AutopsiA

Was heisst Autopsia? Art? Theoria? Framing? Projection? Gaze?
Autopsia is language is image is sound.
Autopsia is a tombstone on the grave of time.
Autopsia is archaeology. The discourse of the beginning and about the beginning. At the beginning is Death.
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The building materials of Autopsia are reproductions of representations. Therefore, the production which is performed by Autopsia is the production of reproductions, or, on the level of producing, Autopsia reproduces the production. In fact, Autopsia does not produce anything, in a usual sense of the word; it does not produce something out of nothing, it does not produce the original, it repeats the production.

Mirror of Destruction

Autopsia comes out of nowhere. It has neither a place of origin nor the address. It appeared in 1980 with the fanzines Bank Rot and Prose Selavy, even today its biography remains unwritten, available information about the group are scarce, reduced to several articles and reproductions. In principle, it is non-communicative, hermetic and elitist. Enjoying the cult status among small group of industrial music afficionados, boasting respectable discography, the group peformed only two concerts, at the beginning of their non-career. The group exhibited its visual production several times (the last time in 1987), only to willingly leave everything to oblivion. The group deals with the topic of death, the method is repetition, whereby speech is impersonal. Autopsia is a genuine and bastard offspring of independent and intermedia subculture scene, gathered around punk and new wave, yet whose program and goals reach further than the joys of DIY home productions and club fetes of erruptive creativity. By accident or not, the forming of Autopsia coincides with the epochal event of the death of the creator of Socialist Yugoslavia, the start of ideological-institutional crisis of the Yugoslav art-culture system and overwhelming feeling of the „end“ and being thurst back into the uncertainty of the „zero state of being“ of the early post-Socialism. Similarly to Laibach (with whome it shares certain aesthetic principles and visual-musical synergy), Autopsia demonstrated refined sensitivity for historical pregnancy of the moment and it recognized in front of itself an open space for intervention of the art at the very heart of the political economy of the culture. With its projects – conceptual, deep, informed by theory, exclusive by content and intriguinging by language, Autopsia has positioned itself in the space between „high“ and „low“ culture, mainstream and alternative, imposing itself, as one of the most authentic and uncompromising art projects that sprang on the area of former Yugoslavia.

Dejan Sretenović, the chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade 2010 (From the exhibition catalogue)

we wander in abandonment
departed is the gold of days
black metallic skies
you are in deep midnight
the sky is lonely and immense
the song of reapers beating out the scythe
the dark purple light rises in the north
a yellow light rises in the east
and eagles float around the jagged crests
send your flames to the spirit
an army of ravens flew
silent above the place of the skull
stillness, fear and silence
in the courtyard the farm boy slaughters a lamb
here are the bounds of death and the gates of hell
Autopsia