ARTEMIJA, pt. 17

Adela Železnik, MA, the head of our meditation and public programs department, presents Mladen Stilinović’s work Red Era (1973–1990).

“Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016) disliked authority of any kind, political or artistic, so much that he also acquired knowledge informally, outside institutions. Through free combinations of language and visual signs and an ironic use of the iconography of his time he became one of the most influential avant-garde artists in the former Yugoslavia. After initially writing poetry and making experimental films, Stilinović became fascinated with visual art in the early 1970s. He was a founding member of Grupa šestorice autora (Group of Six Artists), which carried out exhibitions-actions in the streets of Zagreb between 1975 and 1979 to bring art into public space. Humorous and subversive in their critique of all kinds of ideology, the actions established direct communication with their audience; through this active approach to presenting their work the artists questioned the role of museums and galleries as well. Nonetheless, they did exhibit their work in the first alternative art space in Zagreb named Podroom, and Stilinović subsequently ran the Expanded Media Gallery. Stilinović’s work comprises collages, photographs, artist’s books, paintings, installations, actions, films, and video. His focus was on power relations underpinning society at the deepest level, which he presented in an ironic and humorous manner. He appropriated slogans, catchphrases, and metaphors from everyday political speech for his artistic statements, deconstructing their original meaning. Red Era is a series of drawings combining language and visual elements (such as the font and the material support of the text). Red is the connecting element, self-referential at times, like visual poetry, sometimes humorously alluding to a teacher’s corrections, but above all the element that, according to the artist, loses the burden of its historical symbolic value by increasing the plurality of its meanings. The drawings in the series were made in the 1970s and 1980s, when Stilinović found his subject matter in the clichés of the socialist political rhetoric, and the 1990s, when he drew attention to the contradictions brought by the ‘normalization’ that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Today we wonder what kind of ‘normalization’ awaits us after the Covid-19 pandemic is over.”