Response to the KUTLUG ATAMAN
by mark prince

Since I've never seen any work by Kutlug Ataman I felt a little out of the loop regarding the article about him and all his specific work so this prompted an investigation of him and his films. I am very much interested in the intersection of art and film and this is right up my alley. I am also really interested in philosophy which made me really appreciate the reference to Richard Rorty (the American philosopher who proposed "self-creative" through metaphor as an alternative to the concept of an essential human nature, he also saw identity as a possible language construction--similar to the imaginative narratives produced by a poet or fiction writer) in the first paragraph. For me art has to have a purpose it

just can't be aesthetic  it needs to be grounded and rooted in a rich topic that can help one learn more about themselves and others. That is something that I think Kutlug Ataman does very well. All of his pieces seem to have some deeper meaning to them which makes me appreciate him even more.

Kutlug Ataman is a Turkish film artist who works are formally diverse but what he likes to do is to focus a video camera on a selected individual and listen to their story. His belief is that our attempts at self-definition depend entirely on language and there is no vantage point external to language from which we can qualify that discourse. He does not believe that people have definite identities, he believes that we are rewriting our identity at every moment. His work reflects and addresses "a given community". I found it interesting that Ataman sees personality as the result of our hapless attempts to control our fears and desires. I find many of his projects to be very interesting such as: Women Who Wear Wigs, Paradise (2006), Beggars, Testimony (2006), The Four Seasons of Veronica Read (2002), Never My Soul (2001). I found the reoccurring theme of competing voices on different monitors to be very fascinating. This concept is used in both Women Who Wear Wigs and Paradise (2006). It really is a meditation on the consequences of perceptual overload, both the viewer's and the subjects'.

In regards to our upcoming project using adobe after effects, I want to do a piece that deals with a story/topic that is very important to me, something that I have been writing and drawing a lot this semester. I want to illustrate this concept called The Mythology of Divorce Children which is a story that I developed about a family solar system and how the father is like the sun and the mother like the moon. I would like to work in the style of Michel Gondry but as of yet i still am conjuring up ideas for how to go about this in my sketch book.