Stilinović, Mladen (HR)
Carlsberg Tap E
Mladen Stilinović
Born 1947 in Beograd, Serbia
Lives in Zagreb, Croatia
Inspired by nineteenth-century revolutionary thinkers (such as Paul Lafargue), Mladen Stilinović wrote a piece in 1998 entitled The Praise of Laziness. According to Stilinović, laziness is time wasted, indifference, inactivity, impotence and sheer stupidity, all of which, he insists, are absolutely essential to art.
It may sound odd to hear an artist saying that stupidity and time-wasting are key to the making of art. For art is neither vacuous nor indifferent, and Stilinović's own work proves that he is anything but lazy. Indeed he is a key figure and role model for younger generations of visual artists and art theorists in the Balkans.
Stilinović knows from experience what it is to be an artist in Yugoslavia during the Cold War, as well as in the international art world following the fall of the Wall. While, during the Cold War, artists often had to get by without financial support, were appreciated by few, often working in secret, in the Western-dominated international art world they are confronted with something completely else. Here, while interest and money abound, art is subject to other expectations: it has to be clever, worthy of attention, active, instructive and edgy. Efficiency is the order of the day in a hyper-productive and means-ends culture, and Stilinović seeks to counter this by defending laziness.
One of the artist's contributions to U-TURN is an invitation to come to Zagreb to view an exhibition in Stilinović's own flat. The exhibition is focused around how important anarchy is to art, but also, the impossibility of creating an anarchic idiom since, in the nature of the case, the anarchic resists encapsulation in a formula - even one devised by an artist. And so the exhibition is a self-consciously self-defeating attempt to define an anarchic idiom, hence the title Insulting the Anarchy.
Stilinović's other contribution For Marie Antoinette '68 (2008) is an outdoor groundlevel installation comprising French baguettes, topped by a cream cake. The title is an allusion to the French queen's notorious comment that if people were starving for lack of bread they could eat cake. The theme is one and the same: bread and cake, necessity and superfluity, work and laziness. For Mladin Stilinović, these concept pairs relate to each other like the chicken and the egg.
-NH
Lives in Zagreb, Croatia
Inspired by nineteenth-century revolutionary thinkers (such as Paul Lafargue), Mladen Stilinović wrote a piece in 1998 entitled The Praise of Laziness. According to Stilinović, laziness is time wasted, indifference, inactivity, impotence and sheer stupidity, all of which, he insists, are absolutely essential to art.
It may sound odd to hear an artist saying that stupidity and time-wasting are key to the making of art. For art is neither vacuous nor indifferent, and Stilinović's own work proves that he is anything but lazy. Indeed he is a key figure and role model for younger generations of visual artists and art theorists in the Balkans.
Stilinović knows from experience what it is to be an artist in Yugoslavia during the Cold War, as well as in the international art world following the fall of the Wall. While, during the Cold War, artists often had to get by without financial support, were appreciated by few, often working in secret, in the Western-dominated international art world they are confronted with something completely else. Here, while interest and money abound, art is subject to other expectations: it has to be clever, worthy of attention, active, instructive and edgy. Efficiency is the order of the day in a hyper-productive and means-ends culture, and Stilinović seeks to counter this by defending laziness.
One of the artist's contributions to U-TURN is an invitation to come to Zagreb to view an exhibition in Stilinović's own flat. The exhibition is focused around how important anarchy is to art, but also, the impossibility of creating an anarchic idiom since, in the nature of the case, the anarchic resists encapsulation in a formula - even one devised by an artist. And so the exhibition is a self-consciously self-defeating attempt to define an anarchic idiom, hence the title Insulting the Anarchy.
Stilinović's other contribution For Marie Antoinette '68 (2008) is an outdoor groundlevel installation comprising French baguettes, topped by a cream cake. The title is an allusion to the French queen's notorious comment that if people were starving for lack of bread they could eat cake. The theme is one and the same: bread and cake, necessity and superfluity, work and laziness. For Mladin Stilinović, these concept pairs relate to each other like the chicken and the egg.
-NH