"Walking with the Enemy":
An Online Symposium by ViZ Laboratory of Visual Culture

Walking with the Enemy: Affirmation as Subversion in the (Post)Socialist, Postmodern, and Post-Truth Eras

In 1982, the Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach declared “All art is subject to political manipulation... except for that which speaks the language of this same manipulation.” Accused of being “enemies of the people” for appropriating imagery and rhetoric of contrasting totalitarian regimes, Laibach was censored and banned in Slovenia (then part of socialist Yugoslavia). But their work became emblematic of a new mode of political engagement. In the years that have followed, artists and activists as varied as Franco & Eva Mattes, Nikhil Chopra, Santiago Sierra, The Yes Men and numerous others have echoed the group’s tactics of performing in character and freely mixing totalitarian, nationalist, militarist, and corporate symbols. Described as "radically ambiguous" for the audacious mixture, this aesthetic has mostly been adapted by countercultural artists and activists opposing the dominant status quo or ideology. But in recent years this approach has been taken up by groups advancing far right, Nazi, and neo-nationalist ideas, too. The tactic of rejecting political manipulation by reclaiming its language seems particularly evocative in the post-truth era, just as it was in the times of late socialism.

This symposium attempts to address art practices that have embraced mimicry rather than opposition as a subversive political strategy. Going by the names of “overidentification,” “subversive affirmation,” or “exacerbated mimesis,” this tactic appropriates both the spectacle and stereotypes of socio-political power and by doing so exposes its animus, contradictions, and will to power. These modes of artistic engagement have strong associations with the ideological regimes of late socialism, but this kind of “walking with the enemy” has become one of the key artistic responses (both a symptom and counter-offensive) to our own era of ideological confusion and authoritarian resurgence.

Part I, 18:00-19:30

Welcome. Subversive Affirmation: Historical and Critical Perspectives

Maia Toteva, Texas Tech University, United States

Introduction. Revisionist Histories

Gediminas Gasparavičius, University of Akron, United States

The Second NSK Folk Art Biennale: A Case Study in Subversive Affirmation

Conor McGrady, Burren College of Art, Ireland

A Spectre is Haunting Spectre: Laibach, the Right and the Spectre of Ultra-Identification

Alexei Monroe, Burren College of Art, Ireland

Discussion

Break, 19:30-19:45

Part II, 19:45-21:15

Introduction. Disseminations and (Mis)Interpretations

Tom Williams, Belmont University, United States

Over-Identification and Race in Contemporary South African Political Art and Culture

Matthias Pauwels, North-West University, South Africa

Hypermimesis, Unsettling Mimesis and Non-Cathartic Subversion in Post-Digital Peripheries: Reflections on the 6th Athens Biennale

Kostis Stafylakis, VizLaboratory for Visual Culture, Greece

Discussion

Organized by Gediminas Gasparavičius, Kostis Stafylakis, Maia Toteva, and Tom Williams

Presented by The Onassis Foundation (Athens) and Viz Laboratory for Visual Culture (Athens)

Conor McGrady

Conor McGrady is an artist and Dean of Academic Affairs at Burren College of Art. He has exhibited internationally, with one-person exhibitions in New York, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago and Zagreb, Croatia. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York, The Jerusalem Show VII: Fractures (Qalandiya International Biennale), Biennale of Contemporary Art, D-0 Ark Underground, Sarajevo-Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Editor of Curated Spaces in the journal Radical History Review, his writing has appeared in Ruminations on Violence (Waveland Press, 2007) State of Emergence (Plottner Verlag, 2011), State in Time (Drustvo NSK Informativni Center, Ljubljana, 2012), Manchevski Monograph (Ars Lamina, Macedonia, 2015) and The Design of Frontier Spaces (Ashgate/Routledge, 2015). He was a member of the organizing committee for the Second NSK Folk Art Biennale in 2016.

Alexei Monroe

Alexei Monroe is Research Fellow at Burren College of Art, Ireland. He is author of the book Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK and of many other texts addressing the Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). He edited the book State of Emergence: A Documentary of the First NSK Citizens' Congress. He has written widely on industrial music and culture and was co-editor of the book Test Dept: Total State Machine and author of the monograph Autopsia: Thanatopolis. Other research interests include the cultural history of the stag, electronic music and dystopian science-fiction. His work has appeared in Contemporary Music Review, Central Europe Review, Kinoeye, Maska, The Wire, New Moment, Third Text, Trebuchet Magazine and many other publications.

Matthias Pauwels

Matthias Pauwels is a Research Fellow at North West University, South Africa. His recent publications focus on the entanglement of aesthetics and politics in contemporary art practices, popular protest movements and radical decolonial politics in South Africa. He ran the Dutch theoretical-activist group BAVO together with Gideon Boie from 2002 to 2012. BAVO’s key publications include the monograph Too Active to Act: Cultural Activism after the End of History and the edited volume Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over-Identification. With BAVO, he conducted several artivist projects that subversively affirm neoliberal and neoconservative tendencies within contemporary art, architecture and urban planning.

Kostis Stafylakis

Kostis Stafylakis is an art theorist and visual artist with a Phd in Political Science. He has taught “Research-based Art” at the Unit of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Athens School of Fine Arts, and “Fine Arts” and “Art theory” as adjunct at the Department of Architecture, University of Patras. He was co-curator of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI, the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA, Weasel Dance at Goethe-Institut Athen, “Twisting C(r)ash” at the Batiment d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, “The Suspension of Litanies” at ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture, and more. He is the author of various essays on the intersection between contemporary art and the Political, focusing on the adventures of the mimetic in contemporary art. He is Artistic Director of ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture. With Vana Kostayola, he runs ΚavecS (www.kavecs.com), an artistic experiment with mimetic subversion. In 2017, KavecS presented a retrospective of their work at the Neue Ravensburger Kunstverein. Some of his recent artistic participations include Enter: New Commissions, Onassis 2020, Kultursymposium Weimar 2019, the “Festival of Democracy”, Geneva (2017), Waiting for the Barbarians, Athens Biennale (2017), “Omonoia” 5th to 6th Athens Biennial (2016), 1st NSK Biennial of Folk Art (2014), Hell as Pavillion, Palais de Tokyo (2013), Truth is Concrete, Steirischer Herbst, Graz (2012), 3d Athens Biennale (2011), Media Impact at the 4th Moscow Biennial (2011).

Gediminas Gasparavičius

Gediminas Gasparavičius is associate professor of art history at University of Akron in the United States. His research focuses on collective and participatory art in Eastern Europe in late socialism and early postsocialism. His writings appeared in Public Art Dialogue, MIT Press publications, and elsewhere. He curated and co-curated several exhibitions focusing on political aspects of contemporary art at venues in Ohio, New York, and Lithuania. He is co-founder and vice president of Rubicon Cinema, a non-profit cultural organization dedicated to screening and exploration of experimental film and moving-image art in Akron, Ohio.

Maia Toteva

Maia Toteva is an art historian whose research and scholarship focus on the intersections of art, ideology, language, and identity in Russia and Eastern Europe. Her most recent projects place the Russian conceptual and post-conceptual movements in a global context. She has published and presented on the work of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, on conceptual art in Russia and in the US, and on pedagogical issues. She is an assistant professor at Texas Tech University in the United States.

Tom Williams

Tom Williams is currently teaching at Belmont University. He has also taught at Vanderbilt University, the Museum of Modern Art, and Watkins College of Art. Since 2013, he has co-organized an arts program with prisoners on death row in Tennessee. He has co-organized a number of exhibitions related to this prison work, including Life After Death and Elsewhere at Apexart in New York City. His publications have appeared in Grey Room, Art in America, and others venues.