Irwin

Irwin
Retroprinciple, 2001
installation
Courtesy: Ustanova Arterija, Fundacija za slovensko sodobno umetnost

The retroprinciple is Irwin's working procedure. Its activity, which was based on Irwin's activity within NSK in the 1980s and realised through it, was plotted out in the 1990s. The structure of NSK since the time of its founding in 1984 has been based on the connection between groups and individuals active in various artistic fields; at the beginning of the 1990s this movement realised itself as the NSK State. As part of this process, in 1993 the architectonic model of the NSK State in Time resulted from the transfer of the two-dimensional structure of NSK into a three-dimensional one. This architecture is a union of the already realised projects of the NSK collective, it is inhabited by the members of NSK and within its interior there take place representations, performances, presentations and similar events, and Irwin's paintings from the series Was ist Kunst hang there. Because these paintings have a precisely defined place in the interior of the NSK State artefact, they are subsequently becoming transformed into icons. Irwin, settled into this project, outlined its activity from it in the 1990s. This was presented in the project Construction of context, the title of which must be understood literally as the construction of an artistic system.

The fact that there was not a developed artistic system in Eastern Europe (i.e., a system of symbolic and economic alternation) became all the more apparent following the collapse of the socialist system than it had existed previously. Jürgen Harten, in his contribution to the symposium "Living with Genocide", described the circumstances of the time as a situation in which the vision of the future had evaporated, present-day cultural identity was a forgery and the past was an enigma, if not outright taboo. However, in comparison with activity in an officially dictated artistic system, in which the artist is caught up in a network of obvious expectations and authority, an amorphous status (which is temporary and necessarily differentiates itself once again into a firm structure) has certain advantages. In addition to the fact that it makes possible a view into the interior of the process of societal transformation, it is precisely because of loosened relations that it is possible to enter into it and to actually participate in it in a way that would be difficult in a stabile artistic system.

Irwin's activity in the 1990s was organised along three main lines, which not only influenced one another, but mutually enabled, and even gave rise to, each other. In this way, for example, books were planned from the very beginning as the final product of the geopolitical projects, Kapital made possible the opening of the NSK Embassy Moscow, the entirely different capital of Opus Slovenija significantly influenced the setting up of the collection Arteast 2000+, and so on.
- the politics of the artificial person: preserves Irwin's coherence and directs it (the performative function of naming and naming oneself)
- geopolitics: the establishment of relations and cooperation with artists in the international sphere
- instrumental politics: the use of the instruments through which artists and their output are caught up in the wider social context.

Borut Vogelnik, Retroprinciple 2001

(from the catalogue The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Innsbruck, 2001)