Interview for Audio Arts

London, published in IRWIN's catalogue of the exhibition at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, November 1988.

Bill Furlong and Mike Archer

You work collectively: How do you assess the effectiveness of a single work, how do you know when it is perfect? What mechanisms do you use to determine when a work meets the criteria, and when it reaches its objective?

A plaque bearing the name of Irwin is attached to the frame of each painting; individual authors are not specified. A stroke or a part of a painting done by one individual may be worked out by another, painted over, finished or given to another one. Whenever we are completing a new production of paintings from the series "Was ist Kunst," which contains about 20 pictures, we meet at the studio and deal with each one of them separately. Any member may suggest that a certain picture still needs work. At the next meeting, the pictures are again subjected to the same procedure of evaluation. Thus we engage in an ongoing discussion about the quality of the paintings and the logic of the entire series. At least five out of twenty canvases need further treatment.

How do you choose your subjects? What do you have in mind when you are deciding on a motif?

As a generation raised on mass media, we are constantly under the impression of a countless number of pictures and messages. Therefore, an individual nowadays is faced with a necessity to make a choice, which puts him in a precarious position. This is really only false intricacy covering up for a lack of purpose. Those who have defined their approach to art use motifs freely and employ symbols as a means for the development of ideas in their time. Thus they overcome their single meaning.

We have consciously given up the dictation of style and expressed a critical approach to modernism. Our fundamental principle is to stick to a method which guides us to the establishment of a universal form. We have rejected the chaotic polysemantic post-modernistic mode of production, which evades definitions and forces the individual into subjugation by conceptions, thus bringing him up as an eccentric consumer.

We believe we are allowed to make use of any author or theme. However, our principles bind us to a complex of phenomena which connect our work with the work of the group LAIBACH, the SCIPION NASICE SISTERS THEATER and the COSMOKINETIC THEATER RED PILOT cosmokinetic theater.

For this reason, we perform transformations of these phenomena through various media. In painting, we associate a demagogic, popular presentation of themes which constitute LAIBACH as a politically entertaining institution, and existential and ritual relations of an individual in relation to myth, which are developed by the theaters. IRWIN's choice of motifs is, therefore, the consequence of processes in which we develop our own vision of art and is the result of a mental, aesthetic and spiritual synthesis.

We choose our subject matter according to a retro-key.

Do you think that your work expresses an already-existing consciousness within your space, or do you also reconstruct consciousness itself?

If we ask ourselves whether Mattise achieved the unique expression in his paintings by himself, the answer is no. A work of art continues some other work of art, consciousness continues consciousness.

Our consciousness is creative, which is an approximation of the formula: Everything is as it should be!

As Slovene painters, we are chroniclers of our time, of our culture. Consciousness is our form; we project it to a public through the works of art themselves. The fact that we have our public is proof that we have not invented anything completely alien to the people of our time.

Since your intention is to reconstruct Slovene culture, how do you think that your work can influence the political scene?

We believe that every generation must construct the best history possible. Each nation is created to produce culture. We want to make a new Athens on our soil, a cultural space where art will be integrated with the social and spiritual order. In this project we want to work together with Slovene politics and for its benefit. However, our field is art; therefore we have no specific political intentions. Why should we interpret the world we live in as a consequence of some laws or coincidence? This should be made clear by politics.

From our artistic point of view, we have founded the NSK collective, and in this system we act as a state within a state.

As a matter of fact, politics is our most enthusiastic audience, either condemning or praising us. And that is interesting.

Which objectives concerning the revival of Slovene national culture have you achieved? Are you, for instance, interested in the creation of an independent Slovene state?

For over thirty centuries of the history of Western culture, from Dorians to the atomic bomb, art has brought together the forms and contents of what our civilization has not managed to clarify. It has dealt with the disintegration of systems, which is to occur in the future. It has referred to man as the only real instance in an unpredictable world, a world imperfect through the will of God. Therefore, man has become the victim of experiments history undertook on him. He has been turned into an abstraction, a morally and existentially unreliable organism. Hence the origin of his need for ritual restoration. He has to walk all the way back again to merge with all that surrounds him and finally begin creating.

For us, Slovene artists, the refusal to accept totalitarian and imperialistic styles is imperative. If our ideal is the Japanese economic miracle, that does not mean that we covet Japanese technology. We only take an example from a method whose consistency leads to an ideal execution of a concept.

The idea of reviving Slovene national culture is essentially an artistic initiative designed to re-instill art with its historical identity and the artist with his cultural mission. The more Slovene our art is, the more Yugoslav it will become.

Do you think of yourselves as ironic artists? (And if so, how is irony represented in your works?)

We live at the junction of the East and the West. The former has, by placing too much attention on values, brought totalitarianism and ideology to the extreme, whereas the latter has done the same thing with culture and technology by overemphasizing the commercial aspect. This constitutes the irony of the two systems.

In our country we still remember the victims, the artists that were prosecuted for their art. Faculty professors, art theoreticians and critics, all of whom had an impact on our development, are not inclined to irony at all. To them, art has always meant hard work, studying, existentialist contemplation -- like the great philosophers, only through pictorial means.

Slovene culture and ideology are intertwined. Art cannot act as a destructive element or ideological distance but only as an element of construction which will succeed in joining the two together in the future.

During your stay in London, did you see anything interesting or particularly relevant? What is your reaction to the Gilbert and George show, for instance?

During our stay in London we were particularly interested in the forgotten English painters.

Gilbert and George say: "Our art is based on human life. It contains all relevant existential problems."

We would gladly sign our name under such a statement.

Are you aware of the impact of your criticism of post-modernism? Probably you are admired by a great number of people precisely because they see in you the last post-modernist group. How do you account for that?

In the past, each newly occurring -ism attracted people who accepted it at face value. Some theoreticians, critics and interpreters have identified themselves with the form to such degree that they lost sight of the complex relations present in art. They have thus become victims of their own faith and in some cases even lapsed into insanity. What at a certain moment contributed to the development of art became, at another moment, the main hinderance.

We have adopted a positive attitude towards history, art and to everything that surrounds us. Those who disapprove of us are equally important to us as those who praise us. We believe that the audience can be taught and that the greatest success for an artist is to be applauded by the same audience that previously booed him.

We are artists with a concept, standing trial; we are the symptoms of our era, not its objects.

You make use of Malevich and Duchamp in your paintings. What makes them so important and interesting to you?

The greatest responsibility an artist can shoulder is to influence the evaluation of works of dead painters.

Malevich materialized the idea with his cross. But this was already in 1913. To us, the cross, with all the meanings and connotations it has gained by now, stands for one of the symbols from the picture book of European culture. The cross on a painting by Irwin is therefore a method of translating this culture into consciousness, its mimesis. Nevertheless, for us, members of a small nation, the cross simultaneously takes on a different, fateful meaning. Our culture nails us into the center of the cross, into the crossing point of the mad ambitions of the East and West. It is an empty space, geometrically defined, but its significance has never been completely clarified. It is in here that we materialize our own ideas.

Do you consciously tailor your activities according to other contemporary movements? I am referring, above all, to the futurists and artists in Russia in the period of the revolution, who cultivated a similar wish of mastering all areas of culture?

Analyzing the anatomy of the avant-garde movements in history, we discovered a deficiency which will not permit us to repeat their myths, although their thoughts and motifs recur in our work.

If cars were made to satisfy man's every wish, then men would never step out of them.

Our point of departure is the awareness that the previous artistic strategies were inevitable. The avant-garde movements wanted to transform the world and enforced negation as the method for achieving this goal. Because they proclaimed freedom and believed in it, they were joined by that part of the body politic which was enthusiastic about the idea of liberation. Totalitarianism made a cult of it using the slogan of "permanent revolution". However, freedom still means to be free and not to be liberating oneself.

Thus the avant-garde movements were shattered in their contact with ideologies. The NSK project is set in this very conflict in which the avant-garde movements lost in their fight with politics of all kinds.

August, 1988