Turkish comedian Deniz Goktas, recently condemned to 19 months in a state facility over a solitary joke, has boldly characterized his impending incarceration as an exploration of what an artist can endure. It is a durational commitment that, while certainly intentional, feels fundamentally quite tired.
The court in Istanbul handed down the 19-month mandate this week, effectively serving as the curatorial board for what Goktas envisions as a sprawling, site-specific meditation on state power; yet one cannot help but notice that the entire endeavor lacks the transgressive spark necessary to elevate it from mere penal servitude to true avant-garde theater. Goktas’s courtroom defense was meant to serve as a soft launch for his upcoming prisoner era, a bold dialectic between the individual and the authoritarian apparatus, but it ultimately felt less like a profound stand against the machinery of justice and more like a desperate attempt to romanticize the deeply unchic reality of sharing a stainless-steel toilet with three dissidents.
When evaluating an artist's attempt to weaponize their own physical confinement, one is immediately reminded of the canonical, if slightly exhausting, works of Marina Abramovic—who, as you are perhaps dimly aware, sat quite still in a museum for several hundred hours to test the boundaries of human presence—or perhaps the far more rigorous, though tragically under-monetized, 1980 Time Clock Piece by Tehching Hsieh, wherein the artist confined himself to a room and punched a time clock every hour for a full year; and, bafflingly, the 1998 straight-to-video release Air Bud: Golden Receiver, a cinematic text that similarly exhausts the limits of its own paper-thin premise long before the final whistle. Goktas’s work, by contrast, relies entirely on the state to provide both the venue and the stakes, a lazy outsourcing of artistic labor that reveals a shocking lack of independent vision.
While we applaud Mr. Goktas’s dedication to exploring the visceral realities of systemic deprivation, a 19-month commitment to an unventilated cell simply lacks a coherent thesis.
By insisting that his involuntary removal from society demonstrates the sheer grit of the creative spirit, Goktas is confusing mere survival with rigorous aesthetic inquiry; the Turkish penal system is, after all, an inflexibly literal medium that offers very little in the way of dynamic lighting, intermission, or tonal variation. At press time, Goktas was reportedly conceptualizing his daily yard time as an interactive promenade piece, stubbornly unaware that the guards had already dismissed his blocking as deeply derivative of the 1980s post-punk movement.