Polytropy

This is a report from five years ago on an art exhibit in Istanbul called “Doublethink.” I had an amusing encounter with one of the artists, and I had a conversation with the curator, who like George Orwell had attended Eton College. I wrote my report in three emails, given here with their timestamps. Because I mention some sculptures at the Nesin Mathematics Village, I have added the best photographs that I could find of them among the pictures that I have taken at the Village. Unfortunately I don’t seem to have documented the sculptures as such.

If he or she really wanted to praise doublethink, somebody with a classical education might mention Book VI of Homer’s Iliad, where Hector

• asserts, “the day will surely come when mighty Ilius shall be destroyed with Priam and Priam’s people”;
• prays to God, as if it were possible, “grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among the Trojans.”

I wrote about Book VI, later in 2017, where I am now, in Altınova, Ayvalık, Balıkesir, Turkey, on the beach opposite the island of Lesbos. Last year here, I brought up the Book in writing about the Law of Contradiction as discussed in Plato’s Republic. Hector’s meeting with Andromache and their son is a standard example with me.

I recently joined a new discussion of the Republic. It had begun in May and is set to last a year (so the readings are short). Another participant shared with me a petition or “open letter” about an attempt to turn his American university’s mission into health and anti-racism, rather than research and education. Perhaps the art show that I discuss below represents a similar trend. The move at UMass Boston is criticized in the Boston Globe, as I learn from a newsletter that came up (along with the petition itself) in a DuckDuckGo search.

Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 8:13 AM

Through August 6, Pera Museum in Istanbul has an exhibition called “Doublethink: Double Vision.” I saw it recently and shall probably see it again. However, the promotional text criticizes “linear Platonic thinking”:

Thinking has changed radically, but many people don’t appear to have noticed. Our institutions have been stuck on linear Neo-Platonic tracks for 24 centuries. These antiquated processes of deduction have lost their authority. Just like art it has fallen off its pedestal. Legal, educational and constitutional systems rigidly subscribe to these; they are 100% text based.

‘You probably think of Doublethink as a negative concept. We in Russia think of it as just the beginning,’ says Russian artist, Pavel Pepperstein …

I’m not sure this can be taken any more seriously than words from President Trump’s mouth (or tweets from his fingers)—except that to inhibit thinking is very serious indeed. In the catalogue, the curator says more:

In 1984 the State used Doublethink to ignore anything but its own ‘correct’ thinking. Today Doublethink is our only hope, and artists from around the world are showing how to develop not just doublethink, but polythink, thinking along multiple parallel or tangential lines at the same time.

… [Orwell] was a great radical socialist thinker, but still he could not shake all his shackles to his gender, class, and all-boy classical education. He thought linearly. The line was heading in the wrong direction. His book was a warning of the crash ahead, a crash he wanted the world to avoid. Pepperstein’s point is that Orwell’s end of the world was actually the beginning of a new world, and it should have happened earlier.

The line of thinking, passed from Socrates to Plato and then down through the main western school room of neo-platonic thought for twenty four centuries, should have hit the buffers at the end of the nineteenth century if the early Modernists had done their job…

This is rich, coming from Alistair Hicks, who

was educated at Eton College, and subsequently at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, graduating in 1978 with an Art History MA. Hicks then continued to study at Emory University, Georgia, USA to read Art and Business.

This is from Wikipedia [last accessed, August 20, 2022], where the info is unsourced; but the person who wrote it last August 7 [2017] called herself jessicatamman, and there is apparently a Jessica Tamman at the Tate in London. Probably the info is correct.

Does Hicks then think that he himself has shaken the shackles of his own all-boy classical education? Again from the appropriate Wikipedia articles [as accessed in 2017]:

Following the public school tradition, Eton is a full boarding school, which means all pupils live at the school, and it is one of four such remaining single-sex boys’ public schools in the United Kingdom … to continue this practice.

[St Andrews] is the oldest of the four ancient universities of Scotland and the third oldest university in the English-speaking world (following Oxford and Cambridge).

St Andrews did start admitting women at the end of the nineteenth century. Hicks also “was Senior Curator at Deutsche Bank for 20 years.” Deutsche Bank lent hundreds of million dollars to Trump and is now being asked by Democrats in Congress whether those loans were backed by Russia.

Why is everything coming back to Russia now?

Apparently Hicks will be speaking at the Pera Museum tomorrow evening with one of the artists, Marko Mäetamm, whose work called “Alphabet of Lies” I quite enjoyed. Maybe I shall be able to go listen.

Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 6:23 PM

I was just able to chat with the curator, Alistair Hicks. By linear thinking he seems to mean progress towards a unique ideal. He cheerfully admits to not having cast off the shackles of his Eton education.

Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 5:54 AM

I have since found websites describing a distinction between linear and non-linear thinking. The distinction being described may be real, but I don’t know how well the terminology fits.

When Alistair Hicks criticizes what he calls linear thought, I suppose he is taking a standard postmodernist line—indeed, a line!—whereby there is no “grand narrative.” In his chat with me, he did not mention a narrative, but he did deny the idea of progress.

I agreed with him to the extent of allowing that progress was not inevitable. It was something that must be worked for. I tried to say that, through curating the “Doublethink: Double Vision” exhibit, Hicks had tried to achieve some kind of progress. He accepted the appointment as curator, and presumably he tried to do a good job at at, according to his own standards of goodness.

I don’t think he quite saw my point. He just talked about what he had in fact tried to do with his show: give the artists a voice, or something like that. The emphasis was on the artists, rather than himself.

Our conversation occurred on the ground floor of the Pera Museum, while the Estonian artist Marko Mäetamm was writing on the wall of the nearby men’s room about how he had become an artist.

I had used that men’s room on arrival at the museum at 3:55 PM. At 4 o’clock, Mäetamm was supposed to be

live drawing on Pera Museum’s elevator and restroom walls openly in public. Mäetamm will re-create his work “How I Became an Artist” and following this, he and curator Alistair Hicks will be discussing his works.

As I bought my ticket, I learned that this “live drawing” would begin right there on the ground floor, then continue on the fourth floor. I didn’t feel like standing around on the ground floor, where there were no exhibits; so I went upstairs. The “Doublethink: Double Vision” show was on the fourth and fifth floors. Soon I heard people saying that Mäetamm’s performance had begun on the ground floor. I followed them down and found a crowd around the men’s room where I had relieved myself. There was a queue of people filing in to see what Mäetamm was doing.

Meanwhile, I saw a fellow milling about who must be the curator. My impulse was to berate him for his hypocritical condemnation of Orwell. Again, Hicks had written of Orwell, “he could not shake all his shackles to his gender, class, and all-boy classical education. He thought linearly. The line was heading in the wrong direction.”

I did recognize that a condemnatory tone on my own part would not do. When Hicks was not chatting with somebody else, I introduced myself and asked if he could help me understand what he had written in the exhibition catalogue. He undertook to fulfill my request. He was pleasant, perhaps a bit didactic, but not peremptory.

We didn’t get too far though. Looking for some common ground, I asked if Hicks knew Collingwood’s Principles of Art. He hadn’t heard of Collingwood.

It does seem to me a tragedy that an art professional has not read Collingwood. The book is 80 years old now, and art has changed; but the book is still in print, and has there been any other comparable attempt to say what art is? Or is the whole problem that Collingwood was writing for Modernists, and now we are supposed to be Postmodernists, but nobody can say what this means?

I did not want to bore Mr Hicks, though he did not seem to be trying to get rid of me. In fact he asked me whether I was an artist. Not exactly, I said; I was a mathematician. He seemed to find this interesting, and he observed that the work of Keith Tyson used mathematics, and one of Tyson’s works was in the exhibit. He described this work as “the pyramid,” but this description was not enough to remind me of what it was.

At some point I let Hicks go. Since Mäetamm was apparently still surrounded by a crowd in the men’s room, I went upstairs. On the first floor was a permanent exhibit of Turkish coffee cups. Out of one of the secret doors used by guards, a fellow emerged wearing a dinosaur costume.

He went looking for something he couldn’t find. I proposed to him that he was the artist, and he agreed. I pointed out another secret door. It was what he wanted. He went in and came out in a Bugs Bunny costume.

I found Mäetamm again on the fourth floor, writing on the elevator door in Turkish. He was copying from the translation that somebody had supplied him. Folks were gathered around him, taking snapshots of an artist at work.

I looked through the “Doublethink” show again. I also looked again at the show on the third floor, called “Erotic Nature,” consisting of works by Costa Rican sculptor José Sancho. The works were gorgeous, and as a text somewhere said, they were reminiscent of Brancusi; but perhaps because of this, I wondered if Sancho’s works were really art as opposed to mere decoration.

I did want Ali Nesin to see the show. A few years ago, the Nesin Mathematics Village hosted a sculpture school. Great blocks of marble were brought in, carved, and left behind. Unfortunately they still look like that: great blocks of marble that somebody has carved. For example, one block was carved into the form of a stack of folded blankets. It is still a block of stone. When José Sancho carves a block into a human torso or a coiled snake, it doesn’t look like a block of stone any more.

I didn’t think I needed to stick around to hear Alistair Hicks talk to Marko Mäetamm on a stage. I did have another look at the men’s room I had used. It was empty now. Mäetamm’s text on the wall above the urinal described a childhood of weekly visits to the public baths with his mother, while his father was off on a fishing boat. Young Marko was fascinated by the naked bodies of the women in the sauna. He started drawing them, along with other things.

I went outside. I walked back over to İstiklâl Avenue. In the Arter exhibition space there, I looked at the show, “Ways of Seeing,” curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, “internationally recognized independent curators and academics, and the co-founders of Art Reoriented, a multidisciplinary curatorial platform based in Munich and New York”; but I shall not now try to say anything about this. [The original link does not work, but the Internet Archive confirms the quote; the duo’s current About page, as of August, 2022, has activities since the Arter exhibit.]