Ali Akay, 1999

Tayfun Erdoğmuş, in these last days of twenty century which we have left behind, exhibits his notebooks at Urart Art Gallery. The materials of notebooks are actually constituted by the cells and the cellulose of the tree of Nepal’s soils and the art is created from these materials which are reworked by the artist. The technique of Tayfun Erdoğmuş that the colours and forms are absorbed into the paper pulp is the result of the artist’s long work process in which he uses the scientific method of “trial and error”. That shows us the affinity and the similar work conditions between artist and scientist. In spite of using different methods, that expose the relation of making experiment as experience and to find something. That reminds us the making of “liberales ars”, which is an old expression. That reminds us the new situation which comes into being, instead of guild like in the epoch of Academias where painting and sculpture were not considered as “ars liberales”. That makes us think of the difference between “mechanic” and “liberal” arts, and with this new state, too, the combination of those and not existing such distinctions in the contemporary art; on the contrary, it reminds that the artists work with the seriousness of a scientist and the scientists work with the hand skill and with the patience of an artist. In that example as well, we have seen the products of working and of artistic discipline like other artists from Turkey. That creates an interesting situation for the Turkish art and that brings together the works with the type of the contemporary artist who “finds searching and researching”.

There are three categories of the notebooks and those notebooks are defined with three subjects. The figures which realise by the logic of collage in the process of the production of the papers consist of circles, squares and triangles; the papers, among themselves, accommodate the distinction, but while touching, the sense of homogeneous rouses; in this sense, it gives the impression of homogeneity in which there are distinctions. The subjects are related to cosmography as much as to the educational issues, and thus the vital and the metaphysic issues like birth and death are carried to the pages: astronomy (it is claimed that painting, sculpture and architecture need to astronomy) and geography (it is said that the painter Appelle puts the writing “nobody not knowing geometry cannot enter” on his door) are among both in the themes of art and in the themes of art education. That seems, also, an anamnesis for the Turkish art history. While thinking that, the Turkish painters, at the beginning, were the topographers and became the soldier painters and in Renaissance anatomy put the human figure forward, we may claim that how these two branches have an interesting importance both in art history and in the tradition of the Turkish painting. However, here, as Tayfun Erdoğmuş analyses both history and geography and also the process of cosmos and the place of anatomy in the process of human being, he wants to show that those are anamnesis as well. The phase which reflection tries to remember through the existence of archaic elements, that we cannot know, in realty, they exist or not; that means it make us think that the difference between “subjective memory” and “absolute memory” based on the novels of Proust and Bergsonian philosophy must be considered together. According to that, with the things we remember or misremember from our lives, although the space memory, in the same way, which possesses everybody and history as well as being universal and local occurs out of us, it appears that taking it up as a part of our lives is one of the most important issues. As all the nationalist movements are established on this sort of “amnesia”, in reality, it is an anamnesis, so showing the memory of events which are assumed true but not known true or not, may be claimed as a kind of post-modern memory: the combination of truth and imagination. During the anamnesis, the phenomenological illusion of perception toward the conceptual. Tayfun Erdoğmuş who write such issues in the diary as graphologic and idiomatic displays, for us, our own art history and his perception of life. Not only the colours and shapes, we regard and share our changing geographies and our anatomic bodies which alter with the new gene technologies and eclipse which happened just before August 11 that the artist has also his birthday and after that the tragedies. We can name these notebooks as a kind of “logbook”: a subjective logbook and we possess it and the artist as well.