Curator: Barbara Borčić in collaboration with the Laibach group
___________
Exhibition events
3. 7. at 6 pm: viewing of the exhibition with art historian and curator Barbara Borčić
5. 7. at 6 pm: lecture by post-gravity artist Dragan Živadinov, Northern Order: Laibach Kunst
9. 7. at 6 pm: viewing of the exhibition with founding member of Laibach Ivo Saliger (aka I. Novak)
17. 7. at 6 pm: viewing of the exhibition with the exhibition curator Barbara Borčić, founding member of Laibach Ivo Saliger (aka Ivan Novak) and presentation of the new collection of essays AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST Fundamenti / Fundaments
___________
Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst was the usual call to attend Laibach’s early exhibitions.[1] The field of reference of the present exhibition can also be found in the formative artistic practice of Laibach Kunst, especially in the first two exhibitions at Škuc Gallery, in 1982 and 1983, which lasted one evening each (from 6 pm until 10 pm), as a kind of soirée. They attracted large audiences and provoked turbulent reactions.
Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst (28 April 1982) was experimental, combining the practice of printmaking, Xerox collage and montage with a bruitist concert that tested out the situation in the gallery (a poster with a black cross in a cogwheel as well as an invitation with a programme text and a picture of Hitler’s visit to the Great German Art Exhibition).
Laibach Kunst – Monumental Retroavantgarde (21 April 1983) presented a considerable number of oil paintings alongside prints, documentary photographs and Xerox montages, and also showed the half-hour video Documents of Oppression (a poster and an invitation with an interpretation of the painting “Woman Drinking Coffee” by Ivana Kobilca: the coffee cup features Laibach’s sign – a black cross in a cogwheel – with the programme text on the invitation).
Today, Laibach is best known for its concerts, videos and records. Less is known about their visual production, although it is precisely this that is constitutive of their complex artistic practice and appearance in the media: from their visual identity, concert performances and exhibition events, to paintings, videos, posters and publications, gestures and outfits. Their very first public project was conceived as a group exhibition with an accompanying concert, whose prohibition was triggered by posters pasted across the mining town of Trbovlje. Laibach’s arrival on the scene was thus marked by a ban referring to its visual images. The subsequent notorious multimedia performances, controversies and bans were also largely triggered by images. The first centred on the black cross, followed by others, a series of iconic images from their arsenal of motifs: the worker, the deer, the hayrack, the sower, the drummer, the factory …
The exhibition AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST 1980–1984 presents this very early visual production with artworks in various techniques: paintings, prints, photocopies, installations, photographs, video, posters and publications. It traces the essential methods and processes that mark both their early artistic oeuvre and the exhibition at hand, which presents this oeuvre through (re)construction, reuse and reshaping. The works reused by Laibach in the current exhibition come from a collection of appropriated images that differ in motif, technique and style. They have already been shown in the first exhibitions between 1981 and 1985, during Laibach’s intense activity on the Ljubljana alternative scene, when they held three solo exhibitions at Škuc Gallery, participated in group shows and released posters, publications and music tapes. After more than forty years, a spatial installation in the same space – Škuc Gallery – revisits some of the original installations, showcasing individual artworks while adding new ones. Building on the conceptual starting points of the early exhibitions, it reinterprets them from today’s perspective, making them accessible to a younger audience who may not yet be familiar with the visual production of Laibach Kunst.
Some points of clarification are therefore required. Laibach called their method retroavantgarde and introduced the processes of appropriation and montage into their artistic practice. They produced collages and bricolages by making use of the possibilities offered by the photocopier, tape recorder and video devices, combining the appropriated images in contradictory ways, merging the “incompatible”, layering meanings with references to art, history and politics. The imagery is complex, and the motifs come from a variety of contradictory sources – from classical art and the avant-garde, Nazi art and socialist realism, to propaganda films and Partisan graphic prints, horror films and national icons. The methodology and processes of the build-up of the Laibach Kunst image are largely taken from the historical avant-gardes and engaged art, whereas the referential field of utilising readymade methods and cut-up techniques (editing and sampling), as well as the particularities of photocopy aesthetics and performative action, is multifaceted.
The images of Laibach Kunst are an open sign that has no static meaning. They are imbued with ambiguity and ambivalence, their contradiction remains unresolved. It is an enigmatic aesthetic practice and a complex construct that cannot be decoded without remains, as the receiver or rather their perception is a constitutive part of the effect. Knowledge of the context, the semiotic concepts, the history of artistic practices and movements play a decisive role, while reception is largely directed and determined by the strategy of shock and the suggestive “visual-sound attack on the senses”. No one can remain indifferent. On the one hand, there is the fascination for the image, the drama, the power and the spectacular effect. On the other hand, the unease caused by the accumulation of signs and the superimposition of symbols, which intensifies the alienation effect.
Barbara Borčić
___________
The Laibach group was founded in Trbovlje in 1980. It operates as a collective and in accordance with the programme guidelines that were laid down in the formative years of its activity in the manifesto “10 Points of the Convention” (Trbovlje 1982). Membership is anonymous (hidden under the pseudonyms Eber, Saliger, Dachauer and Keller). They are co-founders of the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (1984–1992), the utopian state of NSK (1992–) and the founders of the retroavantgarde. The central idea of Laibach Kunst is the Gesamtkunstwerk, characterised by the holistic effect of the sensual and the emotional, the physical and the mental. Theirs is an interdisciplinary and multi-media practice. They exhibit in gallery spaces under the name Laibach Kunst: e.g. Laibach Kunst (Happy New Art Gallery, Belgrade, 1981); Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst (Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, 1982); Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst – Regime Trans-avantgarde (PM Gallery, Zagreb, 1983); Laibach Kunst – Monumental Retro-avantgarde (Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, 1983); Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst – Recapitulation 2009 (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2009); Gesamtkunst Laibach 1980–1990 (MGLC, Ljubljana, 2010); Red Districts + Black Cross. 1980–2010 (Workers’ Home, Trbovlje, 2010); NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst – The Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia (Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 2011 – transfers to museums: Van Abbe, Eindhoven; Garage, Moscow; Reina Sofía, Madrid); Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst – Perspectives 1980–2011 (UGM, Maribor, 2011); Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst – Ceci n’est pas Malevich (HDLU, Zagreb, 2011). They are the recipients of the Ljubljana Capital City Award (1997), the Trbovlje 1st June Award (2000), the Golden Flute Professional Music Lifetime Achievement Award (2017) and the State Medal of Merit of the Republic of Slovenia (2024).
___________
[1] Find out more about the exhibitions, the works presented and the artistic practice of Laibach Kunst in the book Ausstellung! Laibach Kunst. Fundaments, published on the occasion of the exhibition (2024), or Barbara Borčić (2013), Celostna umetnina Laibach. Fragmentarni pogled. [Total Art Laibach. Fragmentary View] Ljubljana: Založba */cf.
___________
The opening of the exhibition is accompanied by: SOIRÉE BRUIT: 300.000 VERSCHIEDENE KRAWALLE
The exhibition is accompanied by a collection of essays: AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST Fundamenti / Fundaments (ed. Barbara Borčić), Ljubljana: DZR (Društvo za retroavantgardo), 2024.
Slovenian proofreading: Inge Pangos
English translation: Arven Šakti Kralj
Cover image: Laibach
Design: Lea Jelenko
Photos from the exhibition opening: Simao Bessa
Exhibition view: Matic Pandel
___________
Acknowledgements: Lea Culetto
___________
The Škuc Gallery programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Municipality of Ljubljana.
