Geoff Lowe

This is how I remember him now

The first time I met Mutlu was when he and Stephen Bram applied for post-graduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in the mid eighties. They had both been at Caulfield Institute and had interviews at VCA on the same day. I remember they both said they went to Caulfield because Nick Cave had been there. Later, at the school, they both set a new standard of engagement in contemporary art, issues and discourse that I hadn’t seen until this point in Melbourne.
I remember in his graduate exhibition at Melbourne University Gallery Mutlu made a work that hired out space, in his work, to anyone who wanted to be visible in that museum. Only GRE Insurance responded and bought some space in the painting the rest he left blank. He then, at the George Paton Gallery, showed a work about his rendezvous with the future and an unbelievably rendered painting of a sprouting potato.
He then made a killer exhibition at Anna Schwartz Gallery including the actual migration of bees from the gallery space. I remember meeting Trevor Smith when he was a curator at a gallery in Canberra and he told me he wanted to make an exhibition of just two artists Mutlu Çerkez and On Kawara. Mutlu was inviting and pushing people and curators in Australia to think on a different level. His work was being purchased by significant collections, not that it made him happy, he seemed to be responding to some inner demand.
I remember him in different houses I lived in when my children were small. He would come around and often stay all day sometimes saying almost nothing. He would just join in the vibe and seemed happy to be there, often announcing he was leaving after six or more hours. We did talk though, we talked a lot about music and art. We liked him being around, Esther and Ruby too. Once with Jacqui, we all went to the Whipstick forest together and he got badly bitten by mosquitos and cooked us a great BBQ.
Around these times he started building a house in Carlton. He was a hard task-master for excellence and outcomes for anyone who worked with him. Mutlu was a dreamer-of-the-absolute or at least an-absolute, he had a way of seeing things that was terribly important for to him to realise.
Also then we started making some collaborations together. With video and music. He could go anywhere you wanted to, think fast and intuitive and was fearless. We would work for months with locations and technology to realise something, then he would say , ‘You’re singing out-of-tune.’
Of course he was fun too, one day at the Sao Paolo Bienal, where we participated together, he smoked a cigar, drank wine and drank coffee all on the same day. He claimed he had never tried any of them before.
Mutlu was a success, an important artist, everybody knew it, important curators and institutions from all over the world sought his work.
He was troubled in a way that his monologues about others would show, he understood his own ethics and symmetry and efforts well but was often appalled by the actions and thoughts of others. In 2003, while I was in London, I saw a TV show where people talked about things-they-regretted-the-most in their lives. Mine was once in Melbourne a friend of our family came over while Mutlu was there. He started talking a mad oracular narrative something about ‘a better man than I am Gunga Din’ we were all so appalled the blood drained out of everything. Presumably he was trying to vocalise that we had a non-Anglo Saxon friend in our house and using the available cultural references he had to talk about it. Anyway we felt such shame but we never talked about it until now, too late. I regretted this so much it was something I wanted to tell Mutlu and put it right. I hate my country and what it continues to become, I want to burn the flag, so many people exercise the right to impersonal biogtry over you.
The last time I was in Australia and saw him. I was in Readings bookstore one night, he was in such a fug or a fugue. He had just been refused entrance to an exhibition at Melbourne University Gallery, he didn’t have an invite, even though he lived around the corner, no one would let him in. Such a stupid mistake no one knew our important artist and it cut him deeply, too deeply I guess. He could have made a phone call. Anyway we embraced and he said ‘We need to see each other more next time you come.’ It was all a bit wretched, my father had just died, and I agreed at the last time I saw him.
Sue Cramer has written to me today about the funeral in a mosque, I asked him so many times about his background and beliefs, he talked a lot but didn’t say much about how he felt. I had the impression that he was an atheist and it was like contemporary art was his religion, such was the stoicism, rigor and obstinacy he applied to it. Still there was a lot unsaid. He made the artist’s choice too in his death. When the world wouldn’t conform to his image or construction of it, he chose no compromise. I guess a lot of non-artists choose this too. This was no cry-for-help it was resolute, at least on the day. On this day I see Mutlu was right, he has left an incredibly complete body of work to us all. I feel peeved because I have tried to make a work that lets life in, but his instantly resembles the form he sacrificed himself for. Just look.
Mutlu you bloody mfin asshole, I shoulda quit you a long, long time ago, I never done good things, I never done bad things, I feel depressed I feel so bad, confide in me, I only did everything out of the blue, I’m happy hope you’re happy too, wish you were here, I can’t explain. Si vales valeo.
Kosova 17 December 2005