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 pre-
set 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 post-
Thatcherist 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.