IRWIN
IRWINOne of the most attention-grabbing projects of the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) movement in the post-socialist 1990s was the State in Time project carried out primarily by Irwin. The first important point to be made here
is that the “NSK State in Time” implied the absence of any kind of physical territory, and the second, that it operated through the virtualization and transfer of national elements in a wholly temporal form in which cause and effect were not spatial but linked through information. The mapping resulted in a new re-articulation of the retro-avant-garde movement from the 1980s. First, at the beginning of the 1990s, Peter Weibel relaunched the retro-avant-garde as a discursive matrix in an exhibition catalogue for the steirischer herbst-exhibition in Graz, Austria. In this he coded the ex-Yugoslav territory from “outside,” subsuming the productions of Mladen Stilinoviæ (Zagreb, Croatia), the Belgrade Malevich, and Irwin under the common signifier the “retro-avant-garde.” Irwin’s project East Art Map (2002) takes its cue from Alfred H. Barr’s seminal diagram illustrating the development of Western abstract art, Irwin’s East Art Map is a retrospective (re-) construction and mapping of Eastern European art (1920–2001). |
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