NSK Archives — ClearNFO

by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | Aug 26, 2014

‘Never speak the passions of your breast unless you know the remedy.’
—The Wanderer (Old 10th Century Anglo-Saxon Viking Warrior Poem)

If you’ve never been in a major war or had your country and cities invaded and subjugated by ruthless, powerful forces, you may have a difficult time understanding the fear, anger, helplessness and hopelessness of enduring such insults to customs, icons and loved ones with no way to fight back. Add to this the cheat of being sold on a new better government to correct the injuries of the past only to find out that the new and improved government is much, much worse; and for some in Eastern Europe, the cycle continues; yet what remains today is a distant memory of family, friends, traditions and of nationalism … and it is those memory fragments along with a deep archetype of the meaning of freedom that can be accessed through story, art and music.

Those of us familiar with the rise of totalitarian regimes will also be familiar with their use of symbolism and art to create, focus, amplify and manipulate the body politic into slavery, death and destruction. So how to fight back against the overwhelming force of the state? The state uses art for propaganda so why not use art against the state? Laibach attempts to turn this abuse of art on its head by using the totalitarian regimes’ own art, symbolism and artifacts in avant-garde / kitsch mixtures of high production value music and art to expose the tyranny all governments hold over the people they seek to control. Maybe they hope that through art, they can warn people; or that they can rekindle the latent memories of tyranny, death and destruction people so easily forget? Maybe they seek to use the emotive forces of their art and music to bypass the critical thinking mind for more direct access to the longer lasting and powerful emotional memories stored deeply in the sinews and crevasses of the collective subconscious. Whatever the case, I think you will find their art interesting, enjoyable and perhaps disturbing.

From Wikipedia: “Neue Slowenische Kunst (a German phrase meaning “New Slovenian Art”), a.k.a. NSK, is a controversial political art collective that announced itself in Slovenia in 1984, when Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. NSK’s name, being German, is compatible with a theme in NSK works: the complicated relationship Slovenes have had with Germans. The name of NSK’s music wing, Laibach, is also the German name of the Slovene capital Ljubljana, creating controversy through evoking memories of the Nazi occupation of Slovenia during the Second World War and Slovenia’s previous seven centuries as part of the Austrian Empire.”