal.” We just cannot live without other
people around us. The worst punishment prisons have for inmates is total
isolation. In her latest works, the young Turkish talent Deniz Ayg�n, too, has
reflected upon prison cells and isolation. After a strike in Turkey in 2001
that went against prisons maintaining one-person-cells, Ayg�n, who was born in
New York in 1974, started focusing on prisons, especially single person cells
and their inmates. Like Spinoza, she turns towards general reflections about
the human being, his body, his isolation, his need for and possibilities of
communication with the outside world.
Maybe unique in contemporary art, the subject matter of prisons and
imprisonment of the human being, however, is an old one and can be found in
prose, writing and canvases throughout centuries. For instance, Oscar Wilde’s
noteworthy piece after his time in prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>, is a
gripping account of prison brutality based on his own experiences and a plea
for prison reform. Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), one of the most popular and
respected French history painters of the nineteenth century, had his first
great success at the 1824 Salon with Joan of Arc in Prison
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’>.
Vincent van Gogh’s Prisoners Exercise
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> was
painted during van Gogh’s time in Saint-R�my in 1890. The original of this
work, Newgate: The Exercise Yard, was drawn by Gustave Dor�
(1933-1883) and published in the volume “London, a Pilgrimage” by Blanchard
Jerrold (London, 1872). The subject matter itself is of particular interest,
given Vincent’s own self-imposed internment. The painting, which is hosted in
the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, shows the deadly monotony of life at Saint-Paul
de Mausole.
Deniz Ayg�n’s images, painted with different oil and pigment mixtures,
sometimes appearing fresco-like, show cells with single beds in them. She uses
the bed as symbol for the body. Ayg�n stated: “I think of the bed as a
turned-over self-portrait, pushed over with the immense effort of violence, or
of creativity. The body turning into a bed, reminds me of Gregor Samsa in Franz
Kafka’s novel Metamorphosis, transforming into a beetle.
Ayg�n’s works, at the same time, deal with a further topic, namely the
artist’s own imprisonment. A painter’s workshop or a dancer’s studio can become
a prison, an isolation that may help to create but cuts off from communication
with the outside world. The phenomenon of the artist as self-imprisoning
subject was very clearly demonstrated by the stage performance Le Cage
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> in 1997 at
the Quebec Museum. Choreographer Christiane B�langer together with 8 further
dancers pushed around a cage on wheels in which the Jean Gaudreau painted live
on stage. The walls of the prison consisted of the artist’s canvases and a
camera installed inside the cell allowed the audience to follow the scene.
Similar feelings were stated by Deniz Ayg�n: “In the summer of 2001, as
I started to draw my studio, the interiors started to gain more weight. There
was only a bed, a painting on the wall, a chair, and a bulb hanging from the
ceiling. The objects appeared as spots in front of the light coming from the
window. I started to visualize the subject in a Vermeerish composition. While
making the second, the third and later versions, the room was getting more
abstract. What I have done wasn’t an artist’s studio anymore, but a
studio-cell.”
After the war in Iraq, Ayg�n’s works trace the subject matter of
chemical and other weapons suitable for mass destruction. She writes down her
thoughts and makes notes on nuclear studio-cells. At the end one can read,
“Nobody deserves this”.
Latest Exhibition: “
style=’mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK1′>Body in the Cell” by Deniz Ayg�n, 25
February-13 March 2004,
style=’mso-bookmark:OLE_LINK3′>Karby Sanat, �alybmalary, Ystiklal
Caddesi Elhamra Pasajy No.258, Kat.2, Beyoßlu, Istanbul, Turkey. Further
information on the artist and contact details:
name="OLE_LINK6">denizaygun.lebriz.net,
http://www.lebriz.com.
Suggested readings:
Hulsker, Jan, The New Complete Van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings,
Sketches (J. M. Meulenhoff, 1996).
Morris, William, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-ansi-language:EN-US’> (London,
Bell and Daldy, 1858).
