Text: Oğuz Karayemiş
With the rise of “relationalist” approaches in the humanities and arts, the stability of beings and the ways in which they acquire and maintain this stability have become invisible. This is because forms of relationalism have generally been frameworks that emphasize becoming, change, and process, and this has meant ignoring an important dimension of beings, namely their tendency to persist. In this article I will call this tendency to persist “endurance” and try to think about this endurance through art. But first, I would like to explain what I mean by relationalism. Then I will discuss a video installation from Buşra Tunç’s Leftover exhibition.
Two styles of relationalism
What is usually understood by relationalism is that the ways in which things are related to each other are relatively more important than the things themselves. This proposition implies that a property or power of this or that entity never occurs in isolation, but always as a result of an interaction. It is possible to call this relationalism, which emphasizes relationship over entities, “weak relationalism”. In this sense, we are all relationalists to some extent, in more or less different ways.
There is also a “strong relationalism”, however, that says that properties, powers, and even beings are composed of relations not only in their emergence but in their very existence. The philosophical grounding of this relationalism is found in philosophers like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. In the universe of strong relationalism, there is no room for endurance. Because, in fact, in this relationalist approach, there is no “being”, everything that exists (however much it can be called a “thing”) consists of its relations.
Thinking about endurance
Of course, one should not forget the virtues of relationalism. For example, it is rarely possible to explain the fact that an entity is a work of art except in terms of being in the relations between the artist, the spectator, and the exhibition space. But it is not at all clear why it would be necessary to invoke strong relationalism to explain such phenomena, which weak relationalist approaches can easily explain. Moreover, the costs of strong relationalism are much greater than its benefits: Not being able to explain phenomena of endurance whose empirical existence cannot be doubted. I define endurance as the ability of an entity to maintain its composition despite the effects to which it is exposed. Given that a “relation” is a repetition of an effect, it becomes clear that it is the relation that endurance resists. In other words, endurance is the tendency of an entity to maintain its existence despite the transformative effects to which it is exposed through these relations. In this respect, it can also be said to be a kind of resilience or resistance. But by endurance I mean the positive side of this tendency, which ultimately manifests itself as resilience or resistance, namely the preservation of compositional unity. In this case, the phenomena of resistance would be the negative side of endurance as a symptom of it.
The omnipresence of endurance
The empirical presence of endurance traverses reality from beginning to end. For example, one of the most fundamental events in our universe is the star formation. But for a star to form, the free hydrogen atoms must be compressed and pressurized to a certain degree so that the synthesis of helium, which will become the early nucleus of the star, can take place. Here, “a certain degree” of pressure is defined by the endurance of the hydrogen nuclei in the face of compression and fusion. Hydrogen nuclei want to preserve their unity of composition and do not fuse easily to form helium. This truth, which cuts across nature, underlies our entire industry. To take a closer look at this, I will discuss a work from Buşra Tunç’s exhibition Leftover (2024). I should also add that this exhibition offers other opportunities to think about endurance.
Curated by Ekmel Ertan and on view at Fener Evleri 2 between April 28 and June 28, 2024, the exhibition focuses on the remnants of the formation processes of materials that are seen as industrial raw materials in various fields of production. Since these processes follow a kind of logic of efficiency, they basically aim to transform all inputs into the desired products as fully as possible. But it is the endurance that determines “as much as possible”. The video installation WP275BAR (2024) in the exhibition focuses on the functioning of an industrial machine and the production of leftover as well as end products. Spread across four screens, the video shows how many elements have to be mobilized to produce even a very simple product. Moving parts, hydraulic systems, electronic circuits, and the rhythms of each of these elements are there to prevent leftover. But the only thing that can be achieved is the relative minimization of leftover. Moreover, thanks to the mounting of the video, one can sense that leftover occurs not only in the raw material but also in the machine itself. While the machine is doing the work it was specifically programmed to do, it occasionally misfires, its designed function is interrupted, its rhythmic composition is disrupted.
The universe has a few words
What needs to be heard through the endurance of beings is that nothing in the universe simply yields to the desires of other things. Thus, whatever fantasies about the domination of nature prevail among humans, the leftover in the factory testifies to the limits of human formative influence. It is art, not industry, that can develop this testimony in a positive way, that is to say, that can treat it as a problem to be deepened rather than solved. Buşra Tunç’s Leftover exhibition can be seen as one of the exhibitions where such problematization and research carry an important weight. Because the exhibition, which focuses on the leftover that occurs because the material is enduring, builds its works with them and invites us to think that what lies behind the endurance are the capacities that cannot be utilized within this or that industrial (and even artistic) assemblage. The material is able to move between assemblages with little change in its “nature” (unity of composition) and to be part of different processes.
Of course, it is not possible to say that artists have always explicitly embraced endurance as a problem. However, it would not be excessive to claim that endurance has always been a fundamental dimension determining artistic practices. For example, painting, one of the most ancient media, is the mobilization of the endurance of painted surfaces to liquid paints. Whether on canvas or paper, the construction of a painting requires attention to the limits of endurance of the surfaces and adjusting the chemical composition of the paints accordingly. Most installations today, on the other hand, demand an apprenticeship of the endurances of the materials involved in their media, which are constructed with found objects. With each new medium the artist has to adjust the force he or she exerts on the material according to the endurance of the material in question. This point is one of the grounds where art comes very close to craft, or rather where the boundaries between art and craft blur. It is also now possible to rethink the relation of the “relational” existence of the work of art to endurance: The work functions only within the relations between the artist, the exhibition space and the spectator, but its ultimate meaning can neither be absolutely limited by the artist, nor can the space alone make a failed work successful, nor can the spectator penetrate the work and the work penetrate the audience one hundred percent. In other words, endurance traverses all these relations in terms of both meaning and existence. Therefore, a weak (or cautious) relationalism must always be blended with attention to endurance.
So, it becomes clear that endurance, which marks the boundary of a meaningful relationalism, is not only a fundamental dimension of the universe, but also a constitutive dimension in art, first and foremost at the practical level. Within the posthumanist and ecological interests of the day, spending as much time on endurance as relationality can open new horizons in thinking about the expressive forces of art. For, if artistic expression arises from the expressive qualities of the material, it is its own compositional unity that grounds the traits of expression of this or that material. Therefore, the study of endurance and the study of the expressive possibilities of the material are one and the same research.
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