The National Frame
Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany
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Based on long-term ethnographic research in the art worlds of Istanbul and Berlin, The National Frame rethinks the politics of art by focusing on the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the nation-state, despite the globalization of the arts. By examining discussions of the civilizing function of art in Turkey and Germany and particularly moments in which art is seen to cede this function, The National Frame reveals the histories of violence on which the production, circulation, and, very understanding of art are predicated.
Karaca examines this darker side of art in two cities in which art and its institutions have been intertwined with symbolic and material dispossession. The particularities of German and Turkish contexts, both marked by attempts to claim modern nationhood through the arts; illuminate how art is staked to memory and erasure, resistance and restoration; and why art has been at once vital and unwieldy for national projects. As art continues to be called upon to engage the past and imagine different futures, The National Frame explores how to reclaim art’s emancipatory potential.
If you believe that art is inherently progressive, emancipatory, and universal, you must read this important case study of the nationalist and de-civilizing capacities of art, and its official uses and misuses, in Germany and Turkey. Exploring how national frames delimit the production, circulation, collection, and display of visual art works, Banu Karaca unsettles pervasive assumptions through immanent critique, while also offering a new understanding of the political role of art in our contemporary world.---Marianne Hirsch, co-author of School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference
In The National Frame, Banu Karaca demonstrates how histories of violence that are often conventionally understood to have been overcome (the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide) remain deeply formative of the political present, shaping the economic and cultural policies of the German and Turkish states. With impeccable and eye-opening scholarship, Karaca forces the history of art to confront the history of genocide. The National Frame presents a masterful interrogation of the geopolitics of modernity.---Kabir Tambar, Stanford University
Introduction: Intimate Encounters | 1
1 Modernity, Nationalism, and Civilizing the Arts | 29
2 Art Worlds: Of Friends, Foes, and Working for the Greater Good | 56
3 Governing Culture, Producing Modern Citizens | 90
4 The Art of Forgetting | 120
5 The Politics of Art and Censorship | 153
6 Enterprising Art, Aestheticizing Business | 182
Instead of a Conclusion: Meeting, Again | 209
Acknowledgments | 221
Notes | 225
References | 255
Index | 279
