REFLECTIONS ON “1+1 CONFRONTATION”

Zeynep Yasa Yaman

The works of Mustafa Bulat, who completed his BA and MA at the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts in Hacettepe University, and his PhD in field of Classical Archaeology, Institute of Social Sciences in Atatürk University, bear the traces of the disciplines of arcaheology, history and sculpture.

In his works, he concentrates on the cultural traces left by the nature, life and man in the sense of a momentary time that renders the “past, now and future” the same. While bringing them together at the present, he puts the emphasis on the way they are perceived today rather than a chronological order.

Ever since his days as a student at school, he has problematized such concepts as “nature”, “goddess”, “shadow”, “life”, “death”, “reflection”, existence”, “power”, “hope”, “dream”, “thought”, “ascension”, “confrontation”, “settlement”, “time”, “place”, “passage”, “waiting”, “balance”, “road”, “traces of the past” and disintegration” and put them in his sculpture. He now focuses on “confrontation” as his problematic topic. Through 35 works on his exhibition under the name of “1+1 Confrontations”, Bulat clearly reveals the effects on his art of sculpture, his choices, his analyses and solutions and his final synthesis.

Realizing an archaeological excavation into his own past, he carries onto the exhibition centre the concepts that feed his 15-year-long works and invites them to face him and each other. When Bulat incarnates his views of man/man’s creation and nature/nature’s creation and collects them as a work of art, this collective exhibition makes references to Bulat’s identity, the processes of his creation and his existence.

Not only does he question the archaeological past of man’s creation and the aesthetic pleasure hidden in the details of life and forgotten in an air of unawareness and his relationships, but he confronts himself and his obsessions, as well.
For example, he focuses on the importance of the wheel found in the Central Asia and first used by the Sumerians in 3500 BC on today’s machine age and modern world, thereby rendering it an artistic detail instead of being an ignored one. Just as the mummified human figure on an old wheel connects the significant relation between wheel and man to its past and present, so he runs after the values that have survived from the past to the present, that are protected and that still exist.

The civilization of Egypt, the ability of this civilization to carry today’s life to future by keeping it in death is making visual the link between its importance on body of a functional importance for life and its preservation for this purpose and the desire of the sculpture to convert this body into stone and render it immortal. The pyramids built by the ancient Egyptian pharaohs to transport the dead bodies and worldly richness to the future, these gorgeous architectural statues and their inherent spirit rise up in Bulat’s works and face themselves today and what he has created.

Bulat is interested in every sort of architecture and architectural details, the elements constructing the building, the debris, and the mystery of vertical-horizontal relationship, namely that of composing and standing on feet. Therefore, stone is not always a tool to be carved to be converted into a sculpture, but also the basic unit that leads to perception of the architectural logic. Bulat often shows with the man himself the architecture, which has carried the past of mankind and civilizations to the present and which should be faced in the counter-war for the continuation, organization and preservation of the life, a war that he has launched with an inspiration from the nature. A tombstone, a ruined wall, a shattered stair or platform and a half-destroyed column or supporter are among the basic forms of his narrative. In his works in which the relationship between the shaped nature and man is problematized, figures are located not only in the interior settings but also on the structure as the one that manages this organization. Bulat indeed focuses on the pyramids and ziggurats of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures as well as the basilica of the Christian culture and mosque, tomb, madrasah, caravansary and such architectural forms of the Islamic culture, also elaborating the diversity of the approaches differing and concealed in the architectural details. He faces, gets closer to and tries to apprehend the thought, traces of life, labor and creativity that cower in the architectural elements such as stairs, arch, tromp, and so on which he described upon careful selection.

Bulat refers to almost all techniques and tools of sculpture. However, the relationship between the sculpture and stone in its far historical background is portrayed in this way. The sculptures of ‘goddess’, which form direct relationships between the concepts of birth, death and creativity, occupy an important place in Bulat’s art of sculpture as the symbol of life or immortality. Bulat carries his background of archaeology to his goddesses as well as the “Understanding of the Universal Soul” maintained by Pantheism, which is philosophically based on the Ancient Greek Stoicism and represented as a philosophical doctrine by Plotinos (205-270) in the ancient Greek philosophy and also by Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Spinoza (1632-1677) after the Renaissance, and which gave birth to Hegelianism and the doctrines of Spinoza.

He often uses the goddess and triangle as the form of balance, holy trinity, women reproductivity and creation. While using the material in his different geometric and architectural designs with an eye to their masculine and feminine qualities, he makes us feel the different textural shapes of the stone and the changes it experiences in the hands of the sculptor.

The senses ‘unfinished’, ‘disintegrated’ and ‘coincidental’ are the attitudes he deliberately adopts. The figures he places in the architectural details, such as arcade and stairs’ top that he plucks from the whole work reflect the aspect of the life-building architecture that mangles, isolates, plucks, does not compare, does not bring together, prevents the confrontations and sets the statue and position within man-nature-architecture relationship.

Another problem of Bulat can be described as understanding the balance in all these destructions. In his works in which he makes one feel that balance cannot be explained by similarity and equal forms as it has a more complex structure, he also questions the relationship between balance and hugeness. In such works by him, the figures in either pan of a balance talk to each other but present differing images. Perhaps the most similar and seemingly equal forms in his works are the ones concerning copulation, insemination and birth. The forms are clamped together, retire into themselves and thus get protected. Life goes on...

On the other hand, the exhibition “1+1 Confrontations” makes references to confronting, not confronting, being unable to confront, lack of dialogue and confinement to one’s inner self and also intends to show that just as man bases his existence on the nature, so he wants to hide his fear in his own works even in his death. Necropolis, smaller graveyards and tomb monuments show that the most important part of confrontation is located in between the life and death.

Confronting with ourselves and the past within time, failing to dare to do so for fear of the complexity of the experiences and memory, losing self-confidence and then escaping is as problematic a process as the subconscious impulse of this desire. It is not an easy job to open a debate on the life, past, socio-cultural attitudes and psychological quandaries, but most artists have done so or will inevitably find themselves attempting to do so sooner or later. Therefore, the exhibitions “confrontation” are not few in number today. And here is the one by Mustafa Bulat, a bridge that he has built between the past and present for the sake of his dreams for the future.