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Laibach's use of Slovene cultural imagery is
well-known, yet this was always balanced and contradicted
by a simultaneous and extensive use of Yugoslav references.
Even as it asserted Slovene culture in the most spectacular
form yet seen it retained an ambivalent relationship with
its Yugoslav context. Twenty five years after the death of
Tito and the creation of Laibach, it may now be time to begin
to re-assess Laibach's relationship with Yugoslavia. Now that
Laibach is a fixed (though still controversial) part of the
Slovene cultural pantheon, the extent to which it shaped and
was shaped by the Yugoslav environment is often overlooked.
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XY Unsolved
Churchill once famously described Russia as
"a riddle wrapped inside a mystery wrapped inside an
enigma". In the Western political and cultural imagination
(or fantasy space), this attitude to "Russia" stands
in for "the East" generally, and for all that from
a Western perspective is archaic, obscure, or perverse. Churchill's
description could equally be applied to NSK, and particularly
to Laibach, as an equally fascinating and frustrating presence
within the Western popular imagination.
Few in the West are aware of differences between
for instance Slovene and Polish culture, and even now that
Slav states are in the EU, Slavic cultures are still sometimes
seen as a uniformly crisis-stricken zone of obscurity and
darkness. Slav languages add to the impression of impenetrability
and are both a screen behind which Slavs can maintain mystery
and a source of apprehensive fascination in the West. Even
with the international success and recognition of NSK and
some Russian, Yugoslav and other artists and filmmakers, Slav
cultures retain a mysterious, exotic aura. The histories and
symbols of the region are far less “transparent”,
less exhaustively known and documented than those of the West.
This both makes it more difficult for so-called “Eastern”
artists to move West and presents a rapidly vanishing opportunity
to retain more mystery and ambiguity than is possible in the
“West.” To some extent then, NSK appears enigmatic
simply because of its origins, which it amplifies rather than
downplays. This quality has been ruthlessly exploited by NSK
in its conquest of the West.
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1st of June, 25 years of Laibach existance
When a question is asked, it is done straight
and without compromise. That is because the question should
determine knowledge about the things that are comprehensible
without the answers. The answer is not the key element in
the relation of the one asking the question and those surprised
by the act of asking. The key element is the very idea to
open the things, to expose the fine treated reality, to ask
the question. The question that no one expects, nor wants.
It is easier to lead the things under the ordinary flow, in
a way that others want, because no one wants to see the truth.
The truth is the subject of perfidious politicization of the
presence. It is the very contortion of the reality. The other
reality in which everyone lives without knowledge or will,
without motive or courage. But the answer is here. And what
happens with the response? Did anyone try to define himself?
To give the answer of the question which one has listened,
from the other, from those who are always controversial just
because seeing the truth from the other side of the perverted
reality.
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Here is a true story. In the middle of a crisis
and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj
Zizek telephoned an academic colleague in Britain late at
night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and
when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last
desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed
at the opposition movement, in which Zizek and the NSK, the
Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Zizek is on the phone
during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells
his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown
on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Zizek goes
on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in
every workplace a "commissar" has been appointed
to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is
very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Zizek
is painting. And it is even worse than that, Zizek says, for
even in the universities, in every department a commissar
has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain
exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Zizek then informs
him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all
this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department,
Zizek says, "I am the commissar".
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Terror as Therapy/Therapy as Terror
Theory as Terror/Theory as Therapy
LAIBACH-IRWIN-STATE
LAIBACH
"Laibach itself does not function as
answer but as a question."
Slavoj Zizek.
What is the best approach to exploring what
Laibach, Irwin and the NSK State represent? Fundamentally
the work of all NSK groups represents an artistic and also
cultural response to the imposed violence of ideology, culture
and theory. This perception of violence is present most acutely
in Laibach's initial reprocessing of language and ideology
and to see how the machine operates it's necessary to return
to these traumatic roots.
When someone is confronted by Laibach what they
are actually confronted with is Laibach's confrontation with
the series of political and cultural regimes and systems that
structure our environment and which Laibach confront. Whilst
Laibach might seem like the ultimate mechanism for imposing
ideology it is actually one for exposing it.
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"It would be unreal to wish that the people
who ignominiously use the term "balcanic" to apply
Haideger's invention: to cross "the Being", leaving
the word and the crossing sign over it, because that word
is indispensable, although non-adequate. The erasure sign
would at least present a warning against the metaphysical
use of this term." (Maria Todorova, "Imagining the
Balkans")
- The symbolism should not exist for the reality,
it should be reality;
Or
- The symbolism should exist for the reality, it isn't reality
The dilemma emerges at the moment when a man
is filling hopeless because of the obvious constancy of all
provoked and extorted things. Is the world better with the
false morality of the persistent and, it seems eternal repetition?
Is Laibach more truly with the spiritual power of the spoken?
The message is non-existent if we do not understand the evil
and the good - the two opposites of the false eternity, the
things said and done on every step and in every moment.
Is the misunderstanding of a certain civilization enough to
destroy it?
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Step one: Lycurgus and his laws. The reality of Utopia or
archetype of imagined righteousness.
Lycurgus, according to traditional and mythical
chronology, reforms the Spartan constitution in 884 BC (according
to Plutarch). Sparta, the city in the Hellenic but also in
the Aegean world, symbol of the conservatism and indigenous
endeavor towards self-discipline. It is a keeper of the blurry
Homeric idealistic ancient values; towards Athenian liberalism,
spiritualism and only to a certain extent allowed progressiveness.
But, at the time (9-8 century BC) when the world of Homer
and mythological-realistic kings from almost the same soil,
the neighbouring Argolis (Mycenae and Tiryns) are still a
model of behaviour, courage, justice, poetic as well as of
splendour, wealth and materialized spirituality of the art
on a level of a not at least insignificant symbolism, the
difference between than established dualism (probably only
in our understanding) between the two postulates of the positivism
and negativism: Athens and Sparta, so to say, does not exist.
Negativism in this case signifies not the evil, but the general
and historical non-aspiration for occasional refreshments
of its own values. Standard definition for that is conservatism.
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The past always call for us. Superior, timeless
and inevitable. That is demand by the future. Not because
the future wants that, but because there is no chance for
choosing. The only absolute thing. Unchangeable. Admirable.
The past is ancient and generous, and it returns us at the
beginning. At the beginning of our peculiar mistakes. In addition,
sometimes the mistakes of the others. People do not know to
demand answers. In that place where they silently wait their
own solution. The question of their own present. Like a play
of magic, a play of life and facing.
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By Slavoj Zizek
"...The first reaction of the enlightened
Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation
of totalitarian rituals; however, their support of Laibach
was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: "What if
they really mean it? What if they truly identify with the
totalitarian ritual?" -or, a more cunning version of
it, transferring one's own doubt onto the other: "What
if Laibach overestimates their public? What if the public
takes seriously what Laibach mockingly imitates, so that Laibach
actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?"..."
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Reflections on WTC - updated version
By Slavoj Zizek
"...The safe Sphere in which Americans
live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist
attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards,
cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. Whenever we
encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the
courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside,
we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.
For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and
peace of the "civilized" West was bought by the
export of ruthless violence and destruction into the "barbarian"
Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the
slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound,
we should also, now more than ever, bear in mind that the
actual effect of these bombings is much more symbolic than
real. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the
world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Groznyy, from Rwanda
and Congo to Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in
New York snipers and gang rapes, one gets an idea about what
Sarajevo was a decade ago..."
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