Izložba AUSSTELLUNG LAIBACH KUNST 1980 - 1984.

AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST 1980-198
21. 6. 2024 - 17. 7. 2024.
Curator: Barbara Borčić in collaboration with the Laibach group
The exhibition AUSSTELLUNG! LAIBACH KUNST 1980-1984 presents this very early visual production with artworks in various techniques: paintings, prints, photocopies, installations, photographs, video, posters and publications. It traces the essential methods and processes that mark both their early artistic oeuvre and the exhibition at hand, which presents this oeuvre through (re)construction, reuse and reshaping. The works reused by Laibach in the current exhibition come from a collection of appropriated images that differ in motif, technique and style. They have already been shown in the first exhibitions between 1981 and 1985, during Laibach’s intense activity on the Ljubljana alternative scene, when they held three solo exhibitions at Škuc Gallery, participated in group shows and released posters, publications and music tapes. After more than forty years, a spatial installation in the same space - Škuc Gallery - revisits some of the original installations, showcasing individual artworks while adding new ones. Building on the conceptual starting points of the early exhibitions, it reinterprets them from today’s perspective, making them accessible to a younger audience who may not yet be familiar with the visual production of Laibach Kunst.
Some points of clarification are therefore required. Laibach called their method retroavantgarde and introduced the processes of appropriation and montage into their artistic practice. They produced collages and bricolages by making use of the possibilities offered by the photocopier, tape recorder and video devices, combining the appropriated images in contradictory ways, merging the “incompatible”, layering meanings with references to art, history and politics. The imagery is complex, and the motifs come from a variety of contradictory sources - from classical art and the avant-garde, Nazi art and socialist realism, to propaganda films and Partisan graphic prints, horror films and national icons. The methodology and processes of the build-up of the Laibach Kunst image are largely taken from the historical avant-gardes and engaged art, whereas the referential field of utilising readymade methods and cut-up techniques (editing and sampling), as well as the particularities of photocopy aesthetics and performative action, is multifaceted.
The images of Laibach Kunst are an open sign that has no static meaning. They are imbued with ambiguity and ambivalence, their contradiction remains unresolved. It is an enigmatic aesthetic practice and a complex construct that cannot be decoded without remains, as the receiver or rather their perception is a constitutive part of the effect. Knowledge of the context, the semiotic concepts, the history of artistic practices and movements play a decisive role, while reception is largely directed and determined by the strategy of shock and the suggestive “visual-sound attack on the senses”. No one can remain indifferent. On the one hand, there is the fascination for the image, the drama, the power and the spectacular effect. On the other hand, the unease caused by the accumulation of signs and the superimposition of symbols, which intensifies the alienation effect.
Barbara Borčić
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The Laibach group was founded in Trbovlje in 1980. It operates as a collective and in accordance with the programme guidelines that were laid down in the formative years of its activity in the manifesto “10 Points of the Convention” (Trbovlje 1982). Membership is anonymous (hidden under the pseudonyms Eber, Saliger, Dachauer and Keller). They are co-founders of the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (1984-1992), the utopian state of NSK (1992-) and the founders of the retroavantgarde. The central idea of Laibach Kunst is the Gesamtkunstwerk, characterised by the holistic effect of the sensual and the emotional, the physical and the mental. Theirs is an interdisciplinary and multi-media practice.
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