:MENTALKLINIK _ RABBITHOLE
ZAFER ARACAGÖK
WRITER / COMPOSER
2009

Is it obligatory to have spent some time in a mental clinic so as to be able to know when not a hand, but its shadow touches the wall? Or, is it because the shadow of the walls never falls on walls that a mental clinic has always existed – even before any patient has knocked on the door? Perhaps we should lend an ear to what this hand points at, reaching out as if a door will open the moment it arrives on the blue shadowless wall. Since we are in a :mentalKLINIK show where ears could have well been made of hands and, eyes of ears, we might incidentally get a bit bored because we cannot walk on our heads.

As we step into the exhibition at Galerist, the “Blink 01,” projected on a wall that separates the main entrance into right and left, reduces the field of visuality to a moment of dazzlement, thereby both adumbrating that we will per chance stumble on our entry no matter through which door we enter the hole, and underlining risks specific to stepping into “a colon[:].” All because, it is by means of the latter that :mentalKLINIK brings out the parody of what is right via tiptoeing on the thin line separating the proper punctuation from the improper one.Turning Hegel inside out, it shows that in contrast to Hegelian dictum which holds that all events exist as a tragedy first and as a farce the second time, everything exists as humour since from the start yet only when within the framework of a mental clinic.

Either from right or from left: nothing will change from whatever direction you enter the hall.What matters is that all the series which start vibrating simultaneously should get into resonance. When propositional phrases “like everybody knows” call into resonance another series, “like nobody knows, ”Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole and falls into a topsy-turvy world. People get smaller as they grow bigger, and the meaning of all words, names given to all objects and subjects start changing at any moment; not only the grammer but also the assumed relationship between the signifier and the signified through which we produce meaning in language is turned upside down. As the big black hole, entitled, “Tune,” is presented to us as an “object” to be experienced with no reference to a metaphor, that is, as an incomparable experience, mirrors get bored of functioning as mirrors and start radiating their surface, giving way to a horizonless horizon. A horizonless horizon implies neither being blind nor deaf: it is the moment when colour, sound and “form” vanish, when man’s act of seeing starts seeing itself as his act of hearing strats hearing itself.

If there is no mirror set between the two videos of a hand touching a wall – named “True Blue (right)” and “True Blue (left)” and placed as a mirror image of one another – these hands either point the way to the rABBIThOLE, or they invite us to a visual “tinnitus.” If tinnitus is to hear sounds which are not there, or the generation of a hearing effect by the capillary hairs vibrating in the absence of stimuli, this, in the hands of :mentalKLINIK, turns into a territory of visual and aural tinnitus where objects which have declared their independence create an earthquake-sensation by vibrating occasionally, or where the act of seeing is transformed via distorting and corroding the object of visuality into such works, say, “Eclipse.” The success of Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir lies in the fact that they have managed to erase and lose the origins of sounds and objects as in tinnitus experience, and precisely at this moment tinnitus transforms from being solely an aural discomfort to a liberating horizonless horizon.

What is left behind of colours at such a moment? As we might predict, right at the entrance, from the dazzling Blink 01 flashing on the wall, that is, even before we face the series, or even before they get into resonance, colours will obviously be in death throes in the rABBIThOLE. Despite everything, even if the pink polymer resin had made an effort to return to the exhibition hall by leaking out of metal plates in the works entitled “Bias 01” and “Bias 02,” this attack from outside fails, and it remains solely as a tactless intervention of re-introducing “perspective” to the horizonlessness of the horizonless horizon. Yet another series, “Eclipse,” hung on the opposite wall produces an apt response to this intervention which is possible only in a mental clinic: in these works which might easily be perceived as an earthquake-diary – and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be perceived as such – surfaces sliding on top of each other extend the visuality onto the surface of small boxes where form and colour are subjected to an eclipse, and it is asserted that depth can be obtained only on the surface just as Deleuze put it with reference to Alice in Wonderland. If colour and form drag the artistic effort into the depths of “meaning,” yet remaining on the surface requires an effort of letting oneself to the current of waves without possessing form and colour, without attaining depth, as it were. This is in a way similar to Kafka’s swimming-champion who doesn’t know how to swim. If surface is a territory, based on “sense” rather than understanding, the earthquake-sensation created by the vibrating pipes (Twitter) can be regarded as the visualisation and the auralisation of the resonance that the series in the exhibition enter into with each other. Resonance in this sense does not operate only with sonic units but it also establishes an ironical relationship with form and colour by traversing all units of visibility.

Once upon a time Edgar Varése invented a definition for his concept of music: “Sound organisation.” The latter meant forcing the sounds to a crystallisation-process by stepping away from any concern for traditional composition. Crystallisation in rABBIThOLE operates both visually and aurally, and in the resulting “audio-visual” assemblages, visual and aural materials confined into boxes or frames, crystallise by corroding from within the works they are jammed into, and they touch our walls by overflowing from that thin undecidable line between what is aesthetic and not.