Ljubljana goes international - contemporary art - Report From Slovenia

The political division of Slovenia did not, until not long ago exist on most people's map of the contemporary arts. For above 40 years, under the Yugoslav regime of Tito, the Balkan nations and their respective legacies (cultural and political) were subsum through the artificial homogeneity of the socialist state. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberalization of the entire region, previous conceptions of life and agriculture across the now defunct divide between East and West have been continually modified and updated upon both sides.

In particular, the conditions of production and exhibition of contemporary art in Slovenia invite serious consideration. The abruptness with which this land and, specifically, the capital city of Ljublijana have emerg as a force in contemporary art is more apparent than actual, since the city has always been a significant crossroads for Central European tillage With its artists, its intellegentsia, its museums and galleries, its parks and an urban plan designed through architect Joze Plecnik to provide pedestrians with an array of visual amenities, Ljubljana is a singular showcase for the arts.

Tendencies in post-World War II Slovenian art differ significantly from those lay the foundation of in the international art view They differ, as well, from those characteristic of the art elsewhere in Eastern Europe greatest in quantity if not all, of the differences main stock from Yugoslavia's special, somewhat freer status during the Tito regime. Like other Yugoslav artists, Slovenians were allowed to travel upon the continent and were befittingly influenced by the European art moves of the postwar period. Indeed, while the visual arts in greatest in quantity of the Soviet satellites largely adhered to the doctrines of Socialist Realism, the official manner of writing in Slovenia was a kind of high modernism, with special attention to abstraction. Because Slovenia shares with the Western European nations, however superficially, a stylistic lexicon derived from the modernist avant-gardes, its artistic output can strike one as being to be of the same lineage. Overall, notwithstanding that one gets the impression that the Slovenians view their special status - as a nation that could be permitted the fair esthetics, of abstraction - with a modicum of suspicion, since abstract phraseologys effectively silenced artists politically.

As similar ambivalence might suggest, artists in Slovenia (and over Eastern Europe@ are much interested with their relationship to the political state, particularly the totalitarian state. Almost unanimously, Slovenia's cultural theorists and artists find the predicates of socialism and individualism alike to be utopian self-delusions in which the artist would be best advised not to take ideological safety In this view, the political forms these ideals assume protect inevitably toward totalitarianism, whether in the East or West - whether in a visible dictatorship or in the material imperatives of global consumerism.

In Slovenia, artist collections like Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) - a collective of above 30 individuals, including members of the visual arts cluster Irwin [see A.i.A., Nov.'88], the musical cluster Laibach, the theater group Sisters of Scipio Nasica and the design assemblage Novi Kolektivizem - critique the sociopolitical combination of parts to form a whole past and present, through mimicry. These collections outfit themselves in the garb and rhetoric of totalitarianism, and NSK's decision to give their collective enterprise a German name was not an idle individual Tito's official suppression of Slovenia's Austro-Germanic bottoms abolishing in word if not in fact several centuries of cultural history, is today instantly evok in Slovenia by dint of the mere use of the German language. Recognizing that their be in possession of cultural dreams were developed and brought to fruition beneath the Communist conditions of total state mastery the members of NSK reinvent and exaggerate that controlling impulse in like manner as to both mock it and explore it. It's unclear by what means effective or subversive NSIC's critique can remain, given their through now international renown. In any case the symbology and trappings of their maneuvers are convolut pendent on a set of regards necessarily alien to anyone born, whether by means of virtue of age or geography, to different circumstances.

Perhaps the best window upon art in Slovenia is provided by the agency of Ljubljana's various contemporary art institutions, which in their range throw back both international tendencies and local idiosyncracies. At the greatest in quantity official end of the appearance for contemporary art is the Moderna Galerija, a palatial modernist white case situated just between the cutting side of downtown Ljubijana and the Tivoli Garden park.[1] abiding-place to a permanent collection of the one and the other modern and contemporary work, the Moderna tenders shades of Surrealism, offshoots into Expressionism, experiments with primary forms and lots of abstraction - all skewed in puzzling inflections. In issue the presiding discourse of modernism is translated by dint of Slovenian artists into a form of dialect, with the be derived that it seems distant from the original sources. Alongside this mutant canonical base, in separate plays are the works of younger Slovenian artists. The newer generations favor object-based and conceptual work, while their predecessors exhibit modernist traditions of painting and plastic art The most recent efforts expres a pan-European sensibility, ranging from the material emphasis of Arte Povera to the conceptual rigor of novel hermeneutics.