Prerokbe Ognja Page #3

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unimportant role in Russian history,

after they'd removed

all of these monuments,

they spent a long time

contemplating what to do with them.

On the one hand, this was,

of course, a vandalistic act,

it was quite obviously vandalism,

since history may not be forgotten,

no matter what it may have

been like, and on the other hand,

it was almost necessary to

remove them, in this moment,

it meant an enormous

emotional unburdening.

I think that if Irwin had

been in Moscow at the time

it would have been an interesting

and unusual experience for them,

since they experiment

with the same principles:

to break down, to build,

to break down, to build again,

and in such a way

build their own system.

The experience of NSK in relation

to the darkest and most tragic

and for this reason

also the most interesting

moments in history is very important

for us at this particular time,

as the dilemma of what to do with the past is

what intellectuals are currently dealing with.

But NSK was the first to

formulate precisely

what we can do with our experiences,

that we need no fear them,

that we can harmonize them

into an artistic system.

Fascism will not win!

Americans! Listen to the

voice of working Russia!

Take your dirty hands

off Yugoslavia!

Art and totalitarianism do

not exclude each other.

-NSK Statement

According to theory, the past itself is no

more than an archive of collective memory.

By the 90's, the songs of

the Great October Revolution

have become the property

of an aging rear-guard.

But if history is in fact a sum

total of re-writings through time,

what then to do with this

cargo of conflicting myths?

Like the ideologies

which inspired them,

the early 20th century Utopian avant-garde

were largely organized as collectives

experimental social structures.

The Eastern Modernists believed that the

world could be completely transformed

according to principles of

a new and unified aesthetic.

If the state was to wither

away, as Marx predicted,

then the Soviet avant-garde

would take on the job

of replacing it with

a total art-form

something the Germans

call a 'Gesampt-kunstwerk'.

At the close of the Modern era, with

the wreckage of these utopian dreams

strewn across the landscape

like pieces of a crashed airplane,

it made a certain sense to

reassemble the mechanism

to try to determine what

had happened.

Historical avant garde is a style, written

at the beginning of the century

as a response to the mimetic art which

dominated the world for 2000 years.

Retrogardism, of course, is like the

avant garde a style formation in art.

Its method is the retro-method.

German Nazism, Italian Fascism

and Soviet Communism

all first repressed,

then took direct control of,

the ideas and energies of the early 20th

century modernists.

Each in their own way

transformed the Utopian premise

of the state as a work of art into

an art at the direct service of the state.

Adolf Hitler, the art school reject,

and Josef Stalin, engineer of human souls,

transformed their societies

into vast ritualistic 'dystopias'.

If the state was an

art-work, they were its artist;

If the state was a church,

then their role was clear.

They were God.

The works of NSK's Irwin collective

revealed fascism and communism as

two sides of the same totalitarian canvas.

But they went beyond that.

By deploying a variety world

mythologies together within the same work,

the Irwin artists exposed a

broad spectrum of domination codes.

Placing quotations from Western modernist

art and consumer culture side by side

with symbols of both

totalitarian and religious art,

they revealed their essential similarity

within the world ideological constellation.

The works of Irwin, wrote

Russian theorist Boris Groys,

"had already appeared, long before the

end of the Cold War in political life,

as an artistic rendition of its end."

The people around here are either

scientists or ideologists or religious

representatives or artists or philosophers.

They cover the global

experience of the planet Earth.

Each has its own rituals:

religion

has numerical rituals,

ideology fascinating ones,

science magical ones.

Art, of course, has to act through

the ritual of obsessive neurosis.

Obsessive neurosis is the field where

the sacred paradox becomes evident.

At this point, assuming numerical

or fascinating rituals means

assuming the fields that either

ideology or religion express...

Of course, for the artist, it is

essential, that it speaks with its rituals.

The only truly aesthetic vision of

the State is the vision of the

impossible State.

- Scipion Nasice Theater.

Within the cosmology of

NSK's virtual state,

Laibach plays the role of

the politicians or ideologists,

Irwin are the state artists,

and the theater group, now called the

Cosmokinetic Theater Noordung,

functions

as a kind of church -

a place where obsessive neurosis is

transformed into ritual ceremony.

The ballet we are preparing

will first be shown on December 11, 1992.

It is dedicated to Herman

Potocnik Noordung.

two, hop.. three, hop..

Prayer Machine Noordung

Capital of pain.

Capital of pain.

You are free.

No charge.

No sense.

You are totally alone.

One plus one, plus one....

Throughout history,

art has served power -

be it political,

religious, or economic.

Viewed in the light of

Kazimir Malevich's observation,

the entire NSK project

can be interpreted

as an attempt to 'reclaim' an

aesthetic legacy.

If the ideas and artistic methods

of the early avant gardes

were exploited by political forces,

creating a kind of ceremonial

theater in the service of politics,

then NSK was reasserting aesthetic

control over this work -

while accomplishing an

even more subversive reversal.

Politics and religion would

not only remain within the work.

It would now be they

which would serve art.

This is the "hidden transgression" at the core

of the Neue Slowenische Kunst art movement.

Call it politics in the service of theater.

And what is art?

Art is the goal

and the end of progress.

- Irwin

Suspended as they are

between East and West,

NSK seemingly made a

determination:

no one side would

ever be adequate.

A comprehensive world-view required

that neither hemisphere be denied,

just as neither

be wholly accepted.

No matter how intense

the ideological pressure,

the truth of their specific historical condition

could only include both sides of the story.

And suspicion of history must be

matched by a profound ambivalence

about any single mythology,

iconography or state system.

Only in this way could

an artistic project

defined as a "state in time"

chart an autonomous course.

The famous Slovenian

architect Joze Plecnik,

active at the end of the

Habsburg era, once said the following:

"Of course we have our own culture,

its just that we have to look

for it in Germany, France and Italy."

At the end of a century

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