Perfect Days and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life
An exploration of everyday aesthetics and the relationship between art and life, through the lens of Wim Wenders’s film, Perfect Days.
Bayraktar, Kerem Ozan. "Mükemmel Günler ve gündelik yaşam estetiği" [Perfect Days and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life]. unlimited, April 30, 2024.
Perfect Days, which earned Kōji Yakusho the Best Actor award at Cannes, chronicles the daily life of Hirayama, a public toilet cleaner in Shibuya, one of Tokyo's most affluent districts. As Hirayama methodically repeats his maintenance routines, we witness his deep passion for music, books, and trees. Though his days seem nearly identical, they are punctuated by small, unexpected moments that create emotional ripples. Hirayama is neither a wide-eyed optimist nor a detached Zen master.
Unaware of social media or Spotify, Hirayama inhabits a fully analog world. To watch his unhurried existence is to be confronted with our own frenetic, anxious lives, which we often struggle to imbue with meaning. At least, that was my experience. Yet, Hirayama is not a judgmental figure. A man of few words, he remarks at one point, "The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected, some are not," revealing a quiet acceptance of different ways of living. He consistently meets the passions of younger people with understanding, offering help when he can. We also see him encounter others who, in their own ways, share his mode of existence. In the theatrical dances of a homeless man in the park, for instance, we sense the potential for other worlds, each as rich as Hirayama’s own. The film, like much of Wenders's work, explores complex human states like alienation, inner journeys, and the search for belonging, while also touching on interactions across social classes. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will focus on the film as a gateway to the aesthetics of everyday life.
The Act of Cleaning Toilets
During a trip to Japan, one of the first things that struck me, as it does many visitors, was the sheer number of public toilets. To me, this signaled a deep commitment to civic welfare. In Japan, where collective life often takes precedence over the individual, the culture of co-existence operates under a different set of social rules. Their modest attire, their tendency not to take things personally, and the profound respect they afford each other’s space are immediately apparent. It took a long time to readjust after returning to Istanbul weeks later; I would often find myself agitated in public crowds. While I have no intention of glorifying Japanese culture—we hear of its darker, more rigid aspects as well—one cannot help but admire the meticulous care with which its people approach any task, including those widely scorned in other societies. As a result, everything they do, from pruning a tree to brewing tea, is elevated into an aesthetic act.The film shows how this meticulousness permeates the most unexpected corners of daily life, transforming even the cleaning of a toilet into an aesthetic experience. The elaborate and well-maintained designs of the toilets themselves reflect the value placed on everyday pleasures. For many, the toilet is a place of disgust, a space defined by hygiene concerns and the meanings we attach to excrement. Yet it is an undeniable part of life. In this sense, cleaning a toilet is no different from tidying a bedroom. Just as the careful folding and arranging of laundry can become a source of pleasure, so too can the act of scrubbing a toilet bowl. There is a life-affirming quality to the practice of maintenance. When Hirayama uses a small mirror to inspect the underside of the toilet rim, he does so with the same diligence he applies to caring for his plants. He passes no judgment on the source of aesthetic experience. The film consistently plays with this boundary of disgust. Just as we begin to assume he neglects his own hygiene, we are shown a bath scene where he cleanses himself with the same thoroughness. The sandwich he eats in the park during his work break serves as a quiet reminder that defecation is as natural as eating. These more primal aspects of our being—eating, washing, sleeping, excreting—are what bind us to the world, reminding us of our bodies and our own impermanence.
Cleaning also carries significant social weight. It is often devalued as menial labor and entangled with sexist attitudes, particularly in the home where it is dismissed as "women's work." Artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles have built their practice around such maintenance tasks precisely to challenge these hierarchies in the division of labor. As much as we believe we have moved past such roles, these biases persist. Some jobs are deemed inferior, reserved for certain social groups. This tension surfaces in the film during Hirayama's terse exchange with his sister. The pride and skill he brings to cleaning public toilets is therefore a powerful statement. It demonstrates that any job can be performed with artistry and sensitivity. By contrasting Hirayama's mastery with his young assistant's clumsy indifference, the film highlights the unique, self-possessed way he approaches his craft.
The Aesthetics of Everyday Life
The aesthetics of everyday life is a field of study focused on the aesthetic dimensions of our ordinary existence. Rather than concentrating on "high art" or exceptional natural beauty, it directs our attention to the aesthetic qualities embedded in common objects, routine activities, and the environments we inhabit daily, as so vividly captured in Perfect Days. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey was pivotal in advancing the idea that aesthetic experience is not confined to art, but is rooted in the everyday interactions that shape our lives. He argued for a continuity of experience, where art both arises from and illuminates the qualities of daily life.Other key figures have expanded this field. Yuriko Saito has explored the aesthetic qualities of mundane phenomena like the weather, the sky, and housework. Arnold Berleant introduced the concept of "aesthetic engagement" and emphasized its social dimensions, while Arto Haapala championed the value of appreciating the familiar within our daily routines. More recently, scholars like Katya Mandoki, Ben Highmore, and Thomas Leddy have broadened the discipline to include negative aesthetics, the role of popular culture, and the ethical and political implications of our aesthetic choices.
While the field acknowledges the value of appreciating art and nature, it insists that aesthetic experience is not limited to museums, concert halls, or sublime landscapes. As Tom Leddy puts it, the aesthetics of everyday life encompasses "all aesthetic experiences that fall outside the existing domains of aesthetic theory."
Defining the "Everyday"
Defining the "everyday" is a challenge. The daily life of a farmer in rural Anatolia is vastly different from that of an architect in Istanbul. Routines, habits, cultures, and professions create a diversity of experience that resists a single definition. Furthermore, the everyday is not static; its boundaries shift with our circumstances. International travel, once a routine possibility for some, may now feel like an extraordinary event. A more useful approach is to see everyday life as a spectrum of experience, from the mundane to the momentous.At one end of this spectrum lie the activities we perform on autopilot, like brushing our teeth or commuting to work. We tend to push these actions into the background, where, as John Dewey noted, they become a form of "anesthesia." At the other end are events of heightened aesthetic awareness, like a concert or a wedding, which are intentionally structured to be special.
To define the everyday, we can also look at our attitude toward our experiences. The everyday attitude is typically pragmatic, focused on function and familiarity. As Yuriko Saito observes, this pragmatic lens causes us to overlook the aesthetic potential hidden in plain sight. Laundry, for instance, is usually seen as a chore. Yet, for some, the feel of clean fabric, the scent of fresh clothes, or the simple satisfaction of organization can be a source of pleasure. Moreover, as I've explored elsewhere, one can find aesthetic value in the systemic aspects of the task: the mechanics of the washing machine, the color patterns of clothes on a line, the geometry of folding. The common pastime of watching construction equipment is a perfect example of this.
Looking at the Ordinary
Traditional aesthetics tends to focus on the extraordinary: the beauty of art, the sublimity of nature, the thrill of the new. But aesthetic experience is not governed by fixed rules or objects; it is a matter of perception and engagement, constantly interwoven with our practical needs and interests. To turn toward the ordinary is to shift focus from the object to the experience itself. It requires not the manufacturing of profundity from simplicity, but an active attention to the details of daily life. In Perfect Days, we see this in countless moments: watching the play of sunlight as if it were a painting, observing the shifting shadows of trees, feeling the rain, noticing the actions of others, buying a coffee from a vending machine, watering a plant, photographing the same tree day after day.This is not about finding "the little beauties in life" in a clichéd sense. In theory, anything can be a subject of aesthetic attention, including negative experiences. Familiarity can be comforting, but it can also feel monotonous. Yet even negative feelings contribute to our aesthetic richness. As Ben Highmore notes, a routine can be simultaneously joyful and boring, tender and infuriating. We don't experience our emotions in neat, separate compartments; happiness and sadness often coexist. Our aesthetic sensibilities are similarly complex and indivisible.
This kind of awareness requires practice. Our brains are wired to filter out the familiar and seek out novelty. It is therefore necessary to occasionally disengage the autopilot and consciously direct our attention. We don't need to exert much effort to be moved by a painting in a white-walled gallery or the powerful sound of a symphony orchestra. These frames are designed to command our attention. The aesthetics of the everyday, however, demands an active participant, not a passive spectator.
Aesthetics Needs No Art
Artists have often turned to everyday life to challenge traditional aesthetic conventions, a trend that intensified dramatically after the 1970s. Art can reshape our perception of the everyday, and the everyday is, in turn, a primary source for art. Yet, aesthetic experience does not require art. Aesthetics is not the exclusive domain of art. We don’t consider ourselves to be "making art" when we gaze at a mountain range, drive a car, or have a dream, yet these are all profoundly aesthetic experiences. There is no obligatory link between the two. The common misconception arises because art offers a concentrated dose of aesthetic experience. In truth, every experience is imbued with aesthetic potential, an intensity that cannot be attributed to objects alone. As a result, our expectations of art today have rightly expanded beyond the purely aesthetic.Whether the aesthetics of our own daily lives becomes a source of satisfaction depends entirely on our perspective. The philosophers of the everyday offer guidance: to approach experience without prejudice; to notice and analyze a moment before rushing to judgment; to remember that knowledge shapes perception; to dissolve the boundary between the artificial and the natural; and to focus on processes and actions, not just objects.
This does not require a break from art. In the film, Hirayama’s music and photographs are woven seamlessly into the fabric of his life. He curates his cassettes and his images with care. Art persists as an organic part of his world, another field within his everyday aesthetic. Recognizing this continuity of experience, rather than focusing on isolated moments, is another powerful method. Blurring the frames between art and life can only enrich this continuity.
In a world saturated with spectacular, oversized projects disconnected from lived reality, cultivating this perspective reveals that aesthetics is not merely about beauty. It has deep roots that extend to matters of social justice. As Yuriko Saito reminds us, aesthetics is not a luxury but a fundamental dimension of human life. The perception of aesthetics as an "extra" is a fallacy that leads to its marginalization, a trend most visible in budget cuts for the arts and education. Aesthetics shapes society and improves our quality of life. To integrate it into our collective existence is therefore essential. We must recognize that aesthetics is inseparable from the rest of life, and vital to how we shape our world.
References
Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetics of Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
Berleant, Arnold. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.
Berleant, Arnold. Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Press, 1958.
Haapala, Arto. "On the Aesthetics of the Everyday: Familiarity, Strangeness, and the Meaning of Place." In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, 39–55. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Oxon: Routledge, 2011.
Leddy, Thomas. The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012.
Mandoki, Katya. Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Play of Culture and Social Identities. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Saito, Yuriko. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Does Artificial Intelligence Dream of Electric Sheep?
A critical look at AI's role in art, the myth of originality and exploring the tension between creative remixing and cultural uniformity.
Bayraktar, Kerem Ozan. "Yapay zekâ elektrikli koyun düşler mi?" [Does Artificial Intelligence Dream of Electric Sheep?]. In Argonotlar Almanak 2023, edited by Kültigin Kağan Akbulut and Seçil Epik, 261-67. Istanbul: Argonotlar, 2023.
— Cahit Arf, Can a Machine Think and How Can It Think?, 1959
Artificial intelligence, already a staple in fields from healthcare to the military, is now rapidly being adopted in the worlds of art and design. As with the printing press, photography, and digital imaging before them, machines are once again driving major shifts in our cultural codes and aesthetic sensibilities. One reason AI development has focused so keenly on the arts is the inherent difficulty of mechanizing them. In our current, human-centered discourse, we love to measure machines against ourselves. Since creativity is considered a uniquely human trait, algorithms used in art and design are constantly being put to the test, a dynamic that has fueled their exponential development in recent years.
Machines have always been part of artistic production, but the learning and adaptation skills of today’s AI algorithms are far more advanced than those of their predecessors. Capable of processing vast datasets to generate specific outputs, they are now taking on tasks traditionally performed by humans. This utility, as a partner, an assistant, or, some might argue, a slave, has only increased their visibility and use, making human-machine interaction a central topic of debate. This new reality revives age-old questions about originality and the creative process, while also sparking new controversies over the value of art and the traceability of the artist’s contribution. What separates the developer who builds the algorithm from the artist who uses it? How much influence does the algorithm truly wield, and can we scrutinize the designer's decision-making process? How are our very definitions of creativity and originality being reshaped? And what does this mode of mass production reveal about our contemporary culture?
The fact that AI-generated works are the product of complex algorithms and technological processes makes their aesthetic evaluation a formidable challenge. It's therefore essential to grasp the role of technology, the nature of training data, and the dynamic partnership between the artist and the AI system.
The Myth of the Artist and Originality
Technological leaps often force us to confront slippery concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and creativity. Without a shared consensus on these terms, we risk asking the wrong questions about the wrong things. In the dialogue between AI and art, the way we define the artist and the concept of originality deeply influences how we perceive the work they create.
First, we must remember that the figure of the artist as we know it is a product of a relatively brief period of human history. While creative practices have always existed, the modern conception of the artist has not. This figure—the lone genius—was a historical consequence of the Romantic era's emphasis on individualism and expression. The myth carried over into modernism and, though somewhat tarnished, persists today, often for commercial purposes. This belief in innate, individual genius obscures the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of art, at times erasing it completely. In truth, art has always been a collective endeavor. Renaissance workshops were hubs of artists working under a single master. Artistic movements like Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus were founded on principles of collective creation. This collaboration extends beyond people to include machines, materials, techniques, and events.
Viewed from this wider perspective, no artist creates in a vacuum. Production is always a mix of different elements: learned knowledge, memories, emotions, physical reactions, and the influence of social and historical contexts. Yet, while collective, every creation is unique because it is filtered through the specific experience of its contributors. Each artistic process acquires its own character, shaped by the distinct combination of knowledge, memory, and feeling that flows through it. The link between this uniqueness and originality should not be understood as the mark of singular genius, but as a novel rearrangement of existing elements. Originality is not the creation of something from nothing. It is the act of combining familiar components in an unfamiliar way. This principle operates throughout the natural world: the formation of crystals, the growth of plants, and the mechanics of the cosmos are all processes where existing matter and forces combine to create new structures. Every crystal is unique, yet its uniqueness is simply another name for a different combination.
AI operates on this same principle. It learns from human-created datasets and generates new works by rearranging those existing elements. The algorithm's method of processing and organizing this trove of collective human knowledge directly shapes the final design. The artist's degree of control over this process varies, depending on the algorithm's architecture and the specific conditions of their work.
Remix
All creative work can be seen as a form of remix, where borrowing, quoting, adapting, and reinterpreting are essential acts. While the term is most associated with music, the practice is universal. The reconfiguration of existing ideas, materials, and images is a core component of creativity. Viewing cultural history through this lens reveals remixing across eras and media, seen in Ottoman miniatures influenced by Persian and Chinese traditions, Warhol’s soup cans, Tarantino's cinematic homages, the Renaissance’s reinvention of antiquity, Japanese prints shaped by Western perspective, and Bob Dylan’s reinterpretation of folk ballads. No creative field is free from this blending.
Naturally, inspiring, referencing, quoting, appropriating, and reinterpreting are unique actions, each driven by different intentions and leading to various results. In the 20th century, modernists consciously used techniques like pastiche and quotation to deconstruct the myth of the artist and question the very nature of authorship. The history of art includes pieces that are deliberately dull, unattractive, or lacking creativity; creations made by machines or unknown collaborators; and works that modify, disrupt, or even erase the art of others.
In the digital age, remixing has become effortless, migrating from the art world into the daily lives of millions. Anyone with a smartphone engages in constant remix: taking screenshots, sharing quotes, creating memes, editing podcasts, or producing TikTok videos. Remix is a defining feature of our culture.
AI tools with user-friendly interfaces have supercharged this process. By writing a few lines of text, anyone can generate images, sounds, or even code drawn from a vast sea of sources. Yet this is a unique kind of remix. While theoretically similar to collage, it is far more complex. Interacting with a program is completely distinct from working with physical materials. Though interfaces often simulate analog actions (like the "cut" tool in Photoshop), the metaphor only goes so far. AI engine works with language. The user submits a prompt, either a string of text or an image converted into text, and the program creates a remix based on it. The user can only guide the process to a certain degree, because the program possesses its own autonomy. This is the heart of the current debate.
Another key difference is that tracing the sources of a generative remix is nearly impossible (and, for most users, completely irrelevant). It’s less like collage and more like cooking a meal with ingredients from unknown origins. On platforms like Midjourney, users freely share their text prompts, which function like recipes in the generative art community. There is no anxiety about originality, so recipes are exchanged without hesitation. This culture has even given rise to the term "prompt engineering," a field dedicated to mastering the language of AI. Users share detailed notes on which words yield which results, the effects of punctuation, and which artists’ styles combine most effectively. In their quest for novel blends, many people with no prior interest in art history are now discovering artists and movements.
AI acts as a remix machine, learning and reproducing the styles, patterns, and compositional logics of the data it's trained on. But looking at an AI-generated image, it is incredibly difficult to identify its precise sources. Just as the name Rembrandt evokes not just figures and subjects but a whole atmosphere of light, shadow, and composition, AI-generated images have a similar atmospheric quality. The AI learns the atmosphere. You might feel a hint of Rembrandt in an image, but unless the prompt was explicit, pinpointing the reference is often impossible.
Then there is the issue of total hybridization. When you mix Rembrandt with a dash of Blade Runner's noir aesthetic, a touch of Hokusai's elegance, and the visual texture of a TikTok video, the original references dissolve into a blur of faint resemblances. The traces of origin are scattered across the pixels, like musical notes dispersed in a new composition. The moment one user's creation gains popularity, hundreds of variations are instantly produced by others. In this environment, individual authorship becomes almost meaningless. We are all entangled with a vast, collective machine.
The Risk of Homogenization
While every original work is a remix, not every remix is original. Each crystal may be unique, but at a certain scale, they appear identical. Culture tends to confer originality on broader shifts, not micro-level variations. As a result, many AI-generated images look strikingly similar, failing to become more than variations on existing genres. This tendency toward homogenization is driven by the structure of the algorithms, the biases in their training data, and the echo-chamber effects of online communities.
AI models are typically trained using a deep learning architecture known as a convolutional neural network (CNN), a mathematical model that mimics the neural networks of the human brain. These systems are trained to recognize and classify objects. When you type "cup," the AI generates images of a cup because it has learned to associate the word with a vast dataset of labeled images. Just as we learn to map our visual world with language from birth, AI is taught how to map and define the world. The training data is manually collected and labeled, and the CNN processes it in layers, learning to identify basic features like edges and corners before moving on to more complex patterns.
The content of these datasets directly determines what the model learns and, consequently, its biases. If the training data is incomplete or prejudiced, the AI will inherit and amplify those flaws. This is not a technical limitation but a result of human design. It is a mistake to think of these programs as objective; they are encoded with the ideological biases of the cultures that created them. More importantly, this learning model bypasses a fundamental aspect of art. Art is deliberately ambiguous in its pairing of words and images; it loves to play with and break the very maps AI relies on. This is why Magritte's “pipe is not a pipe”, and why Kosuth's "One and Three Chairs" are all different chairs.
Another factor driving similarity, particularly on platforms like Midjourney, is the feedback loop created by user engagement. When users upvote certain images and discard those they deem ugly, abstract, or nonsensical, the platform learns to favor popular aesthetic styles. While developers may try to balance these inputs, the trend is toward cleaner, clearer, and more conventionally appealing visuals. To what extent does eliminating errors and ambiguity inhibit a machine's creative potential? A program that understands words only in their most common usage and generates images in their most familiar forms would be useful, but would it not also be severely limited in its capacity for interpretation? We will likely have answers to these questions soon.
Of course, the tendency toward similarity is not unique to AI. Human culture is full of it. Popular films, music, and television shows often follow predictable formulas. Throughout history, different eras and regions have produced works with shared characteristics, giving rise to distinct styles. Impressionist paintings, for example, share a common visual language. The similarities in AI-generated work reflect the fact that the models are trained on the same pool of shared cultural values. Depending on your timescale, this can be seen as a form of homogenization.
Creative Remixes
Can new and original genres truly emerge from AI? Let's consider this through a biological metaphor. If a population of rabbits on an isolated island continually inbreeds, its genetic diversity will plummet. The rabbits will become increasingly similar and, eventually, highly susceptible to disease. This is a parallel to cultural stagnation. A system that is not open to outside influence will eventually collapse. To create different kinds of rabbits, you must enrich the gene pool. Similarly, the birth of new artistic genres will come from reinterpreting and transforming remixes across different cultural and disciplinary contexts.
While traditional notions of creativity focus on a clean break from the past, fostering new genres through remix requires a more dynamic and inclusive view. We must look beyond the intrinsic qualities of a single work and consider its interaction with different disciplines, cultures, and forms. It is also crucial to remember that evaluations of creativity are tied to context, scale, and personal experience. A washing machine may be a boring, repetitive object on its own, but in a work of art, it can acquire entirely new meaning. A city planner and a poet see the same sidewalk through different eyes.
Randomness can also enrich a system. When any system—biological or mechanical—encounters unforeseen data, it will interpret and respond based on its capacity for adaptation. Many AI programs allow for some control over randomness, enabling outputs that deviate from a prompt's literal interpretation. The key question is the breadth of the system's possibility space. How many faces does the die have? If an algorithm is programmed to optimize for specific parameters such as harmony or rhythm in music, its outputs will be guided toward a particular style, limiting its potential. All systems have such constraints.
Finally, we must distinguish between the machine’s technical ability to imitate and the artistic merit of what it creates. We may be impressed by an AI-generated poem, but is our admiration for the poem itself or for the fact that a machine wrote it? Often, the praise is implicitly directed at the ingenuity of the engineers who built the algorithm. Technological innovation and artistic creativity are related, but they are not the same. It is always possible to make original art with old technology, and it is a fallacy to assume new technology automatically yields new ideas. That said, the most creative work in this space often comes from artists who subvert these tools, transforming their functions or pushing them to their limits. In short, our fascination with technology itself should not be confused with art.
Autonomy
The degree of an AI's autonomy directly shapes the user's experience and creative influence. A highly autonomous system, by allowing for uncontrolled processes, might increase the potential for truly novel outputs. But a completely uncontrolled system risks producing chaos. Complex systems in art often strike a balance, maintaining overall control while allowing for a degree of freedom. Abstract Expressionism is a classic example. The process aims for a state of controlled chaos, where the artist guides the material but also allows it to assert its own properties.
How much control should a designer have? Who is the author of a work generated by an uncontrollable system? The answer often lies in the program's interface and the degree to which it allows for external intervention. A designer's technical skill, their fluency in programming languages and ability to fine-tune parameters, can also expand their level of control. This, however, does not mean that art requires technical mastery. Artists have always collaborated with specialists and machines. But a general understanding of how these systems work provides a crucial perspective on the opportunities and limitations they present.
Ultimately, the meaning of a work is shaped by how an artist chooses to engage with these tools, embracing their autonomy or asserting control. It is impossible to deduce this from a single image. A holistic view, considering an artist's entire body of work and process, is required.
Boundaries and Differences
I have tried to outline the general dynamics of AI as a machine for mixing, both controlled and uncontrolled. But when we speak of art, a purely technical or sensory evaluation is insufficient. The meaning of an artwork is layered, extending far beyond the pixels on a screen. An artist's intentions, their presentation methods, the work's dialogue with history and other art, and the entire universe of discourse surrounding it; all of these determine its value.
Achieving this kind of holistic view is becoming increasingly difficult in our culture of intensive remix. Context becomes fluid, and a sense of time and place begins to fade. Artistic movements that arose from specific historical conditions are reduced to aesthetic styles, stripped of their context and deployed as mere visual effects. We now see combinations that would be impossible in the physical world. Everything is constantly blending. AI generates photographs of prehistoric eras and paints Boeing jets with the brushstrokes of Van Gogh. When any piece of culture is digitized and fed into this system, it is abstracted from its original network of relationships. The boundaries between media (painting, cinema, games) and subjects (politics, comedy, landscape) dissolve, and the definitions of "artist" and "designer" become blurred. It is, as the movie title suggests, “everything everywhere all at once”.
This state of constant flux has itself become a dominant aesthetic. The imagery we so often see in New Media art, amorphous, perpetually melting and transforming, glitching and shimmering, resembling everything but being nothing, is an icon of our time.
To foster diversity and escape the pull of homogenization, we must emphasize difference. When all differences are erased, everything dissolves into sameness, like particles disappearing into water. This state, where criticism and even description become impossible, is akin to a thermodynamic death—a final equilibrium where all meaningful motion has ceased.
1 Arf, Cahit. "Makine Düşünebilir Mi ve Nasıl Düşünebilir?" In Atatürk Üniversitesi – Üniversite Çalışmalarını Muhite Yayma ve Halk Eğitimi Yayınları Konferanslar Serisi No: 1, 91-103. Erzurum, 1959.
Urban Weeds
An exploration of ruderal plants, examining their ecological role in disturbed urban environments and arguing for a new aesthetic appreciation that challenges idealized views of nature.
The Urban Weeds project is a body of work, comprising presentations, performances, texts, and photographs, that focuses on spontaneous vegetation within the city. As a form of artistic research, this project is a significant part of my broader inquiry into how living and non-living entities shape our environment, as well as into infrastructure networks and our methods for comprehending the life cycles of different ecosystems. This text provides a background narrative on my interest in these organisms within my artistic practice, offers a general overview of the ruderal plant species referred to as urban weeds, and discusses their meaning in the artistic and aesthetic fields.
My particular interest in weeds was shaped by the influence of artists who were first my teachers and later my colleagues: Dr. Elif Çelebi, with her focus on holistic ecological methods and everyday life, and Prof. Tayfun Erdoğmuş, with his aesthetic understanding closely linked to botany. In 2018, I also participated in the exhibition "ot" (weed/herb), conceptualized by Assoc. Prof. Devabil Kara and Öznur Güzel Karasu at the Marmara University Republic Museum, where twelve artists and I approached the subject from various perspectives.
During the time I spent in the countryside in the 1990s, I frequently witnessed the farmers' ongoing war against weeds. Questions over which plant was "good" versus "bad," or when intervention was necessary, were quite confusing. For the farmers, there was no abstract concept of "nature." Years later, these early experiences led me to shut down my plant-care website and turn my focus completely to urban plants. Discovering the opportunity to observe the behavior of organisms in the city without direct human control led me to take an interest in open systems and to direct my artistic practice outside the studio.
During an artist residency in Berlin in 2019, I had the chance to study urban weeds in greater detail within the context of art and urban ecology. Berlin holds a special place in urban ecology. In the post-war ruins and on vacant lots, plants not previously seen in the city began to grow. These were generally species adapted to high levels of disturbance, their seeds often brought unknowingly by soldiers from different countries (Gandy, 2017). After the construction of the Berlin Wall, different plant species grew on either side of the city, demonstrating how military and political structures directly shaped the organization of life. This new environment was studied in depth by pioneers of urban ecology like Herbert Sukopp. Today, Berlin still bears these traces, containing unique areas where its botanical and cultural diversity directly intersect (Stoetzer, 2018). During my time there, with the support of artist Sema Bekirovic, I made observations in abandoned buildings from the war era, in unused factories on the city's outskirts, and on ruderal plots deliberately created within the city.
Ruderal Species
The plants that live in disturbed areas, which I refer to as “sokak otları” (urban / street weeds), are known in botany as ruderal species.
In ecology, disturbance is a fundamental process in plant adaptation. These events can be natural, such as floods, storms, and fires, or they can be caused directly by human impact (White and Pickett, 1985; Grime, 2006). Ruderal plants have developed strategies to survive in such lands where other vegetation would quickly perish. The term "ruderal," derived from the Latin word rudus (rubble), highlights this intrinsic relationship with destruction. In cities, these plants grow among rubble, in abandoned lots, cemeteries, parking lots, sidewalk cracks, and industrial sites. In rural areas, they are found on lands disturbed by agriculture, animal husbandry, and forestry.
Common ruderal species in large Turkish cities include Pellitory-of-the-wall (Parietaria judaica), Shepherd's-purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris), and Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), among many others (Altay and Karahan, 2017). A portion of these are "pioneer species," which are resilient, reproduce quickly, and can adapt to nutrient-poor soils and varying conditions. Some of these plants also exhibit invasive characteristics. Invasive plants can spread rapidly and eliminate other species due to their genetic diversity, stress tolerance, and the absence of natural enemies in new regions (Simberloff, 2011). Today, invasives are one of the primary species that humans combat, mainly due to the economic damage they cause. These plants have spread across the globe, aided by human mobility and climate change. In Turkey, species like the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) are classified as invasive (Önen, 2014).
The Perception of 'Weed' and Urban Aesthetics
"Weed," another term used for many ruderal species, is generally defined as "the wrong plant in the wrong place." The plants designated as "weeds" vary greatly depending on history and geography. It is not uncommon for a plant protected in one region to be defined as harmful in another. For example, the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) has gone through various phases in Europe. This East Asian plant was first valued as an ornamental, later prized for its medicinal properties, and is now considered an undesirable invasive in many parts of the world (Kowarik and Säumel, 2007). Richard Mabey argues that "weed" is a cultural, not a biological, category, suggesting that weeds are not only plants in the wrong place but also plants that have crossed into the wrong culture (Mabey, 2010). Such categorizations are generally based on a human-centered ideology.
Mabey explains that the rise of agriculture was a pivotal moment in forming our modern concept of nature, as it conceptually split the world into two camps: managed organisms for human benefit and "wild" ones left to their own devices. According to Mabey, weeds appear precisely when this neat division breaks down (Mabey, 2010).
The urban environment itself is a key factor in our negative perception. Weeds usually grow in the city's functionally ambiguous or neglected areas. Consequently, our perspective on urban aesthetics affects how these plants are interpreted. As Peter Del Tredici notes, most city dwellers tend to see spontaneous urban vegetation as a sign of neglect, whereas they would view the exact same plants in a rural setting as "wildflowers" (Del Tredici, 2010).
A general aesthetic preference for clean, new, and manicured objects causes plants to be treated like industrial products. This understanding of beauty is entirely cultural. In contrast, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is based on the passage of time; therefore, aging, decay, and imperfections are considered measures of beauty (Juniper, 2011). Beyond aesthetics, the city's "imperfections" are ecologically beneficial. Del Tredici emphasizes the importance of cracks in the pavement, which allow water to seep through, collecting moisture and nutrients that support microbial diversity (Del Tredici, 2014). Weeds often appear at the intersections of different materials, such as the base of walls. These edges are areas of intense diversity at both macro and micro scales.
Ruderal plants are a vital part of the urban ecosystem, living a life integrated with its infrastructure. Yet in large cities like Istanbul, this relationship is often ignored. Instead, ornamental plants that are difficult and uneconomical to maintain are forced upon the city. Inevitably, when these ornamentals fail to survive, ruderal plants take over the spaces opened for them. This triggers a wasteful cycle of removing the weeds only to plant new ornamentals. Beyond the significant loss of energy, this process results in the destruction of both the desired plants and the weeds. This entire futile cycle demonstrates how our aesthetic perception and our view of nature directly determine the approach to the city's green spaces.
Cities, like all ecosystems, possess complex dynamics. A multitude of actors, including humans, engage in multifaceted interactions. Urban plants are one of the most visible indicators of this complexity. It is impossible to keep such a system under complete control or force it to conform to rigid plans. In this context, defining weeds as undesirable is not only unrealistic but also fails to offer an ecologically adaptable perspective. A better path is to embrace coexistence with these organisms that are already well-adapted to the city and to adopt approaches that benefit both humans and plants.
Urban Weeds and Art
Observing the environment outside the studio has been a central activity for artists, especially since Impressionism. However, movements aimed at representing the external world within its own dynamic relationships, without idealization, became prominent in the second half of the 20th century. This manifested in works that emphasized environmental dynamics such as change and decay, seen in movements like Conceptual art, Fluxus, and Arte Povera.
A specific interest in ruderal plants emerged with art's turn toward activism and social and scientific issues. The works of Hans Haacke, a founder of Systems art, created using weeds in the 1960s, are based on the idea of establishing or pointing to living, real-time systems (Haacke, 2016). Lois Weinberger is another artist who has built his practice on ruderal plants. In his work for Documenta X in 1997, he planted "foreign" ruderal seeds from Eastern Europe on railway tracks, creating a dialogue between plants and political activism (Weinberger et al., 2017). Other artists like Maria Thereza Alves and Oliver Kellhammer have also worked with ruderal plants, producing works that do not conceive of nature as an idealistic world separate from humans. This aesthetic is not one of nature romanticism or of "nature resisting man." It is an aesthetic that proposes sensing objects not only by their appearance but by their functional connections and surrounding networks. Sarah Cowles defines a similar approach as "Ruderal Aesthetics" (Cowles, 2017).
Urban Weeds and the Concept of Nature
One of the most important aspects of urban weeds is their ability to blur the nature-culture duality. Today, despite the discourse of contemporary ecology, the common perspective on nature remains romantic. Nature is generally described as a distant place of great harmony, a "garden of Eden." Popular discourse often suggests that nature has a certain balance and that when "sinful" humans withdraw, it will restore itself. To truly understand human impact, however, this idealistic idea of nature must be dismantled.
Contrary to the "balance of nature" belief, ecosystems are frequently disrupted by invasive species, fires, floods, and droughts (Adams, 2012). When these disturbances cease, there is no guarantee that the area will return to its former state. Ecosystems do not have a final state of balance or a purpose. Contemporary ecology sees the ecosystem as a mosaic in motion, a complex system where disturbances are not anomalies but a critical element for the continuity of life (Simus, 2008).
Humans are part of this ecosystem, culturally as well as materially. The relationship between people and weeds has developed through migration, famine, and war, not just agriculture. The remarkable adaptive abilities of weeds, such as transporting seeds via car tires, reveal their deep connection to human culture. In this sense, weeds are not nature that has infiltrated the city; they are plants that have evolved to live there. They are as urban as we are. Therefore, urban weeds challenge all our idealizations of nature. Because they grow in disturbed areas, they also shake up our human-centered views on what is beneficial or harmful. Addressing environmental issues requires a more detailed perspective that does not exclude culture and local elements, rather than caricaturing them with sharp boundaries between an idealized nature and humanity.
The Experience of Weed Watching
Urban weeds allow us to approach plants outside the framework of human interests. Trying to comprehend other living beings for their own existence, beyond purposes like eating, drinking, or healing, opens up a space for both empathy and sensation. Each change of scale provides a new aesthetic awareness. To watch weeds, one needs not only to wander the city but also to "bend down" and "stop" for a time within its rapid movement. The micro-ecosystems that weeds form create not only physical atmospheres but also areas of mental concentration. Activating the body to watch is a valuable counterpoint to a visual culture where the body is often fixed.
Another important element of weed watching is the high factor of chance. As Gilles Clément writes, plants, and especially weeds, travel (Clément, 2011). Although plants are not as mobile as animals, the short life cycles of weeds, their rapid growth, and their constant exposure to human intervention create a temporal effect quite different from long-lived plants. This is one reason they are perceived as insignificant; their temporality is vastly different from the human scale. It is this very difference that creates an opportunity to imagine another way of life. Following a plant for a few days only to find it gone allows us to re-read the connection between feelings of anticipation, attachment, and loss with time and chance. Focusing on the differences of weeds can profoundly change our way of seeing. Today, interest in weeds has grown considerably, and the sharing of this interest through various media creates a positive awareness for urban ecology, promoting a vital and transient way of thinking about aesthetics.
References
Adams, W. M. (2012). When Nature Won't Stay Still: Conservation, Equilibrium and Control. In Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era (pp. 220-246). London: Taylor and Francis.
Altay, V., & Karahan, F. (2017). Ruderal Vejetasyon Üzerine Bir Ön Çalışma: Antakya (Hatay) Örneği. Kilis 7 Aralık Üniversitesi Fen ve Mühendislik Dergisi, 1, 1-10.
Clément, G. (2011). The Garden in Movenment: A Gardener's Manifesto.
Cowles, S. (2017). Ruderal Aesthetics. Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Conference, Detroit.
Del Tredici, P. (2010). Spontaneous Urban Vegetation: Reflections of Change in a Globalized World. Nature and Culture, 5(3), 299-315.
Del Tredici, P. (2014). The Flora of the Future. Places Journal.
Gandy, M. (2017). Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin.
Grime, J. P. (2006). Plant Strategies, Vegetation Processes, and Ecosystem Properties. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Haacke, H. (2016). Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke. London: MIT Press.
Juniper, A. (2011). Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing.
Kowarik, I., & Säumel, I. (2007). Biological Flora of Central Europe: Ailanthus Altissima (Mill.) Swingle. Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 8(4), 207-37.
Mabey, R. (2010). Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think about Nature. London: Profile Books.
Önen, H. (Ed.). (2014). Türkiye İstilacı Bitkiler Kataloğu. Ankara: Tarımsal Araştırmalar ve Politikalar Genel Müdürlüğü.
Simberloff, D., & Rejmánek, M. (Eds.). (2011). Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Simus, J. B. (2008). Aesthetic Implications of the New Paradigm in Ecology. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 42(1), 63-79.
Stoetzer, B. (2018). Ruderal Ecologies: Rethinking Nature, Migration, and the Urban Landscape in Berlin. Cultural Anthropology 33, 295-323.
Weinberger, L., Bunting, H., Zajac, L., & Lahr, C. (2017). Reality check: Wild Cube and Ground Control: Lois Weinberger. Berlin: Berlin Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst.
White, P., & Pickett, S. T. A. (1985). Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics: An Introduction. In The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics (pp. 3-13). Academic Press.
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
An analysis of Hokusai's famous series as a dynamic representation of change, exploring how it challenges traditional notions of landscape and art through the philosophy of Ukiyo-e.
Bayraktar, Kerem Ozan. "Fuji Dağı'nın Otuz Altı Görünümü" [Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji]. In Olimpos Sergileri II: Peyzaj [Olympus Exhibitions II: Landscape], edited by Süreyyya Evren. İstanbul: Taner Ceylan, 2021.
When Hokusai began his Mount Fuji series, Edo (modern-day Tokyo) was a city entirely different from its current form, resembling the settings we see in samurai films. The artist was already in his seventies when he started the project, living under difficult conditions in a region stricken with poverty and illness.
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (冨嶽三十六景, Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) is an Ukiyo-e series that ultimately grew to include 46 prints. The images primarily depict views of the mountain from Edo, interwoven with scenes of daily life, while a few were created from the perspective of the Nagoya region.
Katsushika Hokusai, Morning after the Snow at Koishikawa, ca. 1830–32, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
What elevates this series to one of the most compelling in art history is not Mount Fuji itself. It is Hokusai's masterful blending of Japanese painting techniques and philosophy, coupled with his poetic narrative skill, that sets him apart from his contemporaries. "Ukiyo-e," a style of woodblock printing especially popular during the Edo period, translates as "pictures of the floating world." The term is a homophone for a Buddhist concept meaning "world of sorrow," reflecting the core Buddhist teaching on the transience of all worldly things. This principle was deeply felt in the lives of samurai warriors, for whom closeness to death was a path to detachment from earthly desires. Later, in the hedonistic world of Yoshiwara, Edo's pleasure district where samurai were forbidden, the concept of Ukiyo took on a new meaning.
The writer Asai Ryōi explained Ukiyo with these words: "living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river: this is what we call ukiyo."
This sense of flow and impermanence, central to both meanings of Ukiyo-e, permeates Hokusai's series. Mount Fuji is depicted from different angles, distances, and in varying atmospheres. The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829-1833), perhaps the most iconic image in all of Japanese art, introduced this style to the world. Another famous work, Ejiri in Suruga Province (1830-32), which depicts a sudden gust of wind scattering papers and lifting hats, was famously reinterpreted by Jeff Wall in his 1993 photograph.
The unifying element across all the prints, and what defines them as a series, is the theme of change. Nothing is static. People are never posed; they are ordinary individuals engaged in everyday tasks. The seasons shift, and the force of the wind is ever-present, visible in the swaying grass, the fluttering kites, the sails of boats, and the rippling clothes and water. Mount Fuji itself is in constant flux, sometimes capped with snow, other times shrouded in mist. The mountain has no single, fixed color; it changes with the atmosphere.
Katsushika Hokusai, Viewing the Sunset over Ryōgoku Bridge from the Onmayagashi Embankment, ca. 1830–32, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
This emphasis on change extends to the composition. Hokusai does not present these views from a single, fixed vantage point. The perspective shifts with each work, repositioning the viewer. The mountain is almost never the central subject. These are not formal portraits of the mountain, but depictions of the mountain's appearance under specific, fleeting conditions. In this, Hokusai seems to anticipate the phenomenological theories of later European art. There is no single mountain, no definitive state. In many prints, it is just a small detail in a larger scene. The elements are distributed across the composition in a way that encourages the eye to move rather than rest on a single point.
The serial nature of the work pushes us beyond traditional art criticism, which tends to focus on individual masterpieces. By presenting different sequences, Hokusai tells us that the world is changing, marking this passage of time by capturing the subtle differences in a recurring subject. This focus on the "phenomenon of change," which we often associate with Impressionism, actually arrived in the West through the influence of Japonisme. Artists like Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh were directly inspired by Ukiyo-e, adopting a style that emphasized change, asymmetry, and atmosphere. Both Monet's Rouen Cathedral series and Hokusai's Mount Fuji series are rooted in this shared understanding; they depict shifts in time and space by capturing changes in an object and its surrounding atmosphere.
When viewed as individual pictures, the series can suggest a world where time is frozen. But if we step back and see the artist’s sustained act of painting over time as the true artwork, we witness a systematic performance. To align with the work’s philosophy, we should see these prints not as discrete objects but as frames from a long-term experience, a record of the artist's ongoing engagement with his subject. From this perspective, it would be a mistake to view The Great Wave in isolation, as if it were a direct, unmediated observation. It is not the single image of the wave that represents the totality of change, but the entire sequence of which it is a part. The series as a whole contains a complex set of observations that no single print could ever convey on its own.
For these reasons, we should approach these works not with traditional theories of representation (asking what the mountain symbolizes), but with a holistic view. This means recognizing time as a dimension of the object, analyzing the work through the lens of change, and refusing to grant the medium more importance than the artwork itself. This approach is rooted in a principle of simultaneously considering and highlighting both similarities and differences. For example, only by looking at the entire collection can we form an idea of the region's geography. We see that it sometimes snows and sometimes rains; that the wind can be fierce or the air perfectly still. No single image provides this complete picture; the information emerges from comparing the prints and seeing them as a whole. A single picture presents a landscape as a static ideal. A series of pictures presents a system in flux, offering slices of a reality that has a before and an after. The prints are like stills from a long film, and for that very reason, they open up vast space for the imagination. We know, as viewers, that between any two frames, time has passed and much has changed. The empty space, the void, is crucial, not just as a compositional element within a print, but as the informational gap between the prints. This absence corresponds to all the unrecorded events that occurred in the interim.
We must also remember that Ukiyo-e prints were often designed for handscrolls and books. A scroll offers a profoundly different experience than a canvas hanging on a wall. It is not a window onto a fixed reality, as in traditional Western painting. Even when hung, it is displayed with wooden rollers that speak to its portability and transience. The experience of a book is similar. Flipping back and forth between pages recalls moving through the frames of a film, which helps explain the strong lineage connecting Ukiyo-e to modern Manga and Anime.
The habit of viewing paintings as isolated objects is something we learned from museums, with their standards of display and institutional framing. John Dewey noted that when an artwork achieves "classic" status, it is cut off from the human conditions of its creation; a wall is built around it.2 This problem, Dewey argued, lies not with art itself but with the systems through which it is communicated. Artists have long made work that is deeply embedded in everyday life, yet the art world continues to present these creations as idealized objects. This idealization applies not just to artworks but to artists themselves.
Art is physically enclosed by walls. Yuriko Saito observes that in the sealed environments of museums or concert halls, art is experienced as something immune to change. She writes,
“So, it does not matter whether I view Cezanne’s Mt. Sainte-Victoire in the middle of the summer or winter, during a rainstorm or under a sunny sky, or midday or at night, whereas it makes a big difference if I am viewing the actual Mt. Sainte-Victoire.”3
Exploring Hokusai's work today is meaningful not just for his historical significance, but also for the insights it offers into how we perceive and interpret what we see. To truly understand change, we must look beyond the painted elements and their style, considering also the context and manner in which we view the art, ensuring it remains connected to daily life. This can also have a different effect on our relationship with nature, which we today define through crisis. We can depict nature not as a picture of a separate, ideal reality existing somewhere "out there," but as an entirety of environments that constantly changes with us as we watch it, where no two moments are ever the same, composed not only of visible objects but also of atmospheres, flows, and physical forces.
1 Hickman, Money L. (1978). "Views of the Floating World". MFA Bulletin. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 4–33. JSTOR 4171617.
2 Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Penguin, 2005, p. 3.
3 Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 36.
On the Matter of Didacticism and a Proposal for “Complexity”
A critique of one-dimensional, 'didactic' art and a proposal to embrace complexity as a more intellectually honest and engaging approach for artists and viewers.
“…a given sign need not always lead to the same behaviors; it is possible for it to lead to different behaviors under different environmental conditions.”
— Teo Grünberg, 1999
Anyone involved in the art world has encountered this critique: “It’s too didactic!” Yet, despite how often we deploy or receive this judgment, the line between didactic and non-didactic art remains blurry, revealing a shared confusion on the matter. On the one hand, we are told to avoid didacticism at all costs. On the other, much of the art produced, especially in Turkey since the 1990s, shouts its message from the rooftops, presumably so that “everyone can understand.” You are admonished for being didactic, yet the art world is saturated with advertising aesthetics, parody, one-liners, and craft-based works.
Today, common strategies for avoiding the didactic label involve either retreating into abstraction—shrouding the work in ambiguity, mystery, or vagueness—or producing pleasant, decorative objects, images designed merely to be looked at and felt.
In its general sense, didacticism describes an approach that aims to teach the viewer, to convey a singular message, and to uphold a specific ethic. The paintings of the Church, for example, operated on this level: “Behold what Christ endured for you; do not commit these sins.” Much of representational political art follows the same strategy, merely updating the content: “Learn that violence against minorities is wrong,” “Understand that democracy is good,” “See how politicians deceive us.” The irony is that this often involves people preaching to their own choir, teaching values to those who already hold them.
In didactic art, the image is always layered with a “subtext” or a “super-text,” a structure that mirrors the messaging strategies of advertisers and traditional cartoonists.
The immediate rebuttals, often from art students with whom I’ve had these conversations, are predictable: “So, should we just paint flowers and bugs?” or “Must we only make work that is intentionally obscure?” But art is inherently critical; it constantly proposes alternative worlds. Past attempts to strip art of its critical function resulted in the dead end of a sterile formalism. The problem isn't the presence of a message or a political concern; it is how those elements are integrated into the work.
What we truly mean by “didacticism” is the one-dimensionality of these ethical or pedagogical approaches. It is the conviction that a work possesses a single, fixed meaning that must be received, a conviction that leads the artist to select signifiers with the sole purpose of delivering that meaning. In such cases, if you strip away the intended code, the work collapses, because its foundation was nothing more than a crude punchline. The creative process becomes a hunt for a clever concept, followed by a search for a clever way to illustrate it. There is no room in this model for misunderstanding or interference. Whatever the subject, its nuances are ignored in favor of a single axis of evaluation. The ideal viewer must get the message.
This approach is not inherently good or bad. However, art and design are generally expected to open up rich possibilities for thought. To simply repeat familiar ways of thinking in order to appeal to everyone is a valid choice, but the very nature of intellectual and creative activity is to question, remodel, and analyze our perception of the world. We should therefore have the right to criticize work that settles for one-dimensionality and shallowness. An artist can, of course, intentionally use direct messaging or humor, but this does not always result in a one-dimensional work—as in the case of something being “so bad, it’s good.” Yet, removing the punchline or the message from such works does not erase the artist’s formal language or their specific intervention within a cultural context.
In an interview, Heinz-Peter Schwerfel, curator of a Julian Rosefeldt exhibition, spoke of a prevailing one-dimensionality and “childishness” in major biennials like Venice. What I found striking was his call for “complexity.” He insisted, “It’s not that simple.”
The world is a complex place. But complex does not mean complicated, ambiguous, or mysterious. Complexity describes the very limits of our analysis. It is a state where countless elements produce countless interconnected relationships, all influencing each other simultaneously. It is a state that cannot be resolved with a simple input-output model. While there can be simple representations of a complex world—something science and philosophy achieve with great elegance—there is a vast difference between being simple and being shallow. When we symbolize identity politics with lace or urban renewal with images of ruined buildings, we are not simplifying complexity; we are reducing it to a superficial cliché. Worse, we are treating our audience, most of whom are artists and critics themselves, as if they are ignorant of the world.
A focus on complexity, for artists and critics alike, can steer us away from one-dimensionality. This requires abandoning the comfort of fixed ideologies and the static worldviews they produce. It means examining more elements, grasping interwoven relationships, and accounting for the multitude of forces that shape any structure. It requires us to understand ourselves not as transcendent subjects observing the world from without, but as localized, temporary agents interacting directly with what we see.
Artists often work intuitively; few begin by making a list. But intuition is profoundly shaped by one's environment, and human history is littered with the failures of "reliable" intuition. It will be difficult to escape this shallowness without rigorously questioning the methods of thinking and making we hold most dear. This is likely one of the most exhausting aspects of being an artist. It is incredibly hard to take risks, to disappoint ourselves and others, to make radical breaks, and to reject our own past ideas. Of course, one can always choose the path of least resistance and still build a career.
By its very nature, grasping complex ideas is not easy. Nor should it be. Why do we expect everything to be immediately understandable? Why do we demand from artists a simplicity we would never expect from professionals in other fields? Art has a long, branching history, producing immense theory and a staggering diversity of work across different geographies and cultures. It is a field where each artist’s individual life and social conditions are brought to bear on their practice. How can we possibly expect such a field to be easy?
Is the world itself simple? Is it an art fair we can smile at, find pleasant, and casually walk past? Why should the things we believe represent the world be any simpler? The texts, interviews, and discourses that accompany artworks are not peripheral supplements; they are constituent elements of the work itself. A painting is never just an arrangement of pigments on a surface. Furthermore, every work holds the potential to be connected to different situations across time and space. There is no single, absolute meaning. This does not, however, imply that a work can mean anything at all. No matter how vast the network of potential meanings, there are always points of concentration, directions toward which interpretation is pulled.
If, as viewers, our goal is to approach artworks without any context or effort, we might as well scroll through Instagram for a more instantly gratifying experience. An object or an image cannot mean something on its own. The larger our vocabulary—visual, historical, theoretical—the more connections we can make. The acts of researching, questioning, reading, looking intently, discussing, and creating associations are what open new doors. Is this not true for anything we wish to understand, not just art? And isn't our engagement with these very actions the reason we are interested in art in the first place?
"What does it mean?" is the wrong question. A better approach is to ask, "How can I, here and now, with everything I know and feel, engage with this work? What questions can I ask of it? What can I learn from it?" The viewer is not a passive receiver, and the artwork is not an active transmitter of meaning. The interaction is reciprocal. Misunderstanding, seeing something differently, or even failing to understand at all are also valid parts of this communication. To be able to stay with what remains, without craving a singular, complete meaning… this, too, is an approach we must give a chance.
June 2018
What Does Football Mean?
An inquiry into football, questioning how a seemingly meaningless game generates profound significance and what this reveals about the nature of interpretation itself.
Yet for a hypothetical person encountering football for the first time, or for people like me who are very distant from it, searching for meaning might seem reasonable. In this text, I want you to think of yourself as an alien, a stranger to the human species.
We can think about the question “What does it mean?” in two different ways. The first is an attempt to understand the significance of all these strange movements and rules, to grasp why people do this. Why do so many people run after a ball, and why do thousands of others watch this completely useless activity? Why are such enormous sums of money spent on this absurd spectacle? This spectacle does not benefit the public; it makes no direct contribution to our culture, it teaches us nothing, nor does it serve a tangible, functional field like technology. Moreover, it does not belong to this geography; it is global. If we set aside for a moment the issues of play and entertainment and truly think about it, football is deeply meaningless.
When compared with daily life, a strange situation emerges, prompting questions. "Why are they making these comical movements that resemble nothing else?" "Why are there eleven people?" "Why is that flag there?" "If they want to move the ball, why don't they just pick it up with their hands?" "Why are they wasting their energy?" "Why are they wearing these costumes?" "Why is everything bound by absurd rules?"
The other way to ask the question “What does it mean?” is to ask what football actually means. It is clear that nothing means anything on its own. Abstract activities like football, especially, appear to mean nothing at all. The rules of football, the players, the positions, the objectives—all of it is self-referential; it has no initial connection to everyday life. We make football, or anything else for that matter, meaningful by relating it to other things. Here, we can follow a few different methods.
The first is to look at the dynamics of the game. This is largely what entertains people who enjoy watching football. The game has its own peculiar rules, which may seem absurd but are consistent and do not change from match to match. Although some changes have occurred throughout its history, the way we describe the game has not changed. What changes is what can be done within the scope of these rules. No two matches are the same. The football spectator enjoys thinking about these possibilities for variation, and sometimes enjoys seeing them realized. The majority of "commentary" on football is a discussion of these potentials. Questions like, “Why didn't he pass there?”, “I wish he had passed like this,” or “That player shouldn't be there” are all directed at the game and have no direct relation to the everyday world.
What does all this mean to us? It conveys what can be done within a boundary (physical boundaries like the field, its lines, and time, as well as the rules of the game). It shows what kinds of moves the players can make in this limited, abstract universe, how they can use their bodies and minds, their concentration and conditioning, and how the manager can evaluate time and strategies. “How much preparation was made for the match?” “What is the state of viewer support?” “What are the physical conditions of the field?” “Is the weather rainy or clear?” “How objective is the referee?” The dynamics are endless. The entire match exists, it seems, just so we can talk about it.
On the other hand, football has a great history, a memory. This memory helps in comparing the relationships between matches and also influences how the next match will be played. No one enjoys football by looking at a single match in isolation. The past and the future are always included in the match. History, on the other hand, shows how sophisticated the game has become since the 19th century.
Some people might think this kind of meaning-making is too disconnected from life. However, we can also make football meaningful by relating it to life. This field is vast. From class struggles to capitalist concepts of entertainment, from computer games to the stock market, from the press to sociocultural strata, from sexual identities to hooliganism, from politics to nutrition, from street football to infrastructure projects, it is difficult to find something that we cannot relate to football. These are not things directly related to football itself, that is, the game and its dynamics. But if our concern is to search for meaning, meaning-making is easy, as long as we know how to ask questions.
Some might also be interested in the decorative aspects of the game. For example, they might be interested in the players' uniforms, how handsome they are or their private lives, team crests, trophies, the shapes of footballs, or stadium architecture. Some people might even be interested in simulations of the game, management games, transfers, betting, old football recordings, football sponsors, fan slogans, anthems, collector's items, football posters, or the TV graphics shown during a match.
What generally interests a classic football spectator, however, is the relationship between the rules and the game, strategy and field setup, and analyzing the relationship of external factors to the game. This is what makes the game meaningful. And it is we who establish these relationships; the game has no meaning on its own. It is truly difficult to explain this to someone who has never seen football, never been to a match, never participated in football conversations, does not know the history of football, and has not grasped the relationship between humans and the game. Fortunately, the football spectator or those who play it have no such concerns.
Why Is There Still Art?
An essay questioning why art continues to exist after its boundaries have dissolved, proposing that art’s function is to create a fictional world necessary for us to perceive reality.
Today, any object can be subjected to the same questions asked of an art object. These can be aesthetic questions, or they can be questions specific to art itself, such as what art is or where its boundaries begin. There are no artistic or philosophical reasons, beyond historical habits or dogmatic issues, for me not to look at the pencil sharpener and its shavings on my desk as an art object, or to present them as such. Unless you are one of the ancients who believed that things have an essence, you likely sense, even if you do not consciously know, that an art object is merely a temporary node within a network of communication. You probably have little use for such a concept anyway.
These topics were discussed at length long ago by Analytic philosophers like Danto, Dickie, and Carroll. Nelson Goodman states that when it comes to art, the right question is not "Is this art?" but "When is it art?". You can use a Rembrandt painting as kindling, or you can treat it as an art object. You can also evaluate a piece of wood as an art object, or you can burn it. This situation applies, without question, to all works. Therefore, the thing we call a work of art is that which we look at as a work of art in specific contexts. Our perspective could even be a bigoted one that confers artistic status only upon objects with certain properties. There is no problem even in that case, because it is still the human way of modeling the world that makes the object an art object; the object does not become something on its own. Even for it to be an ordinary object, we are necessary.
Picture frames, photographs, gallery spaces, museums, cinema halls, books, and so on offer us spaces to focus on certain objects. Thus, we see the thing inside the frame (this is a conceptual frame) as the art object, and everything outside it as all the other things that are not art objects. Today, we do not necessarily need these formats for such a frame. If we can approach any everyday object with artistic problematics, then why is there still art?
The answer to this question certainly has a relationship with the social environment. But those might be answers for other fields, such as sociology, anthropology, or economics. More fundamentally, the reason for art's existence, it seems to me, stems from its fictionality and our need for this fictionality to be able to comprehend the world.
In his book Art as a Social System, Niklas Luhmann argues that a work of art establishes its own reality, distinct from ordinary reality. In doing so, despite its perceivable facticity, it creates a simultaneous reference to an imaginary or fictional world. According to Luhmann, this act effectively doubles the world into the "real" and the "imaginary," and the function of art lies in the meaning of this very duplication. He posits that the fictional world of art offers a unique standpoint from which the real world can be observed as reality. Without this distinction between the real and the fictional, the world would simply exist as it is. It is only when reality is separated from a fictional counterpart that it becomes a perspective that can be seen and analyzed.
For me to be able to speak of a world, there must be something else outside of that world. This world could be the ordinary world or the world of art objects. If I can now see phenomena in the world as art objects, it is thanks to the perspective I have previously acquired from art. If Turner comes to mind when I look at the sea, it is because I know Turner. If the aesthetic qualities of a long wall rising in the emptiness of a parking lot strike me, it is because I know Abstract Expressionism. If I am "foolish" enough to treat a pair of glasses left on a museum floor as art, it is because I know how Conceptual Art approaches the world. If I label every picture I see on Twitter as a "Renaissance painting," it is because I have a belief, however vague and incorrect, about what Renaissance paintings are like. If I can say, "This disgusting thing is not art," it is because, one way or another, I believe some objects are art.
If the arrangement of garbage in front of my house moves me, if I get lost in watching construction machines, if I watch the gardener pruning trees or the chef cooking with the subtlety of a performance, if I arrange my books with the air of a Minimalist work, if the studios, conversations, and playing with materials of painters are more attractive to me than their paintings, it is because I have learned to look in this way. We can only have learned to look in this way from something outside of those things. There is nothing wrong with me calling this "art."
In other words, for me to be able to model something called "world" in my brain, I need something that is not the world. Otherwise, there would be only one world. But there are many. For this reason, we are essentially doing nothing other than relating one world to another.
In reality, the only difference between the wall in the parking lot and a Barnett Newman painting is that one was made with a specific consciousness, thus granting me a special space to concentrate. In fact, it is my mind that can see what is common in both. So, I might as well be looking at both the parking lot wall and the painting. Is this not why we look down on certain works? The root of our outbursts like, “What kind of painting is this, it looks like a house painter did it,” or “What kind of object is this, it looks just like garbage,” lies in our ability to make this association. We cannot stand it when a mundane object is presented as an art object out of the blue because we think it is presenting us with the world we already know. However, the two are not the same world. Our personal taste determines the degree of difference we demand. Some people want to see an intense difference; others might find this intensity kitsch and unnecessary. These things also change frequently in every era. When we grasp that art is not a special object but an immaterial one, just a boundary drawn by our mind in the medium of communication, these presentations of difference become as ambiguous as possible. We need far less to be able to see the boundary between an art object and a non-art object.
At that point, we can again ask the same question. Since I am looking at the world with the world itself, then why is there still art? The answer is still the same. We need a tool to be able to look at the world with the world. We do not know how to see in any other way, whether its name is art or language. For this reason, while some things are art at that moment, at the instant we focus on that object or event, there must also be things that are not art. At that moment, while some things are the world we know, others must be what is not so. This is a dynamic relationship. It is transient. That is why the "when" question is important. And the people who establish and sometimes present these fleeting relationships, I suppose, are what we call artists.