The following is an excerpt of an essay by Inke Arns entitled îState Artistsî, about the Slovenian art collective IRWIN, which originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of HMKV magazine.
Affirmation and/as Critique
Members of the artist collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (New Slovenian art; NSK), founded in 1984, travelled to Moscow in 1992 to open open a temporary embassy for NSK State in Time – also founded that year – in a private flat at 12 Leninsky Prospekt. From 10 May to 10 june 1992, the NSK Embassy Moscow hosted lectures and discussions there on the function and significance of 1980s art in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. It is easy to imagine them debating topics such as the relationship of artists to the state and socialist ideology as well as issues relating to the self-organisation of the subcultural art scene outside the state-run cultural sector.
At the same time, critique has always taken the form of affirmation in the work of IRWIN and NSK, and affirmation turns out to be a critique of the political system and its ideology that is difficult to surpass. In the 1980s, NSK’s tactics were not to adopt an openly critical discourse towards the state and its ideology, nor to distance themselves from this ideology through ironic negation (which is usually referred to as a “dissidence” ). On the contrary, their strategy was about reiteration, about the appropriation of certain components and set pieces from the official ideology, about playing with these ready-mades, about adopting existing codes of domination in order – according to Laibach – “to respond to them in their own language”. It was a subversive strategy that the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has described as a radical “over-identification” with the “hidden reverse” of the ideology that regulates social relations. By using all of the identifiers that were both explicitly and implicitly perscribed by the official ideology, NSK appeared like an organisation that seemed even “more total than totalitarianism” (Boris Groys) – a provocative rebuke to the political system of Yugoslavia.
Irwin/NSK have always stressed that they were not particularly concerned with critiquing exsisting structures, but rather were primarily interested in developing and constructing something of their own (which is, of course, a thoroughly complex critique of the existing conditions). After all, as the Irwin members pointed out more than once in the 1980s, they were “state artists” rather than dissidents. This disinterest in a direct critique of the political landscape of the 1980s took on an aesthetic form in their organisational charts – in other words, in the internal structural and functional frameworks of Laibach Kunst and NSK (1984). Indeed, in the 1980s and 1990s, Irwin and NSK regarded themselves as explicitly state-like social structures that were compensating of a proper context.
