My Mother Likes Pop Art, because Pop Art is Colorful, 1998

My Mother Likes Pop Art Because Pop Art is Colorful is one of Halil Altindere’s early works to have achieved cult status, albeit not comparable to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn (1964), that celebrated epitome of Pop art adorning the cover of the book resting in the lap of the woman featured in Altindere’s photograph. However, the work is symbolic of contemporary Turkish art and its balancing act between tradition and modernity, Orient and Occident, as well as Altindere’s attempt to come to terms with Western art and its influence on his own artistic work.
Disguised as a brightly colored, innocuous-looking photograph, the picture delivers an ironic statement about the reception and perception of the West in Turkey and vice versa. Altindere simply reverses the relationship between “us” and “the others”: the history of Pop art is a large-format glossy catalog in an unfamiliar context – a context that seems very traditional and, moreover, private – at least to the viewer who has grown up with contemporary Western art. Much in the same way that the term Orient has frequently come to betoken “the Other” in the Western world, and is thus the object of numerous projections, so also has Warhol’s famous silk screen now become emblematic of the exotic ethos surrounding the term foreign. Both perceptions turn out to be stereotypes. Altindere’s photograph points to an image now become cliché, while drawing attention at the same time to the potential simultaneity of tradition and modernity; something which makes visual migration at all possible and renders permeable apparently rigid boundaries. (KB)