IRWIN: Like to Like

Irwin’s project called Like to Like (2003-2004) consists of six large-scale color photographs presenting actions and projects in landscape. For anyone familiar with Slovene art after 1945, the images are easily recognizable as projects of the group OHO.

OHO was the most important Slovene neo-avant-garde group of the 60s and early 70s. The word itself is a combination of oko (eye) and uho (ear) and is, at the same time, an expression of astonishment. Roughly, OHO’s activity could be divided into three main periods. In the first period (1969 – 1968), it functioned as a multi- and inter-media movement (objects, drawings, film, books, actions, visual poetry, music, etc.) with a broad range of members and collaborators. In the second period, OHO (1969 – 1970) was organized as an art group, and its activities included contemporary and avant-garde art forms, from arte povera and process art to land art, performance, body art, and conceptual art. In the last period (1970 – 1971), OHO was transformed into a community and developed a specific type of conceptual art which aimed at establishing a spiritual communication and ties between the members of the group and between the group and the world. In 1971, OHO – on the threshold of international success – decided to abandon art as a separate field and try to find a synthesis of art and life by establishing a community in the village of Šempas.

Irwin re-staged six of OHO projects (originally carried out between 1968 and 1970) that all belong to the most representative and best known OHO works. As we see the large-scale, perfectly executed color photographs of these projects we necessarily also face questions about the meaning and possible understanding of this work. It may seem relatively simple, but (as it is often the case with Irwin’s works) once we try to answer these questions we become aware of its complex and multi-layered nature.

I would like to indicate here some possible directions of understanding of this project. First, we should of course connect it to the most fundamental principles of Irwin’s work. The group has described their basic working method (besides the principle of collective work) as the Retro-Principle. An essential aspect of this principle is their programmatic eclecticism. What they depict and combine in their works are other images and symbols. They use both the high traditions of the fine arts and the low, mass-produced images; both images from totalitarian regimes and those produced by artists involved in autonomous, apolitical art.

We could say that they depict existing paintings and other imagery, just as other painters depict landscape, people or objects. With other words, their pictorial subjects are the existing works of art and other imagery. More recently, however, they have also started a series of projects where they use not merely motifs from other works, but actual works of art, albeit framed with the typical frames that the group has been using for their paintings. The mere use of such frame (that is, actually, a completely external circumstance) changes the point of view, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing the framed paintings. Works framed by Irwin might be experienced as Irwin’s works, and thus as a critical depiction and repetition of the originals. This operation has multiple consequences. It introduces a certain ambiguity (are these works copies or originals?), it enables a certain reflective distance, i.e. questioning of their character, structure, function, and meaning, and it eventually transforms them from mere art-historical items again into intriguing and contradictory, “living” works of art. It could even be said that Irwin use existing imagery, and even existing works of art, as found or ready-made objects, which is an operation that questions and transforms both the understanding of artistic practice and of the found object itself.

In the case of OHO project, however, they appropriated OHO’s projects not by using the original photographs, but by re-staging original actions. This difference is strikingly accentuated by the use of the spectacular possibilities of contemporary photography. This means that we have to pose the question about the very object of their appropriation and depiction. The OHO artist (just as a number of other artists from that period) were never too interested in producing lasting art objects. Their actions were ephemeral and often carried out without audience. Therefore, the importance of documentation, especially photographs and films, increased enormously. It is, in fact, only through documentation that such project can be available at all. That means that only documentation enables these works to enter the field of art. What has happened, not only with OHO, but also with numerous other artists, is that documentation slowly took over the place of the works of art. The artists deliberately used photography in such a way that it became as impersonal and non-estheticized as possible. And yet we often take it for granted that these images are eminent, canonical works of art. The grainy character of these black and white pictures has attained a particular esthetical and emotional value; the compositions of the images (originally unimportant and accidental) have been transformed into recognizable art icons.

Such process is, in fact, directly opposed to the intentions of OHO artists. For them, not only documentation, but also material executions of their projects were often just exterior accidental circumstances, unavoidable material vehicles of their ideas. Many OHO projects can be repeated, simply using the materials at hand, since their meaning lies not in their material presence, but in relations and concepts demonstrated by objects. Irwin, therefore, did an interesting shift. They repeated the projects, but the composition of the images remains clearly based on (although not identical with) OHO documentary photographs. With the decision to re-stage the actions, Irwin actually went back to the original logic of the OHO group. They did not use “external” imagery from the documentary photographs, but the original OHO concepts that can be (as we said) materially executed and repeated anywhere and anytime. On the other hand, Irwin’s works of art are not actions as such, but the photographs (made by a professional photographer). What they present, therefore, are not just OHO actions, but OHO as a phenomenon that already belongs to the history of art and culture. OHO became such a phenomenon also through the process that placed the documentary images on the position of works of art. This operation can be understood as a symptom of a more fundamental operation, i.e. of codification and categorization of OHO. Through this process, OHO has been constructed as an element of art historical, cultural and ideological structures. It is primarily trough such structures and codes that we today understand the work of OHO, compare it to the work by other artists and groups, appreciate its importance and qualities, etc. An important dimension of Irwin’s approach is, I believe, deconstruction of OHO as a constructed element of the ideological discourse and thus opening a way to grasp it in a more complex way, with more contradictions and ambiguities, but also more directly and intensely.

Irwin's approach is based on the conviction that the impact of different imageries, their esthetical and moral values and their charm are essentially connected to their context and social functions. But they also point at the relativity and instability of their meaning. With the change of the context, the same image, symbol, or form can obtain very different connotations. Dealing with images, symbols, and pictures necessary involves dealing with their context. The context, moreover, is not neutral; images have their function in the social struggles and tensions; e.g., they can be strategically used by those powers that strive for the dominant position in the society, but they can be an effective means of resistance, too. In this sense, Irwin’s art is not only production of works of art, but also a strategic act involving the positioning of these works into a context and organizing its circumstances. They not only want to grasp and understand the field that determines the meanings and roles of art, and their own position as artists, but to operate actively inside the field as well.

Such approach, however, can never be “objective”. It necessarily includes not only deconstruction, but also (re)construction – of artistic traditions, systems of values, ideological systems, etc. Irwin know that dealing with existing works of art involves a great responsibility. “The greatest responsibility an artist can shoulder is to influence the evaluation of works of dead painters,” they said. But such responsibility is necessary primarily because of the fact that they construct new contexts and conceptual networks for such works (and thus for themselves). By appropriating and re-arranging artistic tradition, they also influence the established ideas about the history of art and contribute to the change of dominant notions.

Another interesting aspect of the Like to Like project is that, dealing with OHO, Irwin also deal with themselves and their own practices and ideas. The choice of the OHO projects obviously reflects the interests of the Irwin artists. Some of these projects deal with the idea of the collective artistic production, even a collective artistic body. OHO have, particularly in their last period, developed projects, “rituals” and games that reflected relations between individual members of the group. They understood these differences as the basis for the group’s unity, for “the group OHO man” that can only be achieved through dynamic relations between the group’s members. Even those OHO projects that could be described as works of process art use the model of “family” to describe relations based on differences, sometimes oppositions or even conflicts, that result in a flexible, dynamic unity.

With the present project, Irwin do not return only to OHO, but also to their own history. In 1985, they made a series of four oil paintings called Like to Like: Irwin – OHO. The paintings were done after documentary photographs of OHO projects that, in the mid-eighties, already achieved an iconic status in Slovene culture (although OHO were still considered to be marginal in comparison to the modernist line in Slovene art). The artists combined OHO motifs with one of their own iconic images, the sower. In a reference to OHO’s ideas and practice, they subsequently exposed their works to the effects of the four elements, water, earth, fire, and air. Like to Like is thus not only a re-construction and re-interpretation of OHO, but also of Irwin’s own past art about OHO.

This brings us to another possible line of understanding of the Like to Like project. In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, Borges described a late 19th century French writer whose central work consists of rewriting parts of Cervantes’ novel. “He did not want to compose another Quixote – which is easy – but the Quixote itself,” writes Borges. “Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” When Irwin re-stage OHO projects, these get a whole new set of references. The wheat field, for example, becomes a reference to the Irwin’s recurring motif of the sower. The actions dealing with the collective identity become references to Irwin’s collective artistic practice. Re-staging of OHO’s Triglav project refers to numerous Irwin’s works that deal with images of mountains, and particularly to their interest in the ideological content of the image of mount Triglav that is Slovene national symbol. As Borges says: “Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?”