The Program of Irwin Group

The fundamental goal of Irwin is to assert Slovene fine arts by way of representation based on the spectacular.

Governing principles:

-RETRO PRINCIPLE as a regulative blueprint, as a framework of the working procedure (but not as a style) necessary to analyze the historical experience of Slovene fine arts. Hence also the "dictation of the motiff", varying from one project to another, depending on the purpose of the individual project. Briefly, it is no longer a question of control over a formal procedure encompassing a single idea, but that of perpetual permutation and modification, requiring a new conceptual apparatus to formulate and decode the meaning of individual actions.

-EMPHATIC ECLECTICISM draws on the historical experience, in particular the Slovene fine arts, insiting on permanent permutation of the methods of viewing, reinterpreting and re-creating the past and the contemporary pictorial models.

-ASSERTION OF NATIONALITY AND NATIONAL CULTURE through the dialects of the general and the particular; if modernism and a part of post-modernism stand for the "mainstream", i.e., for the universal in contemporary art (the image of an artist), then IRWIN is distinguished by a disappearance of the individual artist and by the emergence of a goup, and assertion of those elements of the national fine arts that merged into modernism in a specifically Slovene way and served as a basis on which the nations culture and class affiliation were buildt. Western modernism rests on the code of permanent revolution, utilizing the principles of negation, irony and implicit tragedy, whereas IRWIN goes beyand the historical experience of modernism and dialectically provides it with a a superstructure by asserting the national culture, the triumph of collective spirit and by glorifying those properties of fine arts which distinguish it from Western modernism. IRWIN asserts the continuity of the Slovene past as the only future horizon. Consequintly, art represents a ritual of the past in the assertion of death as a dynamic element within life. The ultimate purpose of IRWIN's Activities is to reassert Slovene culture in a monumental and spectacular way.

April, 1984