Prerokbe Ognja

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To make a fire, we need

a flammable substance,

air, that is, oxygen,

and a source of heat.

Making a fire goes like this.

Heat the flammable substance until the

temperature reaches the level where a certain

chemical reaction takes place.

The mixing of these gasses with oxygen

results in the burning of that substance.

Death, lust is dead,

death is dead, sorrow, dead,

God is dead...

In the dark times,

will there also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing.

About the dark times.

- Bertolt Brecht

Towards the end of the period of totalitarian

control of East and Central Europe,

an art movement appeared in a

country then still called Yugoslavia.

It was named "NSK".

Using the materials of music,

theater, and the visual arts,

the NSK collective took on the role of catalyst,

revisiting the repressed

traumas of European history

and exposing hidden mechanisms

of ideological domination.

Tribes of Europe!

Democracy has destroyed order.

The ground is ready.

Now we can say:

no history has been decided,

no nation has ever won thanks to justice.

It won thanks to pure physical strength.

All civilizations are based on it,

all the powers of law will dance

to the sound of arms.

Historiographers are gradually coming to

the realization that history itself

is in fact a series of consensual myths.

It's not necessarily a nation's past

that shapes its mythology,

but its mythology which shapes its past.

Taken apart, analyzed and then re-assembled,

history's fragments reveal a cyclical structure.

Within this recurring pattern,

the history of an entire people

is actually no more than a collective

projection - an illusion shared by millions.

MariborchanX:

I am sorry for the inconvenience.

As you may have noticed, there

is a gap, an error in this video.

Fortunately I have a transcript of

what is said during this missing period.

If you want it, click on this picture,

that will take you to that video.

But what was the real motivation

behind Laibach's early performances?

Was this a politicized art,

or aestheticised politics?

Or were they simply a warning that if you

repress history, it will eventually boil over?

According to homeopathic theory, you can

only cure through the symptoms of an illness.

The immune system must be provoked.

How better, then, to trigger the defense

mechanisms of the state than to

hold a mirror up to that state?

You step forward as

provocateurs, as, one could say,

the number one enemy of the state.

Do you have many followers?

Art is a noble calling

which requires fanaticism.

Laibach is an organism whose aims, life and

means of activity of the group are higher

in strength and duration

than the aims, life and means of the

individuals which compose it.

Aren't you afraid that someone might

one day spank you because of all this?

Art is a noble calling

which as such requires fanaticism.

The new art is a new era.

It is a movement independent

of other ideologies.

- Kazimir Malevich.

By 1984, Laibach and several other

Slovenian groups took one step further

in the fanaticism required of art.

They linked together in a

larger collective body.

NSK, or Neue Slowenische Kunst,

would encompass music,

theater, design, architecture,

and the visual arts.

They said they were presenting

art "in the image of the state."

But, like Laibach, they didn't seem

to have any specific political agenda.

Manifestos issued by the new art movement

said that their intention was to

"revive the trauma of early 20th

century avant-garde movements

by identifying with them in the stage

of their assimilation into the

systems of totalitarian states."

In 1927, Russian avant-gardist Kazimir

Malevich was traveling from East to West.

He passed through central Europe, arriving

finally in Berlin for a series of lectures.

Unfolding diagrams translated into German,

the founder of the school of

abstract art known as Suprematism

explained some basic principles.

Art, he said, had always functioned merely

as a "toiletry article" within society.

But the new art would have its own,

independent ideology.

Although in the West Malevich is credited

with being a godfather of abstraction,

from an Eastern viewpoint it seems clear

that his main intention was

to be the author of a new mythology.

Two generations after the

Soviet Utopian avant-garde

was destroyed by the revolution

it had helped create,

many of its ideas came to life again

in the Westernmost city

of socialist Yugoslavia.

It appeared, that the collectives,

the members of the NSK movement

welded together into a

simulation of a state bureaucracy,

and created an abstract Suprematist form.

Although for NSK,

history and politics were

as the bricks and cement

of their state structure,

NSK seemed to float free

of any specific doctrine.

If the artists of NSK could be said

to have a political goal,

it would be "the destruction

of historical naivete."

Trbovlje. This town has built us,

and we continue its

revolutionary tradition.

- Laibach

Nineteen seventeen.

Shock-waves of revolution spread

outwards across Europe.

The best-known images

of the upheaval in Russia

are already the

product of a myth-making art

serving the direct interests of

the new Soviet state.

In the beginning, the Utopian rhetoric

of the revolutionaries and

the revolutionary ideas of the

utopian artists marched together.

The success of Marxist ideology in the East

inevitably impacts on the

Slovenian mining town of Trbovlje.

Hunger, dismal working conditions,

and blatant exploitation of labor

are the norm in the industrial

heartlands of Royal Yugoslavia.

But the revolution brings

a message of hope.

Strikes and street battles between fascist

and socialist miners groups soon erupt.

Contemporary Trbovlje's huge coal-fired power

plant has the largest smoke-stack in Europe.

Laibach emerged from this

machinery in 1980,

producing a specifically industrial

form of rock music.

Thirteen years later Irwin,

NSK's collective of five painters,

return to the source of the movement's

original motivating aesthetic.

Like Laibach, members of Irwin came from the

factory and mining towns of socialist Yugoslavia.

The earliest Irwin works consciously

reflect their proletarian origins,

using materials like coal, tar and blood.

Although their role would later

evolve, in the early 80's Irwin

took on a specific mission

within the NSK movement.

They would be the

chroniclers, or mythologizers

artists willfully serving the interests

of the state they themselves had helped design.

It's the cement factory!

Maybe these are old

paintings, from the times

when Laibach started and

they painted from here in Trbovlje.

Or they are connected with

the miner's life here.

I don't like their style. They have a

lot of... I don't like their boots.

What do we think of the paintings? F*** 'em.

We don't know what this is all about.

The painting as a painting?

It's unusual, because normally

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