Description

A magazine from the series of controversial, punk-oriented series Problemi (Problems), issued in the last decade of the Yugoslavia, is one of the earliest monographs by the group Neue Slowenische Kunst. It includes art, illustrations, poetry, texts and an interview with the legendary music group Laibach.

Neue Slowenische Kunst or NSK (a German name meaning New Slovenian Art) was a controversial political art collective that formed in Slovenia in 1984, at the time a part of Yugoslavia. NSK is a large collective consisting of different groups, such as the music group Laibach (German name for Ljubljana), IRWIN (visual art), Cosmokinetic Theatre Noordung (Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre and Red Pilot), New Collective Studio (New Collectivism), Retrovision (film and video), and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy (theory), sometimes represented by same members.

In 1991 the movement, run by the group Irwin, transformed into its own state with its passports and stamps.

NSK is using symbols drawn from totalitarian or extreme nationalist movements, often reappropriating totalitarian kitsch, in order to show the repetition of those symbols through the history and in the popular culture. (The strategy of Laibach)… “frustrates” the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironiimitation, but over-identification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification suspends its efficiency.

(Slavoj Žižek, in: Why are Laibach and NSK not fascists? (M’ars, Year 5, nr. 3/4 (1993), p. 3-4)).

References: OCLC 451728316.