WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
By Igor Španjol

It sometimes seems that, besides the reinforcement of geopolitical borders we are seeing today, we are also witnessing a relativistic perception of the boundaries separating advertising and news, appearance and reality. This perception is apparent both the social as well as the individual level; it is reflected in the process of political transition, in liberal capitalism, globalization and its values, in lifestyles and identities. 
In this environment, where some individuals predict the future function of countries as nothing more than a logo or trademark, the prevalent trends in art and culture can, even on the visual level, resemble and become intertwined with some of the fundamental principles of authority. Consciously or not, every artist or artist group acts as an advertiser of values, products or services to suit the consumer's taste. The Church once commissioned the finest artists to paint the churches with frescoes, and today corporations commission artists, graphic designers and advertisers to make us into what Boris Groys calls traveling installations.

A critical awareness of these relations affects the production of art itself, and becomes an integral part of it. “If the artist is aware that the state supports him or her out of national interest, he can act on that and shape his works or public advertisements so as to change and redefine the identity and ethical orientation of the state,” Peter Fend states, and adds: “Over the last few decades, we’ve been growing more and more dissatisfied with the art world, and we’ve seen many attempts to change it. People who think in line with artistic guidelines, about meaningful images and art history, have reached the conclusion that the world of art is too small, too limited, too marginal, too weak, too bohemian, to leave any significant impression in the world.  How does one make the transition from the limited world of art into the real world, where news and advertisements address people, and people believe what they say? These are not people from the art world, these are not intellectuals, these are not “the happy few” – these are everyday people.  Not everyday people who think that your product is an art piece, but people who see it as a persuasive message. This was the original function of art. This was its original purpose. Even in medieval times, sculptors and painters did not create objects to be part of large permanent “installations". They did not create art or culture; they simply created a persuasive manifestation of what people should be thinking about. They were involved in a form of advertising.” *

One of the basic assertions of this contribution to the exhibition is that, despite the differences in individual artistic methods applied, there is an essential parallelism to be found between the otherwise disparate explorations into the field of the visual. This is reflected in the exploration of the artist’s relative role in modern-day society, pointing the way to a specific understanding of artwork and the concept of authorship. Finding themselves in the role of cultural ambassadors, Maja Licul, Marko Peljhan, members of the IRWIN group and Lujo Vodopivec use selected projects to ask themselves questions about the subject of their artwork, about the values, worldviews and technical scenarios they promote through these projects, and in whose name. By publicly asking questions about their roots and role models, revealing doubt about the credibility of their work, they are critically, ironically and cynically deconstructing the myth about the leading role of the artist in society. They examine their own position in a specific artistic tradition, they look back on their own bodies of work and they responsibly ask themselves the question – where do we go from here? They realize that art is not a decoration but a key agent of contemporary culture and society, bearing the potential to formulate essential insights into their structure and operating mechanisms.

* Peter Fend, »Umetnost in oglaševanje« (Art and Advertising), Mzin, 30–34, 1994, p. 79.

Lujo Vodopivec

Extending many years into the past, the artistic production of Lujo Vodopivec is marked with numerous stylistic transformations and object layering, from modernist statues to composite sculptures. The artist carefully and strategically arranges the countless pieces around in space, offering new insights into his past production, changing the way these works are read, and opening the way to professional rediscussion. In the late Nineties, he began to combine high gallery production with commercial mass production under the new paradigm – the two had developed independently of each other up to that point. He brought the orthodox sculptor viewpoint face to face with quotidian reality and brought the concept of the sculpture as trade good to the forefront, with emphasis on the technological issues regarding materials and objects. And so, in 1999 he set up Parcours as part of a retrospective displayed at the Moderna galerija Ljubljana, presenting his bronze horse statuettes in a new spatial scenario. The horses, ironically placed on handcarts, in front of brightly painted hurdles, seem ready to spring into movement and expand their territory. The expansion of the sculpture's function and making use of new semantic contexts, from design and photography to text, document and biography, are both signs of doing away with the artist’s possessiveness, the same way that Warhol integrated everyday nice things into the field of art.
The horse, stopping before the hurdle at the final station of the Parcours, filled with tension and suspense, signifies the moment of stopping to think before deciding what to do next. The decisive arrival at the pivot point between the self-irony of looking at one’s past work and the uncertainty of facing the sculptural quandaries of the future known only to great artists.

IRWIN

The IRWIN group address a similar quandary by making reference to the past. Since its inception, the group has been involving itself extensively with the art history of Eastern Europe in its artistic projects, in particular with the ambivalent inheritance of the historical Russian, but also southern Slavic avant-garde and its totalitarian successors, and thus with the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. Following the creation of an individual visual language in their appropriation projects of the 1980s, the group has been concentrating since the 1990s on a critical examination of the art history of "Western Modernism", countering it with the "retro-avant-garde" of a fictive "Eastern Modernism" which, in its own obvious artificiality, points to the artificiality of Western art historical structures that continue to exclude contemporary Eastern European art to this day.
Like to Like (2004) again involves a certain (re)writing of the history of Slovene art. The work consists of photographs documenting apparent artistic interventions in landscape. These are in fact re-stagings of the activities of the1960s/70s conceptual group OHO, the only remaining evidence of which is meticulous plans and grainy black and white photos. IRWIN's piece augments this documentation with intriguing color images, giving the happenings an apparent clarity and weight.

Marko Peljhan

Through his work, Marko Peljhan also positions himself as a successor of the historic avant-garde. In his strategic actions, he makes no distinction between social activities, regardless of whether they take place in the field of art or in the politics. He employs methods and materials which directly interact with social and capital systems, he communicates, collaborates with, and confronts these systems. So, the Makrolab, a complex project fusion combining art, science and communication technology, is designed as a mobile and ecologically resistant research and communications living unit. The telecommunications activities of the Makrolab operate on the principle of transcribing vague and invisible activities pertaining to the micro-environment into traditional three-dimensional structures, or documents.
In the Resolution series, the artist studies tactical topics within modern-day society, using the system of art and its corresponding representation. This regards the domain of presentation and promotion of ideas, concepts and the corresponding solutions. As part of the series, System 7 (1998) signifies the concept of artistic identity, which is not limited to the individual but rather refers to a collective carrying a name and reputation. In portrait form, a glowing billboard advertisement depicts a group of armed collaborators of the Projekt Atol addressing the viewers with the question “Would you trust these people?” – their values, worldviews, and technical scenarios. Would you entrust them with a leading role in tomorrow’s society?

Maja Licul

This kind of straight-forwardness and direct address of the audience are strategies Maja Licul uses in her own work, as well. The artist operates within the social environment and critically seeks to deconstruct the institutional territories of art. Through this, political reflection is established as a reflection on one’s own position, and the position of the institution, within the system of art. Most often, this involves self-reflection on a unique, very specific situation in everyday life, on the basis of which broader and more fundamental dimensions are revealed. This work was inspired by a survey, which the artist had carried out during her stay in Rijeka for the 1997 Youth Biennial, among random locals whom she asked for directions around the city.  Even though the artist, as a rule, remains within the boundaries of specific social and historic circumstances, she often establishes personal spaces and territories within those boundaries. This is why, during the questioning, the pet shop was granted a status similar to that of the Moderna galerija. However, this is not an enclosure into personal worlds, but rather an interaction between the social and the intimate. This is why she chose to reinterpret her past works and reappropriate them in a different way and in a different context. We can ask her question "What can I gain today from a project I did …” in the name of all Slovene contributors to the exhibition.