Friendly postmodernism Eda Cufer comes to USM and Casco Bay Books BY TANYA WHITON

I thought I’d long since lost patience with postmodernism, and with discussions of identity based on the idea that we are all merely social constructs, comprised of past memories, present fallacies, and future projections. Years ago, after a brief and powerful undergraduate romance with the academic dogma of deconstruction, I had to put my literary dissecting kit away. I was exhausted by intellectual gymnastics. Casting a cold eye on the impulses that had initially led me to write eventually froze me in my tracks: I could not make work. I could only dismantle it. I put theorizing away in two fat file folders filled with academic essays.

But when word of a guest appearance by Slovenian theorist and dramaturge Eda Cufer arrived in the form of a mass email from USM, I found myself curious. The only woman in the radical Eastern European art collective NSK (Neue Slovenische Kunst), Cufer contributes ideas, historical fodder, and curatorial insight to NSK’s ongoing projects, or "departments" as they call the artistic arms of their intricate and imaginary fascist state: the visual arts group IRWIN, Noordung Theatre, and industrial rock band LAIBACH. Cufer also wrote the manifesto for anti-theater artists Sisters Scipion Nasice, and has edited a series of books on the viscerally political "happenings" NSK has staged in the past two decades.

Having grown up on military bases, I was amazed to witness the slow dismantling of what had been the US military’s number one mission post-WW2: to fight communism. I was fascinated to see that NSK is one of the few artistic endeavors to survive the awkward, painful transition from communist state to free market economy, and that they had done so by brazenly addressing the fallacies of the present through the images of the past. The "Iron Curtain" became, in a short space of time, an imaginary enclosure, something we Westerners might get to see through.

The NSK State treads continuously on the line between political commentary and art, by incorporating images from history, cribbed from the iconography of the totalitarian state. A black cross against a white background is their logo, and the posters created for LAIBACH’s "ideological offensives" borrow freely from the stark, frightening (but graphically stunning) images used by Hitler and Stalin.

This riles people up. In the current issue of print magazine, writer Steven Heller chides: ". . . while this tactic has resulted in some caustic and provocative graphic art, it also raises the question of whether such retro practice ultimately desensitizes potent images that are reminders of evil ideologies, acts and events . . . perhaps these images should not be treated so cavalierly."

I realized after reading up on Cufer and NSK just what postmodern critical theory had done for me as an individual: It gave me the tools to interpret and question the iconography and political theater of the United States military, the Navy in particular. It allowed me to see just how powerfully, sometimes virulently, visual and auditory symbols can be employed to sway public opinion, create order, inspire fear, or incite nationalist sentiment.

Cufer’s visit to USM, as part of the Graduate Certificate in Theory, Literature and Culture, (which, I’ll admit, I’d privately derided — terms like Balkanization, interrogating identity, and new historicism struck me as so much theoretical bullshit) in light of this personal discovery, suddenly seemed quite timely. NSK’s images of men in military uniform, banners, dead soldiers, and faux medals of valor force the viewer to recall, and acknowledge, past and present brutality. And the way they have absorbed elements of functional bureaucracy — building an actual post office, creating virtual embassies, and manufacturing items like postage stamps and passports — seem an exceptionally apt commentary on how arbitrary those bureaucracies are.

The fact that Cufer is the only woman in this collective made her especially interesting to me: I imagine that NSK’s vision is altered and informed by her presence, in the way that any single gender group is transformed in dynamic by the introduction of the opposite sex. She is also, as Shelton Waldrep (one of the USM professors responsible for her visit) puts it, an "independent scholar ¾ outside the academy proper," and I can’t help but applaud Waldrep and his colleagues (many of whom were my professors during that early romance with theory) for bringing in someone who is credentialed less by her academic affiliations than by her actions. While the graphic art and political theater of the NSK may seem spawned from abstract, intellectual constructs, their message is contained in their medium in a startling, effective way.

I won’t be taking a nose dive into my dusty Foucault and Lacan textbooks, or attempting to grapple with the latest permutations of critical theory. I can’t even define (though I’ve used the term) exactly what the heck postmodernism is. But I will go and hear Eda Cufer speak. Ultimately, any dogma can be deconstructed to reveal a question for which the answer is forever elusive: Why do human beings do as they do? Along the way, it is useful to have someone reinterpret the symbols, and demand discussion, as Cufer and NSK have done. Her experience may speak to ours more precisely than anyone might have imagined even a few years ago.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com

Eda Cufer speaks at Casco Bay Books, in Portland, July 31. Call (207) 541-3842. She speaks again in Luther Bonney Auditorium, on the USM Portland campus, August 2, following a screening of Predictions of Fire. Call (207) 780-4086.