Curator
Laibach
At this exhibition, Laibach Kunst presents its newer paintings with the following remark: all images are part of a coherent artistic strategy and have a long and rich tradition with a multifaceted meaning that can never be fully grasped or resolved. The first image was condensed in a black cross and the power this symbol holds. It was followed by others from Laibach’s arsenal of images and symbols – iconic images. The exhibition is no different, as it showcases recognisable motifs, such as the thrower, the sower, the deer, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. When Laibach revisit and reinterpret these symbols, they transform them rather than (re)construct them. By doing so, they negate the very principle of “the inimitable” and introduce seriality.
Laibach Kunst was the first to establish the method of the retro-avant-garde, which it has steadfastly been constructing all the way up to the present moment, permeated with a gradual apocalyptic demolition that takes us back in time. The image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus prompted Walter Benjamin to develop the thesis of historical progress – the angel of history turning to the past and looking at the ruins behind him, while a persistent wind pushes him towards the future; the wind symbolising progress. Zygmunt Bauman develops the concept of retrotopia and notes that the current future is worse off, uncontrollable, ridiculed, and untrustworthy. The past, however, enjoys a better reputation, for back then “our choices were still free and hope was not yet followed by disappointment.”
The paintings from the RESTAURANT (Restavracija) series also glimpse into the past; their field of reference and subject matter turn to the early exhibition Ausstellung!, showcased by Laibach Kunst at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana in 1982 and 1983, and the paintings, in which we can recognise a series of appropriations of relatively well-known sources with some interventions that also introduced three basic motifs or themes: the thrower, the deer, and the sower, soon joined by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. All of these are now on display at the current exhibition.
About the retro-avant-garde
When Laibach introduced the processes of appropriation and montage into their artistic practice, they dubbed this method retro-avant-garde and understood the work of art as a point of view (on art), society and politics. With this method, which is essentially determined by the reuse of selected already produced images, they highlight the theme of the original as well as the copy, thus establishing a collective work by rejecting individuality, introducing anonymity and pseudonyms to exploit the possibilities of the reproductive technique. Laibach Kunst’s field of reference is broad: it places symbols of the revolutionary past (partisan graphics) and media symbols of Sloveneness (the Prince’s Stone, mountains, deer, the sower) alongside the cult images of socialist realism and Nazi art, genre, and historical painting, alongside the Russian artistic experiment, Entartete Kunst and futurism. They combine the “incompatible” by dismantling and (re)assembling images and juxtaposing various sources and motifs, ideological and cultural codes.
By combining contradictory images, making intervention into them, and layering meanings related to art, history and politics, Laibach have been creating controversial works in which the contradiction is not resolved for almost half a century. They present an enigmatic aesthetic practice to the public as an open work and a complex construct that cannot be decoded without the referring to every piece of the puzzle, as the receiver, or rather his or her perception, is a constitutive part of the overall effect. Knowledge of the context, symbols, history of artistic practices and movements plays a decisive role, and the reception is largely directed and determined by the strategy of shock and the tactics of manipulation and provocation. This is also why the images always arouse fascination, while on the other hand, a certain kind of discomfort is produced by a specific system of symbols and their placement. These symbols are permeated with ambiguity and multi-dimensionality.
The procedures represented by the paintings in the exhibition belong to the original creed while simultaneously introducing a peculiar twist. By appropriating their own early “second-hand” images, by seizing appropriation itself, Laibach Kunst enacts a kind of Baudrillardian simulacrum of simulacra. The reuse of images inevitably introduces re-othering and reinterpretation. A departure from past paintings, the main distinguishing features of which were the marking and addition of appropriations to the pictorial field, especially the symbolic and mythical figures of the sower and the thrower, now builds on schematization, colour saturation and flattening. This process is not so much a reflection of a stylistic decision, but rather goes in step with the times and the technological possibilities of reproduction – from photography and photocopying, to computer programs and digital transformation. Their meaning, which we try to extract, possibly with a little help from the detective knack of art history, can be different each time. It is being built out of rubble, which is all the Angel of history can see. And the images in them play a key role, even as we turn towards the future.
Blue Sower in Lenin’s Room
Three important bases of Laibach Kunst meet in this rebus composition: Suprematism, social realism, and genre painting. Suprematism is present in a later reworked form as the coexistence of abstraction and realism by the Soviet (Ukrainian) artist Kazimir Malevich; socialist realism in its exemplary configuration by the Soviet (Ukrainian) painter Isaak Brodsky; realism of the Austrian (Tyrolean) painter Albin Egger-Lienz with genre motifs and a robust style, which was subsequently appropriated by the Nazi regime in the context of “blood and soil”. Among the images that Laibach appropriated, reworked and combined in the painting from 1982 – and later, in 2008 – reinterpreted in a schematised form and colour saturation –, complex relationships are interwoven, and the temporal, political and cultural context is layered and composed similarly, as is typical of Orthodox icons: the October Revolution, Stalinism, Nazism. Let us now examine the main nodes of the image.
The basic image template [Appropriation: Isaak Brodsky, Lenin at the Smolny Institute (1930)] is an iconic image that symbolises the early period of Soviet Socialist Realism. Brodsky, who was considered one of the best portraitists of his time and was the first to be commissioned and allowed to portray Lenin, began preparations immediately following 1917. This is probably why Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is depicted engrossed in work at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd, where he had a workshop during and immediately after the revolution (1917-18). Lenin’s figure resembles those of evangelists on Orthodox icons, and its source was a photograph taken by photojournalist Viktor Bulla at the Third Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1921, which shows Lenin writing and Brodsky next to him with a sketchbook. The painting was completed after Lenin’s death to canonise the image of the leader of the world proletariat, a humane politician and an ascetic, labouring intellectual, and its many copies adorned the main state institutions of the time as a kind of Soviet icon.
Laibach added two images to this painting: the “Malevich” and the "sower". The “Malevich painting” on the wall is a recognisable detail from the painting Girls in a Field (1928-1929) – the uniformed and nameless figure with which Malevich made his critical statement about political violence. If we can imagine Malevich’s painting in Lenin’s room, since Lenin (and before him, Lunacharsky) was quite fond of avant-garde art and was also an honorary member of the Russian and international avant-garde, but if we consider the specific location at the Smolny Institute, it could not have been the painting Girls in a Field, which was created later. But if we trace Brodsky’s painting to the year of its completion, a complex set of references appears. In 1930, Kazimir Malevich was arrested and spent six months in prison. Shortly after 1921, there was a shift from avant-garde to a more traditional artistic approach, and following Lenin’s death, under Stalin’s rule, the decree on socialist realism soon prevailed, and pressure on avant-garde artists and censorship was reinstated. Suprematism was labelled as “bourgeois art” and Malevich's paintings were confiscated, and he was forbidden to exhibit them.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich occupied a very special place in Laibach’s creative domain, particularly the concept of "objectlessness", as well as the essay God Has Not Been Overthrown: Art, Church and Factory. Malevich himself wrote a lot about Lenin, especially after his death. In the book About Art, he sees his arrival as “the second coming of Christ” and his death as “another Event”. He also made a draft for his monument (a black cube with a pile of tools complied under it), while at the same time opposing the immediate construction of a cult of personality. He was burdened heavily by the question of the portrait and defined Lenin as an “objectless person” who cannot be matched by any representation or portrayed as he (truly) was.
The image of the “blue sower”" is an appropriated detail from Albin Egger-Lienz’s painting Sower and the Devil (1921). The sower, a popular motif and mythical figure in Laibach Kunst images, is frequently borrowed from this painting. Or more precisely, a naked muscular figure that follows the sower like a dark shadow: sower / devil. In Laibach’s painting, he is depicted as an oversized figure in the foreground (and in a mirrored appearance), partially obscuring the seated figure of Lenin with his rough physical intrusion, testifying to the threat to intellectual work and evoking a series of events related to the political context of the time and the changes that represent the death of Lenin and the arrest of Malevich. The blue sower in the foreground is a disturbing element here, pushing the gaze away from Lenin towards “Malevich” and back to the “sower/devil” and his symbolic connotation; according to the Gospel of Matthew, he sows bad seed and thus ruins a good harvest.
If the blue sower sows the seeds of evil and marches into the future, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, bearing the pseudonyms of the Laibach group (Eber, Keller, Dachauer, Salinger), bring polyphonic ominous predictions from the New Testament, the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle: Death, Famine, War, and Conquest. It is an appropriation / reworking of a tapestry proposal by Werner Peiner, who was one of the most celebrated German regime artists during the Third Reich and whose work was commissioned for the new premises of the German Chancellor. It was designed as a tapestry in 1937, however, it is unclear if it was ever actually completed. (According to some sources, there are two versions from 1943.) Laibach first used this motif in the inner cover of their album Let it Be (1988), and the canvas paintings included in the Apology Laibach installation, dedicated to the band’s founding member, the late Tomaž Hostnik, are presented for the first time at a retrospective exhibition at the Muzeum Sztuki, the Museum of Modern Art in Łódź (2009). If we could comprehend the logic behind Malevich’s painting in Lenin’s Room, perhaps the intention of Hitler having a “doomsday” tapestry in his office remains incomprehensible. Or does it?
