Aldo Milohnić on the symposium “In the Thicket of Capitalism – Saint Joan of the Stockyards Today”, “E-CIBS”, January 20 2025

In the Thicket of Capitalism: Saint Joan of the Stockyards Today
Aldo Milohnić, “E-CIBS”, January 20th 2025
https://e-cibs.org/2025/01/20/in-the-thicket-of-capitalism-saint-joan-of-the-stockyards-today-by-aldo-milohnic/
“Following the Slovenian premiere of the international co-production of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a short symposium took place on 11 November 2024 in Ljubljana. The event titled In the Thicket of Capitalism – Saint Joan of the Stockyards Today was organized by the cultural and congress center Cankarjev dom, the Založba /*cf. Press (which published the Slovenian translation of Saint Joan) and the Research Program of the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television of the University of Ljubljana. The symposium enabled a wide range of insights into Saint Joan from several perspectives: from the literary-aesthetic and literary-theoretical to the theatrical and the performative. It also wanted to encourage sociological reflections on Brecht’s critique of the capitalist system and its dominant ideology.
The event started as a public talk with three actors in the production of Saint Joan (Agata Tomšič as Joan, Danilo Nigrelli as Mauler and Blaž Šef as Slift), the director Davide Sacco and the leader of the music band Laibach (representing the religious sect Black Hats), Ivan Novak. The topics discussed were, among others, possible peculiarities of Brecht’s play from the actor’s point of view and the specific situation of acting in a multilingual performance. Sacco talked about the initial idea for an international coproduction and the play’s relevance for contemporary theatre while Novak explained Laibach’s role in the production of SaintJoan in comparison to other previous theatrical performances by the band.
The second part of the symposium, chaired by the Založba /*cf. press editor Amelia Kraigher, was opened by the renowned theoretician Rastko Močnik with an analysis of the contradictory position of Brecht’s play within the realm of the contemporary cultural and art systems. It is characteristic of contemporary art works that they subvert artistic ideology and its apparatuses. On the other hand, paradoxically, they demand that the artistic apparatuses recognize them as works of art. According to Močnik, Brecht implemented a different strategy: he created a new ideology of artistic practice and, at the same time, he theorized it. The problem is that now his works operate in the field of contemporary art and ideally fit into the pattern of contemporary “subversion-with-demand-for-recognition”. They subvert bourgeois aesthetic ideology and its ideological apparatuses (from which they have already gained recognition, since they have been included in the canon) and, at the same time, have been involved in a contradictory reproduction of the capitalist social formation that Brecht sought to eliminate. When the ideological apparatuses of culture-and-art accept practical (subversive) artistic ideology, a radically paradoxical effect occurs – the musealization of the aesthetic revolutionary practice and its ideology. […]”