By now it doesn't seem bizarre that independent and visionary artists would emerge from what was once loosely referred to as the East, brandishing manifestoes and slogans and utilizing the repressed symbols of a defeated ideology. We've seen a procession: from Komar and Melamid in the seventies to Kabakov in the eighties and a host of others. In a way, it's no longer even very interesting. The globe has, inevitably, moved onwards -- deep into the revived nationalisms and spilled blood of the New World Order, in fact. These artists used irony to make their point, or extreme indirection; they capitalized on the fascination conjured up by a civilization in slavery. In retrospect, there was an inevitability to it all. The machinery of information-oversaturation, influential in the destruction of bankrupt states, was also the mechanism returning word of Eastern art. If one could say that the Wall was defeated by videocassettes well before it fell to jack-hammers and chisels, then "Eastern" art was already defeated at its apex (the Sotheby's auction-block) and by the fickle glance -- away -- of international interest in yesterday's news. It was specifically the death of Empire which rendered those in real or perceived opposition to it moot -- at least in the eyes of the West. That this only served as further confirmation of our status as entirely political creatures was somehow less interesting than the perception that we had reached "the end of history."1 The fact that Francis Fukayama's idiotic proposition was destined to be as ephemeral as a snow-flake's prospects in hell came as no surprise in the Balkans, where the door to the furnace was already being pried open. Still, all this is only a partial explanation of why, out of all the representatives of the "Eastern" artistic phenomenon, few have approached Slovenia's NSK movement in breadth of presentation or discipline of formal approach -- and few have retained as enduring a relevance within a shifted global paradigm.2 Structured "as a state", NSK's various branches -- music, painting, theater, graphic art, even something loosely referred to as "pure and applied philosophy" (not to mention theory, dealing with themes introduced by the former elements) -- together can be said to make up their own, ultimate artifact. Ten years before the birth of almost twenty new states, NSK (re)presented an embryonic approximation of the phenomenon. They did so with none of Fukayama's millennial optimism. NSK's creepily anonymous artists were involved in the collaborative production of an exceedingly dark vision -- one informed by the ghosts of a European history that had never been properly interred. To take one way of approaching them, NSK are a Beuysian "social sculpture."3 No coincidence here; Beuys was their direct predecessor and influence. The comprehensive identifiability of NSK's various objects, statements, visual pieces, artistic gestures and musical compositions is already an indication of the success of their concept. Even without the pervasive NSK logotype (lately visible on embassy plaques outside of buildings in Moscow, Berlin and Sarajevo), it is readily apparent that NSK artifacts all issue from the same governing aesthetic matrix -- products of the NSK sensibility. At the end of a century beginning and ending with Sarajevo, an era which married mass production techniques to mass murder, NSK draw from a well many thought was dry: the one positing that an entire state could become a work of art.4 The fact that they inverted the concept is only in keeping with their position in the historical time-line (it is also indicative of their radical skepticism). Instead of utopia, they produced a free-floating dystopia -- a dystopia in codes. In their dialectical vision of art appropriating political power, they wielded apparent endorsement of the state as a tool in the service of something a little bit more equivocal. That their work comes apparently without irony doesn't mean it should be taken at face value. If NSK's central aesthetic strategy of the 80's was to locate and trigger the ideological defense mechanisms their spectators/viewers unwittingly carried within themselves, they did so not purely to attract attention -- though, within the noisy sphere of the international art market, this was not an undesirable (or unforgivable) by-product. NSK lives in a neglected corner of Europe. This was an art imbued with a serious purpose, interpretable as a warning. NSK included the defeat of revolutions within their (revolutionary) work, presenting the viewer with an uncompromising formula: "the explanation is the whip, and you bleed." Given the postulate that the two great 20th century totalitarianism’s had appropriated the ideas and energies of avant-garde movements which they themselves had destroyed, NSK turned the tables again, appropriating the substance of political and religious power to serve the needs of a secular, autonomous art. A product of internal wiring, like the creation of a thunderstorm in a museum5, this "hidden transgression"6 or inversion at the core of the NSK movement is itself crucial to their creation of a "micro-model"7 of a state structure. Straddling and encompassing the utopian avant-garde, its defeat and usurpation, totalitarianism, and the seemingly final victory of "western" over "eastern" manipulation strategies, NSK presents a kind of theater piece of the European 20th Century. Their specific emphasis on manipulation -- their coded warnings, disturbing illustrations, and graphic demonstrations of the manipulability of individuals within a wider social context -- gives their work an enduring message (not to say subversive formula). Within fin-de-siecle Yugoslavia particularly, NSK functioned as a premonition. (Their relevance beyond the Balkans goes without saying). At various points in the 80's, the entire Yugoslav social space seemed to be dancing to their deadly serious tune. That which would manipulate had become, however temporarily, the manipulated.8 And if the Balkans then went on to become a confirmation of NSK's darkest premonitions, it can hardly be blamed on them. Those who are responsible have names, and are visible with great regularity on CNN, meeting the highest representatives of the “Western” powers. How did the phenomenon start? In the beginning was the Word. Laibach's name, German for the Slovenian capital city of Ljubljana, was used during both Nazi rule and for a thousand years of Hapsburg domination. Dusted off and set in type for rock-festival posters within a year of Josip Broz Tito's death, the word alone functioned as the sheerest provocation in Yugoslavia, "a state founded on a mythologized cornerstone of partisan resistance to fascist occupation."9 It evoked both the much longer span of pre-Yugoslav Slovenian history and an entire counter-mythology. In short, Neue Slowenische Kunst (or "New Slovenian Art" in German) began as a set of theories devised by an upstart rock band with a gift for provocation, a determination to uncover some ugly truths about history -- and absolutely no knowledge of how to play musical instruments.10 Laibach emerged from Yugoslavia in the early 80's to become the only group from the "other" Europe to achieve success in the over-heated Western European (read: British) music scene. Signed to prestigious Mute Records while the ink was barely dry on the order banning them from performance in Slovenia, Laibach became the envy of an entire generation of rock musicians struggling for Western (or any) attention in Yugoslavia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Their use of German (a language which not one member of NSK can actually speak) as a weapon within a larger cultural war was already an indication of their method.11 Laibach were different because, practically alone among the above examples, they rejected imitation of Western models in favor of an originality of concept grounded in specific political-cultural circumstances. While they may have imitated the strategies of the punk movement (which itself had lifted tried-and-true 20th century avant-garde shock techniques), they rejected its exterior appearance and its sound. And while they may have borrowed their signature Nazi-kunst drummer-boys from the cover art of a 1978 Joy Division record12, they set their tin drums down in an entirely new context. Originality, anyway, was an overrated, not to say outmoded concept -- a key premise of all future NSK aesthetics. Where the Sex Pistols dissed the Queen, negated the future, and earned a hard-won place on the BBC's black list, Laibach (and later NSK) singled out -- and fired away at -- their own locally sacrosanct subjects. It was all part of the post-Tito "thaw." As with the Pistols, the resulting scandal triggered a rush (to judgment by some, of freedom for others). How importantly all this figures in the larger picture of Yugoslavia's emerging dissolution remains subject to debate. What is clear is that, in an ideologically "flat" time, Laibach served as polarizers. A position pro or contra was suddenly absolutely necessary. Within Slovenia's relative liberalism -- itself an anomaly within Yugoslavia's "soft totalitarianism" -- Laibach still begged to be condemned. Even those sometimes questioning their motives felt compelled to defend them on the grounds of freedom of expression.13 Having raised a series of issues, the debate commenced -- and suddenly ideology became important again. In the end, using a few Yugoslav Army uniforms, a squall of feedback, and a barked rendition of a speech by Mussolini, they served as catalyst. NSK's "retro-avant-garde" strategy was born at Ljubljana's "Novi Rock" festival in 1983, in a shower of spattered beer, broken glass and drops of blood from the bottle which impacted on lead "singer" Tomas Hostnik's chin. Although easy to exaggerate, Laibach's first appearance was in fact a significant event -- not just in Slovenian, but also in Yugoslav history. Apart from highlighting the fact that the emperor had vanished (leaving, in this case, his clothes behind), it was the beginning of a process in which historically taboo subjects were unearthed to serve various agendas (a process reaching its most overt form with the exhumation of the bones of Serbian King Lazar, defeated by the Turks five centuries previous, for a macabre grand tour of Serbia in 1989). The fact that NSK's was a specifically artistic premonition of such a process did nothing to lessen its visceral impact. And needless to say, this was all fertile ground for misunderstandings (few of which NSK did anything to discourage; they were a necessary part of the process of mythologization -- this time of the artists themselves). Five years after the collapse of Yugoslavia, and more then ten years after Laibach's co-founder Tomas Hostnik hanged himself, all this might seem like ancient history. (The instrument of his self-execution, incidentally, may be the only truly indigenous element of the Slovenian countryside: one of the distinctive elongated-ladder hayracks necessary in the foggy atmosphere of valleys on the "Sunny Side of the Alps"14). It might seem so, that is, were it not for the troubling fact that history itself, in an unspeakable mirror to NSK's "retro-principle", came to life again -- not just in the Balkans but all across the warming post-cold war landscapes. Hostnik, at least, was consciously making out of his death a last piece of Heimat art. And like Beuys' Greens movement, NSK continued long after the disappearance of one of its key architects; it continues -- with varying degrees of aesthetic fascination -- well into Slovenia's successful secession. If NSK's "channeling" of an ambiguous mixture of the two great mid-20th century totalitarianism’s was deeply unsettling to socialist Yugoslavia -- a state founded with the political system of one locked in victorious struggle with the other -- it may well have served as a kind of inoculation in Slovenia15. Of all the ex-Yugoslav republics, Slovenia today is perhaps the least likely to endorse ethnically exclusionary nationalist politics of the type evident all around, not just in the Balkans but in Austria, Italy and Slovakia. And here, too, a Beuysian idea slides into place: that of art as homeopathic remedy. "Simula simulabus curantor."16 Clearly, this kind of experimentation was fraught with Pandoran overtones (as Kim Levin wrote about Beuys: "Like may cure like, but likeness can also be mistaken for emulation. And homeopathic remedies -- wolfsbane for fever, arsenic for ptomaine -- work only in small doses. Otherwise they can cause the symptoms they are meant to cure"17). Still, such symptoms also have their less abstract, Suprematist causes, and those responsible for the Yugoslav tragedy are not unknown to even the most lax viewers of global media. As for NSK, their final paradox is one that has been well-earned. Appropriately enough, it too comes in the guise of a "hidden transgression." Having made the materials of politics and religion the substance of their work, NSK have in turn become a part of the history they once only drew on.18 In view of the graphic confirmation of some of their darkest visions, it's somehow appropriate that one new NSK project, at least, fall under the heading of self-examination. A book-length collaboration between NSK theorist Eda Cufer and the five members of the Irwin painting collective will, among other things, seek to investigate the underlying motivation behind NSK's state simulations. It will also ask whether NSK still serves a useful purpose within the changed geo-political environment.
FOOTNOTES 1. Francis Fukayama, "The End of History", THE NATIONAL
INTEREST, Summer 1989.
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