The Importance of Playing a Double Game

Jasmina Cibic is a Slovenian artist who in recent years has lived and worked in London. The Ljubljana-born artist, who studied art in Venice and completed postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths University in London, was propelled to international recognition through her widely acclaimed project For Our Economy and Culture at the 55th Venice Art Biennale in 2013. In the Slovenian Pavilion, through the interpolation of a Slovenian endemic cave beetle that had been named after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, still-life paintings hanging in the Slovenian National Assembly, and the work of architect Vinko Glanz, she created an artistic examination of the relationship between image, political power, and architecture.

An exceptionally active artist, Cibic exhibits and works around the world. She was recently awarded the prestigious MAC International Ulster Bank Prize. She is currently preparing a project that will address the connection between the stories of two industrial families and architect Mies van der Rohe in the final years of Weimar Germany and the first years of the rise of Nazism. The question of how ideology represents itself through art remains at the core of Jasmina Cibic’s projects, within which she frequently turns to both well-known and lesser-known architectural projects of the twentieth century. Her Gesamtkunstwerk-like projects address both completed ideological systems, such as former Yugoslavia, and those within which we are still living, such as the European Union. Through her engagement with architects such as Vinko Glanz, Dragiša Brašovan, and Adolf Loos, and their relationship to politics and ideology, stories emerge that were previously unknown even to architects and architectural historians. One such example is the discovery of the transcript of the commission meeting concerning the artistic furnishing of the republican Assembly building — a document that is more relevant to the contemporary role of art and architecture than many would be willing to admit. Through her deconstructions and reconstructions of the image of authority, she addresses the soft power of art recruited by political authority.

I met Jasmina Cibic in her London studio, a spacious two-storey loft attached to the rear of one of the typically English repetitive brick terrace houses. This unexpected spaciousness hidden within a familiar and domesticated pattern could serve as an apt allegory for the artist’s questioning of familiar yet never fully explored protocol villas, state buildings, and representative monuments. These are objects wrapped in professional diplomatic silence, yet with the right approach their tongues can be loosened, allowing us to ask questions not only about the past but also about our present. With what intentions and for whose gaze were they created? And somewhere between the lines: with what intentions and for whose gaze do we build and create today?

Your work is, in fact, deconstructive art?

In a way, yes: my projects are actually a kind of amalgam of ready-made concepts and references, where I focus on basic building blocks in order to study their alphabet and the language of specific historicisms and ideological constructs. Each of my projects, in one way or another, addresses one of the key building blocks in the artistic framing of authority.

Among the already vanished authorities particularly present in your work is former Yugoslavia. What does the relationship between politics and architecture, and politics and art, tell us about our recent past?

What is interesting is that when you look at Yugoslavia as a model — even simply as a failed model — architecture is crucial. In my project Spielraum, I exposed Yugoslav architecture of the 1950s as an abstract prism through which we can observe contemporary socio-political models. Architecture as an indicator of how a new language was established, one tasked with promoting a new state or new political form — the Non-Aligned Movement. The Yugoslav moment became exceptionally interesting for researching the ideological context of architecture.

Exhibitions on Yugoslav architecture and art organised over the past decades by foreigners, especially those from the West, were very good, but they repeated a well-known colonial gesture, where the subject of Yugoslav modernism became merely another geopolitical exoticism beloved by the market — where the exoticism of sculptural forms and imagery, read by the West as political propaganda, was primarily promoted, while the discourse surrounding these fields was neglected. In the project Spielraum, I therefore wanted to establish a platform to which I invited key experts who possess the tools to read our specific past. Connecting these people and synthesising their knowledge creates a new and extremely relevant discourse — especially for the current contemporary condition and feminist critique.

The artistic treatment of Yugoslavia is probably also tempting because, in a way, it is a completed project. We know not only its beginnings but also its ending, which allows artists to form a closed, comprehensive perspective on the state.

It enables us to have a forensic view. Similar to working with a deceased artist, where we have insight into the entire production or oeuvre.

Your work dealing with Yugoslav artistic-ideological themes is marked by a very specific aesthetic. Is this some kind of search for the spirit of the period, or an attempt to articulate contemporary nostalgia?

My work is not nostalgic at all. In a way I play a double game, where the question of the visual language I use is conceptually guided. The reason for the specificity of the aesthetics I appropriate is that I am addressing the power of the framing of ideology. I construct projects as aestheticised performances through the duplication of refined form and ask: what surrounds authority? What constituted the historical decoration of different political regimes? This is also why I engage extensively with the writings of Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus, who address decoration and ornament as distracting elements that conceal the essence of discourse while simultaneously helping enthrone authority. That is why the use of a specifically aestheticised language is key within my work. It is a double game — Tevž Logar wrote beautifully about this concept in the catalogue for our book For Our Economy and Culture, published alongside the Venice Biennale project.

My projects are also always the result of collaborations with different people. When it comes to the actual realisation, I mostly work with craftsmen and factories that carry conceptual significance within the project — they are always selected because of historical facts and meanings, as I somehow follow and repeat the gestures of the client within specific architectural programmes of political systems. This is also why the elements of the project appear visually “convincing” — and what is this “convincingness”? It is about uncovering the phenomenal deception on which soft power relies: the service of art and architecture to authority, which they frame and enthrone.

The project Spielraum specifically addressed the 1950s, while through other projects I researched different periods. The Pavilion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the 1929 Barcelona World Exhibition, Loos’s boudoir from 1930 ... In my new project NADA, through a feminist prism, I engage with three great Central European modernists: Richter, Mies, and Jacobsen, and with the question of what political precondition modernist architecture was born from, when it lost it, and why. Spielraum, however, specifically addressed Belgrade at the time of the first Non-Aligned conference. What is interesting is not only how the state represented itself: how the entire country became a reception committee for the new “third path,” the bloc of Non-Aligned nations. It is also interesting how much power was granted to art and artists. In my project For Our Economy and Culture at the Venice Biennale I also dealt precisely with this question: how much power artists and architects once had and how directly present they were at the decision-making table. Politicians actively entered debates about art and artists, even down to such banal details as the question of how long an artist could go to the seaside. We are talking about a world completely foreign to us today, one we can barely imagine.

My own experiences with the political use of artists today are entirely different. By a twist of circumstances, I was invited to a diplomatic workshop in Brussels. Alongside diplomats, scientists, and economists, the organisers also invited a few artists. What was interesting, however, was that we were truly there merely as decoration. While the other participants made deals and developed new projects, we artists formed a kind of decorative background, and active dialogue from our side was not expected.

Completely differently from, for example, the transcript of the artistic committee meeting for furnishing the republican Assembly building, which you published in the volume For Our Economy and Culture, where politicians, art historians, and architects discuss the suitability or unsuitability of individual artists and artworks. Partly because of the former transparency of censorship, but even more because of the extraordinary political power art once possessed.

In this light, the 1958 World Expo in Brussels is very interesting. Also because it was the first EXPO after the Second World War, when states had time to carefully consider and plan their presentations, but this also meant politicians had enough time to interfere. The Yugoslav Pavilion, designed by Vjenceslav Richter, originally envisioned a large supporting column in the middle, which was censored. In the archive I found extremely interesting transcripts of meetings where politicians discussed the image of the pavilion. Moša Pijade, for example, said he could still agree with the column, while Kardelj declared that under no circumstances would he allow it. Politics therefore interfered directly with the artistic gesture.

So not even with the architect’s personality or political beliefs, but with the architectural form itself.

Which again has to be read in a more abstract way. My projects are never critiques of political systems themselves, but rather investigations into historical forms and their metamorphoses, and their relevance for the present.

In your work I read certain parallels with the concept of over-identification introduced into art — and architecture — by Neue Slowenische Kunst. In other words, over-identification means internalising the language of the regime in a more literal way than is expected from artists, that is, without apparent critical distance. In an age where the artist and art criticism have suddenly become irrelevant, critical discomfort can emerge precisely through seemingly uncompromising submission to expectations.

The point at which, in my opinion, we succeeded most strongly at the Venice Biennale in terms of the message and conceptual intention of the project was the treatment of the paintings from the National Assembly that hang in politicians’ offices. We borrowed the still lifes from parliamentary offices and hung them on the “Hitler beetle” wallpaper — a very radical gesture. But where does the key problem of this gesture lie? In the fact that they lent us the paintings at all? In the fact that the majority of the Slovenian population is barely aware of the role of parliament and politicians within it? Today there is complete confusion surrounding the question of what the political body leading the state actually is.

During preparations for the exhibition opening in Venice, an older Venetian lady said that the installation seemed perhaps a little too traditional to her, while a young curator was, on the contrary, worried that we would be burned for its radicalism (laughs) ... This duality of meaning in my projects is actually the essence of my artistic practice. My projects are designed as total artworks, for which it is not necessary that visitors know the entire story upon entering the exhibition. In this sense, it is about playing with the duplication of the sensation of the system.

Participation in art is problematic whenever the artwork creates a precisely determined and pre-anticipated space for the audience within which it may participate — this actually neutralises genuinely equal participation, and such an artistic gesture is fundamentally patronising.

My projects never anticipate audience responsiveness or a “correct” reading of the message. They are theatres where the level of audience participation actually imitates political life — and inclusivity here varies between 0 and 100. Personally, I have major issues with participatory art that inherently expects a specific response from the audience — because ultimately this is about constructing a fiction that is revealed as fiction. If we truly want to imitate life, we have to go to the extreme — where we transition into political activism. There is nothing wrong with political activism, but that is not (political) art. Personally, I have a huge problem with artists who use politics to achieve their own ego-driven goals. Ai Weiwei is a good example.

What do you think about the phenomenon of the last decades, where more and more architects operate within the art scene, while more and more artists address architecture more intensively than before? You yourself are one of these artists, so I’m interested: is the mixing of art and architecture some sort of call for interdisciplinarity, or more of a reaction to the architect’s powerlessness within global capitalism?

I think architecture and art have always been very intertwined, so I don’t see any major rupture in that sense. Or the reasons for it lie elsewhere. Many of my friends are architects and recently, especially after the financial crisis, many realised they hate architecture, at least architecture as it exists today. Many architects left their jobs and, in a kind of altruistic gesture to contribute something to their immediate surroundings, sought employment with local authorities, heritage preservation institutions, and so on.

I was particularly referring to the increasing presence of architecture within the gallery framework — it seems more and more architectural experiments are being made for and within gallery institutions.

That is true. At the Venice Architecture Biennale there is often more art on display than architecture.

And conversely: at the Art Biennale there is sometimes more architecture than at the Architecture Biennale, if I think specifically of your project three years ago!

Contemporary art has changed radically in recent decades in terms of engaging with the specific references of environments and duplicating the methodologies of their functioning. The medium of art has changed; concepts and strategies themselves have become reified ready-mades. And to be even more specific in relation to my own model of practice — this is a response to the rise of reappropriations of (modernist) architecture over the last two decades. As an artist, I began dealing with this topic because I noticed that these practices primarily involved the reappropriation of form itself, mostly within male sculpture, which genuinely angered me because it practically duplicated the problematic nature of the original without using historical distance to revive those truly interesting feminist concepts that could be reopened through such acts.

We all found ourselves in a new paradigm; we are all swimming within it. Intellectual resistance to the current state of the world is therefore crucial. Interdisciplinary production in the true sense — not merely as a collection of diverse collaborators — is becoming increasingly difficult to realise, especially in Slovenia, where the lack of private collectors has resulted in the entire burden of financing cultural production falling on the Ministry of Culture. Contemporary artists here have thus become competitors in a struggle for survival, which greatly hinders any interdisciplinary collaboration. The situation in which we exist today simply does not function. That is why I always try to work interdisciplinarily, beyond the limited fields within art itself, as much as possible.

Perhaps the truly radical decision for an artist today is not so much what they do, but that they work at all, that they continue creating.

The most radical gesture today would be: close the shop. Cultural silence. On the other hand, we are all afraid that only a specifically critically oriented society of creators would be capable of such a gesture, and that the empty space would most likely quickly be filled by populist production.

You belong to a generation of Slovenian artists marked by increasing activity abroad and increasing international visibility. On the other hand, being an artist in Slovenia is becoming increasingly difficult, with less and less money and more and more competition.

This is also where the magazine Outsider plays an important role: it draws attention to Slovenians working abroad and thus keeps alive the connection between us and our formative environment. A connection that is often difficult to maintain for many reasons. The problem of the relationship toward art, the lack of private collectors and investment in art in Slovenia is complex, but it certainly begins with education.

In England, friends of mine who teach art can borrow an artwork from a gallery — a painting, sculpture, video work — bring it into the classroom and spend an entire week deconstructing it from different perspectives. Children are not only taken to exhibitions of Ancient Egypt, but also to contemporary art galleries; visual artists, poets, and writers are invited into schools for discussions. Audience education begins at the level of primary education.

A related problem is that creativity has acquired a negative connotation. Today, even business schools place greater emphasis on creativity than art institutions do. Narcisa Deskovič — my art history teacher at Bežigrad Grammar School — probably did more for Slovenian culture than many people in high institutional positions. She literally drove her fifteen-year-old students across all the remnants of Slovenian culture scattered throughout neighbouring countries, with the goal that “when one of us one day sits on a commission deciding whether to demolish a particular hayrack important to the culture of the nation, the decisive ‘no’ will fall.” Our Narcisa was brilliant.

Given your engagement with architect Vinko Glanz and with the architecture of the 1930s and 1950s more broadly — do you plan in the future to address Glanz’s teacher and perhaps the most extraordinary figure in Slovenian architectural history, Jože Plečnik?

Until now I have deliberately avoided the biggest names. I was more interested in lost stories, forgotten personalities ... This also connects to the feminist aspect, to the shadow of the great architectural narratives of the past. I am partly breaking with this in my new project, where for the first time I am dealing with one of the architectural giants, Mies van der Rohe. In principle, however, I am more interested in students, followers, those who “corrected” and translated the works of their teachers. That is why Glanz fascinates me so much. With these figures we must always ask: who is the person translating, adapting architecture? Similar to the Palace of the Federation in Belgrade, which was built over fifteen years and realised very differently from how it was originally conceived. I am interested in these small background stories, which are actually the most fascinating.

As for Plečnik: the right project has to emerge.

The story of minimalism as an answer to the question of how to appropriate the aesthetics of modernism without the “annoying ideological baggage” of the welfare state and economic egalitarianism. In other words: how to appropriate only the beautiful form. That may be an especially perverse gesture.

Absolutely. When we speak about aesthetics: every artistic practice has its own inherent style. However, in my work I try to ensure that my inherent style is conceptual rather than born from a specific formalist decision. For example, in my short film Tear Down and Rebuild, language itself attempts to break the form of the medium — the historical drama. The screenplay is composed from actual archival transcripts. If you listen carefully, you realise that it is fragmentary and in fact nonsensical — yet the actresses perform it as though it were meaningful. When the film travels internationally, however, questions arise around language, subtitles, and different forms of cultural understanding, and this subtlety of language can be lost.

This is why I try to construct my projects, which take the form of total artworks, in ways that do not anticipate only one “correct” reading. The common element of the artwork across different contexts is therefore the investigation of the framing of political authority, yet that framing itself changes across different cultural and geographical contexts.

Have you ever considered addressing the palaces of Brussels bureaucracy in the same way you have already dealt with Slovenian and Yugoslav state and protocol architecture? After all, architecture in some sense always tells the truth, even when politicians perhaps do not. So how is Brussels authority aesthetically framed?

Some of my works are already included in collections of European institutions. Yet the comparison between the relationship toward art in the Slovenian National Assembly and, for example, the European Parliament is fascinating. The art collection of the Slovenian National Assembly in Ljubljana is alive and even has its own curator. Meanwhile, European institutions simply do not have a relationship toward art — which personally I find both unbelievable and conceptually intriguing.

I remember a revealing incident during the opening of an exhibition at the European Parliament. After the event ended, staff arrived and began carrying away a heavy bronze sculpture that had been part of the exhibition. When I asked why they were removing it, they replied: “So nobody steals it” (laughs). And this despite the fact that the opening took place in the very centre of Brussels governmental palaces, within a secured zone. The story of the European institutions’ relationship toward art says more than they would perhaps like it to.