This April NSK members carried out two major projects in Scotland's second city and aspirant cultural capital Glasgow. Irwin mounted their "Interior of the Planit" exhibition which premiered in Budapest in 1996 a year ago and Irwin members together with Peter Mlakar of the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy took part in the "Virtual World Orchestra" club-art event from 4th-6th April. Glasgow is a blighted post-industrial city where the new bars and galleries of the last decade coexist uneasily with some of the most severe urban poverty in the "united kingdom". So before we consider the monumental "Interior of the Planit" and the demands it places upon its audience the question of its location presents itself. The Tramway Arts Centre is a cultural outpost in a de-industrialized, seemingly almost depopulated zone of the city. The centre is one of the few in Europe comfortably able to accommodate the project's dimensions. It is an empty tram depot in an empty locale. Only its size and the few remaining tracks sets into its floor behind the glossy facade speak of its past. Once a site of strategic spatial communication it has become severed from the city it once connected by the march of time and technology and the effects of the collapse of the industrial economy it represented are perhaps more visible on this cityscape than any other in Britain. Before the encounter with the exhibition the audience will have traversed a stunningly empty urban landscape framed by bleak hills on the horizon. Some streets are filled only by the emptiness of abandoned but systematically stripped warehouses and factories. The occasional fortified pubs and dingy shops seem like interlopers and the Tramway appears to be the only "active" building in the street upon which it stands. For a former transport hub it is now strangely remote from the city's main lines of communication. The Tramway cannot receive many casual visitors. To visit it signifies the investment of a certain effort; the negotiation of the city's still, void spaces.

Judging from the catalogue the subdued monumentality of Budapest's Ludwig Museum, the exhibition's previous host site seems to have presented a smooth visual analogue to Irwin's constructions. The Tramway cannot provide such sympathy. Like the surrounding streets it is mute and bare, passively reflecting and stark. Though not (quite) spectacularly large the grey empty space seems to compress the objects within it yet simultaneously emphasize their inscription in it. The two Irwin constructions seem almost pressed into place by the surrounding void. However the visitor is not free to roam at will: this is a space to be traversed in the strictly limited terms laid down by Irwin. The first demand made upon the visitor is that they ignore the space around them and the instinct to mill around freely. Instead they must allow themselves to be transported not simply by the art but to and around it, to be driven in a strictly delineated figure of eight around the two constructions. The channelling and restriction of audience movements again emerges as a characteristic NSK technique previously seen most clearly in Red Pilot's "Fiat" and GSSN's "Marija Nablocka". Beyond the mere recapitulation of control mechanisms such audience guidance promotes if not empathy then at least a (sub)conscious identification with such restrictions as a given aspect of the submission to culture and an analogue of the restrictions upon creative individuality NSK members voluntarily assume.

The agent of this guidance is a specially constructed Irwin vehicle ("Left, Right, Up, Down") which unsurprisingly functions as an artefact in its own right and not simply as the "servant" of the other components. It is an aesthetic agent in the form of a generic industrial trolley adapted to Irwin's needs. It has space for four visitor-passengers and is equipped with a TV/video unit. Mounted to the left of the video housing is one of the earliest Irwin pieces "Malevich Between Two Wars" and at its rear an NSK logo superimposed on a Scottish flag both of which “brand” the vehicle and make it less generic. Moving into its ordered yet non-hiearchical circuit the on board video prepares the visitors conceptually for their journey to the interior. Both vehicle and concepts move with unexpected speed yet not so smoothly as to let the audience adjust completely. In the course of its parodic orbits through the abandoned tram depot the vehicle seems to flirt with the gravitational pull of its sister objects yet never finally approaches them. Once the didactic video interpretations (the main one from Igor Zabel) are finished the vehicle returns to its exact start point; the visitors' final approach must be made under their own impetus and should again follow a certain choreography, starting with "The Interior of the Planit", the smaller of the two constructions. The structural designs are the latest and certainly not the last NSK retroquotations of a Malevich concept, in this case of his pure architectural forms, "Planits". The thick lead-lined walls of “The Interior of the Planit” press closely upon the narrow, dimly lit interior. In the left corner by the entrance the 1993 Marina Grzinic/Aina Smid video “Transcentrala” plays in competition with the Laibach track emanating from the object at the end of the room, the model of the NSK state. On the left wall hangs the "Transcentrala Icon", a new installation piece combining four small landscapses in each corner orbited by a steadily-rotating central spur which recalls other recent Irwin mobile works. On the opposite wall the five members look down from Andres Serrrano's group portrait "Mystery of the Black Square" in which their upper lips are obscured by variably sized black squares that also resemble Hitler moustaches. The room already presents a dense assemblage of imagery yet the formal focus of the room is the wooden model of the NSK state on the centre table. This is a dematerialization of the pre-existing cyberspace architecture familiar to visitors of the NSK website who will already have wandered its corridors. A long irregular corridor housing various NSK departments such as the confessional leads to the central cupola. The open "dome" of the structure (labelled the "Noordung Auditorium") has its origin in the scenography of the 1995 Noordung children's performance. The arrangement of paintings upon the walls below provided echoes the actual arrangement within "The Heart of Transcentrala". Thus the construction incorporates into its fabric a series of NSK motifs while the design as a whole refers back to the website architecture and forward to its eventual possible realization as a full-scale structure. Set into the floor of the structure is a new motif, the Laibach "State Generator" in the form of an active speaker cone playing the soundtrack to "Krst" and introducing a final set of associations with previous works. Standing at the back of the room looking through the structure and down the approach corridor out into the light beyond the dense visual field coalesces yet still resists further systematization, leaving at the heart of the NSK (model) state some of its constitutive qualities; density, ambiguity and a very specific spatiality.

Irwin: A Model of The NSK State, 1996. (Author’s Photograph.)
The speaker cone visible at the base of the structure is labelled the “Laibach State Generator”.

And the light is ours

From the leaden gloom visitors emerge into the shadow cast by the vast wooden hulk that is the exterior of "The Heart of Transcentrala". The interplay of light and space between the two structures, whether planned or otherwise, appears, perhaps more so in recollection, as a kind of secreted spatial dialectics. Even without the gloomy visual alchemy of the Tramway space Irwin can rely on the spatial enlargement that will take place when the objects later re(tro)place themselves in the visitor's memory. The Transcentrala structure occupies a precise point between impermanence and monumentality, the rough freshness of the unpainted wood exterior offset by its scale. A grand entrance to the structure seems (to have been thought) superfluous and the simple fact of ascent into such a structure is impressive in itself. The interior is warmly lit and enveloping but, especially for Irwin newcomers, this accentuates rather than dilutes the initial element of confrontation. Before turning to scan the room fully the visitors have already been confronted by the mass of the first wall, filled like the others by dozens of works and reflecting those of the other walls and the traumas and paradoxes inherent within them. The four mirrored walls double and redouble the mass of assembled works creating a dense totality whilst simultaneously respecting the specificity of each piece.

Irwin: “The Heart of Transcentrala”, Glasgow 1997.

Much has already been written on the works displayed here but this is a rare chance to assess the works' collective interconnections across the entire span of Irwin's career. To scan the reflective steel walls and the works is to scan the history of Irwin and that of NSK expressed in Irwin's role as NSK chroniclers. Numerous key themes and motifs are present here either individually or singly; "Opus Dei", "Erste Bombardierung", "Laibach Woman", "Red Districts", "The Cup of Coffee", "Home and World". From the earliest to the most recent works this is one of the largest and chronologically most comprehensive gatherings of Irwin's work so far. However while documentary it is not retrospective and is an active rather than a passive project. The heavy, dense works are in flux. From Budapest to Glasgow and beyond the composition of the room can be varied according to need or demand. Rather than colonizing and spreading into an exhibition space the works here have occupied a space only to retreat into a close proximity at the hidden heart of the space, maintaining an active, ongoing status that resists premature codification. Transcentrala is both an arsenal and a generator, an accumulation of critical mass for already familiar yet still unvizualizable stages of development hinted at in "The Interior of The Planit". Through procedures based on symbolic recurrence and mirroring the project again refers to the Noordung children's performance, echoing its role of symbolic familiarization and education.

Ultimately what emerges most strongly from Transcentrala are questions of deployment. One of the project's subtexts is its logistics, which here begin to form the outlines of a nascent motif within the NSK state “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art). In the light of the totality of the works from 1984-7 and the scale of their contextualization here the project is recoded as a demonstration of NSK's state and creative powers and their interface. The local magazine "The List" talks of Irwin as "one of Europe's last remaining arts collectives" as though the project represented the manifestation of a dying paradigm and not of new developments. In fact NSK/Irwin are continuing to develop their place in the vanguard of Europe's state-influenced cultural powerful enough to deploy such resources and material halfway across Europe to create a de facto expo for the new state.

Detail from “The Heart of Transcentrala”.
Note the work in the background incorporating a Tito portrait.