EV MÜZE: TARİHİ BİNALAR İÇİN YENİ BİR İŞLEV

As one of the influential by-products of Modernism, the enlightened envisioning of humanity, museums have been acting as the intellectual agents of society since the end of the 18th century. The development of “museology as a discipline” and “museum as a building type” in Turkey followed a different path from the established museum culture in Europe. That could have never been considered as a coincidence, as Modernism itself had revealed its own track in the country. Very few researches have been accomplished on the subject, and fewer have been published until recently. In the last couple of years, the seminal works of art historians and art critics such as Ali Artun and Wendy M.K. Shaw, initiated a necessary interest on museum studies in Turkey (1). While Artun collected the translations of selected essays in his book, he was claiming a “critical stand” for art museums in general. Besides the meticulous selection of the authors and the almost architectural structure of the book, its value lies in the fact that it is a translated anthology, which made this intellectual agenda available for the Turkish reader. Shaw, on the other hand, via narrating the history of a museum, presents an original idea supported by a vast amount of material on the “visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire”. At the first glance, it is a known nostalgia that is overruling her work, yet a thorough reading unveils a pride, which is again the common feeling supporting the contemporary criticism of the “project of Modernity” in Turkey. The introduction of museology to Turkish academic curriculum, conversely, was first made in 1989 by a graduate degree program at Yıldız Technical University. The academic institutionalization of the field continued with the other graduate programs opened at Gazi and Koç Universities. Their contribution was characterized with the professional and intellectual demands of their graduates. Terms like, “field management”, “cultural economy”, “interactive exhibitions”, “object identification” or “security survey systems”, were introduced to the daily terminology of museum employees in Turkey. As well as the permanent institutions supporting museology, such as the Museum Institute in Ankara, the History Foundation of Turkey, and the Department of Foundations of Turkey; temporary organizations such as Istanbul 2010 The European Capital of Culture and virtual private organizations such as Arkitera, became the free platforms of museologial discussions (2). However, none of the above mentioned intellectual efforts were powerful enough to disseminate the significance of the issues related to museums to the public in general. The over longing cry of government museums, on the other hand, had been suppressed for the last decade, to give way particularly, to the privatization of the archaeological museums and the historical sites in the country. The establishment of private museums in general and the international exhibitions organized by these institutions in particular, had started a new awareness, if not a trend, in Turkey. Established in 1999 the Sabancı Museum was known as the initiator of this new development. Every exhibition organized or hosted by the museum was on the headlines of the newspapers; every celebrity invited to the weekend events were the natural guests of primetime television programs. For a media departed from the ideological, thus, artistic products of the Enlightenment, it was astonishing to see the influential power of the institution. Highly modest in its spatial dimensions, a few months after its establishment, the Sabancı Museum managed to expand its borders for a larger audience not only in Turkey, but also abroad. Originally initiated as part of a University curriculum, recently the institution declared its autonomy to develop its own academic endeavour. Unlike the most popular museums of the world, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Tate Gallery in London, its power has been based neither on its site nor on its collections. And unlike the worldwide known museums such as Louvre and MoMA, it did not have a history, which could be seen as an inspiration for art historians or experts. Therefore, it is the claim of this paper that the establishment and the rapid growth of “private museums” accelerated a belated awareness towards the pragmatic and epistemological problems of museology in Turkey. It was not the already existing, worldwide known permanent historical and archaeological collections of the government museums, but the temporary exhibitions of the newly establishing private museums in Turkey that marked a turning point in the discipline. And Sabancı Museum was one of the initiators of this “transformation” or “shift”; and has managed to maintain its leadership, almost a decade after its establishment. Another reason for the rise is its being a powerful organisation, both in size and in level of self-contained expertise, able to invest in substantial exhibitions and world-wide, up-to-date displays and happenings. A critical inquiry into the transformation of this “private house” first into a “public institution” and then into a “private cultural enterprise”, moreover, not only unveils issues related to museum studies, but also helps to understand the contemporary private/public dichotomy in Turkey, which has been epitomized with the critique of the local history of modernization in the country. Jurgen Habermas’ renowned book, the “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” introduced a modernist vision of “publicity” originated in the late 18th century, which was the birth date of contemporary museology (3). Particularly focusing on language and philosophy, Habermas traced the history of the division between “public” and “private” and defined to criticize what he called the “public sphere” (4). For Habermas, it developed out of the private domain where discussions on social life became possible. Inclusive by definition, the public sphere developed into both the subject and the space of criticism. Among the new institutions of the public sphere, the “coffee houses” were the legendary spaces of the late 18th century; as they were the new locus of cultural life, and increasingly in time, that of political and economical debate. Coffee houses were used by Habermas to signify one of the most significant features of the public sphere, as they existed in the eighteenth century where the “public use of reason in rational-critical debate” took place. They were acting as a free forum for discussions available to all who wish to express their views without considerations of social hierarchies and official positions. “The ‘town’ was the life centre of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated exactly an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies)”(5). Although it is possible to claim that this terminology could only be relevant in its historical and epistemological context, the significance of contemporary museological developments in Turkey had declared its contemporary relevancy. “Public”, as a historically constructed term, finds one of its definitions in the work of Habermas as it relates to public authority of the state. “Private”, on the other hand, relates to the society and the family. Although public and private are defined and separated in terms of law in Turkey, the acts of certain institutions blur their established limits. The relationship between public and private has always been very complex and dynamic in the country, and recently, with the introduction of ideological debates on the definition of “public space” in the governmental institutions, the complexity reached to other dimensions (6). Both in spatial and conceptual connotations, “public” means “open to all”, yet in Habermas’ definition, it also relates to the development of the modernist conventions of public consciousness and critical thought. The underlining quality of the 18th century institutions in general and museums in particular was that they managed to provide a space for all; a space where the free expression of ideas and ideals were possible. The term “museum” had mostly been identified with archeological museums in Turkey. The establishment of more than 90 museums had been considered as a natural outcome of archeological excavations. Located at historical sites, such as Ephesus and Çatalhöyük, their collections formed the bases of their physical and institutional foundations. This almost organic relationship between the collections and institutions declined the necessary development of critical re-evaluations. Therefore, more than the natural development of archeological museums, the constructed emergence of private museums should be understood through the said critical perspective. Jurgen Habermas’ seminal criticism of the late 18th early 19th century institutions symbolized with coffee houses, therefore, forms the epistemological and physical structure of this paper. Divided into five subtitles, this study unfolds an unpublished history of Sabancı Museum and its critical status in “public sphere” as defined by Habermas. Whereas narrating the history of this family house, the goal is to reveal the problems of terminology in Turkish museology. The transformation of the house, first into a public institution and then back to a “private enterprise” epitomizes the necessity of further critical inquires within and outside the field of architecture and museum studies.