“La Pologne, la Pologne. Isn’t it terribly cold there?”
“Pas du tout,” I answer icily
THIS IS THE DEDICATION Mladen Stilinović wrote me in his artist’s book Energetic Action, comprising newspaper cutouts of political meetings in former Yugoslavia, reprinted on the occasion of his 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. The quote is by Polish poetess Wisława Szymborska: two lines of mordant irony and deceptive simplicity.
Stilinović loved poetry. He loved Polish poetry especially. He wrote his own poems, though he rarely published them. He also loved colloquial language: “One must put an end to it. (Whateva’). Let me be,” went a line from one of his early collage works. He loved to imitate political slogans in his titles: Attack on my Art is an Attack on Socialism and Progress. He took down authorities and playfully occupied the space: Work is a disease – Karl Marx.
It’s very difficult to write about Stilinović and not slip into his style of short, trenchant phrases. How astute and humorous they are, how efficient in keeping us vigilant. “Language is pain. Language is possessed by ideology,” he said. The text of another work: An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist.
Since the beginning of his career began in 1970s Zagreb, he never stopped questioning conventions—whether in collage or photography or film. His notorious artist books began as an open edition: As soon as he would give one away, he would produce another.
There is no art without laziness, Stilinović claimed, teasing both socialist and capitalist obsessions with work and money. He was always opposing social norms, both in the East and in the West, examining his own human and artistic status while remaining obstinate toward any authority. He was proud to be an autodidact. Stilinović’s works are mainly simple in their execution—handwriting on cardboard, paper, plates, cakes—meticulously engaged with poverty, death, money, economy, and pain. Money is the only language everybody understands.
He loved potatoes, a simple ingredient. “There are two kinds of art: potato art and cake art,” he told curator Dan Byers and me during a conversation at e-flux during his New York exhibition there two years ago. “New York is full of cake art.” When the lecture adjourned, slices of cake had been carefully placed on the stairway of the gallery.
I have no time is another of his artist books, filled with repetitions of the titular statement. It sounds like a mantra for our age, but Stilinović found it an outrageous and dangerous mode. Stilinović and the art historian Branka Stipancić, his partner in life and art, were always generous with their time. In their apartment on Ljudevit Posavski Street in Zagreb, where Stilinović used to organize his exhibitions, they would meet with artists, curators, students, friends, visitors—these rituals were particularly important for young local artists and curators. We learned so much from them. We laughed, we discussed, we listened, we asked many questions, we wanted to know more about the past, we shared, we worked together, we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. Stilinović was taciturn—sometimes or even mainly—with a canny smile under his mustache, a distinctive sense of humor, a strong charisma and warm humanity.
Szymborska’s poem is called “Vocabulary.” Stilinović left the title out, though I am sure he considered it a good one. He also omitted the poem’s central verses. They resume so well the complex and multilayered relation to language, East-West, power and politics. I hardly think this was an accident, or that he simply had no time: Stilinović was a master of voids, of mordant irony, and deceptive simplicity.
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?” she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is climate.
“Madame,” I want to reply, “my people’s poets do all their writing in mittens. I don’t mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown out the windstorms’ constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an ax at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame.”
That’s what I mean to say. But I’ve forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I’m not sure of icicle and ax.
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?”
“Pas du tout,” I answer icily.
Ana Janevski is associate curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
