2019년 10월 14일 월요일
벽화와 조형물
벽화와 조형물은 오늘날 호구가 되었다. 사람들이 가장 쉽게 자극되고 비판하는 미술이다. 왜그럴까? 모르긴 몰라도 가장 눈에 많이 띄고 오랫동안 지속되기 때문일 것이다. 그렇다면 왜 이것을 가장 급진적인 툴로 사용하진 못할까?
2019년 10월 10일 목요일
Harald Szeemann “About the exhibition”
제만의 서문. 영문 번역이 책에 있었네. 구글 도서에서 찾았다. 일일히 쳐서 기록.
About the Exhibition
About the Exhibition
So far no one has given this complex phenomenon a satisfactory name and category, in the same way that Pop, Op, and minimal art were quickly put into categories. Names suggested so far – Anti-form," "MicroEmotive Art," "Possible Art," "Impossible Art," "Concept Art," "Arte Povera," "Earth Art" – each describe only one aspect of the style: the obvious opposition to form: the high degree of personal and emotional engagementl the pronouncement that certain objects are art, although they have not previously been indentified as suchl the shift of interest away from the result toward the artistic process; the use of mundane materials; the interaction of work and material; Mother Earth as medioum, workplace, the desert as concept.
Noticeable is the absolute freedom in the use of materials, as well as the concern for the physical and chemical properties of the work itself. Whereas two years ago polyester and computers were the media that fascinated progressive artists and at the same time determined the area of expression, nowadays the medium no longer seems importatnt in the newest art. The belief in technology has been superseded by the belief in the artistic process. The major characteristic of today’s art is no longer the articulation of space but of human activity; the activity of the artist has become the dominant theme and content. It is in this way that the title of the present exhibition should be understood (it is a sentence rather than a slogan). Never before has the inner bearing of an artist been turned so directly into a work of art. Naturally enough it has always been the same. Mondrian and Pollock gave form to their inner bearing, but always in terms of the finished product, the autonomous object. The artists represented in this present exhibition are in no way object-makers. On the contrary, they aspire to freedom from the object, and in this way deepen the levels of meaning of the object, reveal the meaning of those levels beyond the object. They want the artistic process itself to remain visible in the end product and in the ‘exhibition’.” It is significant that the mass of their own bodies, the power of human movement plays an enormous role for these artists and creates the new "alphabet of form and material" (Trini).
A large group of artists, like the earth artists, are not represented by works, but with information; and the conceptual artists are represented by working plans, which no longer require further realization. This conceptual art readily makes use of existing systems (telephone, post, press, cartography) to create its "works," and these eventually lead to new systems, which prevent all discussion of their starting points.
Works, concepts, processes, situations, information (we consciously avoied the expressions object and experiment) are the "forms" through which these artistic positions are expressed. They are "forms" derived not from preformed pictorial opinions but from the experience of the artistic process inself. This dictates both the choice of material and the form of work as the extension of gesture. This gesture can be private, intimate, or public and expansive. But the process itself always remans vital; it is "handwriting and style" simultaneously. Thus the meaning of this art lies in the fact that an entire generation of artists has undertaken to give "form" to the "nature of art and artists" in terms of a natual process.
Harald Szeemann “About the exhibition” in Selective Writings, pp. 29-31.
2019년 10월 8일 화요일
공정성과 검찰개혁
https://news.v.daum.net/v/20191008113421914?fbclid=IwAR1RalSanr5Or4g0DZbHxTUgOiV7CeUwpYW4DQT6v9d8dMCbnNHmGUNMKJQ
젊은이들의 공정성 주장에 대한 비판이 부당하다면, 검찰 개혁과 조국 수호에 대한 요구에 대한 비판 역시 부당하다.
젊은이들의 공정성 주장에 대한 비판이 부당하다면, 검찰 개혁과 조국 수호에 대한 요구에 대한 비판 역시 부당하다.
The Myth of the Slovene Stag: Neue Slowenische Kunst and the Reprocessing of Traditional Symbolism – Alexei Monroe
Over-identification is often discussed in terms of ideology, performance or politics. However, the specific visual, sonic and symbolic motifs used to produce over-identification effects sometimes receive less attention. Therefore it may be useful be to explore one of the most commonly used motifs of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), the Stag. An understanding of the dynamics associated with this is critical to any detailed analysis of NSK’s “retrograde” mode of over-identification. There are similarities between NSK and the “symbolic Stag” that appears in folklore, art and mass visual culture. Both have seemingly clear meanings but are actually more transitory and multi-faceted and NSK’s “Slovene Stag” leaves elusive and illusory tracks and scents. In Celtic tradition it is one of the three oldest animals and the emergence of such a primeval symbol in ultra-contemporary underground culture at first seems surprising but this only underlines its continued and surprising relevance within the most unlikely contexts.
Over-identification is a term first associated with the actions of the group Laibach Kunst in early eighties Yugoslavia. Slavoj Žižek later theorised it in his 1993 article Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?[1] He described what he called an “aggressive inconsistent mixture” of contradictory symbolisms that had the effect of “bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system” by seeming to over-identify with its rituals. He also stresses that this is linked to the doubt and fear created by these interventions, effects generated by the lack of the usual artistic-ironic distance towards kitsch, propaganda and other elements that tend to alarm so-called “enlightened intellectuals.” One tactical question that emerges from NSK’s work is whether a symbol such as the Stag is irredeemably kitsch or reactionary, or whether its manipulation can produce valuable and unexpected effects.
Dictation of the Motif
“Our work refers to the entire history of art, politics and mankind in general.” (Laibach)[2]
NSK over-identifies (or seems to over-identify with) a series of mental, ideological and cultural regimes. It has attracted most attention and condemnation for its use of totalitarian symbolism, however, one means by which it has created the semi-illusory spectacle of a national cultural movement has been the use of much older traditional symbolism including pastoral motifs such as the sower or the Slovene hay-rack known as the kozolec and one of its ‘ur-motifs’, the Stag. From early cave art onwards, the Stag has been one of the most frequently used and powerful symbols, recurring throughout art history in Europe and beyond. This means that although it is often used in a kitsch/ironic way, its deployment can still trigger subconscious or pre-rational associations and it carries a primal charge.
Politically, it is strongly associated with hunting, and with what are characterised as anti-cosmopolitan provincial attitudes. This is certainly the way it is deployed in populist Austrian Heimatfilme such as Der Förster vom Silberwald (1954). It appears as a symbol of non-alienated traditional values. In Austria and to a lesser extent in Slovenia, hunters (who wear antler symbols on their clothing) are generally viewed as an inherently reactionary group by outsiders. The stag is a power symbol deployed by specific hierarchies and their client groups (rural populations who defend what are basically feudal relations). While it also appears as a symbol in contemporary contexts it is seen as being tainted by association with a value system antithetical to any contemporary art and culture, let alone ideas such as bruitism, Punk or performance art. Additionally, leaders such as Tito or Franz Ferdinand (who boasted of having shot 3000 stags) have used the practice and symbolism of hunting as a symbol of political virility and the stag was traditionally seen as a royal animal. Thus, the Stag as a symbol always carries the metaphorical scent of blood, suggesting particular hierarchies and traditional practices and codes of honour. Therefore NSK’s appropriation of it was as much a (symbolic) political challenge as its appropriation of state and ideological symbolism.
Who Doubts the Terrible Power of these Horns? Construction of the New Acropolis
“LAIBACH and NSK analyzed nationalism through the aesthetic dimension. By placing ‘national and subnational’ symbols alongside each other, we demonstrated their ‘universality’. That is, in the very process of one nation defining its difference against the other, it frequently uses the same, or almost the same, kind of symbols and rhetoric as the other. In short, nations are not very original at all when it comes to defining their own originality – their ‘raison d’etre’ – against each other. Indeed, they often use exactly the same arguments and symbols (compare, for instance, the use of the eagle symbol by the Germans, Americans, Albanians, Austrians, Poles, etc.). Paradoxically, then, nationalistic conflict between nations are usually not the result of differences, but because the differences are too small (for instance, only a few English people know that they’re essentially an English-speaking Germanic tribe). Such nationalism is based on ‘the narcissism of small differences’. It is the most popular, most European and most fatal. Also in the countries of ex-Yugoslavia.”[3] (Laibach)
Given the extent to which it is bound up with representations of power, it should be no surprise that the stag has been central to NSK’s iconography since 1982. Like all NSK’s appropriated symbols, the stag is structurally paradoxical. NSK made it into a symbol of new Slovene art and subsequently of the NSK State in Time, but it actually began its symbolic journey in 19th century Scotland. The source of the stag that features most frequently in NSK visual art works is actually Landseer’s famous painting The Monarch of the Glen (1851), an iconic Scottish image that appears in numerous commercial contexts such as Glenfiddich whisky and Campbell’s soup packaging. It is interesting to note that NSK have always found an appreciative audience in Scotland, exhibiting there before London and that there are some similarities between Scotland’s place in the UK and Slovenia’s place in the old Yugoslavia (northern nations within larger multi-national states). NSK’s appropriation of the monarch was in fact a sequel to Peter Blake’s pop art version (despite appearances pop art works and techniques were an important precedent for NSK). In this respect, “there is no Slovene Stag” and this original foreign source points to the spectral nature of NSK’s performance of national mobilisation.
The “Slovenization” of the monarch began in 1982 with the exhibition Ausstellung Laibach Kunst in Ljubljana, the first manifestation of what Laibach termed the “monumental retro-avant-garde.” A reproduction of the monarch was featured surrounded by Xeroxed images of a monumental worker figure and the controversial name Laibach (the historic German term for Ljubljana). In this context, the monarch was conspicuous as a ‘high art’ retro presence within an aggressively contemporary multimedia installation. This temporal tension between ultra-traditional and ultra-contemporary is one of Laibach’s most characteristic qualities and is intrinsic to what we can call the “Laibach effect” – the generation of contradictory audience interpretations from the same source.
By the end of 1983, Laibach was performing in London at the end of the first stage of its first Occupied Europe Tour. Laibach performed an extremely challenging combination of industrial music with atonal classical elements and were a fixture on the international avant-garde scene. At a concert at London’s Diorama venue, Laibach first placed a stag’s head on stage. Although it was thrown into the audience during the show, stag’s heads went on to become an expected element of every Laibach show during the 1980s. In some cases, antlers alone were used, sometimes attached to a Laibach painting. In other cases a full scale hunting trophy was used. The significance of this was that Laibach deployed something simultaneously Völkisch, ideological and primeval as part of contemporary culture, rendering the archaic contemporary and the contemporary archaic. This was exactly the type of allegedly reactionary symbolism that other alternative artists and musicians would see as untouchable. For Laibach it was an essential part of a strategy designed to make it seem more powerful and absolute than any “actually existing” state could then be.
Its use also represented a sinister temporal dislocation, an allusion to what majority opinion likes to believe is a safely surpassed dark past. In the senso-brutalist[4] context of a Laibach concert the normally concealed power of the archetypal image is revealed, stripped of its normal ‘reasurring’ folksiness (which Laibach reveal as being connected to force, terror and mobilisation.) Laibach’s over-identification gave it (and themselves) more power than it actually possessed, aiding the construction of its own illusory power.
Here we have to acknowledge that there was also an element of fanatical absurdism present. British audiences in particular tended to view the antlers as proof that the entire spectacle was ‘really’ or ‘primarily’ a joke, and thus that it had no further implications. Some British reviews even reported that Laibach wore the antlers and seemed to need to emphasise the ludicrous aspects, as if they discounted the overall presentation. This overlooked the discomforting to which Laibach’s use of such symbolism was and remains ‘for real’ and is very far from the standard mocking position of many artists. In the Central European/Alpine context the stag is certainly a kitsch symbol but its use by Laibach seemed deadly serious because of its ongoing association with reactionary political forces.
However, the Stag was much more than a curious stage prop. The ambivalently-titled 1985 live album Neu Konservatiw features another less placid Landseer image of a terrified drowning stag. The monarch appeared again on the cover of Laibach’s 1986 album Nova akropola this time with a cross between its antlers, an allusion to the legend of St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters. Nova akropola’s literally exorcistic track Vade Retro (Satanas) also features a stag. From the midst of an extremely harsh sound-field the sampled call of a rutting stag emerges. Once again, the familiar symbol becomes associated with primeval terror and fascination, re-emerging as a force of nature as relevant and disturbing in 1986 as in 986. Many artists use natural references but what is present here is a natural archetype, more intimidating than welcoming and integral to Laibach’s over-identification with ‘eternal’ values and laws. This also took the form of appropriating traditional Tyrolean style hunting clothes of a type now rarely seen in Slovenia but still present in Austria. Laibach even wore the insignia of the Slovene Hunting Association (SLD) and their videos feature Stag clips from hunting films. This hunting image soon drew fire from some certain quarters and Laibach played out a more honestly reactionary role than actual hunters now tend to. Asked if they were aware of the animal rights movement they replied “We know about it, but the animals don’t.”
This stance was also significant as it dramatised the fact that even under the modernity of self-management socialism hunting motifs and Alpine symbolism remained present in Slovene culture (which despite the official emphasis on the “Brotherhood and Unity” of the Yugoslav peoples still bore traces of its former Austrian rulers). Laibach’s image in this period was more typical of southern Austria or Bavaria than of contemporary Slovenia, yet it paradoxically managed to transmit an internationalised Sloveneness via an excessive “Germania”.
Alongside Laibach stood the other NSK groups, all of which used the stag or antlers as one of the symbolic building blocks of the Gesamtkunstwerk that eventually became the NSK State in Time. Indeed, antlers form a key part of NSK’s insignia. The visual arts collective IRWIN took the Slovene stag and subjected it to an intensive process of multiplication, and continue to take into new contemporary contexts. Representations of the Stag comprise an entire iconographic series in IRWIN’s Icons project.[5] These stags are juxtaposed with incongruous elements such as lego bricks or modernist motifs. The oppositions set up by the contradictory elements further complicate the status of the Slovene Stag, further removing it from a directly national role. Additionally, many of their installations featured stags and other hunting trophies, creating the impression of a dislocated temporal space similar to Laibach’s concert environments. Like Laibach, IRWIN takes the Stag both back to the classicist aesthetics of oil painting and European tradition and forward into the digital context. This is intrinsic to their original self-identified role as “state artists” – a category that obviously disturbs those unable to accept the legitimacy of over-identification.
In 1986 NSK created its most monumental collective presentation, the performance Krst pod Triglavom (Baptism under Triglav). IRWIN provided the scenography and Laibach the music for the production by NSK drama group Scipion Nasice. Here again, Stags and hunting motifs were central to what would have seemed to outsiders to be an exercise in nationalist assertion. The reality is more complex. Krst’s theme was the forced conversion and colonisation of the pagan Slovenes by German forces in the 9th Century. It addressed the extent to which Slovene identity has been endangered and suppressed by its larger neighbours and the paradoxical possibility of asserting Sloveneness using international sources. Alongside the Slovene historical and mythological references, NSK employed the art of Kandinsky, Tatlin and Malevich and the Slovene “historical avant-garde”, the music of Kraftwerk, Bruckner, Liszt and more. Laibach were not only reprocessing the German classical canon, but even Völksmusik. NSK successfully used the Germanic imagery and culture that traditionally dominated the Slovene space in order to transmit the previously repressed culture within the heartland of the former enemy.
In this way a small so-called “unhistorical” culture of two million people assumed symbolic ‘great power’ status in the cultural sphere, insisting on its right to recognition while acknowledging the foreign influences upon it. Slovene culture and language have historically been known to very few foreigners and prior to NSK there was no precedent for its systematic international transmission. Here we can see why some of NSK’s harshest critics remain conservative Catholic nationalists who resent the linking of “their” national symbols with foreign and avant-garde sources. Over-identification has exposed some of the private national-folk power rituals that lose their kitsch innocence and effectiveness when exposed. However, we can also see why the Völkisch imagery made so dangerously credible by the Slovene Stag and other signifiers causes alarm. Yet the career of the appropriated and (inter)nationalised, multiplied and industrialised Slovene Stag is the clue that NSK is always also pointing away from or through what it seems to point unambiguously towards.
Progressive Alpinism?
The trajectory of the Slovene stag suggests that the presence of the archaic and the traditional are deeply embedded in the contemporary. Such symbols adapt and mutate to changing times and find new hosts and carriers.
In a sense, the ‘New Slovene Stag’ stands for everything over-identification implies: the refusal not to use tainted symbols. It’s clear why this type of symbolism enrages many on the left, but NSK’s appropriation also affects the Right. Looking at it closely, it becomes clear how with the opulence and monumentality of its representations, NSK created an abstracted spectacle with which no actual state or nationalist manifestation could compete. In the Slovene context, NSK’s appropriation of symbolism that would normally be used by government or far-right groups has been so complete as to alienate it from its natural constituencies. This type of appropriation can amount to a kind of counter-contamination that permanently stains its subjects. They are stained both with the normally concealed power associations and with their use by artists seen as decadent by many. The intensive repetition of motifs sustains the necessary illusion of fanaticism but in the process can dilute the actual fanaticism associated with them, taking them further from their original sources and complicating the enjoyment of those used to exercising a monopoly over them.
The foreign source of the Slovene Stag was paradoxically central to the way in which NSK (re)-invented the traditions of its own semi-fictional nation and then transmitted them internationally. It guaranteed an internal distance while presenting a monumental and threatening external façade that seemed to contain no distance whatsoever. This is central to the most aggressive forms of over-identification – there should initially seem to be no possible space for doubt, even though contradictory symbolism is present. Those confronted by it have to be left to work out whether there is any distance and of what type. Over-explanation has to be avoided and the possibility, even the probability, of misinterpretation has to be accepted. In fact, if the phenomenon does not at least some of the time appear to be what people most fear it to be then it will be less effective. To paraphrase Laibach, “all interpretations must be correct”: the negative as well as the positive. Laibach’s demonisation as nationalists has sometimes worked as positive propaganda, amplifying the effects of its interventions. Over-identification means accepting the likelihood of being identified (only) with the most demonic aspects of the regime the technique is applied to and of being “shot by both sides”. It should be “red in tooth and claw”, encoding painfully real elements of power and in the process alienating them from those who normally wield them.
Obviously there are risks associated with reprocessing the type of power symbolism intrinsic to over-identification, but it has to be asked whether abstaining from this is any less risky. The fact that symbols such as the Stag have been contaminated by the Nazis and others actually demands a counter-contamination. Many on the left engage in a ceaseless kulturkampf against this type of traditional European symbolism, claiming that any use of it (except perhaps the most contemptuously ironic) is unacceptable. However, they will not fade away because they are ignored or even criminalised by enlightened elites. In fact, this simply leaves a potentially powerful symbolic arsenal as the unchallenged property of the Right and makes plausible propaganda about progressive forces being intent on destroying all tradition. This censorious approach which amounts to a refusal to “get their hands dirty” is a colossal tactical error. There is no possibility of any non-aggression pact by both sides abstain from symbolic warfare so on this front there should be no question of what amounts to unilateral symbolic disarmament. Here then is the challenge presented by the example of NSK: why should such symbolism not be taken deadly seriously as a legitimate weapon and why should ‘we’ not appropriate it for counter-cultural irregular use? Entire categories of imagery and tradition cannot be proscribed without generating massive opposition. The challenge is to find and construct non-reactionary modes of using and even respecting these categories. Why not a “progressive Alpinism” as is already apparent in the work of the Austrian group Attwenger? By now there are enough examples of such reclamation and reprocessing strategies out there, and perhaps the time has come to stop talking and “just do it!”
[1] See http://nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php
[2] See http://www.ljudmila.org/embassy/3a/exc/l32.htm
[3] See http://www.nskstate.com/laibach/interviews/excerpts-91-95.php
[4] See Alexei Monroe “The Evolution of Senso-Brutalism” in the English content section of www.skug.at
[5] See http://www.nskstate.com/irwin/works-projects/irwin-icons.php
Over-identification is a term first associated with the actions of the group Laibach Kunst in early eighties Yugoslavia. Slavoj Žižek later theorised it in his 1993 article Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?[1] He described what he called an “aggressive inconsistent mixture” of contradictory symbolisms that had the effect of “bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system” by seeming to over-identify with its rituals. He also stresses that this is linked to the doubt and fear created by these interventions, effects generated by the lack of the usual artistic-ironic distance towards kitsch, propaganda and other elements that tend to alarm so-called “enlightened intellectuals.” One tactical question that emerges from NSK’s work is whether a symbol such as the Stag is irredeemably kitsch or reactionary, or whether its manipulation can produce valuable and unexpected effects.
Dictation of the Motif
“Our work refers to the entire history of art, politics and mankind in general.” (Laibach)[2]
NSK over-identifies (or seems to over-identify with) a series of mental, ideological and cultural regimes. It has attracted most attention and condemnation for its use of totalitarian symbolism, however, one means by which it has created the semi-illusory spectacle of a national cultural movement has been the use of much older traditional symbolism including pastoral motifs such as the sower or the Slovene hay-rack known as the kozolec and one of its ‘ur-motifs’, the Stag. From early cave art onwards, the Stag has been one of the most frequently used and powerful symbols, recurring throughout art history in Europe and beyond. This means that although it is often used in a kitsch/ironic way, its deployment can still trigger subconscious or pre-rational associations and it carries a primal charge.
Politically, it is strongly associated with hunting, and with what are characterised as anti-cosmopolitan provincial attitudes. This is certainly the way it is deployed in populist Austrian Heimatfilme such as Der Förster vom Silberwald (1954). It appears as a symbol of non-alienated traditional values. In Austria and to a lesser extent in Slovenia, hunters (who wear antler symbols on their clothing) are generally viewed as an inherently reactionary group by outsiders. The stag is a power symbol deployed by specific hierarchies and their client groups (rural populations who defend what are basically feudal relations). While it also appears as a symbol in contemporary contexts it is seen as being tainted by association with a value system antithetical to any contemporary art and culture, let alone ideas such as bruitism, Punk or performance art. Additionally, leaders such as Tito or Franz Ferdinand (who boasted of having shot 3000 stags) have used the practice and symbolism of hunting as a symbol of political virility and the stag was traditionally seen as a royal animal. Thus, the Stag as a symbol always carries the metaphorical scent of blood, suggesting particular hierarchies and traditional practices and codes of honour. Therefore NSK’s appropriation of it was as much a (symbolic) political challenge as its appropriation of state and ideological symbolism.
Who Doubts the Terrible Power of these Horns? Construction of the New Acropolis
“LAIBACH and NSK analyzed nationalism through the aesthetic dimension. By placing ‘national and subnational’ symbols alongside each other, we demonstrated their ‘universality’. That is, in the very process of one nation defining its difference against the other, it frequently uses the same, or almost the same, kind of symbols and rhetoric as the other. In short, nations are not very original at all when it comes to defining their own originality – their ‘raison d’etre’ – against each other. Indeed, they often use exactly the same arguments and symbols (compare, for instance, the use of the eagle symbol by the Germans, Americans, Albanians, Austrians, Poles, etc.). Paradoxically, then, nationalistic conflict between nations are usually not the result of differences, but because the differences are too small (for instance, only a few English people know that they’re essentially an English-speaking Germanic tribe). Such nationalism is based on ‘the narcissism of small differences’. It is the most popular, most European and most fatal. Also in the countries of ex-Yugoslavia.”[3] (Laibach)
Given the extent to which it is bound up with representations of power, it should be no surprise that the stag has been central to NSK’s iconography since 1982. Like all NSK’s appropriated symbols, the stag is structurally paradoxical. NSK made it into a symbol of new Slovene art and subsequently of the NSK State in Time, but it actually began its symbolic journey in 19th century Scotland. The source of the stag that features most frequently in NSK visual art works is actually Landseer’s famous painting The Monarch of the Glen (1851), an iconic Scottish image that appears in numerous commercial contexts such as Glenfiddich whisky and Campbell’s soup packaging. It is interesting to note that NSK have always found an appreciative audience in Scotland, exhibiting there before London and that there are some similarities between Scotland’s place in the UK and Slovenia’s place in the old Yugoslavia (northern nations within larger multi-national states). NSK’s appropriation of the monarch was in fact a sequel to Peter Blake’s pop art version (despite appearances pop art works and techniques were an important precedent for NSK). In this respect, “there is no Slovene Stag” and this original foreign source points to the spectral nature of NSK’s performance of national mobilisation.
The “Slovenization” of the monarch began in 1982 with the exhibition Ausstellung Laibach Kunst in Ljubljana, the first manifestation of what Laibach termed the “monumental retro-avant-garde.” A reproduction of the monarch was featured surrounded by Xeroxed images of a monumental worker figure and the controversial name Laibach (the historic German term for Ljubljana). In this context, the monarch was conspicuous as a ‘high art’ retro presence within an aggressively contemporary multimedia installation. This temporal tension between ultra-traditional and ultra-contemporary is one of Laibach’s most characteristic qualities and is intrinsic to what we can call the “Laibach effect” – the generation of contradictory audience interpretations from the same source.
By the end of 1983, Laibach was performing in London at the end of the first stage of its first Occupied Europe Tour. Laibach performed an extremely challenging combination of industrial music with atonal classical elements and were a fixture on the international avant-garde scene. At a concert at London’s Diorama venue, Laibach first placed a stag’s head on stage. Although it was thrown into the audience during the show, stag’s heads went on to become an expected element of every Laibach show during the 1980s. In some cases, antlers alone were used, sometimes attached to a Laibach painting. In other cases a full scale hunting trophy was used. The significance of this was that Laibach deployed something simultaneously Völkisch, ideological and primeval as part of contemporary culture, rendering the archaic contemporary and the contemporary archaic. This was exactly the type of allegedly reactionary symbolism that other alternative artists and musicians would see as untouchable. For Laibach it was an essential part of a strategy designed to make it seem more powerful and absolute than any “actually existing” state could then be.
Its use also represented a sinister temporal dislocation, an allusion to what majority opinion likes to believe is a safely surpassed dark past. In the senso-brutalist[4] context of a Laibach concert the normally concealed power of the archetypal image is revealed, stripped of its normal ‘reasurring’ folksiness (which Laibach reveal as being connected to force, terror and mobilisation.) Laibach’s over-identification gave it (and themselves) more power than it actually possessed, aiding the construction of its own illusory power.
Here we have to acknowledge that there was also an element of fanatical absurdism present. British audiences in particular tended to view the antlers as proof that the entire spectacle was ‘really’ or ‘primarily’ a joke, and thus that it had no further implications. Some British reviews even reported that Laibach wore the antlers and seemed to need to emphasise the ludicrous aspects, as if they discounted the overall presentation. This overlooked the discomforting to which Laibach’s use of such symbolism was and remains ‘for real’ and is very far from the standard mocking position of many artists. In the Central European/Alpine context the stag is certainly a kitsch symbol but its use by Laibach seemed deadly serious because of its ongoing association with reactionary political forces.
However, the Stag was much more than a curious stage prop. The ambivalently-titled 1985 live album Neu Konservatiw features another less placid Landseer image of a terrified drowning stag. The monarch appeared again on the cover of Laibach’s 1986 album Nova akropola this time with a cross between its antlers, an allusion to the legend of St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters. Nova akropola’s literally exorcistic track Vade Retro (Satanas) also features a stag. From the midst of an extremely harsh sound-field the sampled call of a rutting stag emerges. Once again, the familiar symbol becomes associated with primeval terror and fascination, re-emerging as a force of nature as relevant and disturbing in 1986 as in 986. Many artists use natural references but what is present here is a natural archetype, more intimidating than welcoming and integral to Laibach’s over-identification with ‘eternal’ values and laws. This also took the form of appropriating traditional Tyrolean style hunting clothes of a type now rarely seen in Slovenia but still present in Austria. Laibach even wore the insignia of the Slovene Hunting Association (SLD) and their videos feature Stag clips from hunting films. This hunting image soon drew fire from some certain quarters and Laibach played out a more honestly reactionary role than actual hunters now tend to. Asked if they were aware of the animal rights movement they replied “We know about it, but the animals don’t.”
This stance was also significant as it dramatised the fact that even under the modernity of self-management socialism hunting motifs and Alpine symbolism remained present in Slovene culture (which despite the official emphasis on the “Brotherhood and Unity” of the Yugoslav peoples still bore traces of its former Austrian rulers). Laibach’s image in this period was more typical of southern Austria or Bavaria than of contemporary Slovenia, yet it paradoxically managed to transmit an internationalised Sloveneness via an excessive “Germania”.
Alongside Laibach stood the other NSK groups, all of which used the stag or antlers as one of the symbolic building blocks of the Gesamtkunstwerk that eventually became the NSK State in Time. Indeed, antlers form a key part of NSK’s insignia. The visual arts collective IRWIN took the Slovene stag and subjected it to an intensive process of multiplication, and continue to take into new contemporary contexts. Representations of the Stag comprise an entire iconographic series in IRWIN’s Icons project.[5] These stags are juxtaposed with incongruous elements such as lego bricks or modernist motifs. The oppositions set up by the contradictory elements further complicate the status of the Slovene Stag, further removing it from a directly national role. Additionally, many of their installations featured stags and other hunting trophies, creating the impression of a dislocated temporal space similar to Laibach’s concert environments. Like Laibach, IRWIN takes the Stag both back to the classicist aesthetics of oil painting and European tradition and forward into the digital context. This is intrinsic to their original self-identified role as “state artists” – a category that obviously disturbs those unable to accept the legitimacy of over-identification.
In 1986 NSK created its most monumental collective presentation, the performance Krst pod Triglavom (Baptism under Triglav). IRWIN provided the scenography and Laibach the music for the production by NSK drama group Scipion Nasice. Here again, Stags and hunting motifs were central to what would have seemed to outsiders to be an exercise in nationalist assertion. The reality is more complex. Krst’s theme was the forced conversion and colonisation of the pagan Slovenes by German forces in the 9th Century. It addressed the extent to which Slovene identity has been endangered and suppressed by its larger neighbours and the paradoxical possibility of asserting Sloveneness using international sources. Alongside the Slovene historical and mythological references, NSK employed the art of Kandinsky, Tatlin and Malevich and the Slovene “historical avant-garde”, the music of Kraftwerk, Bruckner, Liszt and more. Laibach were not only reprocessing the German classical canon, but even Völksmusik. NSK successfully used the Germanic imagery and culture that traditionally dominated the Slovene space in order to transmit the previously repressed culture within the heartland of the former enemy.
In this way a small so-called “unhistorical” culture of two million people assumed symbolic ‘great power’ status in the cultural sphere, insisting on its right to recognition while acknowledging the foreign influences upon it. Slovene culture and language have historically been known to very few foreigners and prior to NSK there was no precedent for its systematic international transmission. Here we can see why some of NSK’s harshest critics remain conservative Catholic nationalists who resent the linking of “their” national symbols with foreign and avant-garde sources. Over-identification has exposed some of the private national-folk power rituals that lose their kitsch innocence and effectiveness when exposed. However, we can also see why the Völkisch imagery made so dangerously credible by the Slovene Stag and other signifiers causes alarm. Yet the career of the appropriated and (inter)nationalised, multiplied and industrialised Slovene Stag is the clue that NSK is always also pointing away from or through what it seems to point unambiguously towards.
Progressive Alpinism?
The trajectory of the Slovene stag suggests that the presence of the archaic and the traditional are deeply embedded in the contemporary. Such symbols adapt and mutate to changing times and find new hosts and carriers.
In a sense, the ‘New Slovene Stag’ stands for everything over-identification implies: the refusal not to use tainted symbols. It’s clear why this type of symbolism enrages many on the left, but NSK’s appropriation also affects the Right. Looking at it closely, it becomes clear how with the opulence and monumentality of its representations, NSK created an abstracted spectacle with which no actual state or nationalist manifestation could compete. In the Slovene context, NSK’s appropriation of symbolism that would normally be used by government or far-right groups has been so complete as to alienate it from its natural constituencies. This type of appropriation can amount to a kind of counter-contamination that permanently stains its subjects. They are stained both with the normally concealed power associations and with their use by artists seen as decadent by many. The intensive repetition of motifs sustains the necessary illusion of fanaticism but in the process can dilute the actual fanaticism associated with them, taking them further from their original sources and complicating the enjoyment of those used to exercising a monopoly over them.
The foreign source of the Slovene Stag was paradoxically central to the way in which NSK (re)-invented the traditions of its own semi-fictional nation and then transmitted them internationally. It guaranteed an internal distance while presenting a monumental and threatening external façade that seemed to contain no distance whatsoever. This is central to the most aggressive forms of over-identification – there should initially seem to be no possible space for doubt, even though contradictory symbolism is present. Those confronted by it have to be left to work out whether there is any distance and of what type. Over-explanation has to be avoided and the possibility, even the probability, of misinterpretation has to be accepted. In fact, if the phenomenon does not at least some of the time appear to be what people most fear it to be then it will be less effective. To paraphrase Laibach, “all interpretations must be correct”: the negative as well as the positive. Laibach’s demonisation as nationalists has sometimes worked as positive propaganda, amplifying the effects of its interventions. Over-identification means accepting the likelihood of being identified (only) with the most demonic aspects of the regime the technique is applied to and of being “shot by both sides”. It should be “red in tooth and claw”, encoding painfully real elements of power and in the process alienating them from those who normally wield them.
Obviously there are risks associated with reprocessing the type of power symbolism intrinsic to over-identification, but it has to be asked whether abstaining from this is any less risky. The fact that symbols such as the Stag have been contaminated by the Nazis and others actually demands a counter-contamination. Many on the left engage in a ceaseless kulturkampf against this type of traditional European symbolism, claiming that any use of it (except perhaps the most contemptuously ironic) is unacceptable. However, they will not fade away because they are ignored or even criminalised by enlightened elites. In fact, this simply leaves a potentially powerful symbolic arsenal as the unchallenged property of the Right and makes plausible propaganda about progressive forces being intent on destroying all tradition. This censorious approach which amounts to a refusal to “get their hands dirty” is a colossal tactical error. There is no possibility of any non-aggression pact by both sides abstain from symbolic warfare so on this front there should be no question of what amounts to unilateral symbolic disarmament. Here then is the challenge presented by the example of NSK: why should such symbolism not be taken deadly seriously as a legitimate weapon and why should ‘we’ not appropriate it for counter-cultural irregular use? Entire categories of imagery and tradition cannot be proscribed without generating massive opposition. The challenge is to find and construct non-reactionary modes of using and even respecting these categories. Why not a “progressive Alpinism” as is already apparent in the work of the Austrian group Attwenger? By now there are enough examples of such reclamation and reprocessing strategies out there, and perhaps the time has come to stop talking and “just do it!”
[1] See http://nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php
[2] See http://www.ljudmila.org/embassy/3a/exc/l32.htm
[3] See http://www.nskstate.com/laibach/interviews/excerpts-91-95.php
[4] See Alexei Monroe “The Evolution of Senso-Brutalism” in the English content section of www.skug.at
[5] See http://www.nskstate.com/irwin/works-projects/irwin-icons.php