February 16, 2015 by deborahsemeldemirtas

Women in Art

The following pictures are from the installation titled ‘2000 Women’ from 2000 that featured 2000 drawings of naked women. The drawings were all copies of about 7 classic nude images from artists ranging from Reubens to Degas.

After the exhibit, I thought that a better title might be ‘Backfired’.

(unfortunately, best resolution I’ve got – sorry…)

That’s because the original intent of this piece – together with ‘Nü-Nar’ (‘Nude-Pomegranate’), another installation in the British Council’s gallery in Ankara – was to raise the issue of the commodification of women through art.

With 2000 women, I thought that the entire piece would turn into a giant abstract work that would in some sense supersede the individual drawings (200 per month over a 10-month period, 50/week, Mon-Friday, 10/day). In a sense it did, but in a sense, it did not. Horny men still expressed the most interest in the big-busted blondes, whereas they had less appreciation for well-drawn feet and faces.

I thought I would post these today, 4 days after a young woman in the southern Turkish city of Mersin was murdered by a would-be rapist.

The first photo below is another exhibition shot, but the next 2 are pictures of some tea trays I decorated using parts of some drawings that had been in the exhibition. Over the weekend, I had a box of about 200 of the drawings on sale at an open-air Bazaar in Turgutreis that hoped to breathe some life into the dead downtown of a tourist trap in winter and earn some money for some women trying to improve their economic circumstances.

Money – Sex – Violence – Power.

These are the things that ‘art’ messes with.

In the meantime, my husband and I happily celebrated Valentine’s Day with a dinner out on the town:
I’d rather celebrate love than excoriate hate.

Let’s see how to ‘tag’ this one, folks.

February 12, 2015 by deborahsemeldemirtas

Clearing up the mess…

I am sitting and waiting for my husband to wake up so we can have a late breakfast before he goes to work this afternoon and I go down to the Turgutreis Sevgi Yolu Sevgililer Panayır (very loosely translated to the Valentines Day Bazaar on Turgutreis’s Lover’s Lane).

While clearing up the mess in my studio (a never-ending process) and packing up some drawings to take down for my ‘discount days’ art sale at the bazaar, I came across the following text glued inside the cover of a box holding some old papers. I have no idea when I wrote this, or what I wrote it for, but I like it, and I thought I’d share it, for what it’s worth.

Aesthetics

What is Art About?
What do we look at to judge the value of a work of art?

Renaissance to Pre-Modern:

Mimetic. Art is about how it represents things.
We judge the value of a work of art by appreciating its formal qualities.
(What happens after the invention of photography?)

Modern:

Aesthetic. Art is about how it represents things.
We judge the value of a work of art by appreciating its formal qualities.
(What happens after the ‘white square’ or ‘black square’?)

Post Modern:

NOT primarily Visual. Art is about anything.
If art is about anything, how can we judge a work of art?
What kind of knowledge is necessary to judge?

_________________________________________________________

The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions to be a Work of Art

1. Be about something.
2. Embody its meaning. (IN other words, art should give form to an idea.)

And on that note, here’s an idea 😉

February 10, 2015 by deborahsemeldemirtas

More long, tall art

As is wont these days, I will begin with full disclosure:

These pieces are from last week.

Since then, I’ve spent my time on

1. ‘engaging in paid work’ (boring);

2. developing a project (not boring, but definitely more left-brain than studio work);

3. visiting (sometimes I like to do that); and

4. (starting yesterday,) being cold.

But I must have hit a button on the computer that allowed Facebook to reassess its mystical algorithm, because I’ve had some people noticing the last couple of art-related posts, i.e., the top parts of these 2 pieces – ‘Early Gardens’ and ‘Hittite Mommy’ – both from my ‘Column Collage’ series.

Because they are so long, along with the full piece, I like to post the parts, so that you can see the details.

So, below, here are the top (again), middle and bottom of ‘Early Gardens’, followed by 5 segments (from very top to very bottom) of ‘Hittite Mommy’.