Mladen Stilinović: 1+2 ≡ (2015) [English/Spanish]

19 August 2016, dusan

Catalogue for an exhibition held from 5 September 2015 – 3 January 2016 at MUAC in Mexico City. The show comprising work dating from the 1970s up to the first decade of the 21st century included video, painting, collage, documentation of actions and installations, and aimed to demonstrate how Mladen Stilinović (1947-2016) questioned the aesthetic and social legacy of the avant-garde.

“His work comprises exercises that are frequently tautological, with citations that range from the aesthetic of the street to that of the Russian avant-garde, but always based on a dual axis that combines the formal simplicity with the deconstructive power of the absurd. The practice of this Croatian artist is governed by a specific question: ‘how to manipulate that which manipulates you’. Though he is considered a conceptual artist, the work of Stilinović is never cold nor rational, but moves in a register of humor and irony whose simple gestures appeal to the emotions and produce experiences that insist on personal responsibility. All his artistic strategies, starting with his auctioning off the color red, exchanging the definition of all the words in the dictionary for the word pain, or selling self-censorship, are connected—in the artist’s own words—with respecting the anarchy in himself and proposes the absurd as an antidote to ideology—whichever ideology is waiting for us around the next corner.”

Contains three texts by Mladen Stilinović, an interview by Branka Stipančić, essays by Alejandra Labastida and Boris Groys, and reproductions of selected works.

Publisher Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, 2015
Folio MUAC series, 35
ISBN 607025175X, 9786070251757
95 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)


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