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.
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.
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.
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.
This volume studies elements of Austro-Hungarian or Central European culture that were common across linguistic, national, and ethnic communities, and shows how some of these commonalities survived ...or were transformed by the turmoil of the 20th century: two world wars, a major depression between the wars, Stalinism and the Iron Curtain.
This paper is about changing cultural contexts for resistance and the way that cultural practices that are resistant to power at one moment become, at the next, implicated in power. The hegemony of ...certain forms of personal experience also constitutes certain kinds of margins and certain kinds of resistance. Contemporary practices of the self are underpinned by the assumption that there is a frailty of social relations in contemporary society that is homologous to a frailty of the self, a frailty that is addressed by and perpetuated by therapeutic modes of self-management and professional intervention. Qualitative researchers concerned with representations of subjectivity are often engaged in the elaboration of these therapeutic discourses as an alternative to positivist traditions of research in psychology. The interventions described are marked by what can be termed 'knowing emotional illiteracy' that disturbs what we know about the self and identity.
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