Situationist Cartography Take A Bow

The New Cartography of İstanbul (Map not Included) One fine day in 1924 its major protagonists rudely declared surrealism ‘dead’, a definitive manifesto having emerged in the same year. And over the subsequent decades, panicked acolytes of the avant garde desperate to fall behind one ism or other took different paths, some politically charged, and some literally on foot. One particular bunch of ‘ists’, the Situationists in fact, took it upon themselves to supersede art altogether, nobly smiting the elitist idea of the lone artist in a garret, tortured by his muse and aloof of the general public. Hmm. No, instead, they prospected for art in the raw fabric of everyday urban living. And salting the artistic mix with revolutionary vigor they set upon dotting the “I”s and crossing the “T”s of both Dada and surrealism, while easing both into a reactionary grave. Funnily enough though, they still insisted on wearing monocles, top hats indoors and toasting the Kaiser at weddings. The Situationist International hit the scene in 1957 as a slap-happy merger of the Lettrist International and International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, both far less than met the eye. And like any worthy artistic movement, its very origins were in deceit, as a third participating group, the London Psychogeographical Society, was in fact pure invention to boost the internationalist illusion being peddled. Some say they even took to looking west for the sunrise as a matter of subversive principle, though this was never proven. Combined membership was liberally estimated at 70. Twenty years on, Situationist overtones were abducted by the more phlegm-free literate aspect of punk rock. Particularly, in the dysfunctional urban fables of Talking Heads, long before front man David Byrne jumped the shark with tuneful Mexican folklore. And while I would never recommend graffiti to its readership in our fine city, the situationists were known to jazz up their built environment with pensive ditties that gave pause to passers by. “Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom”, demands the patience of Banksy, not to mention a bloody great wall. But my personal favorite, seen on a Paris wall in 1968 “Be realistic demand the impossible!” with rare brevity gets closer to the nub of the matter, even with a cop lurking. "Beneath the paving stones - the beach!", also from 1968, is just plain silly. Yes, those situationists certainly knew their way around the city. Only theirs was more of a universal berg, not so much of bricks, glass and concrete as of memory, imagination and irony. Unwitting friends of the environment too, they walked through the urban narrative based on their théorie de la derive, or theory of drift of 1958. The advantages of exploring, oh I don’t know, İstanbul on foot are legion. Stop dead in your tracks without being rear-ended by an apoplectic taxi, enter dilapidated alleys that capture your fancy, pause melodramatically under a sodium streetlamp to suck face, or run drop-jawed from one Beyoğlu doorway to another like Lady Macbeth on E.

A celebrated situationist trick in fact was to amble through the city using a preset template, for example, taking the first left, third right, walking on for six minutes and then repeating the process. Don’t try this a) drunk near the Bosphorus, b) ahead of a business meeting or c) on a first date. Another gig they favored was to use a map of, say, Berlin to navigate through Barcelona. Don’t try this one when your folks are visiting İstanbul for the first time. These odd fellows were in effect the prescient echoes of today’s bulbous-brained psychogeographers. These include Iain Sinclair, who recorded for posterity, and a sizeable advance, his walk around the satanic M25 motorway that rings London Byrne’s proverbial ‘road to nowhere’. Then there’s the scurrilous novelist Will Self, whose protagonists range from sentient apes rutting their way through postThatcherist Britain, to a weirded-out dealer happily mining a natural seam of rock cocaine under his floorboards. Self’s journalism, particularly his “psychogeoraphy” column in The Independent is as essential as his fiction, and in any case only several degrees from invention. Architect, artist and director Peter Greenway made hilarious early shorts, none better than ‘A Journey Through H’. Here, the narrator, a fantasist, ornithologist and cartography aficionado describes apocryphal journeys using maps acquired by theft, chance or else found within drawings and anecdotal accounts from people whose names begin with “H”. Bear with me, it grows on you. “As a map, the drawing was worthless…” he declares at one point, “…and for all that I never really felt the map was mine”. And this (honestly) made me wonder which city in truth is ever really ours entirely. It might be interesting to calculate the rough percentage of mighty İstanbul that makes up our respective ‘stomping grounds’. 2%? 5%? And when foreign residents talk of ‘going home for Christmas’, what they’re really referring to is probably a relatively small lattice of streets that draft the mental maps of formative years and younger selves. It could probably be sketched on a single sheet of A4 with a fat marker. When in a second-hand bookstore, or meatier budget permitting, one of Central İstanbul’s Çukurcuma antique flea circuses I advise buying someone’s yellowed map of, or better yet, obsolete guidebook to İstanbul. It should ideally feature recommendations for shops and cinemas long since demolished, preferably located on streets long since built over. Because then the guidebook loses all function, retaining simply the form of artifact. And talking of form, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk recently received a royal whupping from American journalist and İstanbul resident Claire Berlinski, for his eternal “Hüzür”, or ‘melancholy’. She took special umbrage to his heavy-knuckled obsession with İstanbul as a - brace yourself - bridge between East and West, past and present, hope and… blah, blah. The situationists would have approved of this, though probably not to her face. They might instead have just bought her an anonymous drink and left it at that. So should you ever find yourself in need of a map of İstanbul select yourself a café, order a tipple and run your index finger around the pattern on the menu. It should get you there.