ART EXHIBITING IN SLOVENIA, FROM THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY TO TODAY: 19TH CENTURY

Together with the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana we cordially invite you to attend the series of public lectures that is part of the seminar Art for Collective Use: Art Exhibiting in Slovenia, from the Early 19th Century to Today.

In the series, over the course of the next few years, we will be examining the development of exhibition practices and art institutions in Slovenia and Central Europe, as well as in the wider international context. We will begin in the first half of the 19th century with the start of modern exhibition-making in the Slovene lands and then move through the evolution of exhibition-making and the institutionalization of the art field right up to the present day. We will discuss various aspects of exhibition-making – institutions, exhibition installations, artworks, the audience, etc. – and try to understand how and why exhibition-making appeared and became established in the region. We will examine the relationship between exhibitions and art and try to determine the kinds of exhibitions that have been successful in Slovenia and where problems most often occurred. We will pay attention to who organizes and/or finances exhibitions and why they do so. We will reflect on the role exhibitions played in the nationalist and political discourses of the 19th and 20th centuries and the role they play today.

Throughout the seminar we will be considering selected phenomena relating to the institutionalization of art, especially exhibitions and ways to do them. We will ask, for example, how artists such as Mihael Stroj, Anton Karinger, Ivana Kobilca, Rihard Jakopič, Avgust Černigoj, the Independents (Neodvisni), and the OHO Group made exhibitions and why they did it the way they did. How did the institutionalization of contemporary art develop so rapidly after World War II, and why did such an enormous surge of biennial exhibitions “happen” to us in the 1970s and 1980s? We will ask about the traditional role of curators in art exhibitions and look at the changes contemporary curatorial practices have brought to Slovene exhibition-making. By analysing concrete examples of exhibition practices, we will begin to see more clearly the inner logic and operational principles of the Slovene art system.

In the first year we will look at the 19th century, which saw the widespread introduction of general and professional education in the Slovene lands – including various kinds of drawing instruction (which provided employment or additional income to numerous painters). Eventually, the commissioning and collecting of art became established among the middle class, and the first institution for collecting and housing visual art (among other things) was founded, namely, the Provincial Museum of Carniola. In the 1860s, contemporary art begins to be shown regularly in group exhibitions at the Kazina in Ljubljana, which also leads to increasingly conscientious reporting on art and art events in the Carniolan press.

Because the positioning of the art system in the 19th century, both generally and within individual countries and provinces, represents the basis of today’s art system (as well as national art systems), and because many operational practices in the system are not developed from scratch but rather modify and extend older practices, we need a good grasp of the beginnings if we want to understand the evolution of both the art system and art in the 20th century and to the present time. The connections between art institutions and the development of the modern nation state, as well as the institutions’ connections with such phenomena as increasing secularization, globalization, and tourism, must be considered in order to understand why the situation in the art field is the way it is and why the art system has been able to grow stronger and expand so successfully right up to today. As Robert Jensen shows in his lucid study Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, aesthetic modernism from its very beginnings produced not only a body of artwork and scores of “-isms” but also a body of institutions and a matrix of practices, which, unlike modern art, was accepted almost without resistance by European and American art publics.

Beti Žerovc, head of the programme

NATAŠA IVANOVIĆ
Spectators and Viewing Areas at the Turn of the 19th Century in the Habsburg Monarchy: Landscape Graphics of Lovro Janša (1749–1812)
Tuesday, 25 October 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording  (in Slovene)

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ALESSANDRO QUINZI
The Trieste Art System in the First Half of the 19th Century
Monday, 7 November 2016, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

The Trieste Art System from Mid-19th Century to 1910
Tuesday, 8 November 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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IVANA MANCE
Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s Slovnik umjetnikah jugoslavenskih (1858): The First Lexicon of Croatian and Slovenian Art
Tuesday, 29 November 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording  (in English)

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IRENA KRAŠEVAC
Arts Association: Exhibitions and the Organisation of Fine Arts Events in Zagreb in the 19th Century
Monday, 12 December 2016, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana

Video recording (in Croatian)

The Beginnings of Artistic Education in Zagreb in the 19th Century: From the Drawing School to the National Arts and Crafts School
Tuesday, 13 December 2016, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Croatian)

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RENATA KOMIĆ MARN
The Art Market in Carniola in the Third Quarter of the 19th Century: Art-Collecting Practices of Eduard von Strahl (1817–1884)
Monday, 9 January 2017, 7 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

Strahl’s Gallery in Stara Loka in the Context of Exhibiting Art in Carniola in the Third Quarter of the 19th Century  
Tuesday, 10 January 2017, 1 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana
Video recording (in Slovene)

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Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana