Petra Milicki/review

Mladen Stilinović is one of the most important Croatian contemporary artists. As a post-conceptual artist and a member of the ‘Group of Six’ he is a founder of the so-called new artistic practices. In the 1970s he is exhibiting his work only in the outdoors as a critique of the gallery system.

He continues the tradition of avant-garde art by advocating for the social dimension of art: art as social critique, with an uncovered and specific form of cynicism.

The artist writes his manfesto ‘Praise of Laziness’ in 1993. He states that, by having learned as both a ‘Western-capitalist’ artist and an ‘Eastern-socialist’ artist, art doesn’t exis anymore in the West. “Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something... Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away form laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so a gallery is a room. “

He finds some of the characteristics and virtues of the laziness to be crucial factors in artistic practice. “Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time - total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration.”

He explains the artistic practice of the artists from the East by saying that they were lazy and poor because the entire system of insignificant factors didn’t exist in their world. They had enough time to produce art while being completly let to the laziness itself. They didn’t do it for the money, they knew it was in vain “...it was nothing.”

In 1976. Stilinović exhibits a photograph ‘Artist at Work’, while lying, sleeping. Stilinovic emphasizes the way in which the artists are seen as parasites by the so-called ordinary citizens engaged in “socially useful” work.

Stilinović also reffers to Malevich’s text entitled “Laziness - the real truth of mankind” (1921).

“In it he criticized capitalism because it enabled only a small number of capitalists to be lazy, but also socialism because the entire movement was based on work instead of laziness. “

To quote: “People are scared of laziness and persecute those who accept it, and it always happens because no one realizes laziness is the truth; it has been branded as the mother of all vices, but it is in fact the mother of life. Socialism brings liberation in the unconscious, it scorns laziness without realizing it was laziness that gave birth to it; in his folly, the son scorns his mother as a mother of all vices and would not remove the brand; in this brief note I want to remove the brand of shame from laziness and to pronounce it not the mother of all vices, but the mother of perfection”. Finally, to be lazy and conclude: there is no art without laziness.