Laibach

The group represents the musical wing of the artistic-political collective Neue Slowenische Kunst – NSK, founded in Ljubljana (Laibach is the German name for the city), Slovenia, in 1984. Over the years it has produced one of the most original variants of electrorock-avantgarde, releasing a staggering amount of material.

The collective has mainly dealt with the aesthetics of power and submission, the staging of domination and the dissolution of the individual within the collective. Furthermore, from the very beginning, NSK/Laibach has pursued a strategy of overidentification. Drawing on the theoretical groundwork laid by Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek, a former student of Jacques Lacan, Laibach carry out a subversion that doesn't stem from ironic distancing, but from taking the system too seriously. What must be affirmed are precisely those aspects of existing reality that cannot be openly expressed, yet are part of the dominant symbolic order. Such affirmative articulation is subversive, because it is in the hidden truths of the symbolic order that the points of rupture are inscribed. Affirming this truth makes the rupture visible.

In their aesthetic, NSK/Laibach draw on the classic avant-garde of the 1920s, whose legacy taps into the same well used by all subsequent aesthetic representations of political ideology. To show the relationship between aesthetic forms and political ideology, Laibach reproduce the fascistic aestheticization of the political and the social, without any distancing whatsoever. The staging of domination and the desire for submission are affirmed, not criticized. In Laibach's understanding, critical distance means above all the possibility of escaping awareness of how the aestheticization of ideology actually works. For this reason, the group generally refuses both to comment on its own actions and to take a critical stance.

A good example of Laibach's modus operandi is a performance the group gave in the early '90s at Belgrade's Red Star Stadium. The climax was a militant nationalist speech delivered in Serbian. The audience was urged to preserve and defend, by any means necessary, the purity and pride of the Serbian people and the integrity of Serbian soil. As a backdrop to the speech, Laibach staged the entire apparatus of fascist aesthetics, deliberately eliminating, in this grandiose display of nationalist epic, any element of distancing. As far as content went, the speech was nothing more than yet another escalation of the nationalist rhetoric that could be heard everywhere at the time in the disintegrating states of Yugoslavia. The group was well aware of the danger hidden in this contextualization, not only in terms of form but also of the effect it produced. Laibach solved the problem with an enormous provocation: throughout the speech, key words and significant phrases from Blut und Boden rhetoric scrolled by in German, without interruption. Against the backdrop of the crimes committed by the Nazi-fascists and their allies in Serbia, any affirmative reading was ruled out; this was bound to have a disturbing effect on the audience, since the affirmation of Serbian nationalist heroism was carried out on every other level with the utmost consistency.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the group has focused mainly on the mechanisms of nation-building. Against the backdrop of the national-state breakup of former Yugoslavia, the group proclaimed the founding of the NSK State. To pursue this goal, it drew on all the symbolic attributes of the nation-state. Through a skillful montage of fragments of collective memory, it even invented a national history. With the NSK State, it was shown that even such a grotesque overidentification could be confirmed by reality. These practices unfolded against the backdrop of (former) Yugoslavia. According to Žižek, the group creates a mirror in which the West discovers its own hidden truth.

Even when the NSK/Laibach artists make use of the aesthetic forms of historical fascism or real socialism, which they define as totalitarianism, they are at the same time alluding to the free, liberal-capitalist West. In NSK/Laibach's understanding, totalitarianism is not the antithesis of the free and democratic West, but a phenomenon whose development is intrinsic to every commodity-producing society.

(Source: Wikipedia)