AN ARTIST IS NOT TO FOLLOW THE TRAMWAY TRACKS 

Victor Shklovsky, Zoo, Or Letters Not about Love (1922)

Nataša Ilić

Mladen Stilinović’s retrospective exhibition, ironically titled Zero for Conduct, came about after almost four decades of artistic work and only following his breakthrough on the international art scene, which, as was the case with many artists from post-socialists countries, coincided with so-called internationalization of the art world in the 1990s. But if his artistic position in the 1970s and 1980s was marginal in relation to the then- dominant paradigm of ‘soft’ modernism, for many years it is no longer so.

In critical texts on Stilinović’s work it has been noted often that his main preoccupation is researching the relations between language and ideology, which he maneuvers by systematically dealing with ‘big subjects’—pain, death, poverty, work, food, and money. His questioning of the aesthetic and social heritage of the historical avant-garde movements; the loosening of the analytic language of post-conceptual art by opening it up to emotional contents and reactions; and his development of artistic procedures described as poor, based not in the field of art but in the social and political context of everyday life (which makes them significantly different from the more visually orientated concerns of Arte Povera, for example) are also mentioned often. But the most precise framing and explanations of his artistic endeavors usually come from Stilinović himself, in numerous texts he wrote[1], as well as in interviews he has given throughout the years. Such a conclusion is not the result of privileging the artist as the source of an ultimate and correct interpretation—that would be the very opposite of Stilinović’s position, because he is always very cautious when it comes to any glorification of the artistic ego—but it is rather based on the consistency of his thought, ever conscious of the artist’s own entanglement with his ideological environment.

The closeness of his art to poetry is regularly mentioned, too. This is apropos, because in addition to everyday language and the ‘official’ language of newspapers, poetry was his first source material for his research into language[2].  Only later were Stilinović’s attempts to explain the relations of art and language theoretically underpinned by the texts of the Russian formalists, especially by Mikhail Bakhtin, who after the mid-1920s developed further explorations of aesthetic devices and the estrangement of language through researching the social and historical conditions of language production; as well as by the socio-semiotic works of the Italian philosopher Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, who in the 1960s and 1970s compared the problems of language and communication to those of the production of commodities and economic categories.

In the 1970s Stilinović had been engaged with experimental films (which he abandoned at the end of the decade because he considered film production too expensive), and with the ‘Group of 6’ artists, he organized exhibition-actions in public space, seeking more autonomous avenues for art production and distribution. Already from the beginning of the decade, he was making collages, paintings, drawings and artist’s books, using language material with an approach close to Bakhtin’s statement; “the word is an ideological phenomenon par excellence[3]“, which he discovered only later and quoted often.

‘The question is how to manipulate that which manipulates you.[4]’

In the 1970s, at the time when Stilinović produced his first works concerned with threatening and manipulative “language blackmail”[5] and suppressed social antagonisms, societal enthusiasm for “exemplary emancipatory moments of Yugoslav history”—People’s Liberation Struggle, socialist self-management and non-aligned movement[6]—was visibly exhausted. The period of ideological powerlessness and political-economic paralysis, “a kind of Yugoslav Brezhnevism,”[7] had started. From the very beginning Stilinović’s exploration of the ways in which “politics contaminates language, and how to avoid it”[8] expressed a penchant for plebeian deflating and the unmasking of the authoritarian intentions of official language and norms, which explains importance of Bakhtin, a theoretician whose understanding of discourse as a consequence and condition of the social development of language was forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered in the 1970s, when it found a global prominence extending the confines of literary theory. Indeed Bakhtin’s recasting of the Marxist theory of ideology anticipated many of the themes of post-structuralism while embedding the realm of ideas in social practice, and his work reached Stilinović primarily through the book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, originally published in 1929 under the name of Vsevolod Voloshinov[9], and translated and published in Belgrade in 1980.

In attempting to forge a Marxist theory of ideology and its relationship to language, Bakhtin argued that meaning is produced and realized in specific utterances of the communicative event i.e. in precise historical actualization. Contrary to a structuralist understanding of language as isolated, finished monological utterance, divorced from its verbal and real context, Bakhtin claimed that any true understanding is dialogic in nature. As such it is also active—a word provokes an answering word, and oppositional—a word also provokes its ‘counter’ word. For Bakhtin, a word is a site of the clash and intersections of differently oriented social accents, and also a dialogical site of class interaction, as different classes seek to imbue a word with their own meaning.

For Stilinović, as for Bakhtin, of crucial interest is language not as a linguistic object, but as material for confronting ideologies. Already in his earliest collages from the 1970s, in which he used cut-outs from newspapers, magazines, leaflets, advertisements, tickets, etc., as well as in simple drawings and texts based on elements of everyday speech, Stilinović’s hand-written textual interventions build dialogic tension; utterances understood in a Bakhtinian sense as a structures of provocation and response, unfinished, and by virtue of the historical constitution of their meanings undetermined, in open relation to past and future speech. The intention here is not to point to literal parallelism or direct influence of Bakhtin, but rather to show the proximity of their intellectual curiosities and searches for autonomy.

For example, in his collage with text “What’s up mister, why so pushy”, the phrase from everyday speech is inscribed in a complex matrix of social relations, with words having multiple echoes as street jargon and class-determined speech. Addressing somebody as “mister” in a way typical for Zagreb slang was not only non-normative and dialectal, but was opposed especially to the official practice of addressing someone as “comrade”. The word “pushy”, also dialectally colored, is intended as an affront to the idea of gentlemanly behavior as such (gentlemen do not push, nor behave aggressively, as the word in Croatian slang suggests), and as a critical arrow aimed at dominant social pattern that would equate social advancement with aggressive pushing, imposing, elbowing. The dialogic openness and thickness of the utterance could be read as a map of the micro-conflicts in Yugoslav society in the 1970s, a society that refuted existence of classes and class conflicts with considerable ingenuity, but negligible persuasiveness. Through a free and critical investigation, one unskillfully, hand-written sentence on ordinary piece of office paper manages to expose the system to comic effect, to pry open the external shell of historical process and put it under examination.

The same principle is utilized in the series of collages that use richly intoned phrases of everyday speech, for example “how are you / so-so / not at my best / how are you / tell me how are you / I’ll slap you if you don’t tell me / thwack thwack”, “I’ll slap you one”, “before I was like crazy without football now I don’t give a fuck”, or “you think you won’t /you have to /you think you won’t /you have to/ that’s how it is”, in which Stilinović humorously questions social norms and deflates the coercion hidden in such statements. In collages with more explicitly political content it is about procedure of estrangement of words whose goal is not to invoke empathy or catharsis, but to test and probe the ideological background of the utterance and open the historical possibilities to the process of analysis. Take for example the one with the text “courage, patience, prayers aaah that’s it comrades that’s it comrades”, whose dense phrase confronts opposed ‘social forces’ and ridicules both sides of ‘class conflict’ united in obedience, by linking a mantra of political leadership (courage, patience) in addressing the working people to a socially dubious religious practice (prayer), and resolving the tension in unanimous, unpersuasively enthusiastic acceptance (that’s it comrades that’s it comrades), or another in which the text “we are ready we are ready” performs a similar operation through basic repetition that still carries the memory of political speech (like slogans and chants) but in so doing ridicules the emptiness of political motivational speech.

Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.[10]

For Stilinović, “language is a type of communication that contains a threat”[11] because it asks for belonging to a language community, or as Rossi-Landi describes it in his book Language as Work and Trade, “language production forces a speaker to see the world in a certain way (…). A speaker is, so to speak, admitted to a society in which he was born.”[12] Stilinović frequently uses language forms like proverbs and political slogans as material for his exploration of the authoritarian imposition of dogmatic truths and forced belonging upon a language community. His works that employ slogans take over the forms used at collective demonstrations (in Yugoslav society, these had a parade character of official, state sanctioned celebrations), but Stilinović replaces slogans directed from above with his own texts, unskillfully hand-written on cardboard (these refer to the way prices are often scrawled on rough-hewn signs at the food market stalls—he calls it “cardboard design”[13]), as for example, in works such as Work Cannot Not Exist (1976), Work is a Word (1982) or Work is a Disease – Karl Marx (1981), in which he questions the understanding of work as wage labor, i.e. the imperative of earning money to live, and employment as the basis of participating in society that characterizes both socialist and capitalist ways of production.

Close to Bakhtin’s principle of carnivalesque ridiculing of power, Stilinović’s resistance to the tyranny of abstract ideas and dogmas often relies on forms of popular culture and on the powerful weapon of humor, as, for example, in works with painted signs (like those for hairdressers in Hairdressers, 1975, or for restaurants and car repair shops in Script + Image, 1976, or street slogans used on the occasion of official celebrations in 1st of May 1975). The official language of political slogans and his interest for “low” culture also found its expression in Stilinović’s utilization of newspapers as visual and language material.  They are raw materials in which he intervenes directly, fragmenting and reordering pages, or taking over the content and working it out in other media. It should go without saying that newspapers are a direct expression of the ruling, or dominant, language. Today, when the freedom of the press is dictated—every bit as much as in socialist times—not by Party directives but by market mechanisms, newspapers shape language as a concrete, ideologically coherent discursive practice, which serves the ideological, and thus socio-political, centralization of society.

In the work Submit to Public Debate (1980) Stilinović takes political phrases from the newspapers and writes them on pieces of cardboard by hand, omitting any direct political content and retaining only those forms of everyday speech that through their repetitive occurrences in the context of official speeches still carry a distinctively threatening tone. In front of the wall with densely set cardboard pieces he arranged several rows of chairs recalling the scenography of workers’ meetings; through this constellation he is ridiculing both the meaninglessness and absurdity of political speech, and the nature of workers’ meetings as a fake facade of self-management. On work (1980-84) is an installation composed of collages made out of newspaper photos and fragmented captions, and texts glued onto red-painted cardboard. The photos depict political plenums, plenaries and meetings dedicated to “working people”, to whom the bold and optimistic newspaper captions refer as well. Newspaper photos show the ruling strata in their position of economic, social and cultural power and control; of course these same people had a mandate and a monopoly on finding solutions to the crucial question of the distribution of surplus labor[14]. Slogans such as “Labor surplus – to the workers”, “Affirmation of work and self-management”, “Proving oneself through work only” are in sharp opposition to the social reality of a resigned acceptance of growing inequality and class divisions.

Stilinović also reacts against the ideological concept of “time on the clock” as a basis for domination of capital over work and reduction of life to functional wage labor and consumption outside of working hours, both in the service of capital. For example, in the series of drawings from the cycle Insulting Anarchy (2005-7), Stilinović varies the theme of the socialist ideal of the division of a day: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest (culture and entertainment) and 8 hours of sleep. He demands realization of that ideal (We demand we wish 8 hours for work 8 hours of our education 8 hours to rest), turns a triadic form 8-8-8 into 6-6-6, or work-rest-sleep into abstraction-cowardice-masturbation, or even more absurdly, repeats three times 8 hours – green, naturally, in the color green. At stake is autonomy devoid of one’s professional role as a guarantee of social standing, especially important in regard to artistic work which, in spite of the proclaimed importance of “superstructure”, was looked upon with certain disrespect, as a form of social parasitism. Opposing demands of economic rationality, in a number of works Stilinović argues for laziness as an expression of autonomy and resistance to the unquestionable, central role of the institution of work. In his text “The Praise of Laziness”, written in 1993, when a promise of market success started to pressure artists from former socialist countries with principles of professionalism, Stilinović promotes laziness as a necessary condition of artistic work.

Laziness is also the subject of Artist at Work (1978), a series of photos showing artist lying down in bed, fully clothed, in broad daylight. It is probably not by chance that in recent years it is one of Stilinović’s most often exhibited works. His ironic commentary on an artist working while sleeping is seen today not only as a position of resistance to the ideology of work and the necessity of leisure and doing nothing for creative work, but also as a literal realization of the total overlapping of work and life, in which even sleep is included. This process, which started in the 1980s with advance of post-industrial capitalism, resulted in the establishment of semiocapitalism, as Italian philosopher and activist Franco Berardi calls contemporary regime in which thoughts, language, creativity, subjectivities and desire became primary tools of production and circulation of value in capitalism. Marxist alienation as a gap between life and work becomes a gap in which capitalist economy controls desires, ideas and beliefs manifested in labor.

During the 1970s, in his critique of alienated work Stilinović’ opposed the non-freedom of wage labor to forms of work related to the most intimate, non-alienated human activities. Several decades later, immaterial labor would occupy a central place in the new economy and lose its privileged position of relative exemption from the pressures of capitalist productivity. But throughout the years Stilinović never lost sight of concrete alienation (from both the means of production and the products of labor) and of distribution of labor surplus in material reality. Food, poverty and money are his constant themes.

There is nothing wrong with poverty[15]

Bag-People (2003) is an installation consisting of a series of photos of people carrying plastic shopping bags, taken at Jakuševac, Zagreb’s biggest flea market, which, in spite of its cult status among vintage clothing connoisseurs, is a rather miserable place. Photos arranged in a row stand on a series of tables, with pages from newspapers mounted on their backs, as if suggesting a front and flip side of society in transition, a process never questioned, with its perilous consequences obediently accepted as a price for the only possible social order.

Today, when the concentration of ever-growing wealth in the hands of the few produces increasing imbalance between capital and labor, the attitude towards poverty again acquires the characteristics of nineteenth century Social Darwinism, which identified the core problem not as poverty itself, which should be eradicated through collective and solidary social action, but rather poor people failing to pull themselves out of misery.[16] In Bag-People, the invisibility and abjection of poverty is stressed through people being photographed from behind, “as a kind of metaphor of the way in which one avoids coming up close to the face of poverty”[17] The same theme figures in Nobody Wants to See (2009), a work that is a material realization of the fact that the three richest people in the world have as much money as six hundred million of the world’s poorest. The immensity of that discrepancy is expressed by the simple juxtaposition of a piece of paper (printed with a single number 3) with stacks of neatly ordered sheets of papers with a densely repeated number 3 (suggesting the six hundred million poorest people). Here the injustice contained in that shocking piece of data is shown without moral outrage. Using reduced and simple artistic means, the work incites an emotional response in the viewer and manages to show historical processes as consequences of human decisions and thus as something that can be influenced and changed.

The emotional dimension of Stilinović’s works often comes across as a consequence of a tension between abstract content and economic procedures based on the utilization of the highly charged emotional and symbolic potentials of objects from everyday life, which is especially present in works dealing with food. From his earliest such works, like Hand of Bread (1974), a series of paintings on white background with the indeterminable utterance, “hand of bread”, written in black and accompanied by different grammatical signs written in red (bracket, tick, period) that calibrate its emotional register, or the photographic series The Foot-Bread Relationship (1977), showing a leg kicking a loaf of bread lying on the floor, to many works that use bread, cakes or eggs as material (for example, vanilla cake on a swing in On the Swing, 1998, bread and cakes on the floor in Bread, Cakes (for Marie Antoinette) from 1996, or plates with broken eggs and dollar banknotes in Egg Money from 2008),  food and objects relating to food are emotional and symbolic signs that demand engaging emotional perception and cut through institutional and ideological frameworks of everyday life.

At the beginning of the 1990s, with the breakdown of socialism and hastened integration into capitalism, the privatization of social ownership resulted in a dramatic increase of social inequalities and the pauperization of broad segments of society. At that time Stilinović made works dealing with food, which was taken as a cheap and corruptible ideological sign, not just the biological basis of human existence. Poor People Law (1993), a wall installation with cakes and plates painted with black and white patterns and hand-written statements resembling slogans or proverbs imposing undisputable truths and referring to law or justice, directly relates to the social transformation caused by rediscovering capitalist social relations. Statements like “New lords new laws”, “Where drums beat laws are silent” or “Much law little justice” are written in English, the hegemonic language of globalization (a term that during the war, but later as well, was taken as a positive vision of unified human history and used as a euphemism for capitalism). Cakes as a cheap promise of prosperity are part of Geometry of Cakes, an installation from the same period (1993), in which tin plates are painted with colorful geometric patterns, while next to the hand-written proverbs on work, food and money, the word “death” is added. Food, like language, is an instrument and means of power, as is convincingly expressed in Stilinović’s work Cakes (1983), a painting of a flag on a cardboard, with red color substituted by pink, and the ideological symbol of a five-pointed star at the middle white field of the flag replaced by the word “cakes”.

By revealing the ideological ballast of language, Stilinović heightens the critical dimension of poetics in a way that poetics was originally understood and theorized by the Russian avant-garde and Russian formalists. The relation of aesthetic production and revolutionary social transformation as sought by Russian avant-garde generally takes a central place in Stilinović’s political aesthetics, with special importance accorded to the aesthetic and social program of Kazimir Malevich. In many works, Stilinović refers to the forms, colors and symbolism of Malevich’s Suprematist paintings, taking them as historical, ideological and aesthetic signs subjected to analysis. Red, the color of hope and victory of Soviet avant-garde, in some of Stilinović’s works loses its manifest ideological charge and becomes a material for tautological works that humorously outmaneuver the severe logic of language and ideology, or mutates into pink, softened red of Yugoslav version of “socialism with human face,” which, by concessions to consumerism, attempted to suppress social antagonisms. By contrast the color white, which in Malevich’s Suprematist system symbolizes utter nothingness as transcendent liberation, becomes the color of pain at Stilinović’s hand.

The work Because Pain Precedes Everything Else (1994), a white, acrylic-painted square board with a smaller square made of transparent glass attached to it, with the text from the title hand-written in pen beneath, is a humorous reformulation of Malevich’s iconic painting White on White. The materiality of the transparent glass square is emphasized by strongly visible black nails, which attach it to the white background. The whole composition appears to refer to the sublimity of Malevich’s white on white as a kind of cheap magician’s trick, while the text explicitly affirms artistic creation as sublimation. “Pain for me is the very opposite of power”[18], said Stilinović. If red is a color of ideology and power, white is a color of powerlessness.

In the 1990s, during the war, Stilinović made many white works that treat white not only as a color of powerlessness but also of absence and silence (White Absence, 1990-1996), but white works and works on pain are in fact prominent since the beginning. For example, The Pain Game (1977), a white wooden cube with the word PAIN written on all its sides, turns the conventional idea of art as game into a game with immense stakes and an outcome that hurts even when one isn’t defeated. His early dictionary works also deal with pain, as in, for example, the artist’s books Dictionary (A), Dictionary (B) and Dictionary (C) (1979/80), in which he wrote words from a Serbo-Croatian-English Dictionary under the letters A, B, and C, and next to them added a dash and the word PAIN as the final translation of all the words. Years later, when English was even more firmly enshrined as the language of power, Stilinović took the whole English dictionary, painted the meanings of words in white and instead wrote PAIN (Dictionary-Pain, 2000-2003), and arranged the sheets on the wall next to each other as an open book. Stilinović annihilates the aggression inherent in language with this emotional gesture that acknowledges only pain. Language is saturated with ideology and that is why it hurts. But although meaning appears to be given in advance—all the words mean pain—this gesture actually abolishes the semantic dictatorship of the monologic style and unified tone embodied in any dictionary, and opens up space for associative freedom and dialogue in which words acquire multiple accents and voices.

Bakhtinian dialogism is an important principle for Stilinović as an artist who has always felt uneasy with the institution of artistic authorship based on the expression of artistic ego. His works abound in quotes, phrases of high and low written and spoken language, slogans, proverbs and recognizable fragments of speech genres, and his statements, especially when coated in slogans to be believed, and often result in humorous effects even when dealing with the most sublime themes. They are always about emotional character of language and two-way communication that counts on the active reception of a viewer. Exploitation of the Dead (1984-1990) is in this sense an exemplary work. Gloomy questions of the death of the avant-garde as an aesthetic project, and of crisis and the end of the socialist project, are expressed through a number of voices in which references to Suprematist aesthetics and symbols of revolution and socialism are combined with a jar of pickles, porno images and cakes. Utterances retain their performative nature and establish a variety of possible social relations, pointing toward a collectivity that means something more than the passive agreement of individual voices—an active form that turns all private bonds and utterances into social ones.

I’ve been free of court, but I haven’t been free of many other things[19]

Stilinović’s understanding of the ideological manipulation of language was also influenced by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s book Language as Work and Trade, as mentioned earlier. The book is a collection of critical essays on language and ideology in relation to sign production and the process of social reproduction. By researching the role of language production in establishing socio-economic relations, Rossi-Landi applied Marxist economic categories to language. “Language is a product, and in a broader sense language is a work. Language is produced through social model of production”[20].  From today’s perspective of “the radical constitution of class relations through financialization”[21], when theoreticians of semiocapitalism like Christian Marazzi or Paolo Virno attempt to explain the main social changes since the 1980s by pointing to the linguistic nature of capital, i.e. to the essential role that communication and language play in contemporary financial markets, Rossi-Landi’s semiotic theory, interpreting as it does linguistic reality in terms of production and consumption, social and individual work, capital and exchange, commodities and money, reification and alienation, gains relevance anew. For Stilinović, Rossi-Landi’s argument that “language as means of universal exchange has the aspect of money by which all other commodities are sold and bought”,[22] and his reproof of the ideological pseudo-naturalness of money were especially important.

For Stilinović, money, like language, figures as a means of communication, “the only language everybody understands”,[23] and as an instrument of blackmail whose value is based on the conventions of the social contract. Using money as both theme and material, Stilinović works with different banknotes and coins mostly with dinar banknotes—those with figures of shock-workers, the social-realist equestrian statue Peace by August Augustinčić, set up in front of the UN building in New York, and later those with portrait of Tito—as well as with dollars. By transforming their aesthetic and symbolic language, Stilinović spoils the authoritarian conventions of money through simple procedures of editing, fragmenting, adding, subtracting or changing text and numbers, combining banknotes with geometric compositions based on Suprematism or with kitchen utensils and food.

Disrespect, ridiculing and the unmasking of authority, all clearly emphasized in his works with money, is a constant refrain in Stilinović’s artistic practice. He activates them all as tools to resist to systemic coercions. The struggle for artistic autonomy is here understood as an ongoing internal distancing and questioning that does not get rid of, but rather loosens the pressures of ideology as the condition of all conscious life. Commenting on his piece Sing! (1980), a collage composed of his photographic self-portrait, with a banknote glued on his forehead, and the hand-written text “Sing!”, the artist said: “You must sing as others tell you, if they pay”[24]. But as Stilinović’s long practice demonstrates, this does not mean that one accepts unconditionally the strictures of morals and demands of social institutions; rather it is possible to relentlessly question social, but also aesthetic, norms and values as historically changing and always socially produced indications of what is at any given moment regarded as art.

Translated from English by Nataša Ilić