Through the Innocent Evil Eyes of Genco Gulan

I’ve thought this to myself for so long that I’m afraid it’s a cliche—that Genco Gulan is the Andy Kaufman of visual art. Naively charming, vaguely annoying, disarmingly intelligent, wackily political, naturally unclassifiable—the Turk Gulan shares much with the late American Kaufman. They even share a physical resemblance.

I’d realized I had a Turkish pick-up line, though I’m not the type of guy that would try to pick-up Genco. “You’re Turkish? Orhan Pamuk is my favorite writer.” It was 1998 and a comment like that from an American was sure to raise Ottoman eyebrows and generate warm feelings of kinship. Genco was a frequent visitor to an art piece I was doing with collaborator Matt Vis at HEREart in New York. I wasn’t sure at the time what attracted him to my undisciplined work, but as I’ve gotten to know Genco’s work I can hazard some guesses. Maybe it was the constant change, the plethora of media, or the public intervention. But surely it was its determined humanness.

Genco’s work shares these qualities, especially the human one. Sometimes the humans are defying classification, or trying desperately to classify themselves. There is the man changing his identity through barbaring, the artist Van Goghing his ear, the Star Nose figures dancing around a plaza.

The humans in Genco’s work are often engaging technology, whether it’s girls pushing a television around the deep end of a pool, a 3D graph of a hooded head, or two people exchanging glances aboard mass transportation. Maybe it’s live webcam images of New Yorkers moving about their city, inset over a video of ancient ruins beneath the Aegean in Gumusluk.

Or another web piece that shows similar webcams of New York coupled with webcams from Istanbul. Mostly traffic cams, the humans in these images scurry about their streets and advertisements like ants on their mysterious missions, or they drive around in their “shiny metal boxes.” When you press the button that says “click here to listen,” voices literally from above cackle out of the computer speakers with New York’s JFK airport tower transmissions. The title Whenever I hear a plane reminds me that Genco and I were both living in New York on September 11th, and that while I was worried about my home he was worried about his two homes.

The Sunday following September 11th, Genco and I met up and ventured downtown. As we walked onto West Broadway, which always featured a perfectly framed view of the World Trade Center at it’s sourthern end, Genco gasped and (I’m paraphrasing) said “Holy shit! It’s really gone!” It’s as if the last 6 days of watching the TV and seeing the pictures in the paper and looking south from his Columbia University area apartment weren’t enough to register for Genco, and he was seeing this omnipresent reality with new eyes. And that, like Kaufman, is Genco’s greatest talent—to see that which has been seen so much and see it freshly anew.

Genco often expresses what he sees through technology, and at times he can look like Andy Kaufman again when fumbling with it. Because for all his interest in technology, its mechanics do not seem to come easily to him. His physical efforts with laptops, small video cameras, transmitters and thrift store TV’s sometime resemble the kinetic disasters of Lucille Ball. Few viewers actually get to witness this marvelous performance element to his work.

When Genco’s work is up and functioning, it facilitates the position of armchair voyeur. The viewer simultaneously monitors East and West, his home and my home, past and present, onstage and backstage without leaving his or her seat.

Genco is at his most mischievous with his Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum. Like Kaufman’s work in professional wrestling, the Art Sanat Museum Muze is Genco’s ongoing masterpiece of deception. Along with his thriving and elusive institution, founder Mehmet Sinan’s reputation is spreading far beyond the boundaries of the Museum itself.

My only trip to Istanbul so far came at Gulan’s invitation. He had set up a workshop at the Gumusluk Akademy and invited some of his New York artist/friends, including me, to come teach. He and I disagreed a bit on what that meant, but we got over it because we are brothers. After an incredible week there, we roadtripped to Istanbul via Genco’s parents house at the beautiful beach in Cesme. His father, the Turkish-gangster-character-actor/architect and his mother fed us like royalty and we bought corn-on-the-cob on the beach.

Genco hoped my experiences in Turkey would lead me to create a different piece than the one I’d planned, but it didn’t happen that way. I made a piece called Semi Tough: You da Bomb at Selda Asal’s The Apartment in Taksim. I striped out the floor of the room upstairs like an American football field. In the endzones, I built cardboard cities, a blue city and a red one. We assembled a blue team and a red team and played a game of football. As players from each team scored, flinging ourselves across the goal lines, we destroyed parts of the opposing team’s city until both were completely flattened.

Genco was working with little robots at the time, playing a BattleBot sort of game with them. He decided to put his robots on a scaled down version of my playing field, with little cardboard cities. Where my piece turned art viewers into weaponry, Genco’s piece removed humans from the war game completely, emphasizing the way the West purports to fight its wars.

In another game, the ensemble all-girl cast in tele-rugby acclimate themselves to the pool they’re in. They develop some control over the TV at its bottom and literally begin pushing it around, sometimes fighting each other, sometimes the TV. Are they fighting television and it’s representations? It’s cultural intrusion? Or for their own chances at celebrity?

Lobsters stood in for the fighting humans in Genco’s Liberty Game, shown at the Game Show at HEREart in 2000. The lobsters’ heroic struggle was cut short when an unwitting HERE employee turned off the lights for the night, shutting off the power to the pump that kept the lobsters’ tank percolating with oxygen. The collision of Genco’s planned piece and it’s unplanned plot twist reminds me of why more people should travel. Traveling reminds the traveler that all of us everywhere go through our daily routines, aiming towards our long-term goals, and lodging our complaints about our governments, bosses, etc. All the while we all rely on the system to function just enough to serve our basic needs. Then someone, somewhere, who thinks they know what they’re doing flips a switch and lobsters perish.

Six years after I met Genco, Orhan Pamuk is now passe amongst Turkish intellectuals—“Too popular.” Genco and his talented green-eyed bride Yesim have a family, their son Sinan-Can having been saved by the wrestling gardener of Gumusluk. Mehmet Sinan, the ghost in the machine, has curated shows outside of his own museum and country. And Genco might visit New York next year. Maybe we’ll go to JFK and cut our hair in the security line before surrendering our scissors and razors and fly back to Turkey. Or we’ll barbar in my living room and keep tabs on it all online.

—Tim Hailey
written entirely on airplanes over North America, 2004