The Artist Works

Across media, the consistent themes Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016) explored in his art were existential and political: language, economy, pain, and death. This essay focuses on the artist's related, decades‐long engagement with the notion of ‘work’, particularly a series of photographs titled Umjetnik radi (translated as ‘Artist at Work’) from 1978 that show Stilinović lying in bed. I argue that these images are often passed over too quickly, especially when they have been interpreted as gestures of resistance to capitalist production. I draw on Stilinović's projects on the subjects of work, idleness and laziness, texts from the history of European literature and philosophy on the subjects of work and non‐work, and passages from the history of East European state socialism, to perform a slower analysis of Umjetnik radi that offers work as an ontological operation, and the difference between work and non‐work as indeterminate

Art · Art history · Epistemology · Existentialism · Laziness · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Resistance (ecology) · State (computer science) · Work (physics) · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy