This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 7, 2008 - Serkan Ozkaya, the young Turkish artist currently featured at Boots Contemporary Art, is someone to keep an eye on. In spite of (or maybe because of?) being enamored with appropriation and reproduction, Ozkaya creates a magical quality with his art that makes one remember and long for that thrill of encountering an original -- in whatever form.
It all makes sense if you imagine Ozkaya's experiences growing up in Istanbul, first encountering masterpieces of Western art in reproductions, many of them cheaply printed. The quality of the imagery evidently didn't detract from Ozkaya's excitement. If anything, it made him more acutely attuned to the ontology of the book reproduction, and its medium of support -- paper.
His attention to paper is partly what's behind "A sudden gust of wind," Ozkaya's installation at Boots. To "get" what Ozkaya does so well with this installation, it bears returning to the original sources -- the Japanese artist Hokusai's 19th century color woodblock print, "Ejiri in Suruga Province (A Sudden Gust of Wind)," and Canadian artist Jeff Wall's staged photograph, "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)" of 1993.
Hokusai's enchanting print has foot travelers surprised by a gale, their hats and papers born aloft and sailing above marshy rice fields. Wall's photograph restages Hokusai's scene, with two of his characters wearing contemporary business attire, likewise surprised by a strong wind, losing their papers and looking particularly besieged against the ugly backdrop of an industrial viaduct, scraggly trees and forlorn telephone poles.
In Hokusai's image, the minor catastrophe we witness is wrought by nature. The wind is reminding us what is ultimately in control of our destinies -- not our own plans and desires, but the earth itself. In Wall's image, the details make clear that it's not nature in charge of our reality, but the volatility of the market, the system we use to organize our contemporary world. And when it comes right down to it, this world's stability is dictated by forces that are as unpredictable and insubstantial as, well, paper. (One is reminded of Marx's warning about capital from The Communist Manifesto: "All that is solid melts into air.")
Ozkaya has distilled these two memorable images down to a conceptual shorthand, using standard white A4 paper suspended by invisible threads in a frozen, one might say breathless, imitation of the more animated predecessors. The installation feels icy, devoid of the familiar details of Wall's picture and the quaint humor of Hokusai's scene. But it also gets to the heart of the matter, constructing with paper rather than representing it or working upon it, and effectively reintroducing the subject of bureaucratic capitalism using an altogether new strategy.
Boots' Juan William Chavez deserves our thanks for bringing an artist of Ozkaya's amazing sensibility to St. Louis. If this is your first encounter with Ozkaya, don't let it be your last. He's shown all over the world but it's evidently not gone to his head yet. His wit is keen but he's never overbearing, and he learns as much from his works as we do.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.