Pinar Yolacan
High fashion may be the ultimate symbol of civilization at its furthest from nature, but Turkish-born and New York-based photographer Pinar Yolacan demonstrates that fashion can also illustrate our most anti-social desires and our fundamental fear of the fallibility of our flesh.
While still in art school, Yolacan staged her first solo show London's Pineal Eyes shop. The organic sculptures she crafted in Ankara and exhibited in London employed foods‚ natural decaying process as a metaphor for women's anatomy. Yolacan lined a pumpkin with velvet and upholstered with pins, she replaced the skin of a melon with gold sequins, quilted sheep's heart and adorned a cabbage's leaves with utilitarian snaps standard in the fashion industry. These additions give the fragile fruit the appearance of having mechanical qualities, but also highlighted its anthropomorphic aspects. An eggplant, which Yolacan spliced to form a purse and filled with human pubic hair, was designed to resemble a vagina.
Recently Yolacan further critically engages contemporary Western culture's responses to women's flesh with 'Perishables', a series of arresting portraits of elderly ladies modeling stylish garments made from sagging chicken. All of the images in 'Perishables,' which was her first shown at New York's Rivington Arms gallery, held from December 2004 to February 2005, are untitled and show a solitary elderly Caucasian lady centered in the frame and looking directly at Yolacan, who photographs her against a neutral white background. The draped tripe, intestines, muscle, organs, skin and chicken heads, sewed with chicken wire, grotesquely mimic the texture, droop, and color of the English and American women's own faded flesh. Each of the women wears her garment with an individual flare, emanating a recognizable sensibility and discernable attitude with her stance, yet they are all easily regarded as representative examples of certain types of Anglo-saxon women, from the cuddly matron, to the stiff schoolmarm, to the aristocrat with her iron straight posture.
In March, the 25 year-old New York-based Yolacan will have her first solo show in her native Turkey at Istanbul's Yapi Kredi Cultural Arts Center, where she will be the youngest artist, and the first photographer, to exhibit. Yapi Kredi is Turkey's first public art space to host international retrospectives of contemporary and modern artists. Since it was founded in 1944, Yapi Kredi has staged exhibitions of work by such controversial Western figures as Joseph Beuys and Otto Dix.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Would you agree that your art conceptually collapses boundaries between the food we eat and our bodies?
PINAR YOLACAN: One of the women in the 'Perishables' series told me that when she looked at the images of other women, she began to imagine their insides. To her, they looked as if their bodies were turned inside out. I think this idea of inversion is really interesting and although skin is a coating, a border, in 'Perishables' it almost makes the bodies look transparent, (like Hans Bellmer's drawings) turning the subjects into nudes.
AFH: Are you hyper-conscious of what you eat?
PY: No. I am interested in the temporality of food (as a material) and not in the concept of it as something we consume in the cultural sense (and maybe that's why all food i have so far used is in its raw state- 'raw food as nature, cooked as culture') I am interested in food as something destined to become formless - like our bodies.
AFH: A lot of your early press seemed to focus on the eccentricity of what you were doing. Writers were describing you and your work as 'kooky' or 'bonkers'. What do you think unsettled them?
PY: At that time I was 18 - after a year I moved to London from Ankara and I wasn't taken very seriously, but still interesting enough to be written about and get an audience. (Also they were British and there is a bit of the British indifference there.) Obviously there is a tradition of objectifying artists, especially female artists such as ethnic Frida or less exotic Diane Arbus. Since insanity is such a threat to masculinity, when manifested in a male persona, it is only in the context of a genius whereas insanity in a female is just a part of her inferiority.
AFH: Do you think it is appropriate to interpret the work of artists from non-Western cultures through ideas about their cultural origins?
PY: I think when you are an artist and people find it hard to relate to your work, they pay attention to your identity or personal history which can be just as interesting but it shouldn't be an excuse to not actually talk about the work. Unless one specifically makes work about it - identity alone shouldn't be a way to market or introduce an artist. I also think there is a lot of ageism in the 'art world' and it's not healthy. It should really be about the work and not about being a young or an old artist. Also I don't think you can call artwork 'eccentric'.
AFH: Do you feel physical disgust handling chicken flesh or other unappetizing food products, or do think squeamishness is irrelevant to your work?
PY: Sometimes I do and sometimes, I find it sexual to touch skin or flesh even when it doesn't belong to a human. We have all these textures and organs inside ourselves but we don't see them or feel them unless they hurt. If you think of what an alien is - or how it's depicted - it's through the manipulation of skin and limbs and that is what supposedly creates the element of fear - or perhaps disgust.
AFH: But aren't we often disgusted by strangers‚ flesh?
PY: I don't know why human flesh is not considered "squeamish" - especially when it belongs to a stranger or maybe it is and that's what constitutes trauma of racism or rape.
AFH: How is your work perceived differently in the different countries you've shown?
PY: I have shown in Western art capitals - New York, Paris, London- and response has been similar. I am showing the entire project for the first time in Istanbul and I look forward to people's responses there because almost all elements in the project are perceived differently such as the female body, clothing and skin in relation to the ideas of modesty. I think in Europe and the US, a lot of the people liked the women's portraits because they reminded them of something familiar - like pictures of their own grandmothers or people from their ancestry. For me they were unfamiliar faces and that's why I became interested to photograph them. It was part of a familiarization process for me which I guess has its traditions since the early colonialists - only reversed.
AFH: Is this why you chose to compose the images as traditional portraits where your subjects stood in front of neutral back-drops and faced you directly?
PY: I began the project by taking full body shots of the women wearing the garments and then I started to pay more attention to their faces and their expressions which are what introduced the portrait element and the photographs became the work and the medium of the project more than just a tool for documentation of the ephemera.
AFH: Do you consider your work at all political? Would you define your work as being feminist or post-colonalist perhaps?
PY: No. I wouldn't.
AFH: Do you agree that fundamentally beauty standards are culturally relative or do you think beauty transcends culture?
PY: Someone in New York called one of my portraits "Angel" and I could never associate that particular image in that way. I think the fundamentals of image making (if any) is much different in the East than it is in the capitalist Christian West not only historically since the industrial revolution with the invention of photography and print, but also with the tradition of religious icons. In Islam, since God is beyond all human conception, there is a great deal of calligraphy but never actual human faces resembling an icon because it's forbidden to worship a human. When I see a Vogue cover with a sublime blond it reminds me of that element of worship (to a human icon), and that quality I would assume is what institutes her 'beauty'. In some countries aging is a regal concept - and in some it is demeaning. In Turkey it's natural. I think it's a less materialist culture there, and death - or the process that leads to it - is more acceptable as a fact of life. There is less effort in preserving physical beauty. In each country people age differently, different races and sexes age differently. In the US, I think age is regal in a male context but when a female ages it's not seen as powerful anymore. I don't know if that perception comes from the fact that women loose fertility when they are beyond child bearing age. I am not interested in the concept of aging and its cultural connotations but biologically time distorts the body and leaves its marks.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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