Notes on Serkan Özkaya’s Today Was Really Yesterday

Catalogue text commissioned by Galerist for Serkan Özkaya’s Today Was Really Yesterday, January 2014

• The tension in the spaghetti in Mark (2011) captions the exhibition of Serkan’s work that tread the ground between the mundane and the imagined, the copy and the original, the new and the old, the spinster aunt and Steven Toole. 
• Steven Toole is threatening for the very exhibition that hosts him. After all, he is a snitch.
• There is a lot of defecation and peeing in this exhibition, which is perhaps a message to the author of these lines not to take herself so seriously with art and words all the time.
• Levitation by Defecation (2009) is a glamorized, updated, social-media friendly version of the Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit (1961). The subtlety and mystery of the 60s (!) has left its  place to a literal interpretation of that method of elevation, rising, erecting one’s self despite the means. Fischli&Weiss’s Rock on Top of Another Rock (2010/13) combined with Jeff Koons’s glitz-is-more attitude, this levitation is a nice, site-specific slap on the wrist. (Anyone else creeped out by that doll?)
• Crazy Tourist (2006) reminds me though, this relationship with the thing is about perspective. After all, a sculpture is a sculpture, a tower is a tower, art is art, life is life, Steven Toole is Steven Toole.
• Chase Manhattan (2010) is David Cronenberg out of a job. The machines no longer need to be transformed to be scary—neither do banks.
• The blue in Chase Manhattan ties in nicely with the Angel (2011), a blinking moment of kitsch that grounds the viewer in that not-so-aesthetic experience of our quotidian existence. Oh well.
• Which is perhaps why we imagine things so often. Mirage (2012) is that moment of looking at the person next to us, asking, “did that really happen?” It did not. It might have. Does it matter?
• I’m really into this idea of having the shadow of something that might or might not be there. After all, if the shadow, which is an index of that thing that might or might not be, is there, then it does not really have to be attached to the thing that it was founded upon. Serkan is on to us; after all, he just has to point at something for us to jump on it and interpret, for better or for worse. Greenberg’s self-contained, transcendental object was not so great either, but really, are we so easy now? How are we different from that pot on the stove, waiting for the moment that will never come?
• We all have a couple of lessons to take form David. The man has been de-pedestalized, moved, exposed for all of Manhattan to see, all after he fell from grace, destroyed, a few years back. And he is still around. 
• Sleeper (2014), a hologram of a relationship and an interaction in real-life, a 3D rendition of the artist’s wife, is exactly that, no more, no less. This idea of representing something, when the concept becomes daunting, can be reduced down to its basics. Relating to images of ghosts (supposedly) that began photography in the 19th century, Serkan deals with this medium and its larger host of art by way of the hologram. After all, what is representation? What are we looking at? Can you really see anything? Anything I have not seen? Anything new? Not really, but holograms are meaningful not because of what they represent, but because of who they are supposed to represent to.