NSK

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NSK, editors

NSK is a full-color illustrated book documenting the controversial theories, statements, visual arts, music, film, video and theater work of the internationally acclaimed Slovenian arts collective from 1980 to 1989. NSK encompasses the innovative pop group Laibach, the IRWIN painter group and the Cosmokinetic Theater "Red Pilot," as well as philosophy, architecture, TV and motion picture departments. Strikingly compiled and designed by the New Collectivism graphic studio on behalf of NSK; includes 260 full-color reproductions.

"We understand politics as an integral part of culture and as the highest, all-embracing form of art." – NSK

hardback with slipcase, 288 pages, illustrated
$60.00
ISBN-10: 1-878923-056
ISBN-13: 978-1-878923-05-9

Reviews

"After several additions and mutations over the last decade, the Yugoslav-based artists' collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) has become an umbrella art 'corporation' with subsidiaries specializing in music, visual arts, performance and theater, and theory, as well as film, video, and architecture. These ensemble groups are linked by a straight-faced presentation of neofascist symbols and styles that are as much an indictment of the current nationalist states as of the previous Communist regime. Their hundreds of well-reproduced paintings and collages are at once poignant and direct--like idols and relics of a crumbling yet unapologetic ideology. The ironic writings are likewise intriguing--simultaneously subversive and totalitarian. Unfortunately, the work is presented by the artists without explanation, critique, or even a social/historical context; the interviews, reprinted from European magazines, leave one with the same ambivalence as Warhol's best--they're putting us on, but how? Still, with the civil war making what was formerly Yugoslavia front-page news, demand for materials on the contemporary society and culture of that region will be on the rise; this work provides a piece of the puzzle. Highly recommended where art and politics are taken seriously." — Library Journal
"NSK is concerned with nothing less than the fate of the soul of Europe." – Edinburgh Review