IRWIN’s Exhibition Was Ist Kunst and Foucault’s Concept of Normalization Julie Niemi PROSPECTUS This paper will examine Michel Foucault’s theory of power, specifically the notion of Normalization, in relation to the communist and post‐communist era artist collective IRWIN. I will examine the work by Slovenian artist collective IRWIN and their concept of ‘retro‐ principle’ as an avenue to understand expressive freedom and transitioning notions of normality in the communist and the contemporary post‐communist landscape.
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IRWIN’s Exhibition Was Ist Kunst and Foucault’s Concept of Normalization Julie Niemi
PROSPECTUS
This paper will examine Michel Foucault’s theory of power, specifically the notion of Normalization, in relation to the communist and post‐communist era artist collective IRWIN. I will examine the work by Slovenian artist collective IRWIN and their concept of ‘retro‐principle’ as an avenue to understand expressive freedom and transitioning notions of normality in the communist and the contemporary post‐communist landscape.
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All art is subject to political manipulation except that which speaks the language
of the same manipulation. -- Laibach, 1984
In 1980, the Slovenian industrial band, Laibach, emerged at the forefront of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) art scene. Laibach, housed under the name of Neue Slowenische Kunst
(NSK), German for New Slovenian Art, came brandishing manifestoes, slogans, and exhibitions,
utilizing the repressed symbols of the defeated Socialist and Communist ideology. These artists used
irony to make their point, or extreme indirection, and capitalized on the fascination conjured up by a
society under Socialist control. Structured similar to a self-governed state, the NSK (fig. 1) had various
areas of concentrations—music, painting, theater, graphic design, and even a branch of philosophy.
Together these branches created a vast portfolio of archival works deconstructing the political language
surrounding Socialist ideology.
For this paper I will look at the activities of the NSK visual arts collective, IRWIN, and apply
their late-1980s exhibition, Was Ist Kunst, to Michel Foucault’s concept of power,, specifically the
notion of normalization, the process by which something becomes normal, of social activities and
history within a social organization of political power. The larger questions I will ask address the
expectations of the individual in the Yugoslavian Socialist society through the production of apartment-
art exhibitions. First, I will introduce IRWIN’s aesthetic philosophies of exhibition production known as
the “retro-avant-garde” and “retro-principle”, and finally apply Foucault’s concept of normalization to
IRWIN’s presentation of Eastern and Central European art history through the revisiting of forgotten
historical moments in Slovenia, Yugoslavian.
Over the course of their career, IRWIN practiced the style of retro-avant-garde and
retro-principle, defined as a field of thought drawing from a range of philosophical, formal,
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and social operations in the post-socialist and postmodern practices.1 Retro-avant-garde was
used as a way of looking to the past and reconstructing the norms of Yugoslavian history in
order to create a set of contemporary norms within the Slovenian fine art experience.
Drawing on work from the Yugoslavian avant-garde past, who were inspired by a wildly
utopian vision of the modern world, IRWIN and the retro-avant-gardes, on the other hand,
deconstructed the countries history in a dystopian, critical fashion. An example of the
integration of retro-avant-garde principles into the collective’s creative culture was the
decision to use the German spelling for New Slovenian Art. The conscious decision to
incorporate the Germanic spelling into the collective’s identity originated from the Nazi
occupation of Slovenia during World War II. The event was pushed further back into the
minds of citizens and activists with the rise of Yugoslavian Socialist regime in 1945.
In the tradition of many Socialist-era exhibitions, IRWIN organized a series of
openings in the private home (fig. 2) of residents in Yugoslavia.2 The traveling exhibition
series Was Ist Kunst contained reappropriated Slovenian folk art objects (fig. 3) of
taxidermied animals and collaged hunting advertisements, a recreation of papering
techniques displaying the iconography of the subject in a more critical demanding way.3 The
practice of IRWIN’s retro-principle is crucial when viewing this exhibition, Was Ist Kunst,
for it serves as a style of visual language developed, consisting of imagery from Western and
European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Socialist Realism, art of "Third
Reich", as well as from religious art and Slovenian art from the ninetieth century. IRWIN
was able to use objects from the past, connect the propagandist material of the then present,
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in order to establish a dialogue which recreated the art historical narrative to the
contemporary. Curated during the final years of Yugoslavian socialism, the exhibition series
introduced a new dialogue towards the re-shaping of Eastern European art, which IRWIN
continued post-1992 to archive and write critically on the state art from this geographical
region.4
Examples of IRWIN’s exhibition techniques found in Was Ist Kunst using retro-
avant-garde and retro-principles are echoed in Foucault’s selected Lectures at the College De
France on Security, Territory, and Population. A particular speech from this collection titled
1 March 1978 addresses the development of secret societies in the form of “counter-conduct”
communities’ presented in a comparative time frame of medieval and modern culture. The
text elaborates on the overarching impulse to be lead differently, towards other objectives
than those proposed by the official government.5 To illustrate this dichotomy, Foucault
speaks about the distribution of power and authority between the medieval structures of the
clergy-laity society. Echoing the socialist structure of Eastern Europe, the clergy-laity society
established that all goods become communal which results in the inherent notion of
collectivism. Furthermore, these temporary, independent secular and non-secular
communities of the middle ages were bound by a common sub-cultural bond distancing
themselves from the larger societal jurisdiction, forming a set of internal norms.
In Was Ist Kunst, an internal norm found in the pairing of art historical and
contemporary material within a specific time and space is viewed with the introduction of
site-specific performance art. IRWIN is seen in the space (fig. 4) suspending from the ceiling
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in identical uniforms surrounded by an art historical timeline of Slovenian folk art, pairing
the current moment with the art historical past. This particular curatorial organization of
ephemeral works, with the combination of the performance art, using human form as an
artistic medium, is similar to the normalization of the Foucauldian clergy-laity society as it
constructed a temporary space separate from the governmental nature surrounding the larger
society.
This construction of temporary time and space is also discussed in the 1 March 1978
lecture in regards to temporary societies. These temporary societies were an internal
component of a larger society, but functioned as short-lived, sometimes one night evening,
offering a platform for societal reform out of the official status quo. Similar to the
functionality of performance art, the contemporary reconstruction of the past is displayed in
real-time without the opportunity for the individual to internally rejection of past.
Within the assigned space of the Was Ist Kunst exhibition, IRWIN made the
curatorial decision and societal necessity of housing the objects in the private homes of
Ljubljana residents. Rejecting the Socialist landscape, the private home gallery demonstrates
a conscious removal from the gallery as an institutional space and furthermore, away from
the formal dialogue of critics. IRWIN was then able to create an autonomous space and set
forth to reconstruct the communal norm of that space.
By actualizing the quote “History is not given, it is constructed” IRWIN was able to
realize a new frontier of historical work through the Was Ist Kunst exhibition. Out of the
constraints of governmental procedure, the exhibition craft in apartment galleries constructed
a space for IRWIN and the NSK to reappropriate a new norm in the realm of art and a
symbolic function of a state outside of the status quo. It was by this method implemented by
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IRWIN that artists living under Communist totalitarian conditions were able to use
alternative space in order to construct their own set of what normal could be in a utopian
Figure 2. Irwin, Was Ist Kunst Exhibition, 1990. Mixed media. Yugoslavia
Figure 3. Irwin, Malevich between the Two Wars, 1989. Mixed media. Yugoslavia
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Figure 4. Irwin,
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END NOTES.
1. In the exhibition manual for Was ist Kunst, IRWIN described the retro-prinicple as "not a style or an art trend but a principle of thought, a way of behaving and acting.”
2. Djuric and Suvakovic, Impossible Histories. Known as “apt-art” galleries, these spaces gained popularity in early 1970s Soviet bloc countries, specifically in dissident communities during the Normalization era of Communist Czechoslovakia.
3. Refers to a mixed media piece by IRWIN titled Malevich between the Two Wars. The piece is an appropriated early 20th century Yugoslavian iconographic painting with the Socialist Realist collage aesthetic in the foreground.
4. Should certainly be noted IRWIN’s latest project is a book mapping the contemporary art of Eastern Europe titled East Art Map. The book begins with art content from before the dismissal of Eastern bloc nation state’s and continues into the contemporary with the region’s gradual introduction into the western cannon of modern art history.
5. Foucault, Selected Lectures at the College De France on Security, Territory, and Population, p. 201. The term “counter-conduct” is Foucault’s alternative to “dissident.” Dissident signifies a regional and time specific term, rooted in religious movements of pastoral organizations or second, residents of the former Soviet Union. Counter-conduct, on the other hand, is defined as the struggle against the processes implemented by conducting others.
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WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Djuric, Dubravka, and Mis�ko S�uvaković. Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes,
Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2003. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College De France.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Arns, Inke. "IRWIN (NSK) 1983-2002: From "Was Ist Kunst?" via Eastern Modernism to
Total Recall." ARTMargins: Central & Eastern European Visual Culture. ARTMargins, 15
