SURET-SİZ

11) Available on the
Internet’s You Tube site,
this film is in two parts
totaling 15 minutes in
length
12) In a taped interview I
did with Burhan Doğançay
in New York in 1990,
he tearfully related the
price he had paid and
tribulations he had
suffered in leaving the
secure waters of the
civil service for life as a
freelance artist.
the gleam of metal parts. Leger’s adherence to a machine
esthetic as one way of expressing the modern world is shown
also in a film called La Ballet Mechanique which he shot
together with Man Ray in 1923-24. This work, the first avantgarde
film in the history of art, ends with the image of Charlie
Chaplin which had first been broken up and assumed all sorts
of shapes, almost as if representing the recombining in a new
synthesis of the figure which had been fragmented as a result
of cubist figure analysis. 11 This film is like a harbinger of
Charlie Chaplin’s 1935 work Modern Times, which describes
surplus value in capitalistic production as represented by
machinery, and which, dominated by the machine esthetic,
was the last of the silent movies.
The point which from Cezanne until that time had been
reached starting with the geometric analysis of nature and
arriving at the machine esthetic—this point had also attracted
the interest of Kazimir Malievich. Products of this approach
were the wood-planing man, The knifegrinder 1912, Boy
1928-1932, and Mover 1932. These conical curves were taken
up by Burhan Doğançay, whose efforts to bring together
the contemporary wall esthetic and art history have gone
through numerous phases since the 1970s. Towards the 90s
such paintings as Perfect curls 1986, Rolling yellow 1987,
and Kaleidoscopic women want 1987 have brought praise
throughout the world for Burhan Doğançay as an original
artist. 12 Like other pioneering Turkish artists, for example
Şemsi Arel and Abidin Elderoğlu, Doğançay adds a leavening
of traditional art to his contemporary efforts. Similarly to his
contemporary Erol Akyavaş, who also lived in New York, he
continued the debates leading up to the 1950s in our cultural
history right into the 70s and 80s, debates focusing on artistic
originality along an axis of east-west contradiction. In works
such as Double Happiness 1980, Little Homage to Calligraphy
1985, and Calligraphy 1986 traditional art is expressed as
the shadow of contemporary forms. The shadow is on the
surface, the contemporary is in the depths. In an untitled work
dated 1985 (101.6 X 101.6 cm), the shadow on the surface (the
traditional) and the contemporary expressed in the depths, are
represented by color tones as being nearly equal in value. That
which is in the depths is brought quite near to that which is on
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