M90 Eda Čufer and IRWIN

The Ear behind the Painting (1990)

The visual art group IRWIN emerged in Yugoslavia in 1983, following the end of Marshal Josip Tito’s dictatorship. Part of the Slovenian artist collective NSK (M81), IRWIN use art to interrogate and critique the institutional structures around us and to raise questions about the history of twentieth-century art. Early projects, like Was ist Kunst? (What is Art?, 1985), featured small framed paintings which layered and repeated religious symbols and images from Slovenian history, confusing their meaning in the process. Later, they combined totalitarian emblems and slogans with modern art styles and quotations by European modernists, subverting the firmly held belief that these were polar opposites. Having witnessed the strange dichotomy of Western artists ideologically drawn to Marxism, while Eastern European avant-gardists’ desire for freedom of expression drew them towards liberal democracy, IRWIN suggest that critical and affirmative positions in art are more complex than traditionally assumed.

In 1990, as the communist regimes were collapsing across Eastern Europe, IRWIN and the curator Eda Čufer (b. 1961) – co-founder of the NSK underground theatre troupe Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (Gledališče sester Scipion Nasice) – wrote the manifesto ‘The Ear behind the Painting’ in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana. (It was subsequently published for the first time, in English, in the catalogue for their exhibition Kapital at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1991.) It stated their intention not to allow their distinctive perspective, as Eastern European artists who had lived through a failed utopian concept, to be neutralized by the West. They called their art ‘Eastern modernism’ and defined its method, which would draw on the history of Eastern European art, as ‘retrogardism’.

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The approach of the 21st century raises the question of whether the period we will have entered in ten years time will be the same for all of us.

At the beginning of this century, the utopian triad – A NEW TIME, A NEW MAN, A NEW WORLD – set the pace for the genesis of a process nowadays claimed by two different men and worlds under the common name of MODERN ART.

The fundamental linguistic structure of MODERN ART, i.e., MODERNISM, was generated in the period of various avant-garde movements. Having descended into the realm of the non-aesthetic, these avant-garde movements expanded into the sphere which was originally penetrated by a MEDIATOR – INTERPRETER – MEDIUM – IDEOLOGIST. The rise and fall of these avant-garde movements make up the starting and terminating points of the first, i.e., the UTOPIAN stage of MODERN ART.

The REALIST UTOPIA, confined to the period between the two wars, climaxed when the tectonic forces of the collective consciousness were shattered by the proletarian revolution in Russia and by the outburst of Fascist and Nazi doctrines.

In this period, MODERN ART caught a quick glimpse of how its concept could make the world change in fire, smoke and blood.

Both doctrines, FASCISM-NAZISM and COMMUNISM, regarded MODERN ART as an inspiring method for the violent aestheticization and idealization of their worlds. The problem of these two formally identical worlds reflected the schism: LEFT vs. RIGHT, GOOD vs. EVIL.

The third, POST-UTOPIAN stage, started with the capitulation of EVIL, not with the capitulation of the DIFFERENCE, which was, in addition to COMMUNISM, denoted by FASCISM and NAZISM.

The LEFT and the RIGHT worlds, Eastern Europe with the Soviet Union and Western Europe with the United States of America, set out to experiment with the two different worlds and times, which, due to fundamental differences in their starting points, fatally transformed the then still uniform linguistic nucleus of MODERN ART.

The arguments underlying the conviction that EASTERN MODERNISM was caught in the ice of Siberia should be sought in the methodology of the COMMUNIST EXPERIMENT. The latter arose in 1917 from the belief that the victory of the proletarian revolution established conditions in which a conflict-free society could develop. Once this belief was formally legalized, art was deprived of its creative force and confined to the role of the interpreter of society and the idealized concept associated with it. Thus society, the monumental edifice of an Eastern state, turned out to be the sole theme to be treated in MODERN ART of the EAST.

EASTERN MODERNISM and the WESTERN STATE speak the same language – a language rooted in the language of the avant-garde movements and their idealist concepts of society functioning as a work of art as a whole. The act of EASTERN MODERNISM interpreting a state as free from conflict and the act of a conflict-free state interpreting Eastern modernism became meaningless. Art was captured in the image of the state and was forced to wither away with it.

The COMMUNIST EXPERIMENT cleared the space and stopped time, capturing it in the static and everlasting experience of revolutionary triumph at the moment when the present day triad – SCIENCE, IDEOLOGY and ART – united in the belief that it went beyond the horizon and occupied the vacant throne of God.

The principles of interaction require that another question be asked: to what extremes has the CAPITALIST WEST developed in the COMMUNIST EAST?

With regard to the common starting points of MODERN ART, the circumstances in which WESTERN MODERNISM developed were controversial in many ways. However, WESTERN MODERNISM also retained the linguistic code which was established during the utopian stage. Unlike the COMMUNIST system, the CAPITALIST regards this code as strange, hostile and aimed at the subversion of the system’s very foundation.

Confronted with this antagonism, CAPITALISM takes advantage of the hyperfunctionality of the interpreters-mediums, who daily translate into the linguistic categories of capitalism, converting its subversive essence into market values. Consequently, the activities performed by these media are reflected in the inflationary acceleration of WESTERN TIME and in the imperialist charge of the WESTERN SPACE. The disintegrative intervention of time-inflation into the structure of WESTERN MODERNISM is most evident in the inflation of -isms, in the production of PREFIXES for the same SUFFIX.

The demonic power of a signifiant in the West has expanded in the East as well. During the Cold War, numerous artists emigrated to the West, and the false conviction that MODERN ART, no matter whether coming from the East or from the West, is so universal as to be classified under a common name: the current -ISM appeared to be very common. The evidence that this conviction only reflects the imperialist charge of the West may be well observed in the fact that, after 1925, the act of application of the signifiant was developed and monitored in five Western states at the most.

We may conclude the study of the POST-UTOPIAN stage in MODERN ART with the statement that the two different contexts in which the WESTERN and EASTERN experiments were carried out deprived MODERN ART of its international character, each in its own domain ALIENATING it from religiously-UTOPIAN function. With EASTERN time preserved in the PAST and Western time stopped in the PRESENT, MODERN ART lost its driving element – the FUTURE. A general interpretation of the current breakdown of the Eastern regimes hides the mutually held illusion that the world will uniformly evolve towards a WESTERN type of government.

As artists from the EAST, we claim that it is impossible to annul several decades of experience of the EAST and to neutralize its vital potential.

The development of EASTERN MODERNISM from the past into the present will run through the FUTURE. The FUTURE is the time interval denoting the difference.

Being aware that the history of art is not a history of different forms of appearance, but a history of signifiants, we demand this DIFFERENCE be given a name.

THE NAME OF EASTERN ART IS EASTERN MODERNISM.

THE NAME OF ITS METHOD IS RETROGARDISM.

Ljubljana, 1990