Lipica & August Černigoj

Černigoj at the beginning of his "jeans" phase in Trieste (Trst), c. 1927

 On Friday I headed for Lipica, a tiny hamlet right on the Italian border. I hadn't quite grasped before setting out how close to the border it was, but a ten minute walk due west from the main stable block, and you're in Italy.

I say Lipica is a "hamlet" but it isn't really even that: it's a glorified large farm which steadily expanded, as a home to one of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's studs, for 350 years, before the Yugoslav period. Since Slovenian independence, the place has been built up as a tourist destination, with a new hotel, restaurants and a casino, in addition to the attraction of the beautiful white horses. However, very few people actually live there; most commute the few kilometres from nearby Sežana. Sadly, when I went on Friday, Lipica was cloaked in a thick mist. Although there was a strong tang of horse, and the occasional neigh from the void, none of the beasts were actually visible.  Fog is a perfect camoflague for a horse that colour. I couldn't even see the brown and black Lippizaner foals, and I was told quite a few were in the fields with their mothers; the horses gradually turn white as they mature. Oh well. My guide told me that the place becomes very busy with tourists in the summer, and with locals on pleasant weekends; it being a dank December Friday, I was the only visitor there.

A Lippizaner and foal. Er, when they are not hidden in thick fog.

 In any case, I was there to have a good look at the work of sometime Constructivist, lithographer and woodcutter August Černigoj.  In his long life, this artist, born in Austro-Hungarian Trieste, lived variously in Italy, Germany and Ljubljana. He had a lifelong fondness for this part of Slovenia, and died in 1985 in Sežana. His death in the nearby town accounts for the bulk of his life's work having ended up here.  Out of tourist season, appointments are necessary, and the gallery is only staffed- by a student volunteer- in the summer months. This is understandable, as in this location, the art gallery is almost an unexpected bonus; an extra attraction to the main equine draw. However, it is also rather a pity, as Černigoj is one of the most significant artists from this part of the world, certainly in terms of inter-war modernism, and perhaps deserves a more extensive treatment than he has received until now.

The museum, a big irregular space with different levels, is absolutely stuffed with everything that Černigoj left to them. This is maybe a mistake, as the focus really should be on the years of the 1920s and 1930s, and the late drawings, woodcuts and lithographs. Some of the paintings from the 50s and 60s really shouldn't take up the space that they do.

Some of the 50s paintings. Hm.

 Černigoj, having grown up in Austria-Hungary and served briefly in the Habsburg army towards the end of the Great War, found himself something of a nomad in the six or seven years after the end of the conflict; soon leaving behind his newly Italian home city for short and rather unsatisfactory spells in Ljubljana and Munich. The major departure in his work came after a year's studying under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Weimar Bauhaus, in 1924. The abstract vision and Utopian desire to shape a fundamentally new art and, with it, a new way of life, was to consume Černigoj for the following fifteen years. Returning to Ljubljana for 1924-25, he taught at a local art school for a semester, and helped oversee the first exhibition of Constructivist art in the city. Reactions to the show were somewhat varied; the re-installation of this Constructivist show in the Moderna Galerija includes a wonderful anecdote regarding the consternation and dismay that accompanied the appearance of the first pair of jeans in Yugoslavia (see below).

"The birth of jeans in Yugoslavia"- Ljubljana, 1924. Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana

The exhibition established Ljubljana as a destination for contemporary art, but this reputation was to be briefly held. Unfortunately, just a term into his new job, the paranoid and censorious Royalist secret police discovered Communist literature in the artist's personal mail. The Communist Party was officially banned in Royalist times (many of the leadership were exiled in Vienna, where they spent their time discussing theory) and even possessing literature could lead to imprisonment- at the very least, a fine and a good beating. So, Černigoj was obliged to slip across the border to Trieste before the heavy knock at the door. Just think about that for a minute. An artist voluntarily flees into exile in Mussolini's Italy for fear of persecution at home- that gives you something of an idea of the intrusiveness of the Royal authorities.

Portrait of Srečko Kosovel, 1926

 For all these personal difficulties, the years from 1924 to the middle 1930s were exceptionally productive for Černigoj. In Trieste, he quickly established a private school for contemporary art, and earned a living through working for advertisers, architects, interior designers, and by illustrating books. Further Constuctivist exhibitions were mounted in Trieste, as well as closely participating in the avant-garde journal Tank, edited by Ferdi Delak- appearing in two brief editions in 1927. This was a baffling mixture of Utopian statement, taut linear drawings of architectural and design projects that never made it into three dimensions, and theatre reviews. The magazine, perhaps looking towards Ljubomir Mičić's Zenitist publications, exhibited a strong leftist sympathy which was never likely to make for a long print run in those times.

Amongst the friends that Černigoj made in this period was Srečko Kosovel, one of the most noted Slovene poets of the last century. Černigoj picked out his friend's round glasses and high forehead as the distinguishing points in a taut, dense network of carved lines in this lithograph, one of a series of similar lithographic portraits and studies made in the first eighteen months of exile. The two men had wanted to establish a journal called The Constructor, but this later became Tank after the poet's tragic death from meningitis, in 1926.

Tank poster feat. Ferdi Delak, 1927

In many ways, Černigoj was a victim of rather unfortunate circumstance. The second war saw him retreat further into private life, drawing from the human figure and occasionally emerging to decorate the interior of a church; in post-war Yugoslavia, he suffered the fate of many 1920s radicals across Europe, by being half forgotten and a radical from a time officially castigated by the prevailing ideology. Černigoj's suffering was recognised; he had some teaching jobs and exhibited extensively in Yugoslavia and Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, by that time, younger artists with a more contemporary focus commanded attention, and Černigoj's later exhibitions aroused little interest or enthusiasm. He moved into retirement in the Karst in the late 70s, where students of the time remember him as a kindly and encouraging figure, and was forgotten after his posthumous retrospective in Slovenia, in 1985.

The gallery in Lipica is able to give a very comprehensive overview of the varied and tortuous path of Černigoj's career. Perhaps there is a little too much focus on the less successful aspects of his career, but there is rich and interesting material here to show that this is an artist who very much deserves a fresh look, in a European context. Černigoj has featured in recent exhibitions of Constructivist art in the US and Central Europe, and his theoretical statements in Tank have re-appeared in readers of the period. Even in death, however, circumstance conspires against him; his gallery is a puzzling presence here in Lipica, where it is unlikely to receive the wider audience that it deserves. However, hopefully the re-construction of his 1920s work at the Moderna Galerija, will encourage more visitors to come and look at this very interesting small museum more closely.

Quick update

It's been a busy week. I have managed to get around most of the galleries in Ljubljana now, and have been very favourably impressed by the new Moderna Galerija, and the Museum of Contemporary Art- Metelkova, which has been fifteen years in the making and finally opened last weekend. I will put up some discussion of these two places in the next few days. I have also had some pretty good meetings with Slovene art historians and artists, which has been helpful for my ongoing research.

I have an essay that is due by mid-week and unfortunately that is taking up most of my writing labours at the moment. I'm going to try and get something up on here tomorrow, and then put up more writing about Ljubljana and Lipica, where I finally got to see the Černigoj gallery, towards the end of the week.

In Croatia and Slovenia, there have been general elections today. To no-one's surprise, the Croatian right wing governing party- the HDZ, mired in corruption scandals, has spiralled earthward in flames, with no obvious sign of a parachute; a newly concocted social-democratic coalition has won power, by the looks of it. The big shock of the night has taken place here in Slovenia. The leader of a new centre-left party, Zoran Janković, has won a quite stunning victory ahead of the expected winner, the ruthlessly slick and self confident Janez Jansa. Jankovic, the current mayor of Ljubljana, has promised to govern "beyond ideologies" in an attempt to lead Slovenia towards a better tomorrow, but the detail of the journey ahead seems rather scant, at present. I guess the Slovenes will find out in the next few months. Janković is former head of the Slovene Mercator supermarket chain, and seems a strange mix of comforting words, triangulated support (he seems to have a wide appeal amongst both younger voters and former Communists- not least of whom, Milan Kučan) and managerialist efficiency.

There are just over two million Slovenes, so the links between high politics and art are much more clearly established than may be the case in more populated nations. Here's tonight's little known contemporary art fact; the current Slovenian flag was designed, at least in part, by Marko Pogačnik, sometime member of 60s conceptual / anti-art radicals OHO. Pogačnik took the symbol of Mount Triglav from Kun's Slovenian Communist coat of arms, inverted the blue and white, added three yellow stars (representing a brief and failed campaign to gain Slovene independence from the Habsburgs in the fifteenth century, the Celje duchy)...and....bingo...


               
                            

                  

I'll leave you pondering the thorny question of how many other living artists have designed a national flag that is still in use in 2011, whilst I come up with a more substantive post in the next 24 hours.

Ljubljana Dérive (and anti-capitalism)

Yours truly when last in LJ, over Christmas/New Year 2008-9, in a miserably overheating Stojadin. The engine nearly blew apart owing to a faulty 1-euro thin cardboard gasket.  This picture later appeared on flickr, having been posted by an incredulous Slovenian driver.

So, with all the galleries closed today, I've taken the opportunity to have a good stroll around Ljubljana in the frosty winter sunshine, and to re-acquaint myself with the city. It's been three years since I last was here (see above), and I have missed it in that time, as it really is quite a unique city, and amongst my favourite three anywhere.

Austro-Hungarian post office, Slovenska cesta

Every time I come back here, the place seems to have become slightly more globalised. Smaller shops on the main drags seem to have been priced out in the last couple of years, so the dubious charms of Vero Moda have now been replaced by international brand names. Not that this process hasn't attracted much local dissent; this city is amongst the most heavily graffitied of any I've been to, ranging from the usual anti-capitalist slogans, to truly ornate street art around the Metelkova "autonomous space", which seems to shrink slightly with every new visit. There still seems to be a robust and defiant community there; good to see, as, with the waning of Christiania in Copenhagen, Metelkova must now be one of the better known communal spaces in a European capital city. The authorities have been frustrated many times in the past in an attempt to clear out the residents, and appear to have given up that idea for now.

Top-hatted Octopus, Metelkova

Ljubljana had a remarkable twentieth century. A person born in 1900 would have been variously a royal Austro-Hungarian subject, a subject of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; a comrade-citizen of Socialist Yugoslavia, a citizen of independent Slovenia; a very few centenerians would have recently ended their days as an EU citizen, in late 2004.  This flip chart of successive short-lived identities also ignores the savage, brutal Italian-German occupation of here in 1941-45. From early 1944 the whole city was cordoned off with barbed wire, so pitifully poor was the hold of the Axis occupiers on a resentful and deeply divided local population. An incredibly complex and hard to navigate micro-civil war was fought here between Slovene Communists, democrats, clerical fascists, and out-and-out Nazis, somewhat cut off from the main thrust of the partisan struggle in Croatia, Serbia and BiH.

More than a tinge of Venice here

Slovenia had a reputation as being the most loyal of the non-Austrian provinces to the house of Habsburg; it joined the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, only because there was little other viable alternative, in the wake of the First World War. At the other end of Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, Slovenia was the first to unshackle itself from an increasingly moribund Yugoslav federation. The moderate and pluralistically-minded leadership of the League of Slovenian Communists, under Milan Kučan, found themselves increasingly at odds with the centralising, new ethnic nationalism of Slobodan Milošević as 1989 wore on. The Slovenian party formally withdrew from the League of Yugoslav Communists at a stormy and vehement extraordinary congress in late 1990; half a year later, on 25 June 1991, Ljubljana became the newest capital city in Central Europe, after the dismal failure of Milošević's half-hearted attempt to call the Slovenes to heel, by force.

Stari trg (Old Square) in the afternoon sun

In the subsequent twenty years, Ljubljana has undergone a thoroughgoing reconstruction and redevelopment.  Culture has been central to this. For a city of not much more than 250,000 people, there is a remarkably diverse and thriving official, and unofficial culture. This has been the case here since the late 1960s, and the time of the remarkable and oft-mentioned OHO group; "alternative" culture, as a means of critiquing rather than calling for the overthrow of the Socialist government, took several large steps forward in the mid 1980s, with an alternative scene producing the likes of Laibach, the IRWIN grouping and the Neue Slowensiche Kunst phenomenon. From the 1990s, Slovenia has maintained and developed a cultural profile in inverse proportion to its relatively small population and size.

The city today bears strong traces of all its stages of development in the last hundred years. The pearl- like city centre, set around Joze Plecnik's famous three bridges, the Roman Catholic cathedral, and the apartment blocks all bear strong traces of the Habsburg period. Around the River Ljubljanica, with small boutiques, coffee shops and pleasant restaurants, there is an unmistakably Venetian flavour. Around the rather empty Cankarjevo Dom, now a cultural and shopping centre, and office blocks, is the heavy concrete footprint of the Titoist years, given a mournful aspect by the neglected revolutionary monument, constructed in 1975.

Monument to the Revolution, Cankarjevo Dom. 1975

On the surface, Ljubljana still appears to be in robust economic health, with many of the fatal existential doubts plaguing other parts of the EU little evident here. In common with the neighbouring Croats, Slovenia goes to the polls on the 4th December, after Borut Pahor's soft-centrist government fell in a vote of confidence; moderate, technocratic, middle of the road candidates stare out from electoral posters of all different hues. Purely in terms of graffiti, however, there does appear to be an appetite for a different kind of politics here; calls for the death of capitalism, or a renewed collectivism are hardly unusual, but the daubing here does seem driven by much more than the raging hormones of an angry sixteen year old with an aerosol can.

The trouble is, what is that alternative? No one knows. The student and anti-captialist protests across the EU and USA in the last year have been spectacular, but unfocused, rudderless and seemingly lacking any kind of political nous, or viable forward strategy. They have made good copy for the 24 hour news networks, but saturation media coverage is of dubious merit now; the permanently-ravenous permanent-breaking-news focus quickly moves on when the protests stagnate, and the collective memory is now so short, addled by the 'net, that such protests tend to blend quickly into one faded cartoon wallpaper.  

It may well be fair to say that people are jaded, cynical and sick to the back teeth of a professional, media savvy political class that pursues power as a goal in itself, in a post-ideological age. That acknowledged, the same very old, re-heated Trot and Anarchist slogans, shouted through a megaphone, or written in Gill Sans Bold 48-point on the front page of a newspaper that nobody reads, aren't going to persuade anyone of the viability of a radical alternative. If the forms and articulations of adversarial twentieth century democracy are played out, so to are the wannabe-utopian alternatives.

Revolutions and ruptures reflect the character of the age that produces them. Middle class opinion-formers have seen in the current student protests, a strong echo of their own youth in the late 1960s. However, this generation of discontent is utterly atomised and disunited, held together only by a rather vague, impotent "down with this sort of thing" sentiment, a loose farrago of 101 discontents crashing into one another and cancelling one another out, according to the specific local circumstances of the protest. 

The spectacle of unity, the spectacle of discontent, can easily be accommodated in late capitalist society, without so much as a pin prick of damage being caused to its architecture. For every latter-day revolutionary who wants to seize control of the means of production, distribution and exchange, there is a protestor waving a placard because he happens to be worried about his ability to re-pay a mortgage or car loan, in an age of spiking job insecurity. In the internet age, people relate to circumstances around them on an ever-more individualised, consumerist basis, which is a challenge that collectivist and radical strategies have never convincingly confronted. 

How is it possible to act on a basis of collective solidarity, in order to achieve collectively agreed aims, when such widely differing viewpoints have to be accommodated, in order to merit the label "collective" in the first place? A further problem is the discrediting of the label "collective" in post-socialist societies such as Slovenia. Here, there are far fewer Yugo-nostalgics than may be found further south and east; the Yugoslav period is seen, at best, as an interesting historical experiment which failed utterly, the political imperatives of that era never to be re-visited. 

One of the few old Yugoslav-era buildings left, across the road from Metelkova

All of which post-Marxian nurdling leads us, thankfully, back to Metelkova. Such autonomously minded small communities- consisting of only a couple of hundred or so folk at most- may point a way ahead for those who want to effect meaningful change in how their lives and those of their friends- are lived.This must necessarily be done on a very small scale, and incrementally. Over time, communities such as Metelkova have shown that it is possible to live collectively, with little reference to mainstream society. The answer that no one has yet come up with, is how to translate that very small scale, local change into a much wider transformatory movement. Maybe that's why I'm a bit frustrated with the glacially slow progress of the myriad protests around the world this year. Utopianism, a sensitivity to obvious injustice, and a good heart, aren't enough to achieve anything any more. The vague, woolly "it's not fair" sentiment of the protests won't convince a hard bitten political public who worked that out for themselves, over two decades ago.

Never before has a revolutionary moment such as this one lacked, so painfully, a popular political expression and alternative strategy. In an atomised, deeply individualist political culture, maybe immediate local gains, and the gradual transformation of local conditions are the way to start, in an attempt to build, over time, a fundamentally different collective patchwork.

Some of the things I'll be looking at this week...

...when everything re-opens tomorrow (almost all museums are shut on Mondays in Slovenia, other than the odd private gallery)...enjoy!