IRWIN Coffee Cup

by Charles Krafft

Please imagine a box that looks like a theater. The box is a stage. The mise en scene is a mountain painted on the back of the box and along the four sides of it's interior. Because this is an assemblage, not a theater, there are no actors. There is only an enigmatic antique porcelain cup placed before the mountain. The title of this assemblage is "Coffee Cup" so we know this is a coffee cup. It is red at the top and white at the bottom with a thin band of gold around the inside lip and gold filigree around the outsidew here the two colors meet. It is a real cup not a painting of one. It looks empty, but maybe it is not. Maybe it is half full of dried tears, or pine scented air. We don't know. Whatever the coffee cup contains, or does not contain is invisible.

The mountain is painted in the extra thick Impressionist style of, say, Chaim Soutine. The paint has been piled on to accentuate the motion of every brushstroke. It is a self -contained churning sea of stone gray, snow white, and sky blue in the shape of Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia. Behind the mountain the artist has painted a stormy blue-gray sky with one white cloud hovering near the peak. This rendering of Mt. Triglav is based on a drawing by Valentin Hodnik. He was a Slovene artist from the district of Gorenjsko. I would like to think that everyday he said good morning to God and then went about his business free of psychosis. Because he was so normal, of course, he lived and died in obscurity. In those days the state provided everyone with their sausages and shoes so most of the time Mr. Hodnik was probably as happy as a horse.

This quasi-Impressionistic impasto painting of Triglav can be read as a symbol of national pride. There is another symbol on the coffee cup. It is the black cross of the Russian Supremetist Kasimir Malevich. Unlike the Christian cross, the Supremetist cross has equidistant arms similar to the red cross on an ambulance. This version of Malevich's black cross is circumscribed by a black cog. The effect of placing these images together  on a cup is reminiscent of German National Socialist kitsch, but this is actually the logo of Laibach, the musicians of the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) collective. Laibach is the German name for Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. Ttriglav and the Laibach logo together help define a Postmodern Slovene nationalism based on a new history of the Central European avant garde.

The box containing the painting and cup is framed in black tar which has been thickly brushed over four blocks that protrude out from the center of the top, sides and bottom of the frame in the manner of another cross. Imbedded in the tar in the center of the bottom block is a small brass plaque identifying this as a work of Laibach kunst by the Irwin group. The whole piece has the rough handmade quality of a folk art object found in a flea market. It is deceptively simple yet mysterious at the same time. The juxtaposition of the cup and mountain can be only be decoded by those who have familiarized themselves with the history of Slovenia's recent independence and the role the artists of the NSK collective played in helping to secure and celebrate it. 

In order to approach the mystery of the cup, one must also be aware of NSK's ongoing philosophical effort to remove the taint of historical totalitarianism by removing the word itself from the political sphere and applying it to the spiritual. This is the realization of man and beauty as a reflection of the totality of a God without opposites. It is a new icon for the new man who understands that where there is art there is no devil.

15:IV:03 Seattle