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“An Icon” / Sarkis
Of one who set out in search of art...
The oeuvre of Sarkis occupies a central position in Turkish contemporary art.
Yet little is known about the Istanbul-born artist, other than that his family is of Armenian descent and that he has lived for many years in Paris, where he is an integral part of the city’s art scene.
And it was also in Paris where our first encounters took place in the late 1960s. As a young gallerist, I regularly visited the Parisian galleries and was delighted when I ran into Sarkis, who was earning his living as the assistant in a renowned avant-garde gallery. He informed me about the current goings-on in Paris and I answered his questions about the artists with whom I was working, especially Beuys, Paik and Polke. Sarkis was intensively involved in all aspects of the city’s cultural life: exhibitions, concerts, readings, theatrical performances and in the endless discussions that went on during the student uprisings of May ’68. But his hobby was film, film – always film, that time-based Gesamtkunstwerk made up of image, language and music.
In 1985, when I brought his contribution for the "Art of Peace" Biennial (initiated by Robert Filliou) into dialogue with works by Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys and John Cage, there sounded a sublime artistic chord, a space of silence imbued at the same time with a palpable powerful energy. Sarkis had made an installation out of thousands of meters of tape. The tape had been recorded, possibly with Wagner’s complete "Ring of the Nibelungen" (I remember not the music but the conductor, Pierre Boulez). Around this time, we both loved the same woman. We met her in the daad-galerie in Berlin, sometimes together, sometimes each on his own. The woman’s name was Lulu. She was modeled from hundreds of meters of tape recorded with the music of Alban Berg, conducted by Boulez. It was always Pierre Boulez; Sarkis was consistent on that score.
Unerring in judgment and keenly analytical, Sarkis was an advocate for artists who were important to him. This happened with the acceptance of the works of Beuys in Paris in the ’70s and also when, for my first trip to Istanbul in 1991, he recommended that I meet the artists Füsun Onur, Gülsün Karamustafa and Ayse Erkmen – as yet unknown to me – whose monographs opened this series.
Sarkis is an artist – here he is very much like Beuys – whose work can be experienced and grasped in its entire depth only through the person himself. This prompted me to ask the art historian Elvan Zabunyan, the daughter of the artist, to write the text for this monograph. Originally planned as one of the first books in this series – the conversation in these pages between the artist and Evrim Altug took place in December 2006 – it now is published as the series’ last volume. The close relationship between author and artist, between daughter and father, proved to be an unexpected obstacle to interpretations of any kind. Continually recurring doubts as to the definitiveness of the description delayed the completion.
In the end, though, we have a portrait, unique in every respect, of Sarkis the person, who once set out to seek art and found life in all its rich facets. That the daughter chose to write her text in the first person, speaking of “My Father”, created a barrier for her, the art historian, which for a long time could hardly be overcome. But it is precisely this private perspective that has gifted this series with a remarkable high point and conclusion.
René Block, August 2010
...and found life.
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