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WHAT IS NSK ?
Reprinted From The First NSK Bulletin, 1994
Very often, basic information on what NSK is, when it was founded, what the NSK and Laibach philosophies are, and the like are required. To put it in a nutshell, NSK is in its structure a simple and yet complex mechanism which makes any precise explanation in a few words practically impossible. NSK began operating in 1984 as a large collective, a union of various groups brought together by their shared way of thinking and a similar way of expression through different media. The main NSK groups are: Laibach, Irwin, Noordung, New Collectivism Studio and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, while there is a number of flexible subdivisions which emerge as the need arises and disolve under their own inertia. Each of the groups primarily works within its medium, nevertheless their bonds are firm and fruitful. Members of the groups meet on a regular basis, they talk, discuss and plan major common campaigns, test aesthetic and other preferences, exchange ideas and contexts, travel together, etc.
Laibach began working in 1980 and was mainly oriented to popular music, although it associated different levels of work from the beginning, including gallery and theater installations. The resume and chronolgy of Laibach are diversified, as well as its records, while its philosophy is a complex one. Its history until 1989 is dealt with in much detail in the NSK book. Regarding the philosophy - it may be called untranslatable, which of course means that it is understood by those who understand it. It is a certain poetry which is reflected in all Laibach's work, including interviews, and which can be interpreted in a number of ways. This is entirely up to you, of course. We could assume despite this that Laibach is the ideological foundation of NSK while the Irwin artists group has the function of NSK biographers recording NSK archetypes on canvas and in history. The Noordung Theater (formerly Red Pilot, and Scipion Nasice before that) assumes ritualistic NSK contexts and operates through religious patterns above all. Their work is also rich in scope, but we intend to gradually familiarise you with it as closely as possible.
Besides these three groups the most active within NSK are the New Collectivism Design Studio and the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy. The former obviously works with design (posters, record covers, books, etc.) and the latter mainly with critical aspects of classic philosophy. The Department treats philosophy as its subject matter and medium, which does not imply that this philosophy is entirely relevant to other NSK groups or to NSK as a whole. In spite of links, they are strictly separated in NSK. Each of the groups works according to its internal logic, its rules and principles of work, whereas they are connected by a certain contextual and formal aspect, and this aspect is what forms NSK.
NSK STATE
In the year 1991 NSK has been re-defined from an Organisation to a State. A state in time, a state without territory and national borders, a sort of "spiritual, virtual state". It has issued an original NSK passport and everybody can become its holder and therefore a citizen of the NSK State. The Passport can be used creatively, also as a official travel document, naturally with a certain hazard to its owner. With use, such passports can become rare (artistic) documents, and with the years their value can grow.
NSK is opening its embassies and consular offices world-wide. They operate as creative institutions, but still possess no permanent character. Within such an embassy, lectures are held, discussions, meetings, project presentations and various campaigns take place. An embassy was open for a month in Moscow in 1992, another one in Ghent in 1993, and the same year a three-day "NSK State Territory" in Berlin Volksbuehne Theatre (8.10-10.10.1993) and a consulate in Florence was proclaimed. NSK will continue to work on the development of such embassies into permanent NSK centres in the coming decade.
The NSK state denies in its fundamental acts the categories of fixed territory, the principle of national borders, and advocates the law of transnationality. Besides NSK members the beneficiaries of the right to citizenship are thousands all over the world, people of different religions, races, nationalities, sexes and beliefs. The right to citizenship is aquired through ownership of the passport.
The passport is numbered and untransferable; its validity is limited and renewable. By signing the adjoining statement the holder pledges to participate on a best-effort basis to support the integrity of the NSK State, and not misuse the passport for criminal, ideological, religious or political purposes conflicting with the contents of NSK and/or jeopardising the reputation and good name of NSK. The holder's statistics are logged in the confidential (protected) register of NSK citizens. Citizenship ceases with the expiriation, return or confiscation of the passport.
HOW TO GET NSK PASSPORT?
NSK STATE IN TIME
Eda Cufer & Irwin
Retro avant-garde is the basic artistic procedure of Neue Slowenische Kunst, based on the premise that traumas from the past affecting the present and the future can be healed only by returning to the initial conflicts. Modern art has not yet overcome the conflict brought about by the rapid and efficient assimilation of historical avant-garde movements in the systems of totalitarian states. The common perception of the avant-garde as a fundamental phenomenon of 20th century art is loaded with fears and prejudices. On the one hand this period is na vely glorified and mythicized, while on the other hand its abuses, compromises and failures are counted with bureaucratic pedantry to remind us that this magnificent delusion should not be repeated.
Neue Slowenische Kunst - as Art in the image of the State - revives the trauma of avant-garde movements by identifying with it in the stage of their assimilation in the systems of totalitarian states. The most important and at the same time traumatic dimension of avant-garde movements is that they operate and create within a collective. Collectivism is the point where progressive philosophy, social theory and the militarism of contemporary states clash. The question of collectivism, i.e. the question of how to organize communication and enable the coexistence of various autonomous individuals in a ommunity, can be solved in two different ways. Modern states continue to be reoccupied with the question of how to collectivize and socialize the individual, whereas avant-garde movements tried to solve the question of how to individualize the collective. Avant-garde movements tried to develop autonomous social organisms in which the characteristics, needs and values of individualism, which cannot be comprised in the systems of a formal state, could be freely developed and defined. The collectivism of avant-garde movements had an experimental value. With the collapse of the avant-garde movements, social constructive views in art fell into disgrace, which caused the social escapism of orthodox modernism and consequently led to a crisis in basic values in the period of postmodernism.
The group Neue Slowenische Kunst defines its collectivism within the framework of an autonomous state, as artistic actions in time to which all other spatial and material procedures of artistic creation are subordinated. This means that the procedure of the deconstruction and analysis of past forms and situations functions as the creator of new conditions for the development of the individual within the framework of a collective. One of the aims of Neue Slowenische Kunst is to prove that abstraction, which in its fundamental philosophic component - suprematism - explains and expels the political language of global cultures from the language and culture of art, contains a social program adequate to the needs of modern man and community. The NSK state in time is an abstract organism, a suprematist body, installed in a real social and political space as a sculpture comprising the concrete body warmth, spirit and work of its members. NSK confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind, whose borders are in a state of flux, in accordance with the movements and changes of its symbolic and physical collective body.
Ljubljana, 1993
THESIS OF THE NSK STATE
FROM THE INTERNAL BOOK OF LAWS CONSTITUTION OF MEMBERSHIP AND BASIC DUTIES OF NSK MEMBERS
NSK SITE
OFFICIAL LAIBACH SITE
OFFICIAL IRWIN SITE
COSMOCINETIC CABINET NOORDUNG PRESENTS:GRAVITATION ZERO