This paper reflects a study in how the Slovenian Performance Art collective the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), and more specifically its sub-group Laibach, functioned as a ‘Memory machine’ in ...re-enacting historical European trauma in an apparent re-staging of the totalitarian ritual. In this way, Laibach demonstrate history as a contemporary active political agency of Eastern and Central Europe.
Shaped by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the NSK was a multi-disciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk primarily comprising three groups: IRWIN (visual arts), Noordung (theatre), and its most influential delivery system, Laibach (music). Championed by Slavoj Žižek, Laibach are Slovenia’s most famous cultural export, and are widely considered Europe’s most controversial music group. In 2017, Laibach caused further controversy for being the first ‘Western’ group to play North Korea.
With the strategy of Retrogardism, an aesthetic system unique to Eastern European aesthetic praxis, Laibach and the NSK re-mythologised totalitarian iconography associated with Nazi Kunst and Socialist Realism, which contemporary capitalism can only relate to as offensive kitsch.
Die dramatischen Werke des deutschen Dramatikers, Schriftstellers und Librettisten August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) gehörten in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts nicht nur zum festen Repertoire ...des Ständischen Theaters in Laibach (Ljubljana), sondern Kotzebue gehörte in den 1830er-Jahren, wie aus den Spielplänen ersichtlich, zu den meistgespielten Dramatikern auf der Laibacher Bühne. Es wurden sowohl seine ernsteren Schauspiele als auch Werke komischen Inhalts aufgeführt. Vor allem bei den Letzteren ist eine rege Vielfalt an komischen dramatischen Formen (z. B. Lustspiel, Schwank, Posse) zu verzeichnen, was bei den gespielten Werken anderer Autoren und Autorinnen zu dieser Zeit nicht der Fall war. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden in Hinblick auf die in Laibach aufgeführten Stücke von Kotzebue die verschiedenen komischen dramatischen Formen dargestellt und erörtert.
The worldwide renowned Slovenian industrial alternative music group Laibach, which was also a member of the multimedia artists’ collective called NSK, has been a subject of many professional ...discussions. This article attempts to analyse Laibach’s conception of a uniform according to the theory of anti-fashion. As one of the most recognizable elements expressing a mythical, totalitarian aura, inseparably linked with the performers’ distant and constrained attitude, Laibach’s uniform can be erroneously comprehended as anti-fashion clothing, expressing fixed and rigid social environments. The analysis of Laibach’s television interview from 1983, in which the band is directly imitating the ruling ideological language, shows that the strategy of over-identification and subversion represent dominant principles of Laibach’s actions, combining them with the retro-method of using symbols and images of various cultural traditions and periods, as seen in their diversity of clothing worn, including the Yugoslav military uniform, miner and hunting uniforms, jeans and shirts, and even fashionable items. With the performative dimension in the ideological ritual and by emphasizing totalitarian tendencies in contemporary society, Laibach endeavours to show that all changeable multiform clothes are uniforms – timeless, universal and deprived of semiological meaning and thus surpasses the distinction of fashion and anti-fashion or fixed and modish costume. Nearly forty years after the establishment of the group, Laibach is conventionally dressed in regular clothes, nevertheless providing a sentiment of wearing a collective’s uniform.
Laibach is a music and cross-media group from Slovenia, which develops a multi-disciplinary art practice. While exploring the relationships between art and ideology as their major point of interest, ...Laibach has appropriated a symbolically charged language of communication, which encompasses an eclectic assemblage of provocative and ambivalent artistic, political, and religious references, often relying on their shock value. Since their beginning, the group has been associated and surrounded with controversy, provoking strong reactions from the political authorities of former Yugoslavia and in particular in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Laibach's international success commenced when the famed British label Mute Records signed them and released their 1987 album Opus Dei. In the over 40 years of Laibach's existence, which coincided with the political, economic, and cultural transition in the European East, the group has crossed a wide path from being the harsh, ominous voice of the Slovene alternative cultural scene in socialist Yugoslavia to independent Slovenia's major cultural export. This paper puts into an historical perspective the spectacular changes in Laibach's uneasy co-habitation with the institutional framework and cultural mainstream of their home country, on the one hand, and the global contemporary art scene and music industry, on the other.
In summer 2015 for the first time in its history the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea welcomed a western rock band, making an unexpected gesture of inviting the Slovene art group Laibach. ...Laibach’s credentials for this type of cultural diplomacy may be best observed in the sociopolitical context of the 1980s, when they operated within a broader alternative cultural scene of civil society movements in Slovenia (then socialist Yugoslavia). Laibach have since uniquely employed different media and approaches to inspect relations between art, politics, processes of nation-building and popular culture. In the Western media they are mainly presented as a highly controversial music group originating from the former communist East and disturbing the audiences with their totalitarian imagery and ambiguous political messages. Across the globe they were seen as going to North Korea to entertain a brainwashed and utterly unpredictable audience in the most totalitarian and isolated society in the world. This unusual and well documented journey to the far end of what has remained of the former communist East provides interesting material for analyzing the media interpretations of the East/West divide in the contemporary context. However, this paper focuses on the media debate in Slovenia informed by the local knowledge of Laibach’s significance and history which was largely lacking in the international coverage of this out-of-the-ordinary voyage.
Józef Robakowski is a prolific experimental Polish artist who has worked across multiple media including photography, film, video, experimental television, artistic documentation, and curating. This ...interview was conducted as research into his multifaceted career and informed the article in Apparatus Nr. 9 on his work that appears in this issue. The interview provides vital historical and political contexts to situate the emergence of Robakowski's various artistic practices, in relation to broader developments of Polish cinema, video and art history.
Behind the scenes of the Congress of Laibach (modern day Ljubljana), a dance form called Deutscher came into existence and for a decade remained, in a specific local version, the most popular dance ...of bourgeois circles. This paper sheds light on the phenomenon of the Laibacher Deutscher within a broad social and cultural context and political background.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Umetniška skupina Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) je v osemdesetih letih dvajsetega stoletja nastopila s postmodernističnimi umetniškimi tehnikami, eklekticizmom in pastiche, s katerimi so prek glasbe, ...slikarstva, oblikovanja, gledališča in izjavljanja priklicevali politične in umetniške spomine, ki pa so jih ob tem tudi razgrajevali. Zlasti za skupino Laibach je bilo obdelovanje nacionalsocialistične ikonografije in totalitaristične retorike osrednjega pomena, vendar ne v službi politike. Umetniki so si v svojem programu zadali politično neodvisno umetniško delovanje. Toda v drugi polovici osemdesetih let je kolektiv deloval s podporo Zveze socialistične mladine Slovenije, partijskega podmladka. V članku avtorica preučujem zapletena razmerja med umetnostjo in politiko oz. kako je bilo delovanje Laibach in NSK v osemdesetih letih povezano s tedanjo politično situacijo.
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