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Bedri Baykam, Interviewee 
David Applefield, Interviewer
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Bedri Baykam Calvary China ink on paper, 1963 (age 6) |
As Turkey struggles to find its place in the European family, famed Turkish painter and cultural provacateur Bedri Baykam launches his most audacious coup to date: a deeply personal retrospective of a half century of art and action echoing the political and social turmoil of his country. A record 3000 people turn out for the grand opening in the Atatuerk Kueltuer Merkezi in central Istanbul.
Turkey´s contradictions between economic sophistication and blatant poverty, democratic aspirations and human rights record, and worldly intellectuals amongst virulent fundamentalists, baffle many Western analysts ready to accept Turkey as a European equal. At worst, Turkey´s external image remains stymied by unfortunate cultural stereotypes--belly dancers, Gaestearbeiters, Midnight Express, Byzantine exoticism--the very things that Baykam and his three decades of abstract expressionism, multimedia performance art, and politicized conceptual installations have attempted to dismantle. "If we don´t represent an economic advantage to Western museums and galleries we´re as valuable as monkeys in a zoo," the painter states.
Son of the late Suphie Baykam, a high official in the PH opposition party and elected member of Parliament, Bedri lives in a sprawling but cluttered modern apartment overlooking the Bosphors with his journalist wife, Sibel, their three year old Suphi, and Baykam´s mother. Amidst unruly stacks of old Millyiet and Cumhuriyet, Turkey´s leading left-leaning dailies, books, files, toys, a battery of computers, modems, and scanner, a 6-foot home entertainment screen on which the Turkish football matches are watched religiously, the painter-activist plans and plots. Baykam´s work incorporates objects, political news, old love letters, cut-outs of glossy porn stars and photographs of himself, and thus nothing can be tossed until the artist combs the print with scissors. It all becomes art and statement.
One wonders if it isn´t obsessiveness that ultimately cements an artist´s place in the history books. Driven by a passion to prove to the Western art establishment that talent and innovation are universal--in 1993 he installed a public ballot box and asked viewers to vote on the question "Do Monkeys Have a Right to Paint?" With 93% answering yes, he decided to keep painting. Part of Baykam´s genius is his seemingly non-depletable energy to both create and self-promote, which he does with an unabashed bravado, often converting simple fans into adoring believers. His greatest accomplishment may be the way he has activated sponsors, banks, city government, Turkish Airlines, and a major industrial holding company, to publicly back art that openly affronts the values and traditions of its own culture.
Parts of Istanbul today feel like San Francisco, Milan, or Frankfurt with mosques. Traffic is dense and late-model BMWs and Mercedes are plentiful. Young Istanbulers speed around with cell phones, packs of Marlboros, and palm pilots. It is said that there are more cell phones in Istanbul per capita than anywhere in the world but Helsinki, the home of Nokia. Fewer and few Turks have time or patience for the old Turkey. One young taxi driver couldn´t even find the Blue Mosque, Istanbul´s most celebrated Islamic venue.
Three large rooms are filled with paintings, drawings, documents, objects and letters spanning the artist´s life achievements beginning at the age of 2, when his first drawings were touted as those of a child prodigy and written about as early as 1964 when the Washington Post featured him. A total of 240 works, plainly hung and at times overly crowded, steer viewers from Baykam´s early line drawings of cowboys and Indians through his recent layered paintings of cars, naked women, computer screens, weapons of mass destruction and Third World revolutionaries.
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