Reconfiguring the Turkish Cultural Public Sphere

In 2007, in parallel with its efforts toward accession into the European Union, Turkey agreed to meet cultural criteria for the review system organized by the Council of Europe (CoE). However, after several years had passed, the Council's reviewers found that

there seems to be no coherent stated policy (or at least future strategy) for culture as a whole … the private (and foundation) sector exists almost in a parallel universe to public (state) cultural provision…. cooperation between the public, private, NGO and independent sectors and the government is very difficult indeed to achieve (Council: Experts' Report, 76, 37).

The reviewers noted that the government was so highly centralized as to allow little initiative to regional authorities; that bureaucratic obstacles impeded the functioning of NGOs; that cultural minorities continued to be marginalized and freedom of expression to be constrained; that gender equality issues needed to be addressed; that there was little transparency in the grant application process; and that high-quality cultural policy research done in Turkish universities was not being utilized for policy development.

A group of 185 Istanbul academics, artists, and NGO representatives, aware of this disconnect between the CoE and Turkish government policymakers, worked in teams for two years before 2011 to prepare a report laying out what needed to be done to meet CoE criteria (Turkish … Summary Report). This report's vision is more panoramic and at the same time more specific than that of the Council reviewers. It specifies that culture should be administratively linked with education rather than with tourism, which instrumentalizes culture as an economic investment, and that priority should be given to contemporary art, new media, and the performing arts.

The Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MCT), responding to the CoE, in fact submitted a voluminous report listing its various activities together with file numbers of the legislative acts authorizing each (Council: National Report). It did not address the Council's concerns, and the Council sent it back repeatedly for revision (Ada 2013).¹ What could be the reasons for this disconnect between state and civil society?

INTERRUPTIONS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

It may be useful to understand such cases involving the Turkish visual art world—the focus of this essay—in its relation to government and to civil society as interruptions of the public sphere, a condition from which it suffers but has found creative ways to overcome. In what follows I will discuss application of public sphere theory to the Turkish situation, trace some effects of such interruptions upon the Istanbul visual arts scene and speculate on their reasons and causes, and present examples of two NGOs—the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), which organizes the Istanbul Biennial, and SALT, an art research and exhibition center—that through judicious comportment and political agility have so far managed to maintain much of their autonomy. A subtheme of this essay will be the persistence of top-down, authoritative modes of behavior by the state, as contrasted with those agents in civil society that try to undermine it by loosening people's deference to authority and urging them to participate, whether in art or in politics, in the development of a more democratic practice—one that includes both assent and dissent.

Several Turkish scholars have believed that public sphere theory could be usefully adapted to Turkey, perhaps because it allowed them to schematize the relative positions of civil society and the state. Perhaps too it represented to some extent an initiative to turn toward universalist ideals and away from the toxic constraints of nationalism. These scholars found themselves confronting the public sphere's major theoretician, Jürgen Habermas. Feyzi Baban, for example, notes that

According to Habermas, there is a substantial difference between the public sphere and civil society. Civil society is a space that is outside the realm of the state while the public sphere is the social and political space within which the state and society negotiate over the nature of governance through formal institutions and participatory politics.

(2007, 77)

Baban reframes in terms of the public sphere other disconnects in civil society...