Fragment: Mladen Stilinović

Bad Art Writing has given me cause to explore the darker regions of my hard drive, where I keep finding fragments like this one from mid-2011.

Within the small but extraordinarily fertile artistic milieu of 1970s Yugoslavia, Mladen Stilinović found a means by which to unassumingly and not unamusingly highlight a revolutionary intellectual pretence of staggering — and, I submit, unflagging — absurdity, that of a hierarchy of colours. Even in the most radical of modernisms, red and black had been afforded a status apart, a symbolic value of mythic proportions imbuing a self-belief of historically determined, even messianic, revolutionary inheritance. Pink, meanwhile, was utterly marginalised, too girly, too queer, too impure to qualify as anything more than decorative or pretty. So what does dissolving the chromatic classes do, as Stilinović does? On one hand it suggests that there is a relationship between the two, and that this relationship is direct. On the other it demonstrates that this relationship is disempowered, indeed totally muddled, when the two classes are presented together, that there is no immanent reason for the their role in the absurd hierarchy, that as with all class divisions, inheritance relies for its privilege on a specific set of political associations. And, rather hilariously, these are classes that can have no impact on the form of those political associations — or, indeed, any interest in them.

And there is a footnote to the sentence on red and black:

As hyperbolic as this may sound, the unimaginative decision of ‘the largest radical publisher in the English-speaking world’ to brand its ‘Pocket Communism’ series in precisely these shades speaks volumes for their appeal to the petty narcissisms of the libidinal economy of political economy