Monads in Stone: The Ottoman Baroque

This project was an investigation of Baroque-style buildings constructed in Istanbul during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. A happy (polyamorous) marriage of three interests: The Baroque (as a style and method of analysis), the Ottoman Empire, and Photography. In summation, I wanted to better understand how the Baroque period had been interpreted by the Ottomans.

Rather than serving as a style -- which insinuates an internal coherence -- the Baroque denotes more of a tendency or sensibility. The meaning of the word, "irregularly-shaped pearl," is a particularly effective term in the sense that works in this style are mostly held together by ornamentation taken to a level of excess or deformation. Common elements include curvatures, monumentality, the depiction of movement, and incredible contrasts. Deleuze writes "The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, a trait. It endlessly produces folds." In a word, busy.

This suggests to me that buildings exhibiting this sensibility cannot be understood as the material constructions of some ideal Baroque form. It simply doesn't do to ask "how Baroque is this building?" or "did the architect fully understand the style?" as if there was a rulebook to the Baroque or a perfect Baroque building out there from which we can make comparisons.

Unfortunately, this is the exact method of analysis that has been previously used to appraise what I will refer to as the Ottoman Baroque. Rather than examine the cultural and social contexts in which the buildings were constructed, much less their relationship to the fabric of the city -- Istanbul, in this case -- critics have described the Ottoman Baroque as an incomplete form, a half-hearted attempt to replicate a European style. The Ottoman Baroque is seen as a sort of veneer which did not fundamentally change the interior structures of buildings or rupture the pre-existing Ottoman styles in the ways that are evident in European construction- does this, however, make the buildings any less Baroque? Moreover, this sort of narrative seems too easily subsumed under the Orientalist depiction of the Ottoman Empire as the "sick dog" of Europe, experiencing a period of cultural and imperial decline after the 16th century.

This being the case, I wanted to understand the Ottoman Baroque not in terms of its referentiality or ability to represent a specific style, but instead in terms of its performative nature - the way in which the buildings transformed the social landscape of the city and instantiated the presence of the empire. In this sense, it was important to me that my photos not necessarily be mimetic but instead productive in their own right. While the vast majority of the photographs are indeed direct representations, I have produced some that attempt to subvert the referential language of photography, either by extending the exposure interval or intercalating disparate elements. I will expand on my understanding of the Baroque as a performative style throughout the exposition of my work.

Some scholars historicize the Baroque within the context of the Reformation: Catholic churches in particular serve as a sort of aesthetic reaction to the plain, unadorned style of Protestant churches. In this case, we would do well to also think about the Baroque period also as a stage in European intellectual development, the style itself a reaction to a new way of thinking about religion, representation, and the meaning of life. This perspective is also relevant to my project- within Orientalist knowledge production in the 19th and 20th century, Ottoman buildings in the Baroque style are discussed as half-hearted mimicries, simply incorporating stylistic elements on the facades of buildings. The Ottomans fail to transform the relationship between interiority/exteriority in the way that the Catholic Baroque did.

By connecting the development of the style to the Reformation, however, we are able to better understand the ways in which the style was adopted in the Ottoman Empire. Islamic Hadith recommends against the ostentatious adornment of mosques and in many cases the visual representation of holy figures-- the Baroque style would have been inherently contradictory to the religious sensibilities of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, some historians argue that increased trade between the Empire and England during the Reformation was spurred by the shared religious perspectives between Islam and Protestantism. This being the case, the Ottoman Baroque reflects a much more interesting intervention into two opposing perspectives on the nature of representation and religion instead of a simple disinterest in the style.

The religious and political connotations of the Baroque also illuminate Deleuze's claim that the style is an operative function- for instance, ornamentation was used to instantiate the wealth of the Church and the luster of God. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, public monuments of this sort functioned to assert sovereign power. Historian Unver Rustem argues that a series of Sultans commissioned buildings in the Baroque style in order to concentrate the influence of the Empire over an increasingly cosmopolitan Istanbul. This being the case, I am less interested in the Ottoman Baroque in-itself, but rather the relationship between the buildings and the urban environments in which they are situated. The style must be understood in its operation, shifting away from descriptions of coherence between materiality and an essential style and towards questions of doings and transformations.

In what was possibly a pretentious decision, I used the following quote from Jorge Luis Borges as the epigraph for my application for this venture grant:

“The Faithful who gather at the mosque are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum…” 

The quote comes from the postscript to "The Aleph," the Argentinian author's short story about a single point that contains within it the rest of the universe. Borges, who is also the narrator in the story, concludes in the postscript that the point he encountered--and invariably failed to represent fully in the text--was a false Aleph, and that instead a real one might exist within one of the stone pillars of a mosque in Cairo. I have always found this to be a somewhat inexplicable conclusion to a story set in Buenos Aires. However, the Hebrew letter Aleph is used to represent the Ein Sof - infinite divine presence beyond manifestation. Any access to this infinity is, by definition, a false experience. The Aleph is marked by a constant deferral, a promise of an experience to-come; In witnessing it, Borges can only conclude that the Aleph he saw was false. But I digress- Borges concludes that the real (was it?) Aleph was originally in a Jewish temple that been destroyed to build the Mosque in Cairo.

The connection between "The Aleph" and my project is more poetic than substantive. But I was interested in the connection between the crisis of representation in the Borges story and my own qualms with the staging of the Ottoman Baroque. I think more sustained engagement with the concept of an infinite point is warranted. I will return to this concept later in the presentation of my photos.

As I argued, the architectural critique of the Ottoman Baroque put forward by Orientalist critics suggests that the "real" Baroque is marked by a full transformation of both the interior and exterior of a buildings; that the Ottoman Baroque is "less" baroque because of its non-Baroque interiors. Contrary to this position, Deleuze argues that "Baroque architecture can be defined by this severing of the facade from the inside, of the interior from the exterior and the autonomy of the interior from the independence of the exterior."

For Deleuze, the severing between inside and outside represents a shift in the way in which humans interact with the world, beyond simply architectural configuration that is unique to the Baroque period. He visualizes inside and outside as a separation between two floors: the facade is the bottom floor, and the interior is the top floor. This allows him to make an analogy between entering a house and the Baroque itself: the bottom floor is open to the world, and to access the top floor one would need to pass through it and ascend stairs through the layer separating the two floors. The spatial hierarchy is used to demonstrate the relationship between the interior and openness to the heavens. We could think about this in terms of the Baroque Mosques- the ornate exterior fends off the chaotic world such that the autonomous interior may serve as a place in which one can access God.

Already it is clear that Deleuze is thinking about baroque architecture in terms of human perception- the exterior represents the multiplicity of the world and the interior represents the Oneness of the Soul. Thus, the interior is situated above the exterior, closer to the sky. What is crucial for this relationship, however, is the fold-- maybe a domed roof -- that separates the exterior from interior- rather than serve as an absolute barrier between mind and body, the existence of both as distinct from each other is contingent on the fold, roof, or floor - depending on our analogy- that both separates and unifies them. A Baroque way of existing in the world, then, is not distinguished by the soul's containment within the interior space (as with the aporia between mind and body in Cartesian terms) but in constant movement between inside and outside - entering and exiting the doors to a sacred space to access the One.

Interior/exterior are radically autonomous but both exist on the same line of inflection- the fold or Baroque dome. This being the case, the interior world, that which is not immediately accessible as material phenomenon (the soul, the Oneness of God, the Ideal concept of the baroque) is contingent on the exterior (facade, materiality, Multiplicity) and does precede it.

Deleuze writes:

Baroque is abstract art par excellence: on the lower floor, flush with the ground, within reach, the art comprehends the textures of matter. But abstraction is not a negation of form: it posits form as folded, existing only as a "mental landscape" in the soul or in the mind, in upper altitudes; hence it also includes immaterial folds. Material matter makes up the bottom, but folded forms are styles or manners. We go from matter to manner; from earth and ground to habitats and salons.

Thus, the Baroque cannot be evaluated in terms of a coherence to an immaterial form (think of a fictive guidebook to how to build a Baroque building) because the buildings themselves inaugurate form as an affect. The Baroque is, as such, performative.

This being the case, I would like to go back to Borges's understanding of the Aleph- a single point that contains the infinity of the universe within it. As I mentioned previously, encountering an Aleph belies that it is a fake Aleph. Despite witnessing, albeit briefly, the entirety of the universe, the mere fact that it was available to human experience confirms for Borges that it was not real. As such, the Aleph constitutes the very horizon of phenomenality - we can only ever experience the deferral of the real Aleph, the promise that the true one exists somewhere in the world. I see a fundamental relationship between this concept and what I have appropriated from Deleuze as the "performativity" of the Baroque.

In the same way that the experience of an Aleph for Borges merely marks the possibility of a real Aleph, the Baroque building enacts the possibility of a transcendent form through its relationship with the social, historical, and built environment in which it is situated. The concept of the Baroque as an essential style is only made possible by the existence of the building itself- it enacts the possibility of an essence through its unique way of expressing the world. Viewed grammatically, the predicate resembles a verb which cannot be reduced to the copula and subject-- this building is not baroque, instead this building baroques. Likewise, this Aleph is not The Aleph, it Alephs.

The relationship may seem abstract—and in many ways, it is. However, my aim is to move beyond value judgments that treat these buildings as if they were all conceived from a single blueprint. The notion of an ‘essential’ Baroque can only be glimpsed indirectly, always deferred by the architectural forms that arise from diverse social and historical contexts. Instead of searching for a fixed essence, we should focus on how these buildings express the potential for such an essence—their performativity, and their dynamic relationship with the affective states of the city. The photos in this exposition attempt to do justice to this way of looking at buildings.

Of course, there is no set method to transmit affect. I attempted to use long exposures to convey movement in and around buildings, and I hope that the videos similarly provide new ways of "seeing" the buildings. Much of this project was spent as an elaboration of a methodology through practice- having established this method, I would love to continue my investigations with more specific focus on single buildings and incorporate other forms of affective experience. Reflective writing and recording the sounds around buildings - the way in which sound travels inside, the contrast between traffic outside and serenity inside, etc - come to mind.

Infinite (or the promise of an infinite) thanks to the Keller Family for making this project possible. I completely fell in love with Istanbul during my time in the city. Opportunities like this come few and far between, and I believe that my time spent in Turkey will have a life-long impact.