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for Slovenia. This created a media scandal and Laibach issued a statement explaining its methodology. Laibach claimed its “provocative interdisciplinary action” applied to ideological and historical trauma encouraged “…critical awareness” in those exposed to it. Laibach explained itself 2 in terms of modernist conceptual art practices and referenced amongst others the work of Nam June Paik, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Laibach's use of these elements was a commentary on the presence of Western avant-garde ideologies in Yugoslavia and severely complicated any definitive political classification of the group. What Laibach was enacting was a type of mystifying demystification, illuminating the contradictions and normally hidden noise of ideology, using its irrational, uncanny aspects to build its own mystique and evade definitive categorization. Alongside the paramilitary and ideological elements, Laibach also introduced more esoteric symbols, and alluded to Slavic paganism, exorcism and the occult. The implication of this was that just below the surface of Yugoslavia's rational modernist reality lay all manner of irrational forces and unprocessed historical tensions. The pandemonium of its early concerts represented a manifestation of these tensions. Laibach repeatedly claimed to be carrying out exorcistic practice, and referred both to Catholic ritual (in Vade Retro Satanas) and to the shamanistic actions of Beuys, which were also intended to heal the psychic wounds inflicted by the war (Laibach is also an example of Beuys' theories of artistic “infiltration” and, most relevantly, “social sculpture.”) Cultural oscillation
Under Tito, Yugoslav foreign policy oscillated between East and West, at times closer to one than the other. When the individual republics made final incompatible choices about their geopolitical alignments and the oscillator (embodied in the figure of Tito) was shut down, Yugoslavia ended. Previously, Yugoslavia could never be definitively included in any category but its own, (“non-aligned, self-managing”) despite (or because of) the fact that in some respects it identified very closely with other sys-
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