SALVE ET COAGULA

An interview with Alexei Monroe
by Haris Hararis

HH: You are the author of a Thesis on Laibach and NSK and now you are working on a book with this subject. How you did first encounter the work of these Slovenian artists and what was the reason that made you want to work so extensively on their work?

AM: I first encountered Laibach (and NSK) in the summer of 1987, during the promotion of the "Opus Dei" album. I read a Laibach interview and shortly afterwards heard "Geburt Einer Nation" for the first time. Initially the concepts interested me more than the music. I had an existing interest in German and Soviet history and I was finding my way into electronic music so my interest was natural.

One of the characteristics of Laibach is that it tends to raise more questions than it answers. As I began to track down the releases and get information from sources like Donald Campbell's fanzine I was amassing more and more material but was not much clearer about what lay behind it. The outbreak of war in Yugoslavia in 1991 put some aspects of Laibach/NSK into context and it was becoming clear that there were connections between these events and NSK works but from a Western perspective it was hard to fully understand. I decided to carry out some research on Slovenia as part of my M.A. studies, partly to understand the political situation but also as a means of understanding the context of NSK. In April 1992 I was able to visit the country for the first time and gained information not available elsewhere, particularly the book "Ljubljana, Ljubljana" by Ales Erjavec and Marina Grzinic which describes the eighties in Slovene art and culture. The decisive moment was when I bought the NSK monograph in August 1992. This revealed whole areas of NSK activity and references that had been unknown to me and the complexity and scale of NSK became clear. The monograph is a typically tantalising NSK work - it provides a mass of material but no commentary, intensifying the desire for explanation. For instance, the Laibach interview responses in the monograph are multi-referential and conceal a series of hidden stories. By 1993 it was clear to me that the only way to "exorcise" my fascination was to research NSK in depth.

HH: What were the reactions of the academic community when you first announced your theme? How familiar were they with the work of Laibach and the art in Eastern Europe in general?

AM: In Britain at least there are very few people I could have carried out this research with. I was lucky to find Glenn Bowman at the University of Kent to supervise me. He had been in Slovenia, had good contacts there and was himself curious about the subject. Another academic in the department (Communications and Image Studies) was an expert on Constructivism and also had some knowledge of NSK. This was far from typical. The majority of people in Britain were simply mystified by my research but those who did know something of Laibach/NSK were interested.

In terms of Eastern Europe, Russian art tends to monopolise people's perceptions - figures like Oleg Kulik, Komar and Melamid or Ilya Kabakov are taken to speak for Eastern Europe as a whole. Its still not realised how varied and productive culture was in the former Eastern bloc - the first extensive documentation of contemporary art in the region only appeared last year (the "ArtEast 2000+ project by Moderna Galerija Ljubljana). It can't be stressed enough that Yugoslavia was quite distinct, both in terms of its ideology and the greater cultural freedom it enjoyed compared to "Eastern Europe" proper. Of course I was working during the period of the Bosnian and Kosovan conflicts and this also tended to colour perceptions. People would assume that I was interested only in the political context or because of these events and not in the subject itself. The underlying assumption of this attitude was that ex-Yugoslav culture in itself could no be of much interest or relevance.

Naturally the situation within ex-Yugoslavia was quite different and most of my strongest support has come from friends and colleagues in Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Novi Sad. In this context nobody questions the significance of the NSK phenomenon (even if they dislike it) and they are interested to see a "Westerner" studying it. However, what's striking is that apart from one recent Serbian researcher who wrote a diploma on Irwin, no one from these territories has studied NSK in such intensive detail. In Slovenia this may be due to the fact that NSK goes so close to the roots of Slovene identity, raising a lot of unresolved tensions and traumas and that Laibach in particular can still disturb people in their home context. In this respect its perhaps easier for an outsider to approach the subject.

HH: Tell me about the structure of your work. What is the special viewpoint of this research?

AM: The initial research proposal was about identifying the key "significances and effects" of NSK and this remains the general principle of my work on NSK. It was obvious to me and to anyone with more than a casual knowledge of the subject that this was a highly significant phenomenon - not just artistically but politically. However, even now, several years later NSK is only just beginning to creep into the art histories of its period. Like most other Central or East European artists they are excluded from most accounts of contemporary art and culture. In the case of Laibach this is not necessarily a negative thing. Laibach's absence from the story of its time is partly a symptom of its continued power and the fact that it remains problematic and ambivalent. However, although I'm obviously biased I think that narratives which don't at least mention NSK are going to be seen as increasingly deficient. So both in the academic context and beyond a key goal was to establish NSK as a serious and significant subject of research.

I was lucky enough to be able to work within the experimental Communications and Image Studies framework (the programme has since ceased). As I see it if you want to cover the totality of Laibach or NSK (rather than just focussing on certain aspects) your approach has to be interdisciplinary. A lot of people assumed I was an art historian but in fact I used various approaches as and when necessary and attempt to create a synthesis appropriate to the subject, combining elements of art history, politics, cultural studies etc.

The real core of the research has been an attempt to examine the deepest and most complex elements of how NSK has functioned. For instance, the associations and mechanisms active in a Laibach concert, or in the combination of two particular motifs in a design by Novi Kolektivizem. To put it at its simplest, I've been interested in "how the spell was cast" - how the works produced certain effects and responses, both in myself and others.

HH: What were the steps that you made or the methods that you followed on that research?

AM: From 1994-1995 I was a guest researcher attached to the Philosophy Institute of the Slovene Academy of Arts and Sciences (ZRC-SAZU) working with Dr. Ales Erjavec. I attended all major NSK events in Slovenia during this period, meeting and working with all the NSK groups. I gathered catalogues, articles and a large amount of source material. I also visited locations associated with NSK and gained a better understanding of Slovene history and culture. I also spent time in Croatia and Serbia, exploring these newly separate but still related contexts.

I also carried out a lot of work hunting down and identifying images and other references used by NSK. Through understanding the context of these source materials I was able to move on to "interrogating" individual works and images and relating to them to their contexts. The historical context is vital as NSK works are full of references to events and themes within Slovene and Yugoslav history. This focus on the individual works is particularly distinctive in relation to Laibach, as the majority of those who have written about the group have focussed on the political aspects and have neglected the actual music and the way it relates to the phenomenon as whole. Both the thesis and the book attempt to address this situation and devote systematic attention to the music (although not in either a musicological or sociological mode).

Besides the specific works I am also very interested in the symbolic functioning of the NSK structure and I have examined this in detail.

HH: What were the things (or the people) that helped you the most and what was the hardest part of the whole process?

AM: All the NSK sections co-operated with the research in various and generous ways for which I'm very grateful. Various academics and curators in Ljubljana were also very helpful. When the book comes out people will be named.

The hardest aspect was the scale of the project. To produce something perfect I could easily be working on the book for the next ten years. Even if you try to restrict the scope of an NSK study you find that new avenues and references are constantly opening up. Laibach said once that its work was ultimately connected to everything and while this is a mark of its power it makes it very hard to set limits. There is also the vast quantity of material in several languages to deal with. Laibach have a large archive of articles from the Slovene, Croatian and Serbian press covering 1980-89, which they allowed me to use. Even this is a vast body of information but if you also consider for instance all the articles written in English or German then you're really dealing with a colossal quantity.

HH: How did you manage to overcome the language problem? Was it easy to find all the necessary information in English?

AM: It would be possible to produce some interesting studies just from the English material but by itself its insufficient for a detailed analysis. Without some grasp of the language it would have been impossible to fully understand the context and origins. Many NSK references are to specifically Slovene symbolisms and there are several key texts that have never appeared in English. Slovene is complex grammatically and in the former Yugoslavia Serbs and Croats often used to find it difficult to learn and for someone speaking a non-Slavic language its more difficult again. Through living in Ljubljana for a year and repeated visits plus the help of friends it's been possible to acquire a reading knowledge of the language.

HH: What were the reactions after the presentation of your PhD?

AM: Since it was accepted I've been circulating copies of the thesis on CDROM to various people - NSK, those I worked with and others who've expressed an interest. If there's been any negative reaction it's been to the length of the document, but that's "in the nature of the beast". I've had some very interesting and productive responses and I hope that when the book comes out it will open up more debate.

HH: How did you come upon the idea of the book, and what are the differences that it is going to have from your Thesis?

AM: In many respects a book is the inevitable result of the research. There is a far wider and very often better-informed readership amongst those who follow Laibach and NSK than in academia and it would be senseless to confine all this material to a small audience. However I should also mention that positive responses to the thesis, both from NSK members and others have been a major incentive to realize the book project.

The thesis was written in a very dry, formal style in order to justify what was actually a very experimental approach. For instance I completely rejected the standard academic discourse on popular music and tried to construct a new mode of analysis appropriate to industrial/electronic musics. So in book form the language can be partially de-formalised and hopefully the result will be more fluent. Having said that, NSK is a very dense and paradoxical subject and if you want to engage with it at the deepest levels you have to operate at a certain level of complexity.

HH: Because NSK never wholly "self-interprets" its work and uses a special poetic language, many people create for themselves a mythical image. The construction of such images is inevitably arbitrary, sometimes approaching reality but at other times much further from it. I would like to know how your personal image of Laibach and NSK altered during your time in Ljubljana and if, in a way, your fascination faded.

AM: At the NSK Embassy Moscow event in 1992 Roman Uranjek of Irwin said:

"I have a feeling people here expected we would come dressed in military uniforms and march in the Embassy hailing: "Heil Hitler!" I remember a story about the psychological embarrassment of young soldiers who were not allowed to even think that Stalin had to go to the toilet too. To those who want to cherish the myth of fascination I recommend observing the phenomena only from a distance, and to never look behind the stage."

Confronting the reality behind dreams and approaching cherished archetypes too closely is always risky. You have to balance the frustration of unresolved questions with the danger of disillusion. That said I never really had the choice not to carry the project through to the end although I knew that certain things would inevitably fade. Meeting the actual individuals involved and seeing them in their daily lives entails a degree of culture shock because NSK as a whole de-emphasises individual personae to such an extent. Yet ultimately you can't converse with a collective but only with individuals. Some contradictions and banal realities emerge from such encounters and of course you can't maintain all illusions but any action has its consequences and you also gain new insights. Exposure to reality breaks down illusions but after a time you re-create a new synthesis that can only be accessed at the price of relinquishing certain ideas. Seeing the difference between the collective image and the background realities gave me a deeper understanding of the mechanisms through which the NSK Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) was constructed. People have to decide whether or not they want to preserve a pure love for the subject or peer behind the stage, both are equally valid responses, I would only caution against people citing NSK in support of their own agendas without having analysed the subject sufficiently comprehensively. There is no shortage of tautologies, contradictions and random elements in NSK and it would be futile to hunt down every instance of these. The book isn't going to be a stripping down that reveals "all the answers" because I don't know all the answers myself. Quite possibly I don't even know all the questions and neither do NSK! I do analyse the aspects of the subject that interest me most in intensive detail however there will still be some gaps and spaces in which people's illusions and images can survive - a brutal demystification is as much to be avoided as a wholly uncritical mystification! So of course in one sense my image of NSK was changed forever but in other ways now that I've seen the reality I can appreciate NSK's achievements in a new light.

April - May 2002

Related page:
Plural Monolith: Laibach & NSK [Pluralni monolit: Laibach in NSK]