This piece was the catalogue essay (of sorts) for an exhibition I put together with Ahmet Öğüt for Artspace, Sydney, in 2010. It was actually written to be read aloud with slides, which I planned to do when the exhibition traveled to Adelaide, but my daughter decided to bring her birth forward a few weeks. In the end neither Ahmet nor I could travel to the show, so Melanie Oliver stepped in and apparently did a brilliant job for both of us. The exhibition itself was called 'Speculative Social Fantasies', after a text that Pelin Tan had written on Ahmet's work for Art Papers. My essay was originally published in issue 8 of Column (Artspace, 2011, pp. 30-5), and also appeared in truncated form in the exhibition brochure produced by the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.
We see planes. Military planes. An array of them, corralled into a vast grid that seems to stretch all the way back to the mountain range rising abruptly behind it. This is one of the famed aeroplane graveyards we might recall from their numerous representations within popular culture. Shot as a long, scrolling dolly from the window of a vehicle driven with remarkable steadiness, Ahmet Öğüt’s Things we count (2008) attempts to account for this extraordinary landscape, which the famously mobile artist came across in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The last drops of a receding thunderstorm periodically spatter and blur the lens, with the camera’s focal length drawn so long that they can only be seen after they have hit. Their arrival registers sharply, like a jump cut, or a cigarette burnt into the surface of a frame of film. From the gallery, the lens assumes its materiality, becoming a form whose physicality can be detected by the way the raindrops cling and stream.
It is this charismatically subversive sensibility, at once darkly humorous and profoundly empathetic, that characterises Öğüt's wry artistic propositions for daily life. In Öğüt's work, the world is a panoply of gags just waiting to be discovered. All it takes is coming to terms with the tragedy and paradox of existence; only then can speculative social fantasy be understood as a force, which is to say, as a potentiality — it is the real that will not be realised, but can be. Even if this limits it to the realm of ideology — and whether it does or not depends on your understanding of subjectivity — it maintains a material force.
The first thing you should know about Öğüt's sense of humour is that it is deadly serious. His videos, photographs, drawings, actions, installations and publications are populated by the most serious of characters — cops, terrorists, stone-throwing youths, bomb-disposal robots, high-ranking officials of every stripe. They cover the trauma of guerrilla warfare, paraphernalia of public security, the politics of currency exchange, geographies of human movement, and the power of institutions, both social and cultural. The form that they take is doubly serious, for Öğüt rejects even the already solemn medium of documentary exposition in favour of an approach informed by conceptual art and its legacies, the tendency within contemporary art which so rigorously takes its own status as art into account that it must surely operate as the most serious of presentational modes.
But for all its seriousness, Öğüt's work is never earnest. Earnestness fixes seriousness and play as two distinct and opposing modalities; Öğüt’s sense of humour allows for no such contrast. Its operation recalls the fluid relationship between seriousness and play that Johan Huizinga identified in children’s games — and at the roots of Western culture — where ‘the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes the troublesome “only” feeling.’ Here, we might substitute ‘only a pretend’ for ‘only joking’, for like the best of jokers, Öğüt endeavours to construct a point of identification for his audience, to allow them to participate in the foibles of his actors, even to see such shortcomings in themselves, and to do so happily. Like Chaplin, Keaton or Tati, the artist frequently appears in his own works, undertaking absurd and self-deprecating actions — ‘punch this painting’ implores a recent self-portrait; you too can risk arrest to turn a Toyota into a police cruiser for no reason, suggests Somebody Else’s Car (2005). This isn’t just comedic classicism. By not excluding the possibility of being the butt of his own joke, Öğüt only underlines the joke’s empathic function and broadens its potential appeal. Such jokes are shared and never traded.
As with the best jokes, Öğüt’s works operate irruptively and iteratively. This is to say, that they are at once temporary invasions of social consciousness by its repressed, and transpositions of the power of the irruptive moment onto the listener. To put it another way, the joke is a means by which we convince someone that a thought that has occurred to us is funny, that it momentarily reconfigures acceptable patterns of cognition and behaviour, and we do this by articulating that thought in a way that simulates for the listener the force of the thought’s irruption from our subconscious. Numerous strategies — timing, rhythm, plot, characterisation — are put into motion to achieve this. Success of the joke depends not only on the listener ‘getting' the joke and finding it funny enough to laugh, but also on the transformation of the listener into the teller through the jokes repetition and embellishment, which further underlines an identification between the experience of listening and the occurrence of the irruptive thought. The joke is thus the reiterative transfer of the social repressed, the operative flipside of dramatic tragedy, whose historical function was to legitimise the event as history. But for all its transferable capacity to reorder social ego — its potentiality — the joke is limited to the field of the ‘only joking', even if it does proceed with the utmost seriousness. The repressed idea only arrives in consciousness on the condition that it is only a joke, a kind of temporary entry visa that comes with an extensive set of restrictions.
What an unfunny definition of the joke! What a verbose and overly analytic disservice to such vibrant work! Perhaps Guy Hocquenghem approximates the operation of Öğüt’s humour better when he observes that writing ‘gets as close to madness as it can without ever entering into it for fear of ceasing to communicate', that ‘for madness to be transmitted, it must be put to reason, that is, prison', that he who succeeds in communicating ‘is a cop, and a cop that doubles as a transvestite... wearing garters concealed beneath the pants of his uniform!' This is a far more appropriate image, far closer to some of the ubuesque police, politicians, soldiers, clerics, businessmen and Mafiosos who inhabit Öğüt's works. And it is closer again to the tragic paradox of speculative social fantasy.
Is conceptual art just the austere uniform under which Öğüt sports his garters? Only to the degree that the art world needs to know that madness is art before it can fully embrace it. For Öğüt, conceptual art itself is already awash with deviancy. Take the works that open Speculative Social Fantasies, which might be read as reiterations of some of the best jokes to emerge from the advanced art of the 1970s. Send him your money (2010) is a reasonably straightforward ‘cover’ of Chris Burden's 1979 hour-long radio broadcast imploring listeners that their donations would ‘make a lot of difference’, albeit read in Öğüt’s Turkish accent, the artist substituting his own Amsterdam address for Burden's. The work plays on an old transistor radio animated by a small FM transmitter secreted behind a wall. Guppy 13 vs Ocean Wave — a Bas Jan Ader Experience (2010) is a single-channel video documenting a participatory work in which Öğüt invited viewers to complete Bas Jan Ader's fatal trans-Atlantic voyage in a replica of Ader's yellow, thirteen-foot sailboat that Öğüt had secured from a collector in the United States, complete with a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind to accompany the triumphant arrival into Amsterdam’s waters. Burden and Ader are hardly the dowdiest of precursors; such is their idiosyncrasy that one imagines a survey of conceptualism curated by Öğüt — no doubt also including other baroques like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Julius Koller, Mladen Stilinovic — bearing the subtitle A history of dumb ideas.
In any case, the most perverted aspect of Hocquenghem's image is not what is being repressed, but the mere fact of repression itself. Thus the cruel irony of the joke, that its irruptive function, which constitutes its very meaning, can only be such in the context of repression. Without repression there is no irruption, nothing to irrupt, Öğüt seems aware of this irony, an irony as frustrating as, but not identical to, the ‘troublesome “only” feeling' described by Huizinga. One need only spend a minute watching the short loop of his Light Armoured (2006), in which a military vehicle remains disconcertingly unaffected by rocks tossed at it from just out of view. Is there a better metaphor for the effectiveness of political art?
And yet on he presses, proceeding with the utmost seriousness, because art never functions as a case of straightforward oppositionality in any case. Here we need to return to Things we count, arguably Öğüt's most iconic, but least funny work. How to deal with the tragic paradox that lies at the scenario’s heart? With the collocation of fascination and horror, or better, because horror is fascinating after all, the confusion of ethical assumptions by a symbolic field that would purport to represent them, the mechanised, militarised sublime as irresolvable trauma? Like repeating to oneself, Last House on the Left style, ‘It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’, we count. We count to reduce the things in front of us to mere things (and thankfully, they no longer possess the power to reduce us to mere things). We count to create silences to punctuate with our counting, percussive and regular, an aural approximation of the modernist grid lain over the desert. We count to create vacuums, gaps in the vast armoury before us. This is the simple power of the voice, the power of the voice that refuses to be silenced in the face of the awesome exercise of power — even if nothing is accomplished, something has still been said.
Thus the artist's fascination with the group of boys combining the games of football and chicken on a darkened stretch of road, pursuing their game at the risk of life and limb, and thus their capacity to pursue the game at all, a game whose real beauty can only be illuminated by the lights of the next car that would temporarily shut it down, or, depending on levels of skill, gall or dumb luck, render it existentially unplayable — the game takes on meaning precisely because of the presence of risk. Sure, no cars will be destroyed. Sure, young lives may well be. But a degree of autonomy is created all the same, however fleeting.
Materially it is glass, it tells us that we are watching something — we know that this is a video; we know a camera was involved in its production; we are made complicit, rather than simply interpolated, in the exchange of showing and looking. Metaphorically, it is a windowpane, and we know from Walter Benjamin, who gleaned it from Andre Breton, that ‘the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment’ conceals a certain revolutionary energy, ‘immense forces of “atmosphere” that might be brought ‘to the point of explosion’. The streets in this city we look out onto are composed negatively, in the spaces between dormant aeroplanes; they seem to confirm, in the most literal manner, the assertions of the Invisible Committee—those anonymous partisans of explosion—that ‘The armed forces don‘t simply adapt to the metropolis, they produce it'. The city is no longer bound to its ancient opposition to the country: ‘All territory is subsumed by the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through the intermeshing of its networks.’
We cannot deny the fascination this spectacle of surplus hardware holds for us; its strangeness and its awesome potentiality are enervating. In recalling his days in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote of field-guns, lashed to the open trucks of a troop-train of men from the International Column, making his heart leap ‘as guns always do’, of ‘that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all’. But these are planes in disuse, a kind of forced hibernation. Staring blindly forward, with their cockpit windows covered, they take on the melancholy air of masked birds of prey or blinkered horses. A single cloud from the ebbing storm hangs above a gap in the mountains to the top right of the frame as if to underline this tragic sensibility. Are these not weapons? Do they not have the potential to kill, maim and dispossess, or at least to aid, significantly, in the mechanised process of killing, maiming and dispossessing, an operation that is in its essence a political one? And in their very dormancy, are they not symbols of a vast surplus of production, both fueled by, and geared toward, the expropriation and exploitation of bodies, resources and vital energies? Why should we ever feel sorry for planes? How do we make sense of this emotion?
In this tragic paradox lies the singular richness of Öğüt’s work, and the appropriateness of the artist’s decision to title this particular selection Speculative Social Fantasies. For the notion of a speculative fantasy is itself tragic — as speculation, it is pure fantasy, which is to say that of all possible futures, it is the one that won‘t eventuate; while as fantasy, its speculative character implies that it will never escape the space of the real. Perhaps this paradox, cast back onto the realm of the social, defines the limits of possibility of the world in which we live, the very world whose absurd logic and occasional wonders Öğüt’s work so frequently exposes through its subtle perceptual shifts and keenly observed re-framings.
Paradox, of course, is the unstable foundation on which all of Western philosophy teeters — or at least this is how Boris Groys has formulated it. The embrace of contradiction at the heart of all language distinguishes philosophy from the logical pretences of sophistry and politics. In exposing the contradictions hidden at the dark core of the smooth, coherent speech of the sophists while offering no logical proposition of his own, Socrates attests to the paradoxical composition of all discourse and hence makes paradox his point of departure. This is the secret methodology of every ‘true’ philosopher to work within the Platonic tradition, culminating in the traumatic radicality of Derrida, for whom paradox radiates not from reason, but from its Other. It is toward an encounter with this Other of unreason that against all reason deconstruction strives, knowing that this encounter is ultimately unreasonable and unachievable, because ‘it is impossible to see darkness in the dark’.
So says Groys. As metaphor, this is remarkably ocularcentric. For might the denial of vision not heighten our senses to the heavy breathing of this Other? To the sweet pungency that permeates our nostrils and coats the backs of our tongues, the sharp pain we encounter when we stumble over it, or the confusing pleasure we feel in its sweaty embrace? We'd be like blind men with an elephant, for sure, but the whole point of philosophy is not to claim we know the beast, only to reflect on the experience of grasping and caressing its leathery trunk, its leg or its tail. In fact, let’s forget what the Other might be altogether and concentrate on what it might do. What if it tries to elude us, to attack us, to ravish us? What if it simply remains indifferent to us? Now that would be truly traumatic. And what, in our self-consciousness, in our tragic, never-ending quest for unobtainable wisdom, would we do if this other were to crack a joke?
Might this be the terrible possibility Öğüt entertains in his work? That the Other might be laughing at our expense, that this is the root of our fears? Could the Other really be so funny? At least we know that Öğüt himself is funny, whether he occupies the position of the other or not. Why else would he leave paradox lying around a darkened room for Derrida to trip over? Now that would be a sight gag — if only we had sight. Naturally, we would feel for Derrida, a charming, generous fellow in his lifetime; we certainly wouldn’t wish him physical harm. And no doubt Derrida would have seen the humour in it all — having spent a lifetime seeking the irrational Other precisely on the basis that it could not be found, he encounters it in the clumsiest and most corporeal way possible. Who knew that in the sphere of critical modes, slapstick and deconstruction would be separated by only the smallest degree of hermeneutic arc?
We cannot deny the fascination this spectacle of surplus hardware holds for us; its strangeness and its awesome potentiality are enervating. In recalling his days in the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote of field-guns, lashed to the open trucks of a troop-train of men from the International Column, making his heart leap ‘as guns always do’, of ‘that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all’. But these are planes in disuse, a kind of forced hibernation. Staring blindly forward, with their cockpit windows covered, they take on the melancholy air of masked birds of prey or blinkered horses. A single cloud from the ebbing storm hangs above a gap in the mountains to the top right of the frame as if to underline this tragic sensibility. Are these not weapons? Do they not have the potential to kill, maim and dispossess, or at least to aid, significantly, in the mechanised process of killing, maiming and dispossessing, an operation that is in its essence a political one? And in their very dormancy, are they not symbols of a vast surplus of production, both fueled by, and geared toward, the expropriation and exploitation of bodies, resources and vital energies? Why should we ever feel sorry for planes? How do we make sense of this emotion?
In this tragic paradox lies the singular richness of Öğüt’s work, and the appropriateness of the artist’s decision to title this particular selection Speculative Social Fantasies. For the notion of a speculative fantasy is itself tragic — as speculation, it is pure fantasy, which is to say that of all possible futures, it is the one that won‘t eventuate; while as fantasy, its speculative character implies that it will never escape the space of the real. Perhaps this paradox, cast back onto the realm of the social, defines the limits of possibility of the world in which we live, the very world whose absurd logic and occasional wonders Öğüt’s work so frequently exposes through its subtle perceptual shifts and keenly observed re-framings.
Paradox, of course, is the unstable foundation on which all of Western philosophy teeters — or at least this is how Boris Groys has formulated it. The embrace of contradiction at the heart of all language distinguishes philosophy from the logical pretences of sophistry and politics. In exposing the contradictions hidden at the dark core of the smooth, coherent speech of the sophists while offering no logical proposition of his own, Socrates attests to the paradoxical composition of all discourse and hence makes paradox his point of departure. This is the secret methodology of every ‘true’ philosopher to work within the Platonic tradition, culminating in the traumatic radicality of Derrida, for whom paradox radiates not from reason, but from its Other. It is toward an encounter with this Other of unreason that against all reason deconstruction strives, knowing that this encounter is ultimately unreasonable and unachievable, because ‘it is impossible to see darkness in the dark’.
So says Groys. As metaphor, this is remarkably ocularcentric. For might the denial of vision not heighten our senses to the heavy breathing of this Other? To the sweet pungency that permeates our nostrils and coats the backs of our tongues, the sharp pain we encounter when we stumble over it, or the confusing pleasure we feel in its sweaty embrace? We'd be like blind men with an elephant, for sure, but the whole point of philosophy is not to claim we know the beast, only to reflect on the experience of grasping and caressing its leathery trunk, its leg or its tail. In fact, let’s forget what the Other might be altogether and concentrate on what it might do. What if it tries to elude us, to attack us, to ravish us? What if it simply remains indifferent to us? Now that would be truly traumatic. And what, in our self-consciousness, in our tragic, never-ending quest for unobtainable wisdom, would we do if this other were to crack a joke?
Might this be the terrible possibility Öğüt entertains in his work? That the Other might be laughing at our expense, that this is the root of our fears? Could the Other really be so funny? At least we know that Öğüt himself is funny, whether he occupies the position of the other or not. Why else would he leave paradox lying around a darkened room for Derrida to trip over? Now that would be a sight gag — if only we had sight. Naturally, we would feel for Derrida, a charming, generous fellow in his lifetime; we certainly wouldn’t wish him physical harm. And no doubt Derrida would have seen the humour in it all — having spent a lifetime seeking the irrational Other precisely on the basis that it could not be found, he encounters it in the clumsiest and most corporeal way possible. Who knew that in the sphere of critical modes, slapstick and deconstruction would be separated by only the smallest degree of hermeneutic arc?
It is this charismatically subversive sensibility, at once darkly humorous and profoundly empathetic, that characterises Öğüt's wry artistic propositions for daily life. In Öğüt's work, the world is a panoply of gags just waiting to be discovered. All it takes is coming to terms with the tragedy and paradox of existence; only then can speculative social fantasy be understood as a force, which is to say, as a potentiality — it is the real that will not be realised, but can be. Even if this limits it to the realm of ideology — and whether it does or not depends on your understanding of subjectivity — it maintains a material force.
The first thing you should know about Öğüt's sense of humour is that it is deadly serious. His videos, photographs, drawings, actions, installations and publications are populated by the most serious of characters — cops, terrorists, stone-throwing youths, bomb-disposal robots, high-ranking officials of every stripe. They cover the trauma of guerrilla warfare, paraphernalia of public security, the politics of currency exchange, geographies of human movement, and the power of institutions, both social and cultural. The form that they take is doubly serious, for Öğüt rejects even the already solemn medium of documentary exposition in favour of an approach informed by conceptual art and its legacies, the tendency within contemporary art which so rigorously takes its own status as art into account that it must surely operate as the most serious of presentational modes.
But for all its seriousness, Öğüt's work is never earnest. Earnestness fixes seriousness and play as two distinct and opposing modalities; Öğüt’s sense of humour allows for no such contrast. Its operation recalls the fluid relationship between seriousness and play that Johan Huizinga identified in children’s games — and at the roots of Western culture — where ‘the consciousness of play being “only a pretend” does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes the troublesome “only” feeling.’ Here, we might substitute ‘only a pretend’ for ‘only joking’, for like the best of jokers, Öğüt endeavours to construct a point of identification for his audience, to allow them to participate in the foibles of his actors, even to see such shortcomings in themselves, and to do so happily. Like Chaplin, Keaton or Tati, the artist frequently appears in his own works, undertaking absurd and self-deprecating actions — ‘punch this painting’ implores a recent self-portrait; you too can risk arrest to turn a Toyota into a police cruiser for no reason, suggests Somebody Else’s Car (2005). This isn’t just comedic classicism. By not excluding the possibility of being the butt of his own joke, Öğüt only underlines the joke’s empathic function and broadens its potential appeal. Such jokes are shared and never traded.
As with the best jokes, Öğüt’s works operate irruptively and iteratively. This is to say, that they are at once temporary invasions of social consciousness by its repressed, and transpositions of the power of the irruptive moment onto the listener. To put it another way, the joke is a means by which we convince someone that a thought that has occurred to us is funny, that it momentarily reconfigures acceptable patterns of cognition and behaviour, and we do this by articulating that thought in a way that simulates for the listener the force of the thought’s irruption from our subconscious. Numerous strategies — timing, rhythm, plot, characterisation — are put into motion to achieve this. Success of the joke depends not only on the listener ‘getting' the joke and finding it funny enough to laugh, but also on the transformation of the listener into the teller through the jokes repetition and embellishment, which further underlines an identification between the experience of listening and the occurrence of the irruptive thought. The joke is thus the reiterative transfer of the social repressed, the operative flipside of dramatic tragedy, whose historical function was to legitimise the event as history. But for all its transferable capacity to reorder social ego — its potentiality — the joke is limited to the field of the ‘only joking', even if it does proceed with the utmost seriousness. The repressed idea only arrives in consciousness on the condition that it is only a joke, a kind of temporary entry visa that comes with an extensive set of restrictions.
What an unfunny definition of the joke! What a verbose and overly analytic disservice to such vibrant work! Perhaps Guy Hocquenghem approximates the operation of Öğüt’s humour better when he observes that writing ‘gets as close to madness as it can without ever entering into it for fear of ceasing to communicate', that ‘for madness to be transmitted, it must be put to reason, that is, prison', that he who succeeds in communicating ‘is a cop, and a cop that doubles as a transvestite... wearing garters concealed beneath the pants of his uniform!' This is a far more appropriate image, far closer to some of the ubuesque police, politicians, soldiers, clerics, businessmen and Mafiosos who inhabit Öğüt's works. And it is closer again to the tragic paradox of speculative social fantasy.
Is conceptual art just the austere uniform under which Öğüt sports his garters? Only to the degree that the art world needs to know that madness is art before it can fully embrace it. For Öğüt, conceptual art itself is already awash with deviancy. Take the works that open Speculative Social Fantasies, which might be read as reiterations of some of the best jokes to emerge from the advanced art of the 1970s. Send him your money (2010) is a reasonably straightforward ‘cover’ of Chris Burden's 1979 hour-long radio broadcast imploring listeners that their donations would ‘make a lot of difference’, albeit read in Öğüt’s Turkish accent, the artist substituting his own Amsterdam address for Burden's. The work plays on an old transistor radio animated by a small FM transmitter secreted behind a wall. Guppy 13 vs Ocean Wave — a Bas Jan Ader Experience (2010) is a single-channel video documenting a participatory work in which Öğüt invited viewers to complete Bas Jan Ader's fatal trans-Atlantic voyage in a replica of Ader's yellow, thirteen-foot sailboat that Öğüt had secured from a collector in the United States, complete with a copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind to accompany the triumphant arrival into Amsterdam’s waters. Burden and Ader are hardly the dowdiest of precursors; such is their idiosyncrasy that one imagines a survey of conceptualism curated by Öğüt — no doubt also including other baroques like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Julius Koller, Mladen Stilinovic — bearing the subtitle A history of dumb ideas.
In any case, the most perverted aspect of Hocquenghem's image is not what is being repressed, but the mere fact of repression itself. Thus the cruel irony of the joke, that its irruptive function, which constitutes its very meaning, can only be such in the context of repression. Without repression there is no irruption, nothing to irrupt, Öğüt seems aware of this irony, an irony as frustrating as, but not identical to, the ‘troublesome “only” feeling' described by Huizinga. One need only spend a minute watching the short loop of his Light Armoured (2006), in which a military vehicle remains disconcertingly unaffected by rocks tossed at it from just out of view. Is there a better metaphor for the effectiveness of political art?
And yet on he presses, proceeding with the utmost seriousness, because art never functions as a case of straightforward oppositionality in any case. Here we need to return to Things we count, arguably Öğüt's most iconic, but least funny work. How to deal with the tragic paradox that lies at the scenario’s heart? With the collocation of fascination and horror, or better, because horror is fascinating after all, the confusion of ethical assumptions by a symbolic field that would purport to represent them, the mechanised, militarised sublime as irresolvable trauma? Like repeating to oneself, Last House on the Left style, ‘It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’, we count. We count to reduce the things in front of us to mere things (and thankfully, they no longer possess the power to reduce us to mere things). We count to create silences to punctuate with our counting, percussive and regular, an aural approximation of the modernist grid lain over the desert. We count to create vacuums, gaps in the vast armoury before us. This is the simple power of the voice, the power of the voice that refuses to be silenced in the face of the awesome exercise of power — even if nothing is accomplished, something has still been said.
Thus the artist's fascination with the group of boys combining the games of football and chicken on a darkened stretch of road, pursuing their game at the risk of life and limb, and thus their capacity to pursue the game at all, a game whose real beauty can only be illuminated by the lights of the next car that would temporarily shut it down, or, depending on levels of skill, gall or dumb luck, render it existentially unplayable — the game takes on meaning precisely because of the presence of risk. Sure, no cars will be destroyed. Sure, young lives may well be. But a degree of autonomy is created all the same, however fleeting.
A simple sign, which Öğüt positions in such a way as to not be mistaken for art — think about it — puts this more literally. ‘This area is under 23 hour video and audio surveillance’, it proclaims in no-nonsense Helvetica. Power is everywhere, Öğüt has observed, but not without its gaps and slippages. The precise location of these gaps and slippages is open to question. Note that the sign does not divulge precisely for which hour, due to budget cuts or bureaucratic oversight, the space is left unsurveyed, or indeed, if the audio-visually unregistered hour is continuous or cumulative. But if speculative fantasy can accomplish anything, it will locate them and, with a little prodding, make them that tiny bit wider.
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