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Eda Čufer
A conversation with Borut Vogelnik

Experts define Irwin as a fine arts group with characteristics of the eighties and the nineties. Can you give a concise definition of some of the key concepts and ideas that have formed the identity of the group through the last two decades?

It's a long story and actually quite difficult to summon in a few words. In the eighties we have come up with an idea of forming a group, and that is certainly related to the fact that we couldn't possibly conform to the modalities of art production of our generation during this period. We realised that we cannot change the conditions of such production as individuals so we organised ourselves into a basic fine art group Irwin, which was, as it is known, also connected to the NSK art collective. One of the assumptions on which our discourse was grounded in the eighties, was that there were no institutions in Slovenia and former Yugoslavia that would connect a small, national subsystem, to the broad, international system of art. Namely, in that time the local system of art was based on non-critical translation and copying of patterns from the international, Western system of art production, to the local system and resulted in some kind of air-tight cultural environment.

According to the information that was available to us it was very easy to define the difference between the West and the East. Whereas in the West the system of art production was internationally inter-linked and integrated, the East had no such system. Instead there were various particular, local sub-systems that operated by themselves. Considering the political reality of the time it was not unusual that Slovenia wasn't a part of the cultural exchange system with the West, but some of us still remember that it wasn't a part of the Yugoslavian system either. It was a completely localised, particular system.

Dušan Mandič, a fellow member of Irwin often explains the situation in the early eighties, when he and Marina Gržinič began organising exhibitions at the Škuc Gallery. These were the first attempts to tie up and give meaning to Yugoslavian conceptualism of that time. Beforehand there was no space for art production of that kind in Slovenia. Exchange of exhibitions between former Yugoslavian republics functioned as an exchange between different states. The exchange took place in a form of some sort of a delegation system, where delegated curators would send works of art that were selected by political or at best bureaucratically set criteria to other republics. There were some institutionalised forms of gathering, for example Bienale mladih (Biennale of Youth), where artists could spontaneously associate, but these were rather rare. First forms of spontaneous communication among artists first started in the late seventies. It is true that the OHO group had worked in Belgrade before, but these attempts were short-lived. First non-institutionalised art exhibitions in Ljubljana began only after the Škuc Gallery was set up. It is a fact that critics, theoreticians, and curators in former Yugoslavia had since always communicated amongst themselves, while artists on the other hand, had been systematically localised. As far as I know not a single book exists that would cover Yugoslavian art of the seventies. The first such book was a catalogue of an exhibition at the Franciscan monastery in Široki Brijeg, Bosnia in 1990- FRA-YU-KULT which was compiled by artists, not critics and art-historians. I know about a meeting in Sarajevo in the eighties when Kaspar König tried to persuade curators to launch a project called Ost Kunst, but somehow they were not able to agree on how they should approach the matter because they were used to working in safe localised systems without any comparisons and symbolical or concrete connections to other cultural environments. We have reviewed this situation and reflected upon it in texts that deal with augmented eclecticism as a platform of our engagement. We maintained that eclecticism is a real cultural practise which we accept as our starting point.

In the nineties, as we know, the political system changed and with that also the social fibre on which our actions in the eighties were based changed. As in the first period, our conception was that facts must be accepted as they are and we tried to articulate them in our projects and texts. If we therefore agree that the conditions of certain art production influence the form and contents of artistic practices, then we can conclude that a specific difference exists in the former East. This arises due to different conditions of production and that's what differentiates and identifies Eastern art in relationship to the West. It seemed to make sense that we should first articulate our standpoint. So, if it's true that the Slovenian system of art, our local sub-system, is objectively different to the international system and that there are no cultivated or articulated paths that would lead from smaller to bigger, from lower to higher but only vice-versa then the transition to a broader system is not self-assured. Possibilities of articulation and integration in a broader cultural space are yet to be organised. This relationship can only be organised, if the basic issues of standpoints and ideas that you advocate are addressed and analysed. We took up a task of articulating the fact that there is a specific difference that defines Eastern art - art that arose on the geopolitical territory of former socialist countries. A difference which is a consequence of a different system of art production, a system that had over decades established and organised artistic criteria in these countries, following the principle of intentional cultural isolation.

In the lecture where you have introduced Irwin's conceptual development associated with subjects concerning art between the East and the West, you have, above all, mentioned four projects, characteristic for the nineties: Kapital, NSK Embassy Moscow, Interpol and Transnational. What is the story behind these projects?

In all these projects the goal was to establish and organise communication with the East and then indirectly with the West. What is the point of these relations? The Western system is organised specifically, thus only a subject, an individual can communicate with it. If the individual doesn't fit the Western concepts of individuality, and if his subjectivity isn't expressed in Western cultural codes then one cannot create his own space and has no identity or integrity, so his ability to communicate with the West is very limited. Of course one can choose subordination. Viktor Misiano spoke about this very clearly, when he said that it is only possible to communicate with the West through a precisely articulated position of someone communicating from the outside and entering a dialogue with Western culture and its institutions. The project Kapital was the first project after the downfall of socialism, and we began with basic questions i.e. the questions of naming things. To name things, phenomena, is one of the crucial tools of seizing the territory in art, and also elsewhere. It was an attempt to constitute a concept of Eastern modernism. This was paradoxical in itself because modernism is by definition trying to be international and global. In fact modernism itself is based on two very paradoxical criteria. On one side this criterion is being global, and on the other we are faced with the criterion of certified quality. It is a common practise to attribute preciseness to quality, to think that it is possible to define what is art and what is not art. We know that both criteria do not exist as such. We know that modernism is not a global form of art. We also know that there are no objective criteria to measure and evaluate the quality of a work of art. All theories from Kant on talk about it and that is no mystery. At the same time the system of art acts as if the former and latter criteria are valid. The thing is that these two (being global and certified quality) demands function only as a pair of false presumptions that are nevertheless generally accepted. In the project Kapital, which was the first project following the Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia, we used this guideline of naming in order to introduce the name Eastern modernism as a name for modern art that was being created under the conditions of production in the East. We did this in time when all currents in the East were headed towards the West. Our idea was that the conditions we had worked under were the only real capital available to us, therefore we turned to the East in order to compare our experience with artists that worked under similar or at least comparable conditions. The next and at the same time the most crucial project was NSK Embassy Moscow where, as it is known, we began the dialogue with some of the Russian artists and curator Viktor Misiano.

This identification with the Eastern experience with a difference led to an unusual conflict in Stockholm in 1996. The main initiators of this conflict were two artists whom you have worked with since the project NSK Embassy Moscow.

This conflict is symptomatic particularly if we consider that the aim of the project was quite opposite. It was an attempt of bringing artists together and reflecting through live communication of artists from the East and the West. Probably this would not have happened, if the project had been carried out in some more conventional, Western European context. The Swedes had used, I should say, a very transparent imperialistic logic and the reaction to it was considerable. The conflict was then transferred to the first Manifesta in Rotterdam mainly because of the letter that the Swedes had sent to all major addresses in the art world and because the majority of artists that worked on the Interpol project introduced their work also at the Manifesta a few months later. So the conflict was, in a way, completely conveyed to the first Manifesta. We (Irwin) also had projects on both shows and tough we were not directly involved in the conflict, we principally supported a certain position. We think of Interpol as one of the more important sections of that phase for it had an impact on the new politics as well as the configuration of relations in European art following the fall of the socialist system.

How do you see Manifesta as a new super-event and what is its role in European art and cultural politics?

In the beginning of the nineties when new circumstances appeared in the East, some sort of a common standpoint was accepted that all cultural and economic environments, which weren't part of the West, are in a phase of transition. Eastern Europe, parts of Asia, South Africa, all areas that adopted capitalism as a form of production and distribution and began learning the basics of democracy, got subsumed under this transitional sphere. The label transition only means that a system needs some time to establish certain mechanisms and so forth. Nevertheless it was believed that production of art, as well as artists and artefacts themselves, without their basis of production, were not as dependant on the communal processes connected with transition. It was worthwhile believing that art was alike in all these areas, for it spoke about the same desires and reflections of mechanisms of liberation and liberalisation, about infinite craving of the subject to be free. Still, the position of artists can only be equated if we conceal the context of its origination. On all other domains difference is articulated and defended. Criteria for joining the EU are furiously enforced and so on. On the other hand art is excluded from these trends, relieved of this burden. This conclusion makes one curious to ask how and for what purpose is art being used. Who profits from this logic, if we know that art depends on the mechanisms of production and economic exchange and is a part of a social system as a whole?

In this context, I think Manifesta has two functions. The first corresponds to the cultural policy of Western Europe, which determined modern art as one of the most important tools of cultural integration. Manifesta exercises this task very well, cost-worthy and efficiently. Besides, it also plays a role of selection. Selection is a matter of choosing the ones that will be accepted in a realm of new rules of cultural exchange and a matter of criteria for the new European cultural policy and new set of values. Manifesta has become a first sieve for young artists. This is a simple observation and not a critique or moralisation. These mechanisms need to be regarded even if we discuss cultural policy on a local level. It is interesting that since conceptualism the very foundations of the elite structure of Western art must be overlooked in order to enable such a policy. These foundations being the meaning of context, the meaning of production conditions, which are analytical and socially critical aspects appointed by modern art and theory.

The last project in this set is the project Transnational.

Considering the path we have followed since NSK Embassy Moscow, I think this project tells the same story. The East and the West still haven't miraculously bridged the historical and economic borders that separate them.

What are your plans for the future? In the last catalogue, it seems like you are currently dealing with the conceptualisation of "icons" which is a more practical aspect of your work which we have not mentioned so far. What is the relationship between your practical production i.e. production of paintings and conceptual projects we spoke about earlier?

Irwin was never defined as an art group, but rather as a group of painters. Painting has always been crucial to Irwin. Painting has always been the basic ground of our production and we have never denied the economic aspect of our work. We have been striving for economic independence from the very beginning, even more so, we wanted to live in Ljubljana and at the same time be a part of real economic interchange which rule the global distribution of art. The means of isolation in the past was always seclusion from real distribution; thus, local politics had absolute power over artists through economic control. In the past the artist, if he wanted to work under real economic conditions, would have to emigrate and physically move to the West. We tried to change that. "Irwin" has always been defined as a group of painters and not a group of "artists". Painting has always been crucial to Irwin. In all these years we have been dealing with analysis and recognition of circumstances under which the contemporary painting can still exist or make sense. It is true that we have recently gradually transformed some images from the Was ist Kunst series into icons. This, off course, is a completely different matter that has no direct relevance to geopolitics and art, which, if my memory serves me right, are the topics of this conversation. We could say that it is possible to describe our activity as a process of organising and creating conditions for an icon, a painting, even though these can appear as completely divergent projects. However, I can say, without any second thoughts, that painting is and will probably remain the basis of our production.