Between Men
Catalog text for Rasim Aksan’s solo exhibition “12.12.12″ at Galerist, Istanbul. December 2016.
Approaching the new series of works by Rasim Aksan, before attempting a critical reading, as a female writer I first had to get familiarized with ‘daybreak cards’ – an image-object that stands at the core of day counting practices within mandatory military service in Turkey, one of the most deeply ingrained and widely spread rituals associated with male bonding through suffering and projection in the context of confinement. These four-fold cards are printed by several companies and distributed inside military camps and service manuals; a wide choice of software and online services for customized daybreak cards also exist. The front side of these cards combine erotic photographs of semi-naked women, images of the motherland to be defended by male soldiers with heavy weaponry and a kitsch imagery composed of flowers, bouquets and hearts alongside words of love and longing. On the flip side are a calendar and a graphic rendering of the number 365 or 460 – the number of days one has to spend in the military service - composed of small numbered boxes to be filled as days go by.
These daybreak cards and associated rituals stand at the center of Aksan’s exhibition 12.12.12. Through his extremely detailed, time consuming hyperrealist work the artist establishes a clear analogy between his chosen method and medium of work and the act of counting days by meticulously scratching one box everyday to achieve a larger image in the end of a long process. This analogy is further reinforced by the title of the exhibition that refers to the date when the artist was first drafted into mandatory military service and underlines the autobiographical tone of the exhibition. Aksan reinterprets the imagery of daybreak cards with a critical focus on the associative relationships they build between patriotic sacrifice to defend the homeland, longing for loved ones, war scenes filled with heavy weaponry and eroticized female bodies. His arrangements shed light on these images as privileged objects of male projection throughout the experience of military service that lies at the foundation of an exclusively male socialization and as such they reflect back on the patriarchal power relations within contemporary Turkish society.
The coexistence of images and texts, as well as the four-fold narrative structure of these works open up multiple avenues for interpretation. As such, they can be read in the light of a few distinct but interrelated points of convergence between several artistic forms in their historical specificity on one hand and strategies of social engineering and homosocial male bonding in the context of military confinement on the other.
What transpires initially from the image and text arrangements of Aksan’s daybreak cards is a melodramatic tone that combines heroic male aspirations, self-sacrifice for greater moral values of patriotism, a fascination with heavy weaponry and combat scenes with a sense of continued suffering through longing for the loved ones, as well as for eroticized female bodies as sites for sexual release. The textual messages shift between the four images and create a space of open association between these distinct elements.
Upon closer inspection and through the sheer number of examples at view, these combinations offer an insight on the strict but undisclosed rules of their arrangement. Textual messages such as “You are my longing”, “This passion will never end” or “You are hidden in my every teardrop” are exclusively reserved for images of flowers and hearts but never printed alongside erotic images. Another kind of textual message is reserved for scenes of combat and underlines the dedication and sacrifice of the individual in defense of the homeland while reinforcing some of the founding myths of Turkish national identity: “Every Turk is born a soldier”, “All I think about is my homeland” or “We have written every inch of this land with our blood”. This rule of association creates a space of transition between love and sacrifice for the motherland and longing for one’s family or lover, while strictly forbidding any affective bonds with female bodies. Text is consistently missing from the erotic images. Operating on a subliminal level, this structure of the messages paradoxically forbids love for female bodies and encourages their objectification as sites of sexual release, while it sanctions the close association between motherly affection and sacrifice for the homeland qualified as ‘mother’.
Military service, as a rite of passage, has been and continues to be a foundational experience of exclusively male socialization in modern Turkey, and just like all institutions of confinement it is an essential pillar through which patriarchal values are engineered, fined-tuned, adapted and reproduced within the individual – in this case exclusively male – members of society. In Aksan’s exhibition this aspect of social criticism is underlined through several other works on display, notably an installation of works on paper depicting portraits of family members where the artists’ self-portrait as a schoolboy in uniform stands out. Through primary and middle school, and later the military service, we are contained and united in uniforms. The family photographs are tucked into a half-window sill, bringing into the exhibition space a fragment from a family home that functions in parallel to the daybreak cards, this is a partial fragment from the domestic space where women – not the erotic objects but mothers, sisters and wives - await and pray for their absent male relatives.
Much of the last few decades’ writing about patriarchal structures emphasizes that ‘obligatory heterosexuality’ is built into male-dominated kinship systems. In her seminal work “Between Men”, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick argues that ‘in a society where men and women differ in their access to power, there will be important gender differences in the structure and constitution of sexuality’, a consequence of which is a ‘strict opposition between homosociality and homosexuality of men, whereas for women, there seems to be a widely accepted continuity’. What might first appear paradoxical in Aksan’s daybreak cards can be understood in light of this analysis: while enabling a homosocial male desire to emerge among its youth, the military apparatus also needs to enclose those same desires in strictly heterosexual forms, forbidding any allusion to male homosexuality within its confines, and this is precisely what the eroticized female bodies are meant to achieve. The artist hints at this potential continuity between homosociality and homosexuality in another series of works: a number of cards he has reproduced and modified are scattered on the floor of the gallery, advertising for sex workers of both heterosexual and trans women.
The violence and sexuality, as well as the moral codes imaged in these cards are not merely theatrical, nor exclusively confined to the spatial and temporal limits of military service. They are representative of a pathos that not only shapes and translates certain traits of popular contemporary Turkish culture but also reiterates itself constantly by borrowing imagery from our global interconnected visual culture. In his reinterpretation, Aksan conserves the rules of association described above but replaces and reshuffles the iconography on these cards by inserting images found online, of half-nude international celebrities, images reminiscent of Hollywood blockbuster film posters and at times he replaces the figure of the soldier with a self-portrait. This editorial gesture diversifies and extends source materials on one hand, pointing at specific microcultural interpretations of images in mass circulation, and more importantly at the complicities between global and local representations of patriarchal values. On the other hand, by weaving ‘selfies’ into the fabric of this grand narrative of male patriotism and longing, it brings into critical focus mechanisms of projection and internalization at work between grand political narratives and individual identity within this specific iconography.
*Photo credit: Ridvan Bayrakoglu