Culture instead of a state, culture as a state : art, regime and transcendence in the works of Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst

The thesis examines the significance and effects of the Slovene art collective NSK (founded 1983), particularly the group Laibach. NSK employ traumatic and controversial imagery (Nazi-Kunst, Socialist Realism) as part of an extremely complex response to various political, historical and aesthetic ''regimes'' that structure their political and cultural environment. Its interventions are mapped through discussion of specific works in the media it operates within including music, art, philosophy, theatre and design. The subject is approached via an integrated representational strategy that seeks to illustrate NSK's relation to political and cultural trends (including the disintegration of socialism and the influx of capitalism) through in-depth analysis of the content of its works. The sources ofNSK's aesthetic extremism are located in historical tendencies and the political structures with which the groups interacted. It identifies the sources of the wide range of historical, political and artistic motifs used by NSK, and recounts some of the key works and their significances and effects. The discussion centres on the interplay between state and culture in NSK's work and the way in which NSK have preserved a space of utopian post-territorial imagination by using the imageries of the totalitarian state and other regimes. The thesis concludes that it is possible for an artistic practice based on the "demaskiog and recapitulation" of regimes to temporarily disrupt and transcend such systems.