The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

port which wasn't spent on the production of
a work by Igor Grubit but on his seven-day
vacation in one of the irresistible summer
resorts on the Adriatic coast. Sure enough. this
sudden eruption of laziness is in direct relation
to the infrastructure that supports and organ-
izes the art production of young artists.
Referring to the concept of work within an
Eastern European, transitional and post-com-
munist context, Mladen Stilinovit (b. 1947)in
his statement In Praise of Laziness, read for the
first time in Gent in 1993. at a moment when
the short-lived enthusiasm for Eastern European art
had already melted into an indifference of 'inex-
orable logic of the capital'singles out laziness as a
socialist circumstance of art which is lost in contact
with Western models that demand the knowledge
of the system and well-organized and codified
artistic behavior from artists. Convoking Duchamp
as the representative of non-work, and Malevich,
who in 1921 proclaimed laziness to be the real truth
of mankind, Stilinovi questions the destiny of lazi-
ness. The outbreak of consumer laziness in the
action Resting is not just a praise of laziness, but
also of silence, of protesting withdrawal. The
stressful lack of time and over-activity needed in
order to keep 'normality' going produce this delay.
But a complete withdrawal from labor is not possi-
ble anyhow, because the brain works all the time.
Toni Negri speaks of a brain-machine in which the
center of bio-power is located, which emancipates
work. Paradoxically, labor is still conceived as
employment, as work 'employed' by capitalism
through the structures linking it to fixed capital.
although fixed capital today has moved to people's
brains, turning it into bio-power located in the brain
of laborers. Labor has emancipated itself through
its capacity to be immaterial and intellectual and
herein lays its radical possibility for the revolution
of contemporary capitalist society.
Ever since Tanja Dabo polished the gallery floors
(160 m2) at the Youth Salon in 1998 before the offi-
Tanja Dabo
The Earliest Memories, 2000
cial exhibition opening, the issue of maintain-
ing everyday life, be it the maintenance of
material resources or of communication, has
become crucial for her work. The action of
floor polishing is read differently in different
contexts, varying from a meaningless. absurd
action to a metaphor of caring and mainte-
nance of the space we live in. The value of
generally devalued manual work is thus
affirmed, and the work of maintaining life
becomes equal to artistic work and it ques-
tions its value as surplus. as an ornament
which makes the environment more tolerable
but is not necessary.
It seems that the present moment of the
Croatian visual art scene is the one in which
transitional society with significant delay but
not diminished efficiency tries to turn the
achievements of conceptual art, which obvi-
ously rates well internationally, into its own.
The quality of indefiniteness and delayed time
of that moment turns repetition into an excit-
ing experiment with an unpredictable result in
which the frustrating dream of the never
attained ideal working conditions of the
Western European cultural worker and expo-
sure to the completely different brutalities of
transitional economic order produce a tense
situation in which all possibilities are still
open.
49 I THE MISFITS