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.
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.
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.
The Likeness Bakke, Gretchen
05/2020, Volume:
13
eBook
The Likeness is a close ethnographic study of subjectivity in the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. In this highly imaginative work, the author argues that much of what matters in Slovenia plays ...out on surfaces-of people and things, systems and locations-rendering the complexity of expression external and legible, but rarely unique or original. Here likenesses are everywhere in bloom and powerfully deployed. Moving blithely from Slovenia's most famous thinkers to its most confounding artists, from grammatical categories of number to the particularities of history, The Likeness explores alternative modes of self-expression as postsocialist Slovenia gains visibility on the world stage.
This paper reflects a study in how the Slovenian art collective the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), and more specifically its sub-group Laibach, interrogate the representation of Central and Eastern ...European cultural memory in the context of post-Socialism, and operate as a nexus between Eastern Europe and the West. Emerging in the wake of Tito's death and shaped by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the NSK were founded in 1984, in Ljubljana (northern Slovenia). The NSK is a multi-disciplinary collective primarily comprised of three groups: IRWIN (visual arts), Noordung (theatre), and its most influential delivery system, Laibach (music). Brought to academic scrutiny in the West by Slavoj Žižek for their subversive strategy of over-identification with the totalitarian spectacle, Laibach are Slovenia’s most famous cultural export, with a global following, and an international and domestic history of controversy. With the strategy of Retrogardism, Laibach and the NSK re-mythologise totalitarian iconography associated with Nazi Kunst and Socialist Realism. Through this process of re-mythologisation Laibach explore the unfinished narrative of Communism and the legacy of the European traumatic historical in the context of a ‘post-ideological’ age.
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