Laibach

Laibach
LAIBACH & RTV SLOVENIJA: "XY-unsolved"
television interview, June 1983

CONTEXT: in June 1983, after a series of scandals which accompanied their gallery and concert appearances, the multimedia cultural group Laibach agreed to a television interview for the cultural/political programme TV TEDNIK (TV Weekly) broadcast on Slovenian national television. The item, directed by Jure Pengov, was inserted directly after a report on fascist violence in Trieste, and at the end of the interview Pengov, in a conclusion edited-in afterwards, appealed to the television audience with a call for the political lynching of the group; the programme provoked a thunderous reaction among the public and in political forums, which in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (as was) led the very same year to a formal ban on Laibach's activities lasting several years, a ban which was even recorded in the Official Gazette of the Republic of Slovenia.

FIVE YOUTHS AWAKEN MEMORIES OF THE NOTORIOUS HOUSEPAINTER
Is the agitation which has spread across Slovenia because of the 'uniformed artists' justified?

Five young men in uniforms very similar to those once worn by members of the Hitler Youth sat with their arms folded in a dimly-lit room and stared straight ahead, immobile. The gloomy atmosphere created by the mysterious light (their faces were lit from below) was complemented by a merciless camera which travelled across their stony faces and the symbols on their sleeves (crosses - ordinary ones. They were not swastikas and those with colour television sets could also see that they were not red). A voice in the background posed questions provocatively and directly, while a figure on set read replies from his documentation - incomprehensibly and far from directly. This was the TV Tednik interview with the Trbovlje/Ljubljana cultural group Laibach, which left many an unsuspecting viewer in a state of apoplexy. There was nothing directly fascist in the imbecilic responses of the uniformed youths, but the sensation after the interview was an uncommonly nightmarish one. Perhaps because of the questions asked in very comprehensible language about similarities to the Hitler Youth, about models, about the aim of such a horrifying approach - which were followed by the recited verbal diarrhoea of the uniformed ones? (...) The response was just what one would have expected. And naturally the members of the 'cultural group' Laibach (the epithet 'cultural' is not, heaven forbid, the invention of the author of this article. The group added it themselves) expected it (and wanted it) too. The editorial offices of newspapers, and probably the TV station too, have been swamped with letters. (...) The Slovene public is indignant and enraged. 'Are you going to do something?' ask concerned citizens, and it is not clear what should be done and who should do it.

Extract from an article by Dore Tomažič entitled WHO MADE LAIBACH'S SHIRTS? published in the high-circulation popular Sunday paper Nedeljski dnevnik on 3 July 1983

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE QUESTION OF THE IDEOLOGICAL PREMISES OF PUNK
(in relation to Laibach's interview for TV Tednik)

(...) the essential concept of Laibach's approach, of the 'blind', 'mechanical' reading of totalitarian texts, lies in the fact that it allows us to see the internal, immanent de-centeredness of ideological language, that it allows us to see, in a naked form as it were, the unthinking 'automatism', the 'machine' through which ideology is reproduced (...). The 'nightmare' feeling awoken in the innocent listeners by what Nedeljski dnevnik called 'the verbal diarrhoea of the uniform-wearers' - (...) this feeling can of course only be explained by the fact that Laibach?s appearance brought to life something which is not simply alien to us but which still somehow concerns us in our most 'genuine' inner selves: the 'nightmare' actually lies in the fact that the cards have unpleasantly been revealed - what has come to light is that even our most reflective, witty, well-argued, culturally refined and noble ideological commitment is in the final instance based on 'habit', on the automatism of an unthinking ideological ritual, that in the end all our argumentative witticisms merely have the role of showing this ritual as 'legitimate' and concealing its true 'origin'. The syntagma which Nedeljski dnevnik offered its readers as a term of abuse - 'uniformed artists' - from this point of view proves to be utterly appropriate: it is actually a case of the 'uniform', the blind symbolic ritual, hiding behind the noble 'artist'.

Extract from a text by Slavoj Žižek

(from the catalogue The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Innsbruck, 2001)