On Laibach and Laughter

• In Event: At Home on the Stage and on the Page: Culture and Change

Abstract

The work of Laibach is continuously marked by an uncertainty as to whether we should take their performances literally or ironically. According to Alexei Yurchak (2006), their actions were never perfectly clear: using “the symbols that could be part of any ideology (leather uniforms, red stars, paroles in German, Russian, English and Slovene, deafening sounds of trumpets and drums, dead animals and torches) […] it was impossible to know how to read this.” This ambiguity, which emanated from over-identification and artistic irony, is at the core of what Laibach does: their work hinges on ambivalences, dilemmas, and interpretational uncertainties that their performances inevitably create. The paper analyzes premises and consequences of this ambiguity in two seemingly very distinct periods of Laibach activity: the 1980s and during the last decade. Discussing how Laibach was understood, interpreted and appropriated by various subjects in these periods, the paper highlights both the conditions specific for late socialism and the present day neoliberal society, as well as continuities between the two, which call for the rethinking of persisting on spatial, temporal and ideological particularities through which we tend to observe cultures and relations between them.

Author

• Tanja Petrovic, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)