ABSTRACT 
 
 
Title of Thesis: THE SLOTH OF THE AUTHOR: IN DEFENSE OF A 
CALL TO INACTION 
 
 Laura Michiko Brady, Master of Arts, 2020 
 
 
Thesis Directed By: Professor Steven Mansbach 
 Department of Art History and Archaeology 
 
 
Mladen Stilinovi??s (1947-2016) text ?In Praise of Laziness? (1993) makes 
seemingly absurd claims about the relationship between art and laziness which are most 
often interpreted as political commentary in his typically cynical brand of humor. While 
this humor is indeed a consistent and essential element of his work, such readings fail to 
critically assess the depth of his notion of ?laziness.? I conduct a thorough unpacking of 
his definition in order to reveal ?laziness? as a form of constructive passivity with a 
potentially pacifist dimension. With particular focus on his artist books and works 
dealing with themes of time and pain, I demonstrate the myriad ways in which 
Stilinovi??s notion of ?laziness? manifests throughout his oeuvre. Contextualization of 
?In Praise of Laziness? has been dominated by oversimplified narratives of a global 
?East/West? divide while Stilinovi??s particular geopolitical circumstances as a member 
of the last Yugoslav generation have been overlooked. Following a careful 
recontextualization of ?In Praise of Laziness,? I suggest that this work may be considered 
a critical response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE SLOTH OF THE AUTHOR: IN DEFENSE OF A CALL TO INACTION 
by 
Laura Michiko Brady 
 
 
 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements of the degree of 
Master of Arts 
2020 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
 
Professor Steven Mansbach, Chair 
Associate Professor Jordana Moore Saggese 
Associate Professor Alicia Volk
 
Table of Contents 
 
Table of Contents????????????????????????????.ii 
 
Introduction??????????????????????????????..1 
 
Chapter 1: Coming to Terms with Laziness??????????????????8 
 
Chapter 2: Locating Lazy Manifestations??????????????????..33 
 
Chapter 3: Remapping the Political Particularities of Lazy Landscapes??.????..63 
 
Conclusion??????????????????????????????.78 
 
Bibliography?????????????????????????????..82 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii 
 
Introduction 
 
 
In his 1993 text ?In Praise of Laziness? (fig. 1),1 Mladen Stilinovi? (1947-2016) 
makes gross generalizations and seemingly absurd claims about the nature of art and 
announces its demise amid the dissolution of Cold War-era divisions: 1) ?art cannot exist 
any more in the West,? because 2) ?artists in the West are not lazy,? and 3) ?there is no 
art without laziness.?2 These assertions--none of which are entirely original--form a series 
of claims in which each one is justified by the next. However, this final claim about the 
necessity of laziness for art, upon which the others are precariously stacked, are never 
quite explained. Stilinovi? also defines laziness, reiterates its alleged necessity, deems it a 
moral imperative, and issues a call to inaction: ?Those virtues of laziness are important 
factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.?3  
?In Praise of Laziness? represents the culmination of his decades-long 
engagement with this theme, typically implied by his critical stance toward the topic of 
?work.? Yet, this text remains somewhat of an anomaly within the context of his oeuvre 
because it represents a formal break for Stilinovi?. Contrary to the majority of his works,  
                                               
1 This work has since been retranslated and republished numerous times in a wide variety of print and 
online sources, resulting in multiple versions with slightly different texts. These differences are few and 
minor, consisting primarily of grammatical errors and having virtually no impact on its meaning. However, 
one of the variations involves the title, which has appeared as ?The Praise of Laziness,? ?In Praise of 
Laziness,? and simply ?Praise of Laziness.? Stilinovi??s original document (one of several copies shown in 
fig. 1, treated here as an image because it is frequently exhibited as such alongside his other works) uses 
?The Praise of Laziness? and includes many spelling and grammatical errors. After assessing the variety of 
translations, I have chosen to follow those who refer to it as ?In Praise of Laziness? for several reasons, 
including because translations employing this title tend to be more grammatically correct throughout the 
text, and it is frequently employed by reputable art historical sources. (The Croatian title, ?Pohvala 
Lijenosti,? does not include ?the? as the Croatian language does not have articles.) 
2 Mladen Stilinovi?, ?In Praise of Laziness,? 1993, Atlas of Transformation (Tranzit, 2011), 
http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/l/laziness/in-praise-of-laziness-mladen-
stilinovic.html. 
3 Stilinovi?, ?In Praise of Laziness.? 
1 
 
Figure 1. Mladen Stilinovi?, "The Praise of Laziness," 1993, text, variable dimensions. Stilinovi? 
presented this text for the first time by reading it aloud at the Opus Operandi Gallery in Ghent as part of 
the NSK Embassy on May 2, 1993. After his presentation, he ate a piece of cake before the audience.  
(Source: http://centrevox.ca/en/exposition/mladen-stilinovic)  
2 
 
its objectives (articulating definitions, analyzing global political developments, and 
anticipating their cultural consequences) require that it conform to conventional use of 
language.4 In his essay ?Against Dictionaries: The East as She is Spoke by the West,? 
Roger Conover reminds us that ?all classification systems, whether maps, dictionaries, or 
exhibitions, are inherently ideological constructions reflecting the social, political, and 
cultural values of the contexts in which they originate. A map is a polemic first, a locator 
second.?5 Stilinovi? recognizes this and makes language itself one of the main targets in 
his relentless attempts to dismantle the ideological tools of power. Most often, he works 
subtractively and at the ?micro-level,? isolating individual components (words, symbols, 
colors, etc.) from their ordinary contexts and employing relentless repetition or absurd 
juxtaposition in an effort to ?de-symbolize? them.6 As articulated by Alejandra Labastida, 
Stilinovi? is not interested in critiquing the content of any particular ideology, but rather 
in ?neutralizing the apparatuses of by [sic] which power is reproduced?[his works] 
propose the absurd as an antidote to whichever ideology might be lying in wait for us 
around the next corner.?7 Boris Groys echoes this interpretation: 
Entropic processes permanently undermine every system, dissolving it into 
material chaos...the modern/contemporary artist is a collaborator in this 
entropy...From today?s perspective, one can say that only very few artists of the 
twentieth century resisted the seduction of the ?new order? and remained faithful 
                                               
4 While ?In Praise of Laziness'' is not the only text written by Stilinovi?, it does maintain a level of logical 
progression and conventional coherence that others up until that point do not. 
5 Roger Conover, ?Against Dictionaries: The East as She is Spoke by the West,? in East Art Map: 
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006), 350. 
6 Igor Zabel, ?A Short Walk Through Mladen Stilinovi??s Four Rooms,? in Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist at 
Work = Umetnik na delu, 1973-1983, eds. Alenka Gregori? and Branka Stipan?i? (Ljubljana: Galerija 
?kuc, 2005), 15, 19. 
7 Alejandra Labastida, ?1+2= or, How To Manipulate That Which Manipulates You,? in 1 + 2 = Mladen 
Stilinovi?, ed. Ekaterina Alvarez Romero (Mexico City: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, 
UNAM, 2015), 13, 16. 
3 
 
to their union with the forces of entropy and anarchy. One of these very few 
artists is undoubtedly Mladen Stilinovi?.8 
 
 
Thus, Groys situates Stilinovi? in an ahistorical realm, above the naive majority who fall 
prey to whatever political agendas populate their time. Such emphasis on his 
deconstructive tendency and consistent refusal of ideology itself overwhelmingly 
dominates the scholarly narrative of his career, portraying him as a timeless cynic whose 
absurdist humor simultaneously exposes and negates dogma. Considering the 
predominant notion of laziness as a condemnable quality, his unwavering advocacy for 
its practice exemplifies the nihilist humor that characterizes most of his work. Yet, 
according to Stilinovi?, ?humour is not a joke? because ?through it, the truth can be 
understood.?9 While Groys? interpretation appears applicable to most of his work, the 
coherent composition and evaluative assertions of ?In Praise of Laziness? seem to mark a 
moment of weakness in resisting the seduction of the system. Despite its fundamentally 
uncharacteristic diversions, it remains among Stilinovi??s most widely celebrated works. 
What is it about laziness that warrants succumbing to the formal conventions of language 
he otherwise so ardently resists? This question, as well as those arising from his staunch 
but baseless claim that ?art cannot exist without laziness,? will serve as my main points 
of departure: What exactly is the relationship between art and laziness? 
 Stilinovi? situates ?In Praise of Laziness? within the dichotomous narrative of a 
global ?East-West? divide and mourns the ?East? as it becomes ?formered? in the wake of 
                                               
8 Boris Groys, ?Poetics of Entropy: The Post-Suprematist Art of Mladen Stilinovi?,? in 1 + 2 = Mladen 
Stilinovi?, 71-72. 
9 Sabina Sabolovi? and Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi? in Conversation with Sabina Sabolovi?: I?ve 
Got Time,? trans. Graham McMaster, in Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, ed. Branka Stipan?i? 
(Istanbul: Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, 2007), 43. 
4 
 
capitalism?s eastward expansion: ?As an artist, I learned from both the East (socialism) 
and the West (capitalism). Of course, now when the borders and political systems have 
changed, such an experience will no longer be possible? Artists from the East are lazy; 
whether they will stay lazy now when they are no longer Eastern artists, remains to be 
seen.?10 Scholars and critics addressing this text tend to follow suit, interpreting his work 
primarily through the same post-socialist lens broadly applied to Eastern Europe at large. 
While this is obviously a significant aspect of Stilinovi??s political context, it fails to 
address some important particularities of his more immediate geopolitical circumstances 
as a member of the last Yugoslav generation. Pre-1989, Yugoslavia held a unique 
position among the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe because it did not 
belong to the Soviet Bloc and was able to implement its own brand of socialism. Later, 
while the rest of Europe was witnessing the peaceful dissolution of Cold War-era divides, 
Yugoslavia?s internal borders were being violently redrawn through a series of brutal 
civil wars. In other words, the Yugoslav experience remained unique within Eastern 
Europe both before and after the major shift in the political world order. Croatia, 
Stilinovi??s home within Yugoslavia, was right in the middle of its war for independence 
when he wrote ?In Praise of Laziness.? I hope to complicate the dominant narratives 
surrounding his work by reconsidering it within his local context, and I contend that ?In 
Praise of Laziness? may be read not only as a post-socialist lament for art, but also as a 
critical response to the violence accompanying Yugoslavia?s dissolution in the 1990s. 
This recontextualization will allow new and more constructive ways of interpreting his 
                                               
10 Stilinovi?, ?In Praise of Laziness.? 
5 
 
notion of laziness beyond its significance in art, exposing its positive potential as a 
pacifist attitude. 
 I have decided to begin by addressing Stilinovi??s notion of laziness 
independently from his political context in order to allow room for new interpretations 
unbound by his spatiotemporal specificity. While understanding his particular context 
forms a substantial part of my argument and is crucial to understanding his work and 
notion of laziness, I am ultimately less interested in what we can learn about Stilinovi? 
than in what we can learn from him. As mentioned earlier, the main ideas expressed by 
?In Praise of Laziness? are not original--this work joins a long lineage of lazy literature. I 
will use chapter one to conduct a close reading of the text and thoroughly unpack 
Stilinovi??s definition of laziness, exploring its many potential meanings. Then, I will 
situate it among notions of laziness expressed by other authors, including several who 
also recognize its relevance to art, and draw comparisons to some other practices and 
philosophies akin to his notion of laziness. In sum, the first chapter will seek to answer 
the questions: What are the possible meanings of Stilinovi??s notion of laziness, and how 
do they fit into the grand lazy scheme? The next chapter will occupy the landscape of 
laziness mapped out by the previous chapter to locate manifestations of laziness in 
Stilinovi??s other works. Focusing primarily on his textual works and artist books, I will 
demonstrate the myriad ways in which he employs, performs, and/or imposes laziness 
with his work: How exactly does Stilinovi? practice the laziness that he preaches? 
Finally, the third chapter will zoom in on his particular political context(s) and address 
the problems with accounts of his work that have ignored these particularities. In light of 
6 
 
this contextualization, I will reconsider his notion of laziness for its positive potential as a 
way of existence. 
  
7 
 
Chapter 1: Coming to Terms with Laziness 
 
 
Of all the recurring themes in his work, laziness is the only one that Stilinovi? 
does not attempt to render meaningless through ceaseless decontextualized repetition. In 
fact, in a completely uncharacteristic move, he actively articulates his own definition of 
laziness. Being otherwise opposed to the act of defining and to the ideology inherent in 
language itself, he makes an exception for laziness. Furthermore, he endows laziness with 
a fundamental role in art. In his unrelenting, hyper-critical battle against ideological 
power, laziness becomes an ally rather than an object of critique. 
Attempting to define ?laziness? in conventional dictionary-terms, i.e. 
consolidating its meaning within a narrow selection of concrete terms, would result in a 
semantic goose chase which I do not intend to pursue and which would go against the 
spirit of Stilinovi?. It would restrict the meaningful potential of laziness, and the purpose 
of my endeavor is to do exactly the opposite: to entertain Stilinovi??s notions, to discover 
what laziness can achieve, to exhume laziness from the dictionary and put its positive 
qualities to use. Though I do not intend to write a definition, I will consult those written 
by others--I will scrutinize, oppose, and align with them, expand them, extract their 
enriching potential, and mark them as points of reference for paving Stilinovi??s 
particular lazy path. Rather than define ?laziness,? it appears more fruitful to explore the 
many potential meanings and manifestations denoted by the term as articulated by 
Stilinovi? as well as his peers and society at large. Such an understanding will allow us to 
recognize laziness in all its forms when and where it occurs, and to identify its actual, 
perhaps even measurable, benefits in reality. Thus, this chapter aims not to define a word, 
8 
 
but to excavate the range of ideas, attitudes, and practices contained within and connected 
to that word.  
Stilinovi? is far from alone in advocating the practice and necessity of what he 
terms laziness. He credits two major precedents in his text by quoting Marcel Duchamp 
and Kazimir Malevich, and likely chooses to cite artists (arguably, two of the twentieth 
century?s most influential artists within their respective geographical spheres) to 
demonstrate his claim that laziness is a necessity for the existence of art. However, there 
is an abundance of literature by a diverse array of authors coming from outside of the 
visual arts praising laziness: French revolutionary Paul Lafargue penned his polemic The 
Right to be Lazy in 1883, in which he critiques the ?dogma of work? inherent to 
capitalism and dreams of a society that will allow its citizens to ?practice the virtues of 
laziness.?11 Like Stilinovi?, Lafargue draws a connection between laziness and art: ?O, 
Laziness, have thou mercy upon this eternal misery! O, Laziness, mother of the arts and 
the noble virtues, be thou balsam for the pains of mankind!?12  
Other advocates have employed synonyms (such as idleness or leisure) to 
describe nearly identical notions. British philosopher Bertrand Russell?s 1925 essay ?In 
Praise of Idleness? observes that ?leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times 
leisure for the few was rendered possible only by the labors of the many. But their labors 
were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good.?13 These alternative 
terms tend to have a more neutral appeal than ?laziness,? which is haunted by decidedly 
                                               
11 Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy; Being a Refutation of the ?Right to Work? of 1848, trans. Harriet E. 
Lothrop (New York: International Publishing Co., 1898), 8, 32. 
12 Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 41. 
13 Bertrand Russell, ?In Praise of Idleness,? Harper?s Magazine, October, 1932, 
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/. 
9 
 
negative connotations. In his proposal to use laziness as a method of post-qualitative 
inquiry in academic research, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve articulates these negative 
connotations and outlines some of the ongoing debates surrounding laziness: 
In contemporary western vernacular, laziness often equates lethargy. It is 
associated with concepts like idleness, leisureliness, and sloth...it carries a 
generally negative connotation...in one perspective, laziness is valued as the free 
time to do nothing. In another, free time should be spent on self-improvement: 
going to the gym, taking extra classes, pursuing a side job for additional income. 
Once thought to be the expression of elitism, laziness was reserved as a luxury 
only for those who could avoid work on the labors of others. Over the history of 
the emergent and ascendant United States--mirroring the ascendancy of 
industrialization and capitalism--leisure time has increasingly been seen as an 
opportunity to self-improve, as additional time to contribute to something via 
means of production...those who choose to do nothing with their leisure time, any 
time spent not working, have been relegated to the despised status of lazy.14 
 
 
As we shall see, those who champion practices and mindsets that resemble what 
Stilinovi? calls laziness often avoid using this term, and sometimes even explicitly deny 
the ?lazy? label in their own defense. This knee-jerk reaction, especially its presence 
among academics (i.e. those whose careers are based on critical thinking), is one 
indication of the extent to which the negative implications acquired by laziness have 
eclipsed its core meaning(s).  
 While the negative connotations of laziness are secondary to the aims of this 
chapter, which is primarily concerned with identifying the practices and attitudes 
encapsulated by the term rather than its cultural evaluation, it is worth acknowledging 
that Stilinovi? chose to use ?laziness? as shorthand for his philosophy despite all of its 
baggage. It seems plausible that he deliberately chose to use ?laziness? rather than a more 
neutral term precisely in order to exploit its perceived negativity for provocative 
                                               
14 Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, ?Laziness in Postqualitative Inquiry,? Qualitative Inquiry 24, no. 9 (2018): 
694-5, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417744579. 
10 
 
purposes. To suggest praise for a decidedly negative trait fits neatly within Stilinovi??s 
brand of humor, which often relies on absurd juxtapositions. 
His unapologetic advocacy of laziness might also be seen as indicating a wider 
social-historical awareness of his own particular and layered peripheral position, not only 
as a person from Eastern Europe, but also from the Balkans. In her seminal book 
Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova traces the development of primarily negative 
Balkan stereotypes as articulated by western travelers and perpetuated by western 
journalism, literature, and scholarship over the course of the past few centuries.15 In the 
imagination of Western Europe and the United States, the Balkans acquired meaning 
beyond their objectively defined geographical designation and became associated with a 
particular kind of societal backwardness. Seen not as a worthy destination in its own right 
but as a mere liminal space between Europe (?the West?) and Asia (?the East?), the 
Balkans became known as the ??other? of Europe?--importantly distinct from otherness 
from Europe, which would grant the Balkans completeness in their otherness.16 Instead, 
as they remain a part of Europe, their perceived otherness renders them an ?incomplete 
self.?17 Among the traits frequently assigned to inhabitants of the region in this discourse 
of ?balkanism? as early as the nineteenth century are ?their inability to work hard? and ?a 
curious mixture of industry and thrift with laziness and apathy.?18 
There are abundant examples of Stilinovi??s peers demonstrating awareness of 
these negative stereotypes, frequently employing ?subversive affirmation? or 
                                               
15 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 
16 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 3. 
17 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 18. 
18 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 98-99. 
11 
 
overidentification as critical tactics in response.19 Institutional recognition of artists? 
tendencies to engage with such discourse was exemplified by an exhibition held in 2004 
at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana titled Seven Sins: Ljubljana - Moscow. These ?sins? 
were purportedly applicable to Central and Eastern Europe in its entirety, as the 
exhibition thematically linked the two capital cities perceived as the opposite poles (in 
terms of both geographical location and cultural/political policy) within the formerly 
socialist countries. The ?seven (Eastern European) sins? (simultaneously introduced in 
the exhibition catalogue as ?virtues?) were identified as: ?collectivism, utopianism, 
masochism, cynicism, sloth, unprofessionalism, and love of the West.?20 Arguably, 
Stilinovi? is guilty of engaging in all but utopianism and love of the West. However, he 
affords laziness a unique position, privileging it above all other themes addressed in his 
work: laziness gets articulately defined, explained, performed, practiced, lauded, 
defended, mourned, championed. All of his other major themes--language, time, work, 
pain, money, etc.--get aggressively deconstructed. Laziness emerges as the indisputable 
protagonist of Stilinovi??s worldview.  
In 2004, Stilinovi? was invited to speak at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana on 
the occasion of Slovenia?s entry into the European Union. His assessment of the situation 
was characteristically and predictably cynical, as Western Europe?s economic and 
political absorption of the westernmost, formerly Yugoslav nation marked one step closer 
to the end of art he regretfully anticipated nearly a decade earlier with ?In Praise of 
                                               
19 Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, ?Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,? in East 
Art Map. 
20 Tamara Soban, ed., 7 Grehov: Ljubljana - Moskva [7 Sins: Ljubljana - Moscow] (Ljubljana: Moderna 
Galerija, 2004). The English translation on the title page, on which the list of ?sins/virtues? is introduced, 
uses the term ?sloth,? while the following essays employ the term ?laziness.? However, both are translated 
from the same Slovenian term ?lenoba,? for which ?laziness? appears to be the more appropriate 
translation. 
12 
 
Laziness.? Acknowledging these negative perceptions pervading western notions of the 
East, Stilinovi? complained: ?Of all the insults, the worst is the one targeting our laziness 
because it challenges its authenticity.?21 
Stilinovi? is certainly aware of the widely perceived peripheral status assigned to 
his geographical origin and the historically persistent negative preconceptions associated 
with it, and he may deliberately lean into those negative associations in order to enhance 
the provocative nature of his work--but his ardent identification with laziness, as he has 
stated and as I will demonstrate, is not merely a satirical critique of this patronizing 
discourse. Rather, it is genuine, and his task is not to dispel the myth that eastern artists 
are lazy, but to dispel the myth that laziness is bad.  
Some aspects of Stilinovi??s definition are straightforward, self-explanatory, and 
in alignment with conventionally accepted notions of laziness; some appear strange and 
irrelevant. Some are redundant, while some are contradictory. We might infer from these 
contradictions that he recognizes multiple forms or dimensions of laziness. Without 
further ado, let us begin to unpack his definition:  
Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time?total 
amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. 
It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, of futile concentration.22  
 
 
?Absence of movement and thought? means physical and mental stasis, inaction, 
idleness, total passivity. ?Dumb? time, in the sense of being unable or unwilling to speak, 
implies time spent silently, producing auditory nothingness, vocal passivity. Using 
?dumb? rather than another term denoting silence produces an important distinction 
                                               
21 Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Entry into (Europe),? in Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A 
Critical Anthology, ed. Ana Janevski et al., (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 223. 
22 Stilinovi?, ?In Praise of Laziness.? 
13 
 
between merely experiencing silence and being silent, ?dumb? implying the latter. In 
other words, ?dumb time? does not preclude the lazy from listening. Alternatively, 
?dumb? can be understood to describe time itself (as opposed to the manner in which one 
spends time during laziness). In this case, time is silenced, ignored, irrelevant--laziness 
liberates us from the dictates of time. ?Total amnesia? is forgetting everything; it 
abandons not only all memories of the past but also all previously held intentions for the 
future, forcing a fully immersive experience of the present. ?Indifference? lacks opinions, 
emotions, convictions, even will--and therefore lacks an agenda or direction for the 
future. It also adds a layer to the absence of action, namely the absence of reaction: 
thoughts and actions, or lack thereof, remain unaffected by external factors. In this sense, 
indifference can become resistance. On the other hand, it could also mean stability, 
neutrality, or even a tendency toward agreeability and acceptance as the path of least 
resistance. Indifference, as a lack of motivation or will to enact change, can mean 
universally adopting a policy of contentedness. ?Staring at nothing? employs the bodily 
sense of sight--and, notably, employs the verb ?to stare? positively (rather than ?not 
staring?), suggesting that this is not passivity, but an active pursuit of visual nothingness. 
On the contrary, ?non-activity? is passivity. ?Impotence,? as the inability to act, 
elaborates on non-activity by implying that it is not achieved by choice--laziness is a state 
of powerlessness. ?Sheer stupidity? means that laziness lacks intelligence, i.e. abandons 
knowledge and rejects reason. However, this could be spun to mean that laziness is a 
state of open-mindedness uncorrupted by preconceived notions and learned habits of 
thought. Laziness as ?stupidity? becomes a fertile ground for developing fresh 
perspectives. As a markedly negative experience that comes in both physical and 
14 
 
psychological forms, ?pain? implies vulnerability in those who suffer it. A ?time of pain? 
implies its persistence--enduring discomfort. Contrary to popular opinion which 
considers it an aversion to (difficult) work, laziness (as endurance of pain) is not easy. 
?Futile concentration? is fruitless effort: concentration is the devotion of energy to a sole, 
specific task, object, or in this case, lack thereof (?staring at nothing? is one mode of 
futile concentration). Its futility relieves laziness of tangible or quantifiable purpose. It is 
a means to no particular end, it has no goal beyond itself, it results in nothing, it has no 
predefined intention or direction. Laziness is an endeavor unburdened by expectation, 
free from the mandate to produce. 
Scrutiny of his definition reveals certain fundamental components which I will 
address briefly here and, as I will argue in the following chapters, manifest in his other 
work. First, laziness is both a biological and psychological phenomenon: it depends on 
the senses and bodily experience as well as intellectual function, or suspension thereof. 
Second, it is centered on concepts related to negation: absence, nothingness, inaction, 
inability, erasure, etc. Third, it involves multiple forms of deliberate inaction, or active 
passivity. This oxymoron leads to the fourth point, which exposes some contradictions: 
certain terms imply inability rather than unwillingness, suggesting that laziness is an 
involuntary state. This is at odds with Stilinovi??s insistence that laziness ?must be 
practiced and perfected.? How can something be at once intentional and involuntary? 
(Perhaps the occurrence of laziness is not within our control, but something that happens 
to us, which we can actively decide to either embrace or resist.) Fifth, futility (i.e. 
unproductiveness) emerges as a crucial defining factor with its implications of accepted 
aimlessness and subsequent freedom. Stilinovi? expressed the absence of intention as a 
15 
 
condition of freedom in his approach to artistic activity, shedding some light on his 
conviction that art relies on laziness:  
I have never had any strategy or decided intention when it came to my activity as 
an artist. I see artistic activity as ?free shifting.? It?s about the freedom to move in 
all the directions that may interest me; the freedom of movement in art and 
life...Art is also nothing because it is an activity without end, without a goal. It is 
very important to understand the ?nothing? not in a pessimistic way, but rather as 
a manifestation of freedom.23  
 
 
For Stilinovi?, embracing the futile nature of his endeavors is liberating. Not having 
defined goals eliminates the possibility of disappointment due to failure and, at the same 
time, opens up infinite possibilities. Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, laziness is 
articulated as a time-based notion. This is also recognized by the curators of the Seven 
Sins exhibition: ?[Laziness] is, above all, a different means of structuring time.?24 This 
applies to conventional dictionary definitions as well, in that one?s degree of laziness can 
be measured by the ratio of time spent active versus inactive. However, for Stilinovi?, it 
is both a way of spending time and an attitude toward time. Stilinovi? approximated 
?total amnesia? when voicing his intention of embodying this temporal aspect: ?I try to 
live in the present. I?m not so much attached to the past, and especially not to the 
future.?25 His laziness is a reconfiguration of one?s relationship to and perception of time. 
Finally, I emphasize ?perception? because it can be understood as an emergent property 
of the aforementioned factors of laziness. When we pursue a passive state, we relinquish 
                                               
23 Ariane Daoust and Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Idler // Mladen Stilinovi? // An Artist Who Invents Nothing,? 
excerpt from a conversation between Mladen Stilinovi? and Ariane Daoust, Zagreb, June 2009, VOX no. 33 
(May 2010). http://centrevox.ca/en/exposition/mladen-stilinovic/. 
24 Zdenka Badovinac, Viktor Misiano, and Igor Zabel, ?Seven Sins: Ljubljana - Moscow,? in  7 Grehov: 
Ljubljana - Moskva [7 Sins: Ljubljana - Moscow], ed. Tamara Soban (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2004), 
9. 
25 Mladen Stilinovi? and Nata?a Vasiljevi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?: Work is Disease,? Flash Art (January-
February 2013): 89. 
16 
 
intentions of affecting our surroundings, which allows an opportunity for our 
surroundings to affect us. We become more adept at perception when we are not 
preoccupied with our own actions or thoughts. Recall how ?dumb time? forbids the lazy 
from speaking, but not from listening. Laziness as an exercise of perceptive abilities 
encourages more thorough understanding of, and consequently more harmonious 
relationships with, our environments and all that they contain.  
One important aspect of conventional definitions not explicitly stated in 
Stilinovi??s (but acknowledged in other forms later in his text) is its oppositional 
relationship to work, which we have already briefly encountered in Lafargue and Russell. 
A typical dictionary defines ?lazy? as ?unwilling to work or be active; doing as little as 
possible.?26 Classifying laziness as a matter of will disagrees with Stilinovi??s implication 
of its involuntariness, and it is also a key factor in the term?s negative connotations. 
Being unwilling rather than unable (?impotent?) to work, in a society where work is 
considered virtuous, becomes a symptom of moral decay. The fact that its negative 
associations stem from the implication of will is further illustrated by the neutral and/or 
positive tone with which we apply the term to the nonhuman or inanimate, i.e. things 
typically believed to lack agency. The lazy Susan, for example, promotes ease of access. 
The lazy river, named for the slow pace of its flow, is a venue for enjoyment and 
relaxation. Both are luxurious in nature and are valued precisely because they cater to 
human laziness. These examples expose the tortured nature of dominant attitudes toward 
laziness: it is simultaneously condemned and desired. Russell observed the economic 
implications of this contradiction: ?Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money 
                                               
26 ?Lazy,? Oxford Learner?s Dictionaries (Oxford University Press, 2020). 
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/lazy. 
17 
 
[working] is good and spending money [leisure] is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of 
one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good but 
keyholes are bad.?27 
Yet the second half of this definition, ?doing as little as possible,? does not 
present laziness as inherently wrong. In fact, it presents laziness as an economical and 
resourceful approach to work: laziness does not necessarily prevent the job from getting 
done, it only eliminates unnecessary expenditures of energy in the working process. In 
this sense, advocating laziness equates to the common token of advice to ?work smarter, 
not harder.? This line of thought begins to illuminate one of the already well-established 
links between laziness and creativity, namely that aversion to work prompts innovative 
solutions to minimize or avoid it, i.e. laziness breeds creativity, innovation, invention, 
etc. This causality is often summoned to dispute the notion that these things are born 
from necessity, but these two allegedly conflicting concepts--laziness and necessity--are 
inseparable for Stilinovi?. 
While Stilinovi? is obviously aware of the generally accepted opposition between 
work and laziness, he does not endorse it. Perhaps this is why he makes no explicit 
mention of ?work? in his own definition and chooses instead to acknowledge the 
paradigm by quoting those who do. In a 2013 interview, Stilinovi? said: ?I think 
[laziness] is important, and that all those who glorify work are guilty.?28 This statement 
does not necessarily condemn work; it condemns work?s glorification at the expense of 
laziness. A year later he responded to a question about the relationship between work and 
laziness by explaining that they are not fundamentally opposed but supplementary tasks, 
                                               
27 Russell, ?In Praise of Idleness.? 
28 Stilinovi? and Vasiljevi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?: Work is Disease,? 89. 
18 
 
and reiterated his 1993 claim that laziness is a prerequisite for art.29 In his view, laziness, 
work, and art appear to form a symbiotic relationship. While it can be argued that 
laziness is valuable and worthwhile in its own right, Stilinovi? considers laziness a 
crucial component of a process which makes work possible and leads to art. 
This notion of laziness and work as two sides of the same coin is by no means 
original. Rainer Maria Rilke shared this view: 
I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to 
remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. 
Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are 
nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within 
us during idle days...In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, 
with devotion, possibly even with joy.30 
 
 
Similarly to Stilinovi?, Rilke advocated the deliberate practice of idleness. Kim Brockett 
echoes Rilke in her analysis of Stilinovi??s laziness, writing that ?laziness becomes the 
illusion of leisure. It is still a form of work, however: not inert at all, but a robust and 
fertile site essential to the production of more work.?31  
While these interpretations acknowledge the value of laziness, they still insist on 
its subordination to work. Accomplishing work remains the end goal and ultimate source 
of value, while laziness is only a prerequisite. Laziness is demoted to the position of 
work?s assistant. In his 1877 essay ?An Apology for Idlers,? Robert Louis Stevenson 
rejected this hierarchy by asserting that ?pleasures are more beneficial than duties? and 
                                               
29 Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Abeceda nezavisne kulture: Mladen Stilinovi?, intervju,? interview by Matija 
Mrakov?i?, uploaded by Kulturpunkt.hr on December 15, 2014, Video, 52:03. 
https://vimeo.com/114548058.  
30 Rainer Maria Rilke, ?On Work: Get up cheerfully on days you have to work,? in Letters on Life: New 
Prose Translations, ed. and trans. Ulrich Baer (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 48. 
31 Kim Brockett, ?Nothing Doing,? West Space Journal no. 3 (Autumn 2014). 
http://journal.westspace.org.au/article/nothing/. 
19 
 
deeming extreme busyness ?a symptom of deficient vitality,?32 an idea which has been 
validated to some degree by medical professionals in more recent times: American 
physician Larry Dossey coined the term ?time-sickness? in 1982 to describe the epidemic 
belief that ?time is getting away, that there isn?t enough of it, and that you must pedal 
faster and faster to keep up.?33 Stevenson also proposed that idleness should be classified 
not as an opposite of or prerequisite for work, but in the same category of activity: 
?Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not 
recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its 
position as industry itself.?34 However, his arguments against busyness seem to indicate 
that he endorses the outward appearance of idleness rather than the full-fledged ?absence 
of movement and thought? articulated by Stilinovi?, complaining for example that ?if a 
man reads very hard...he will have little time for thought.?35 Nik Wakefield proposes a 
similar interpretation of laziness resulting from his own reading of Stilinovi??s work, 
with the additional caveat of its futility: ?Laziness might include all kinds of effort and 
thought but it does so for no good external reason.?36 These perspectives posit laziness 
not as an undervalued form of nothingness, but as an invisible somethingness 
misidentified as nothingness. 
As quoted in ?In Praise of Laziness,? Duchamp boasts about his luck of not 
having had to work for a living. Adair Rounthwaite notes Stilinovi??s ?ventriloquistic? 
                                               
32 Robert Louis Stevenson, ?An Apology for Idlers,? in An Apology for Idlers and Other Essays, ed. 
Matthew Kaiser (San Diego: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2018), 10, 7. 
33 Carl Honor?, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers 
Ltd., 2004), 3. 
34 Stevenson, ?An Apology for Idlers,? 1-2. 
35 Stevenson, ?An Apology for Idlers,? 3. 
36 Nik Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? Performance Research 21, no. 1 (2016): 126. 
20 
 
use of this quote, as his own family?s financial circumstances also allowed him to avoid 
working.37 Duchamp also expressed the ?hope that some day we?ll be able to live without 
being obliged to work.?38 In the same interview, though not quoted by Stilinovi?, 
Duchamp admitted: ?deep down I?m enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than 
working.?39 This view reverses the hierarchy by considering work an unfortunate but 
necessary step in achieving the goal of laziness--which, for Duchamp, consists of ?living? 
and ?breathing? (aligning with Stilinovi??s notion of laziness as a biological function), 
i.e. the most basic maintenance of life itself. Duchamp?s notion of laziness is mere 
existence. Stilinovi? has also articulated it along these lines, saying that laziness 
emphasizes the importance of ?the right to exist, simply as a being.?40 Lafargue is in 
agreement that laziness is preferable to work and states that only absolutely necessary 
work is good or useful: ?only when work is regulated according to reason, and is limited 
to a maximum corresponding to the social needs will it be a spice to the pleasure of 
idleness, a useful exercise to the human organism.?41 Russell similarly recognizes the 
necessity of work but condemns its glorification: ?immense harm is caused by the belief 
that work is virtuous...while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, it is 
emphatically not one of the ends of human life.?42 For both Lafargue and Russell, work is 
neither inherently virtuous nor inherently valuable. It only acquires value as a means to a 
purposive (and foreseeable) end. Wakefield articulates laziness precisely as a rejection of 
                                               
37 Adair Rounthwaite, ?Lazy Objects: Viewing Mladen Stilinovi??s Exploitation of the Dead,? Tate Papers 
no. 30 (Autumn 2018). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/30/rounthwaite-lazy-
objects. 
38 Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (London: 
Thames and Hudson, 1971), 15. (Also quoted in ?In Praise of Laziness.?) 
39 Cabanne and Duchamp, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, 72. 
40 Daoust and Stilinovi?, ?Idler // Mladen Stilinovi? // An Artist Who Invents Nothing.?  
41 Lafargue, ?The Right to be Lazy,? 22. 
42 Russell, ?In Praise of Idleness.? 
21 
 
the ?dogma of work? against which Lafargue and Russell react: ?Being lazy is deciding 
not to participate in a belief in the inherent goodness of work.?43 
Malevich, whom Stilinovi? quotes alongside Duchamp in his text, also recognizes 
work as ?a simple necessity connected with nutrition? which ?does not appear as the 
main essence of man?s perfection.?44 However, his notion of laziness (or ?sloth,? as it 
appears in some translations) is not merely a preferable, more enjoyable way of spending 
time than work. It is a state of divine perfection, transcendence of not only the material 
world but also of thought, cast as the ultimate goal to be achieved by humanity. 
Imagining a distant future when humankind has quenched its thirst for knowledge by 
solving all mysteries of the universe, exhausted the full potential of the arts, and 
eradicated the need for physical work by perfecting the machine, Malevich writes:  
...the moment of complete inaction will have arrived, action becomes meditation, 
the world produces itself, the moment of complete ?Sloth? is achieved?humanity 
will liberate itself from work and achieve peace, eternal rest--in sloth-- and will 
enter the image of the Divinity, and the legend about God as perfection in ?Sloth? 
will be justified.45 
 
 
Despite its centrality to Malevich?s conception of laziness, Stilinovi? omits this dramatic 
exaltation from his summary and quotation of Malevich?s text. Perhaps this is done to 
best serve his own concept of laziness, or perhaps it is simply due to his economy of 
words--perhaps the omission is the result of laziness. In any case, Malevich?s belief in 
laziness as a state of total and final transcendence does not align with Stilinovi??s 
                                               
43 Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? 126. 
44 K. S. Malevich, ?Sloth - the Real Truth of Humanity,? in The Artist, Infinity, Suprematism: Unpublished 
Writings 1913-33, Vol. IV, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Hoffmann (Borgen, Copenhagen: 1978), 78. 
45 Malevich, ?Sloth - the Real Truth of Humanity,? 80-81. 
22 
 
implication of its partial biological basis. Furthermore, Stilinovi? does not directly lament 
the loss of laziness alone, but the subsequent loss of art. 
Stilinovi??s final descriptor (?futile concentration,? i.e. attention spent on 
something that will not result in any tangible, measurable, reward) indirectly regards the 
issue of production, a problem that resurfaces later in the text: 
Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists, but rather producers of 
something. Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, 
promotion, the gallery system, the museum system, the competition system (who 
is first), their preoccupation with objects?all that drives them away from 
laziness, from art. Just as money is but paper, a gallery is but a room.46  
 
 
?Production? is posed in opposition to laziness and art. This echoes sentiments expressed 
by Lafargue, who blamed the disappearance of ?joy, health, and freedom...everything that 
makes life beautiful, that makes it worth living? on the erection of capitalist factories.47 
Decrying the prevailing ?superfluity of wares,? Lafargue observed that ?the great 
problem of capitalist production does not consist in finding producers and in increasing 
their strength but in discovering consumers, in tickling their appetite and encouraging it 
by habit.?48 According to Lafargue, this insatiable hunger of the industrial capitalist 
machine is responsible for the unnecessary overworking of populations and the resulting 
superfluous production.  
Stilinovi? similarly observes a superfluous production of art in the West as a 
symptom of the competition inherently imposed by capitalism. He appears to endorse the 
notion of art for art?s sake, or at least for some sake other than the corrupting factors of 
profit or fame. A system in which an artist?s livelihood depends not only on their 
                                               
46 Stilinovi?, ?In Praise of Laziness.? 
47 Lafargue, ?The Right to be Lazy,? 16. 
48 Lafargue, ?The Right to be Lazy,? 20, 29. 
23 
 
continuous production of marketable art but also on outselling their peers leaves no time 
for creative processes involving laziness and thereby fundamentally changes the nature of 
the art produced. In other words, when creative work is subject to the dictates of time, 
money, and competition, it is reduced to a strategic matter of catering to others? interests 
and can no longer be primarily seen as an authentic expression of the artist. According to 
Wakefield, Stilinovi? recognizes a fundamental ?difference in kind between the art that is 
monetized and the art that has the purity of having no function...Lazy art is free because it 
is not working for anyone or anything. Art is excused and that is its value.?49  
If an artist wishes to maintain the uncorrupted nature of their art, they must 
choose a different profession by which to survive, which leaves them little time to focus 
on art. Russell also recognized this dilemma and envisioned a solution of limitations on 
working hours: 
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day every 
person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every 
painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may 
be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by 
sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence 
needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will 
have lost the taste and the capacity.50  
 
 
As becomes evident by consulting the literature, an investigation of the relationship 
between work and laziness poses a sort of chicken-and-egg problem. However, it is clear 
that the ?dogma of work? deplored by these authors persists today. This understanding of 
labor (rather than its fruits) as something valuable and desirable in itself is reinforced by 
the rhetoric of contemporary American politics, in which there is talk of jobs being 
                                               
49 Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? 127. 
50 Russell, ?In Praise of Idleness.? 
24 
 
?stolen? and where claims of being able to ?create jobs? (without regard for their social 
or environmental impact, let alone their purpose or necessity) counts as political 
currency. An entire century has passed since Lafargue, Russell, and even Malevich 
predicted the eventual obsolescence of human labor with the advancement of technology 
and eagerly anticipated an age in which we would all spend significantly less time 
working. Yet, the opposite seems to have happened: most of us continue to work at least 
forty hours per week, and our most sophisticated technologies have only made our work 
more portable and harder to escape. David Graeber?s theory of ?bullshit jobs? addresses 
this frustratingly curious phenomenon, maintaining that much of the work performed 
today is not only unnecessary, but also demoralizing: 
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their 
entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to 
be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is 
profound. It is a scar across our collective soul...The ruling class has figured out 
that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal 
danger...the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not 
willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of 
their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.51   
 
 
The fact that Graeber?s assessment of the problem with work essentially regurgitates the 
arguments and complaints put forth by the likes of Lafargue leaves the uniquely bitter 
aftertaste that follows more than a century of hindsight, appropriately culminating in the 
year 2020. Considering work?s acquired performative dimension--i.e. that much of the 
work performed today is not necessary and is therefore not really work, but merely a 
performance of work--Wakefield rearticulates laziness accordingly as ?a gesture of 
resistance to that performance of being busy that is endemic to contemporary 
                                               
51 David Graeber, ?On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,? Strike! Magazine no. 3: The 
Summer of... (August 2013). https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/. 
25 
 
capitalism...Laziness here is not defined as not working but rather as not offering to the 
world a performed representation of being always at work.?52 Work itself (i.e. time spent 
performing work) has become its own form of currency--a phenomenon eerily 
epitomized by the phrase ?time is money.? 
As an attitude toward time, laziness has garnered a wealth of support in recent 
decades. Carl Honor??s book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed 
chronicles the rise of the ?Slow Movement? from its beginnings in 1980s Italy as a 
sustainable agricultural movement and its subsequent global spread to other aspects of 
life, spawning philosophies of ?slow? food, school, travel, fashion, sex, and more.53 
While they collectively encompass a broad range of ideas and practices, the common goal 
of all Slow Movement sectors is to combat the phenomenon of ?time poverty? (the 
widely shared feeling that time is always running out and its negative consequences for 
not only our own mental and physical health but also the health of our planet) by means 
of a lifestyle revolution. There is no shortage of literature purporting solutions to the 
perceived shortage of time, but most approaches to solving time poverty fall victim to it 
by attempting strategies like ?time management.? They fail to apprehend what the Slow 
Movement considers the root of the problem: our perception of and relationship to time 
itself. This aim is succinctly stated by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber in their book The 
Slow Professor: ?Given that no day will ever have more than twenty-four hours, it is 
more useful to change our perception of the passing of time.?54 In the context of 
academia, Berg and Seeber demonstrate the necessity of time for reflection and open-
                                               
52 Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? 126. 
53 Honor?, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. 
54 Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the 
Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 32. 
26 
 
ended inquiry to produce quality research. They condemn the ?publish or perish? culture 
that plagues academia for creating an abundance of meaningless and mediocre 
scholarship (much like Lafargue?s condemnation of industrial capitalism?s ?superfluity of 
wares?) and blame the rise of the neoliberal capitalist university system for prioritizing 
the ?customer satisfaction? of students over the well-being and intellectual integrity of 
faculty.55 Though they insist that their notion of slowness is not a ?form of laziness,?56 it 
clearly shares affinities with Stilinovi??s time-based notion of laziness. Berg and Seeber 
thus inadvertently offer an explanation for Stilinovi??s claim that art cannot exist without 
laziness: ?The time crunch is not just a personal issue. It is detrimental to intellectual 
work, interfering with our ability to think critically and creatively.?57  
Unlike Berg and Seeber who are careful to distance themselves from the term 
?laziness,? fellow academic Gildersleeve seeks to rescue the term from its decidedly 
negative connotations in order to foster its acceptance as a method of post-qualitative 
research.58 Laziness, as an exercise of passivity, may seem more like willful ignorance of 
than a respectable response to politics. However, as Gildersleeve demonstrates, laziness 
(as inaction, or avoidance of work) has long been an effective tactic employed by 
activists of all kinds. One glaring example of this is the worker?s strike: the refusal to 
work as a means of achieving more favorable working conditions.59 Gildersleeve also 
points out the fundamental role played by deliberate passivity in non-violent protest, such 
as the sit-ins of the civil rights movement. Seen in this way, laziness can encompass a 
                                               
55 Berg and Seeber, The Slow Professor, 6. 
56 Berg and Seeber, The Slow Professor, 11. 
57 Berg and Seeber, The Slow Professor, 17. 
58 Gildersleeve, ?Laziness in Postqualitative Inquiry.? 
59 Gildersleeve, ?Laziness in Postqualitative Inquiry,? 695. 
27 
 
form of resistance. In Wakefield?s view, ?conformism is the opposite of laziness.?60 
Laziness as nonconformism opens up new possibilities of interpretation regarding 
Stilinovi??s use of ?stupidity?: intelligence, if reduced to nothing more than learned 
ideologies (as ideology is present in all symbolic systems) is something Stilinovi? strives 
to resist. In this context, it is not difficult to understand stupidity (as refusal to conform to 
conventional knowledge) as another method of de-symbolization. Conover defines 
ideology as ?the opposite of biology.?61 If we accept this definition, the biological basis 
of laziness suggests yet another form of its potential as a mode of resistance to 
ideological forces. Consider the example of the sit-in as a point of convergence for 
several strains of Stilinovi??s laziness: it is the use of bodies deliberately exhibiting an 
absence of movement--enacting passivity--as a means of displaying indifference to, and 
thereby resisting, the dominant, codified ideologies. Its participants knowingly put 
themselves in vulnerable positions, exposing themselves to potential pain. Its 
effectiveness relies on its temporal duration and preparedness to endure discomfort. It 
may prove futile--its desired result is not guaranteed, and those who embark on it must 
acknowledge this possibility--or, it might turn out to be an effective political tool. 
Commitment to enacting a potentially futile task is inherently optimistic. 
In searching for parallels that provide positive insight into Stilinovi??s idea of 
laziness, meditation presents one well-established example of active passivity. 
Meditation?s various methods of practice come into remarkably close alignment with 
Stilinovi??s definition, and, as we shall see, can be found materialized throughout his 
other works. These various methods fall into two main categories: ?focused attention,? 
                                               
60 Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? 128. 
61 Conover, ?Against Dictionaries: The East as She is Spoke by the West,? 352. 
28 
 
which involves ?bringing attention to a particular object of focus and keeping it there,? 
(staring at nothing, total amnesia, futile concentration) and ?open awareness,? which 
entails ?observing all salient stimuli as they occur without pursuing them in thought (or 
action)? (absence of movement and thought, dumb time, indifference).62 Important 
common factors of all meditative practices, which are also crucial to understanding their 
connections to Stilinovi??s work, include extended temporal duration, honing of 
perceptive abilities, and engagement of both the mind and body. Examples of focused 
attention include concentrating on repetitive physiological processes such as breathing, 
directing attention toward a particular visual object of focus, or repetition of a mantra (i.e. 
particular word, sound or slogan).63 Repetition is of particular interest here because it 
forms one of Stilinovi??s main methods. Open awareness is most prominently 
exemplified by mindfulness meditation, which aims to gain control over and reduce 
reactivity to one?s own thoughts and emotions by increasing awareness of cognitive 
processes, and can be defined as ?paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the 
present, and nonjudgmentally...learning to simply rest in a bare awareness of thoughts, 
feelings, and perceptions as they occur.?64  
The formal affinities shared between meditative practices and Stilinovi??s work 
acquire their meaning through the purposes and benefits of meditation. Reports from 
meditative traditions suggest that ?meditation practice can dramatically alter one?s 
                                               
62 Kirk Warren Brown, J. David Creswell, and Richard M. Ryan, eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, 
Research, and Practice (New York: Guilford Publications, 2015), 190, ProQuest Ebook Central.  
63 Nirbhay N. Singh, Psychology of Meditation (Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc, 
2014), 2. http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-
um.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=681317&site=ehost-live. 
64 Singh, Psychology of Meditation, 5. 
29 
 
perception; it is said to become more vivid, more clear, and more intense.?65 More recent 
studies on the effects of mindfulness meditation in particular demonstrate that its 
potential benefits can include reduced anxiety and depression, improvement in working 
memory, improved focus, reduction in subjective experience of pain, and shifts toward 
more receptive and less evaluative cognitive processing.66 However, the evidence 
suggests that these benefits rely on sustained practice over time, and that ?this proposed 
shift in cognitive processing is positively correlated with cumulative time spent in 
meditation practice.?67 This point appears significant in light of Stilinovi??s assertion that 
?knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.? In addition to 
these benefits, and as a further parallel to Stilinovi??s connection between laziness and 
art, it has been argued that meditation supports creativity:  
MM [mindfulness meditation] supports creative thinking (particularly incubation 
and illumination phases), even in novices, by inducing broad, open awareness in a 
state of low cortical arousal...enhancing sensitivity, reducing habituation to 
external (and perhaps internal) stimuli, increasing cognitive performance on 
complex problems and supporting novelty-seeking...MM promotes cognitive 
flexibility due to its transcendent, detached witnessing effect. Strong associative 
thinking habits are suppressed allowing for the generation of new ideas.68 
 
 
While Stilinovi? does not appear to have explicitly voiced any connection between 
meditation and laziness or intention to simulate meditative practices through his work, 
the similarities are undeniable. His rhetoric, too, often seems to describe practices akin to 
                                               
65 Brown, Creswell, and Ryan eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 195. 
66 Brown, Creswell, and Ryan eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, and Practice. 
67 Brown, Creswell, and Ryan eds., Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, and Practice. 178. 
68 Roy Horan, ?The Neuropsychological Connection Between Creativity and Meditation,? Creativity 
Research Journal 21 no. 2-3 (Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2009): 211. 
30 
 
meditation: ?I always wanted to sit down while visiting an exhibition, and look quietly. 
Sit down, have a look. Sit and look quietly.?69  
I wish to draw one final comparison between Stilinovi??s ?In Praise of Laziness? 
and Japanese writer Jun?ichir? Tanizaki?s 1933 essay ?In Praise of Shadows.?70 
Tanizaki?s reflections on the distinctive aesthetic traits of Japanese material culture 
foreshadow ?In Praise of Laziness? in some fundamental ways. Both authors establish 
their geographical and cultural context within the popularly employed East-West 
dichotomy. While this framework is not particularly unique, there is a striking similarity 
between their attitudes. Like Stilinovi?, Tanizaki laments the cultural consequences of 
western influence in Japan and speculates about how things might have developed 
differently in the absence of western imports. He imagines, for example, how Japanese 
literature, and even thought, would have taken a different course had the western style of 
writing pens and ink not been introduced.71 Despite occupying perhaps the two most 
geographically distant, opposite ends of the ?East,? Stilinovi? and Tanizaki adopt equally 
polarizing tones when describing their aesthetic distinction from the ?West.? Where the 
West insists on cleanliness, for example, the Japanese admire ?the glow of grime.?72 
Tanizaki?s celebration of shadows is posed in direct opposition to the western obsession 
                                               
69 Igor Zabel, ?General Equivalent,? in Mladen Stilinovi?: Pain, Tihomir Milovac and Branka Stipan?i? 
eds.  (Zagreb: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 8. 
70Admittedly, my initial connection between these two texts was limited to the shared format of their titles 
(also employed by Russell?s more obviously relevant ?In Praise of Idleness,? Honore?s In Praise of Slow, 
and others). Further comparison revealed unexpectedly striking similarities, which leads me to wonder if 
Stilinovi? had encountered ?In Praise of Shadows.? However, I have not been able to determine whether he 
was aware of or familiar with Tanizaki?s essay. 
71 Jun?ichir? Tanizaki, ?In Praise of Shadows,? trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker 
(Stony Creek: Leete?s Island Books, Inc., 1977), 7-8. 
72 Tanizaki, ?In Praise of Shadows,? 11. 
31 
 
with light, exemplified by his description of philosophically different approaches to 
roofing: 
In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a 
shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. 
There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the 
sun than to keep off the wind and dew; even from without it is apparent that they 
are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as 
much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a 
Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to 
allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves.73 
 
 
Beyond their shared approach to cultural contextualization, a conceptual parallel exists 
between Tanizaki?s shadows and Stilinovi??s laziness: they are both manifestations of 
erasure, of absence, of nothingness. Their targets of praise mirror one another in their 
respective dimensions. Tanizaki?s shadows reside on the surfaces of objects, buildings, 
and earth, while Stilinovi??s laziness inhabits art in the era of its dematerialization. ?In 
Praise of Laziness? echoes Tanizaki?s values but adapts them from the material third 
dimension for application to the intangible fourth. Tanizaki?s shadows embody visually 
what Stilinovi??s laziness fosters temporally. Shadows consist of darkness, the absence of 
light--visual pause. Darkness is an arena of the unknown, the undefined, apparent 
nothingness; it denies the pursuit of knowledge by concealing visual information. 
Darkness decorates the wallpaper of sleep. It renders space directionless, navigation 
futile, and maps useless. It negates light, yet also grants its worth. Just as cast shadows 
owe their shape to looming illuminations, the outer limits of laziness are laced with active 
potential. 
  
                                               
73 Tanizaki, ?In Praise of Shadows,? 17-18. 
32 
 
Chapter 2: Locating Lazy Manifestations 
 
 
Stilinovi? concluded his definition of laziness by imparting the wisdom that 
?those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not 
enough, it must be practiced and perfected.? This begs two questions: First, what exactly 
is the role of laziness in art? While this is not a question that can be answered 
definitively, I have used the previous chapter to suggest some potential explanations of 
the relationship between laziness and art as a point of departure for the next question. 
Second, what does practicing laziness actually entail and how does it manifest in art? 
Answering this question as it applies to Stilinovi??s work will be the focus of this chapter. 
How exactly does Stilinovi? practice the laziness that he preaches? Laziness can be 
detected throughout his oeuvre in all aspects of his work, from method and materiality to 
production and reception. Sometimes its references are overt, but usually it maintains a 
discreet presence. As Adair Rounthwaite points out, the ?rigorously conceptual? nature of 
Stilinovi??s work has ?resulted in a tendency among art historians and critics to 
emphasise concept and downplay materiality in the interpretation of his work.?74 This 
tendency overlooks some of his work?s most prominent features of laziness. Just as his 
notion of laziness is rooted in both physical and mental means of experience, the lazy 
elements of his work emerge from both material and conceptual roots. Using the varied 
notions of laziness articulated in the previous chapter as a blueprint, I intend to illuminate 
Stilinovi??s lazy practices as they manifest in all stages and facets of his work. 
                                               
74 Rounthwaite, ?Lazy Objects.? 
33 
 
While ?In Praise of Laziness? is not Stilinovi??s first work dealing with the theme 
of laziness, it does appear to be the first instance of explicit reference to the term. His 
earlier works only flirt with or imply the notion of laziness by critiquing its perceived 
opposite, i.e. ?work.? Perhaps the most vivid example (and certainly the most frequently 
reproduced) is the 1978 series of photographs titled Umjetnik Radi [Artist at Work] (fig. 
2). This work was created in response to a 1975 work, Untitled (fig. 3) by Serbian artist 
Ne?a Paripovi?, consisting of a series of nine photographs depicting the artist sitting at a 
desk, staring intently at a blank white surface.75 Paripovi? performs a perfectly 
straightforward example of laziness by ?staring at nothing.? Stilinovi??s response, not 
only inspired by but also dedicated to Paripovi?, assumes a similar form: eight 
photographs taken from a single perspective, each depicting Stilinovi? lying in bed, 
closing his eyes and turning his back toward the camera in some frames. However, the 
most remarkable feature of this work and likely the reason for its popularity is its title (a 
feature absent in Paripovi??s work). The humor of Artist at Work resides in its apparent 
contradiction between the expectations set by the title and the imagery it delivers. This 
frequently employed tactic of staging paradox might be considered a method of lazy 
training: by setting certain expectations and then deliberately defying them, Stilinovi? 
conditions us to abandon the futility of forming expectations (futile because they are 
often unfulfilled, resulting in disappointment that could be avoided by discarding 
expectations) and encourages us to embrace the nonsense and aimlessness that constitutes 
laziness. 
                                               
75 Armin Medosch, ?Cutting the Networks in Former Yugoslavia,? Third Text 32, no. 4 (2018): 561. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.1528716. 
34 
 
  
Figure 2. Mladen Stilinovi?, Umjetnik Radi (Artist at Work), 1978, series of eight black and white 
photographs. (Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/artist-at-work-01/) 
35 
 
 
Figure 3. Ne?a Paripovi?, Untitled, 1975. Photographic performance.  
(Source: Amy Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960. 
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. p. 316.) 
 
 
Artist at Work is perhaps most easily interpreted as a statement about the 
intellectual nature of artistic labor. Branka Stipan?i? posits this view, seeing its basis as 
the unquantifiable nature of an artist?s work: ?Is he sleeping, drowsing, perhaps thinking 
up something new? What can we know at all about the work the artist has put in when we 
see the final result??76 Several scholars foreground the presence of the bed and focus on 
the images in which his eyes are closed, reading it as a commentary on the role of sleep.77 
For example, Nik Wakefield sees it as a dismantling of the border between art and life 
through the conflation of art-making with sleeping: ?Art-making can be as everyday as 
                                               
76 Branka Stipan?i?, ed. Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006 (Istanbul: Platform Garanti 
Contemporary Art Center, 2007), 14. 
77 In addition to those directly quoted in the text: Brockett, ?Nothing Doing.?; Sandra Kri?i? Roban, 
?Laughter Protocol: Elements of Humor in Proto- and Conceptual Photography in Croatia,? in Photography 
Performing Humor, ed. Liesbeth Decan and Mieke Bleyen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), 191.; 
Bojana Kunst, ?Art and Labour: On Consumption, Laziness and Less Work,? Performance Research 17, 
no. 6 (2012): 120. I find Kunst?s reading of Stilinovi? as sleeping problematic because the article omits four 
out of the eight photographs from Artist at Work, only including those that show him with eyes closed or 
back turned toward the camera. 
36 
 
sleep.?78 Rounthwaite pushes the role of sleep in the opposite direction, locating a 
?semantic chain between laziness, sleep, and death? in Artist at Work: ?To sleep is a 
common euphemism for death, and in those images where Stilinovi? has his eyes open, 
staring blankly ahead, he might almost be mistaken for a corpse.?79 Whether taken as a 
necessity for life or a metaphor for death, sleep fits into Stilinovi??s definition of laziness 
as a state of impotence. 
Here, a brief detour on the theme of death is in order. Death features prominently 
in Stilinovi??s later works and, as we have seen, ?In Praise of Laziness? announces the 
death of art in the West--but there are precedents for this, as his work began anticipating 
the death of art (and the artist) as early as 1977 with works like I hear them talk about the 
death of art? (fig. 4). Its inscription reads: ?I hear them talk about the death of art, the 
death of art is the death of the artist, someone wants to kill me, help.? Like Artist at 
Work, its humor resides in its title--but the title is essentially its only content. As we shall 
see, this format is typical. This work is also exemplary in terms of its inexpensive, 
haphazardly assembled materials and handmade, amateurish aesthetic. The title, painted 
by hand in red on an unapologetically creased piece of pink silk, rattles off a series of 
absurd yet somehow logical conclusions, quickly escalating a metaphorical rumor into an 
imminent murder plot, punctuated by a pathetic plea for ?help.? While the title alone is 
absurd, its juxtaposition with the manner of inscription--mainly the fact that any time has 
been spent inscribing it at all, given the dramatic urgency of its claims--adds another 
dimension of absurdity. The incompatibility between its apparently time-consuming, 
somewhat unwieldy form and the dire content of its message begins to show signs of 
                                               
78 Wakefield, ?Sleep, Laziness and Making,? 131. 
79 Rounthwaite, ?Lazy Objects.? 
37 
 
Figure 4. Mladen Stilinovi?, I hear them talk about the death of art?, 1977. Acrylic on silk, 36 x 50 cm.  
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/6-2/) 
laziness: it reveals the artist?s apathy, lack of self-preservation, and indifference to threat. 
This is just one of many examples in which form and materiality emerge as the primary 
stewards of his laziness. 
Returning to Artist at Work, this series might also be read as an act of defiance, a 
refusal to conform to conventions (of ?work?) and the expectations based upon them. In 
this sense, Stilinovi? alienates his audience by refusing to perform as expected. Armin 
Medosch posits this interpretation of both Artist at Work and Paripovi??s Untitled as 
?refusal[s] of the ideology of labor,? but also proposes reading them as ?carefully staged 
narratives which turn aspects of the everyday into special moments through making them 
strange.?80 This reading scratches the surface of two significant points of tension in Artist 
                                               
80 Medosch, ?Cutting the Networks in Former Yugoslavia,? 561. 
38 
 
at Work which deserve closer attention: first, the fact that it is, in fact, ?staged,? and 
second, its estrangement of the everyday. Estrangement initiates through the same means 
as humor, i.e. the incongruous pairing of the word ?work? with an image of rest, but it is 
reinforced by repetition. The work would retain its humor even if it consisted of only one 
photograph. Its strangeness, however, relies on the repeated image because this ensures 
that its presence persists beyond the punchline. The longer this image of laziness lingers 
past its comical prime, the stranger it appears, the more it compels us to make sense of its 
strangeness by questioning our initial evaluation: what exactly is so funny, so strange, 
about a person in a bed, a person doing nothing? Doing nothing (inaction), upon critical 
reflection, is not so strange after all. As the default state of being (recall Duchamp?s 
laziness as mere ?living? and ?breathing?), we might even call it the epitome of normal. 
This projected path toward estrangement by persistent exposure ultimately forces a 
radical reassessment, transforming the strange into the alarmingly familiar. Stilinovi? 
employs both formal and conceptual elements of laziness: temporal endurance 
(necessitated by sequential repetition), insistence on apparent inaction, rejection of 
conventional knowledge (of the meaning of ?work?), refusal to fulfill expectations based 
on that knowledge--culminating in a work that simultaneously depicts the sloth of its 
author and induces laziness in its audience. His laziness is not merely a self-indulgent 
artistic practice, but a practice laboriously imposed on his audience through repetition, 
refusal, and negation. These are the tools he uses to enforce lazy law. Not unique to Artist 
at Work, they appear incessantly throughout his oeuvre and are especially prominent in 
his artist books. 
39 
 
However, the depiction of laziness in Artist at Work is a much less common 
occurrence. With this point we return to Medosch?s observation that Artist at Work is 
staged. The very existence of this work, along with Stilinovi??s claim to both authorship 
and subject, indicate its intentional creation (a process which Stilinovi? recalls took only 
five minutes to complete81). It is therefore not a documented occurrence of laziness, but 
decidedly a performance of it. Stilinovi? maintained that he considers Artist at Work 
primarily photographic, rather than photographic documentation of a work categorized 
primarily as performance.82 By calling this work a ?performance? of laziness, I do not 
mean to disregard his own classification. Rather, I mean that the alleged state of laziness 
represented in the photographs is inauthentic and that his active portrayal of inaction 
(distinctly superficial in comparison to the genuinely lazy practice of ?active inaction?) 
was a necessary step in the process of this work?s realization. With this in mind, the title 
of Artist at Work ceases to be a punchline and reveals itself as a self-reflexive and 
boringly accurate descriptive title: the artist is indeed at work, posing for a photograph 
which will be deemed art. 
 Other references to ?work? appear abundantly in the 1970s and 80s in the form of 
humorous phrases, absurd juxtapositions, appropriated slogans, and decontextualized 
repetition. One such work exemplifying his tautological approach consists of the 
statement Radim na ovom djelu od 11.VI.1976 [I have been working on this work since 
June 11, 1976] (fig. 5) scribbled across a bent sheet of paper with yellowing edges. He 
                                               
81 Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?,? interview, Parasite, March 28, 2013. Video, 
https://vimeo.com/62851903?utm_campaign=5370367&utm_source=affiliate&utm_channel=affiliate&cjev
ent=9eea3191180011eb83ca004c0a24060f. 
82 Stilinovi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?? (interview). His explanation for this choice questions the purpose of 
staging public performance when it will ultimately be documented and preserved in the form of 
photographs anyway. 
40 
 
simultaneously asserts and rejects the statement Rad ne mo?e ne postojati [Work cannot 
not exist] (fig. 6) with a pair of prints, each containing the same phrase but with one 
boldly crossed out--which actually contains three times the rejection, as crossing out a 
double negative makes it a triple. Plan Rada [Work Plan] (fig. 7), a numbered but 
contentless list, displays a playful apathy toward work. Jotted down in red pastel, 
Stilinovi? suggests the autonomy of work: Uvjeti za moj rad nisu u mojim rukama, ali na 
svu sre?u ni u va?im [The conditions for my work are not in my hands but fortunately 
they are not in yours either] (fig. 8). Collectively, these aim to strip ?work? of its 
culturally assigned ideological meaning by repeatedly poking at it from all angles. This 
ultimate reduction of ?work? to an empty signifier is epitomized by a piece of cardboard 
with the painted statement Rad je rije? (fig. 9), or ?Work is a word.? Despite their 
preoccupation with words, these works display a strong emphasis on materiality. The 
diversity of materials used and the resulting variation of textures, amplified by 
Stilinovi??s indifference to neatness and the clear trace left by his hand, form a significant 
contribution to the manifestation of laziness. They oppose the ideological meaning of 
?work? not only through linguistic means, but also by asserting their physicality. They 
attempt to kidnap ?work? from the conceptual realm and reestablish it as a material 
presence devoid of inherent meaning in the realm of objects. 
This is just one of the ways in which Stilinovi??s approach to material and method 
can be considered a lazy practice. Often making use of small-scale, cheap, easily 
accessible materials, his work is almost always produced by hand and written in 
unrefined handwriting. This is a departure from the tendency of (western) conceptual 
artists to favor a neat, mechanically produced aesthetic. On one hand, his manual  
41 
 
Figure 5. Mladen Stilinovi?, I have been working on this work since June 11, 1976, 1976. 
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/)  
 
Figure 6. Mladen Stilinovi?, Work cannot not exist, 1976. Screenprint on paper, (2x) 50 x 70 cm.  
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/) 
 
Figure 7. Mladen Stilinovi?, Work Plan, 1974.  
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/early-works/) 
 
42 
 
Figure 8. Mladen Stilinovi?, The conditions for my work are not in my hands but fortunately they are not 
in yours either, 1979. Pastel on paper, 20.8 x 29.5 cm. (Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/) 
Figure 9. Mladen Stilinovi?, Work is a Word, 1982. Acrylic on cardboard, 31 x 62 cm. 
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/10-2/) 
 
production of works and use of inexpensive materials has been attributed to the relatively 
low interest in/availability of funding for machine-printing equipment in Eastern 
European countries.83 However, using the materials that are most easily accessible also 
aligns with the resourcefulness inherent in an understanding of laziness as ?doing as little 
as possible.? Creating works manually--particularly when they consist mainly of text and 
could therefore be easily typed rather than handwritten without omitting any essential 
content--might seem like an unnecessary amount of work, i.e. the opposite of laziness. 
Yet, Stilinovi? explained how working manually actually meant less work for him when 
                                               
83 Stipan?i?, ed., Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, 8. 
43 
 
it came to producing his artist books: ?I made my books by hand, because I thought that 
no one would publish them, and even if they did, I would spend more time looking for 
and persuading some publisher than would be needed for me to make enough of these 
books. I make just as many individual copies of the book as I sell.?84 This method is not 
only easier, but also less wasteful because it avoids superfluous production (one enemy of 
laziness condemned by Lafargue). Yet there is another important measurement of 
laziness present in his manual production: time. He may save time on finding a publisher, 
but he still spends more time on the process of making works. This process becomes 
extremely repetitive and, as we shall see, subsequently approximates certain types of 
meditation. His laziness manifests here in how he chooses to spend his time, namely his 
preference for repetitive, solitary, meditative acts over the busy pursuit of art-world 
networking. In addition to this temporal factor, manual production fosters a level of 
intimacy and familiarity with (i.e. enhanced perception of) the material world that cannot 
be attained through mechanical production.  
While most of Stilinovi??s work does not explicitly address the themes of work or 
laziness, some form of implicit laziness can be identified in nearly all of his work. His 
tendency to employ lazy tactics can be traced back to his earliest artistic endeavors as a 
member of the Group of Six Artists (alongside Vlado Martek, Boris Demur, ?eljko 
Jerman, Fedor Vu?emilovi?, and Mladen?s younger brother Sven Stilinovi?) from 1975 to 
1979. During this period, they participated together in what they termed ?exhibition-
actions? by mounting unofficial exhibitions of their work in public places, including city 
squares, streets, river banks, the seashore, university halls, yards, and private houses in 
                                               
84 Stipan?i?, ed., Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, 9. 
44 
 
locations throughout Yugoslavia and beyond, including Zagreb, Belgrade, Mo??eni?ka 
Draga, and Venice.85 While ?exhibition-action? sounds inhospitable to laziness, this term 
is somewhat misleading. These events have been remembered by historians as 
deliberately subversive, embodying a ?spirit of constant rebellion,? ?bypassing the traps 
set by the institutions of art,? and ?adopting the style of guerilla warfare, the tactics of 
constant disturbance.?86 Such language portrays the Group of Six as militantly anti-
institutional and fits neatly within broader narratives of ?anti-art? and public intervention. 
There are certainly subversive elements in the Group of Six?s work, but Stilinovi??s own 
recollection of the exhibition-actions suggests a more relaxed agenda: ?the deal was the 
six of us would just go out and walk around town with our work.?87 They chose to bring 
works that were easy to carry and made no attempt to coordinate any semblance of 
cohesion in terms of theme or style--Sven even showed up once with nothing and 
assembled a work at the last minute.88 The exhibition-actions were informed by 
principles of laziness: the selection of works was based on minimizing the difficulty of 
their transportation rather than curating their content. They were aimless, open-ended 
experiments beginning with no particular intentions or goals. While it is true that they 
bypassed art institutions, this was not because of any moral or political objection: ?we 
didn?t have anything against galleries, so when they started inviting us, we exhibited 
there.?89 As they were not yet widely recognized by art institutions, the exhibition-actions 
                                               
85 Darko ?imi?i?, ?From Zenit to Mental Space: avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, and post-avant-garde 
magazines and books in Yugoslavia, 1921-1987,? in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-
avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, ed. Dubravka Djuri? and Mi?ko ?uvakovi? 
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 324-35. 
86 Branka Stipan?i?, ?This Is Not My World (after ?eljko Jerman),? in Group of Six Artists, ed. Bojana 
Pi?kur (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2015), 2-3. 
87 Mladen Stilinovi? and Branka Stipan?i?, ?A Talk with Mladen Stilinovi?,? in Group of Six Artists, 11. 
88 Stilinovi? and Stipan?i?, ?A Talk with Mladen Stilinovi?,? 11. 
89 Stilinovi? and Stipan?i?, ?A Talk with Mladen Stilinovi?,? 12. 
45 
 
resulted from impatience to find an audience for their work, indifference about the 
demographic of that audience, and unwillingness to put effort toward courting galleries to 
play the middleman.  
Stilinovi??s fascination with repetition, perhaps the most pervasive manifestation 
of laziness in his work, can also be traced back to his collaboration with the Group of Six:  
Demur had this work, which I really love; it is actually a theatre performance. He 
had set up eight panels around the space and eight of us were supposed to write 
?Repeat? on them. First, one would come out and start writing and say ?Repeat? 
then ?repeat? then ?repeat,? and then another one would come on? And so on. 
And then the first to fill up the entire panel with words goes out. And so the crew 
gets smaller and smaller until only one is left. We performed this at one of the 
April Meetings,90 where we would frequently be, as the Group of Six. And it 
turned out really well in my opinion, because the drama develops in such an 
unexpected way. Everybody in the audience is looking, waiting to see what will 
happen next, and the performers drop out one by one until in the end only one is 
left, the slowest. That was Sven, since he is left-handed.91 
 
This performance embodies multiple aspects of laziness. First, it is a subtractive, 
anticlimactic process of negation and disappearance--its end result is isolation, and 
ultimately, absence. Second, it demonstrates how repetition can be employed to prolong 
the temporal duration of experiencing a work. This may seem like an obvious property of 
repetition, but it is not inherent. It is easy for a work of art to employ repetition without 
demanding that its audience spend the time to experience each repeated element 
individually. For example, the repetitive photographs that make up Artist at Work, as well 
as most of his other photographic works, were originally assembled in book formats but 
have since been displayed side by side on gallery walls.92 When presented unbound, the 
                                               
90 The April Meetings, also called ?Festival of Expanded Media,? were multi-day, multidisciplinary artistic 
programs ?conceived in the spirit of the time with the goal of transcending the boundaries between art 
forms,? held annually from 1972-77 at the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade. ?April Meetings,? last 
modified December 21, 2011, https://monoskop.org/April_Meetings. 
91 Stilinovi? and Stipan?i?, ?A Talk with Mladen Stilinovi?,? 15-16. 
92 Stipan?i?, ed., Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, 88-9. 
46 
 
repetitive nature of this work loses much of its power because it allows audiences to view 
all eight photographs at once. It becomes a grid, or a homogenous visual plane, rather 
than a rhythmic sequence. The sequential format of the book, because its pages must be 
turned and each one viewed independently from the others, necessitates a temporally 
extended experience. Repetition is the perpetual presentation of sameness, the prolonged 
absence of newness. Given time, repetition familiarizes, desensitizes, diminishes its 
substance. It is the opposite of typically expected book contents (or any inherently 
sequential format, e.g. film): readers expect a narrative that develops or changes in some 
way as the sequence progresses. Stilinovi? is aware of these expectations and wants to 
defy them, so he employs repetition to exploit the sequential nature of the book, creating 
the conditions for laziness in his audience. 
 His gravitation toward sequential formats existed from the very beginning of his 
artistic career, which started with producing short experimental films. In 1969 he founded 
the cinema club Pan 69 with a group of friends and showed his films at the Student 
Centre in Zagreb.93 He began making artist books in the 1970s, which ultimately helped 
inspire the Group of Six to launch the magazine Maj ?75 in 1978.94 They (unofficially) 
published a total of seventeen issues over the course of the next six years, usually 
producing between 100 and 200 copies per issue and handed most of them out free of 
charge at exhibition-actions.95 The A4-format magazine featured contributions by fifty-
three different artists from cities all over Yugoslavia, including Zagreb, Belgrade, Novi 
Sad, Ljubljana, Kranj, Rijeka, Pula, and Sarajevo, as well as abroad, from Venice, 
                                               
93 Ana Janevski, ed., As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 
1960s and 1970s (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2010), 36. 
94 ?imi?i?, ?From Zenit to Mental Space,? 325. 
95 ?imi?i?, ?From Zenit to Mental Space,? 326. 
47 
 
Bratislava, and Frankfurt.96 Stilinovi? created well over one hundred different artist 
books over the course of his career and produced nearly all of them by hand. One early 
book titled Sad [Now] (fig. 10) consists of six pages, each with some variation of the 
     
     
     
Figure 10. Mladen Stilinovi?, Sad (Now), 1976, pencil, acryl, letraset, seal dye, adhesive tape, thread, 
staples. 20.9 x 29.4 cm. (Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/artists-books/) 
                                               
96 ?imi?i?, ?From Zenit to Mental Space,? 326. 
48 
 
word ?sad? scribbled in pencil.97 One page includes a piece of tape, one is marked by a 
smudge of brown ink, one is pierced by a tack, and the final page adds some letters to 
form a new and seemingly unrelated word, ?sadnice? (meaning ?seedling?). This mode of 
repetition containing only slight alterations from page to page, as well as free-flowing 
word association that strings together terms unrelated in meaning but phonetically 
similar, are typical of Stilinovi??s artist books. Through repetition, ?sad? becomes a sort 
of mantra. However, its meaning also becomes significant: ?now? is a term that 
disregards past and future, denoting a lazy outlook on time (i.e. the only applicable 
temporal term in ?total amnesia?). It redirects attention to the present with each turn of 
the page, continuously demanding the reader?s presence, thereby functioning as a sort of 
simulated meditation. This applies not only to the experience of reading, but also to the 
process of making: Stilinovi??s repetitive, manual working process resembles meditative 
practice that becomes encoded in the works themselves and ultimately mirrored by the 
reader?s experience. 
 Nemam vremena (fig. 11), the first book that was printed rather than 
handwritten,98 appeared in 1979 in Croatian and was reissued in English (I have no time) 
and German (Ich habe keine Zeit) in 1983.99 It opens with the introduction: ?I wrote this 
book when I had no time. The readers are requested to read it when they have no time,? 
followed by over 100 saturated pages of text repeating the book?s title, without 
                                               
97 It is possible, though unconfirmed, that Stilinovi? was aware of the ?false friend? status of ?sad? as a 
word in English, in which case we might read a double meaning in this work. 
98 It also appears to be the only book which was typed and printed rather than manually produced, as I have 
not been able to find any others. However, none of the existing scholarship confirms this fact. 
99 Stipan?i?, ed., Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, 22. 
49 
 
Figure 11. Mladen Stilinovi?, Nemam vremena (I have no time), 1979, 1983. 52 sheets, paperback, stapled. 
16.3 x 12cm. (Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/artists-books/) 
punctuation, more than 14,500 times.100 This book epitomizes his repetitive tendency. 
There is humor in the sheer absurdity of the book?s demands, but there is also a serious 
critique of dominant attitudes toward time. Predating the Slow Movement, it appropriates 
the signature excuse of time-poverty, ?the most commonly uttered phrase, with which we 
justify not having done the things that we should have done or would like to have 
done.?101 Already by the late 1970s the time-poverty epidemic was so pervasive that 
Stilinovi?, using only a few words, was able to produce ?a book with which a numerous 
reading public can identify, something that has not been achieved by painstakingly 
                                               
100 Spomenka Nikitovi?, Mladen Stilinovi? (Zagreb: Meandar/Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, 1998), 
15. 
101 Stipan?i?, ed., Mladen Stilinovi?: Artist?s Books 1972-2006, 22. 
50 
 
constructed works of literature.?102 Similar to the process of estrangement and 
reevaluation previously discussed with Artist at Work (though to a much greater extent in 
the case of I have no time), he incessantly repeats this ?collective symptom and 
mannerism of modern man? to expose it as ?a large-scale lie.?103 I have no time 
aggressively questions conventional notions of time, including the idea of (not) ?having? 
time, i.e. time as a measurable commodity or possession, subject to ownership, purchase, 
or sale--the notion that warrants the phrase ?time is money.? The perpetual scarcity that 
characterizes the modern time economy is based on a linear conception in which time is 
always running out. Kim Brockett contrasts this model with an alternative, kairological 
time: 
Most think of time in its chronological sense. That is to say, we follow ?clock-
time?: a measurable, linear concept that only moves forwards. The landscape of 
time that laziness occupies is less straightforward. It meanders through a freer 
notion of time?one that is populated by daydreams and inactivity, where time 
can simultaneously feel everlasting and yet come to an end all too soon?The 
counterweight to chronological time is kairological time, a term which originates 
from the Greek word kairos: an opportune moment. The kairological experience 
is largely intuitive and is more about timing than time. It is eating when you are 
hungry, and not because it is one o?clock and lunchtime. The process of art 
making follows a similarly loose timescale of occurring at the right, rather than 
the prescribed, moment.104 
 
In other words, kairological time offers an alternative view more conducive to laziness. 
As an intuitive relationship to time that heeds biological functions and intellectual 
impulses rather than dictating when they should occur, kairological time adopts the same 
holistic approach that constitutes laziness. By conceptualizing time as an abstract venue 
for the flow of existence rather than a perpetually vanishing resource, it frees naturally 
                                               
102 Nikitovi?, Mladen Stilinovi?, 17. 
103 Nikitovi?, Mladen Stilinovi?, 15-16. 
104 Brockett, ?Nothing Doing.? 
51 
 
occurring inclinations from the prison of arbitrary schedule. As Brockett suggests, 
kairological time mirrors artistic process. Chronological time allows room for neither 
laziness nor art, and I have no time prefigures these losses, later observed by ?In Praise of 
Laziness.? Stilinovi? inundates us with what he considers an irritatingly ubiquitous 
falsehood. If this work contains any optimism, it lies in the prospective revelation that 
time is not something to be possessed--in fact, it is not something at all. Time is abstract 
nothingness, a crucial ingredient in laziness (where it plays essential partner to concrete 
nothingness). In our current linear world, it is intangibility commodified. The occurrences 
by which it is measured--the planetary orbits, the rising and setting of the sun, the ticking 
of a clock--embody the same ceaseless repetition appropriated by Stilinovi? as a means of 
escaping dogma. I have no time is a monumental work of fiction.  
 Despite its many fundamental similarities, I have no time has a distinctively 
cynical and frantic flavor in comparison to Stilinovi??s other repetitive books. This seems 
at least partially due to the fact that, unlike his handwritten books, the experience of 
creating it does not closely resemble the experience of reading it, which robs the reading 
experience of its intimacy and imbues the book with a sense of imbalance. It might also 
have to do with its over-crowded pages, as his manually produced books tend to consist 
mostly of negative space, giving readers substantial visual pause. The majority of his 
books are material manifestations of his own meditative, lazy practices which also foster 
lazy conditions for readers by silently yet unapologetically occupying time through slow 
and sequential repetition, almost functioning as guidebooks for following lazy 
philosophy. This element of shared experience is ruthlessly absent from I have no time. It 
appears to mark a moment of frustration in which Stilinovi? concedes to the fast forces he 
52 
 
normally resists, just to prove a point. I have no time serves as a guidebook of ?what not 
to do,? making a mockery of time-poverty by exposing its absurd demands. It shares this 
formally deviant role with ?In Praise of Laziness,? which uncharacteristically concedes to 
conventional use of language to convey its message. In both cases, concessions are made 
in the interest of promoting and/or defending principles of laziness. 
The compromises Stilinovi? made when he first recited ?In Praise of Laziness? in 
1993 at the Opus Operandi Gallery in Ghent are amplified by comparison to an earlier 
performance. At the 1979 Works and Words exhibition at the De Appel Gallery in 
Amsterdam, he delivered a lecture against the English language titled ?The Discourse 
about Language and Power? entirely in Croatian, and requested that it remain 
untranslated.105 Recalling the event decades later, he explained: ?Of course, no one 
understood what was I talking about. So, this is that double role of the English language: 
as a power and as a necessity...I prefer my mother tongue.?106 
Fourteen years later in Ghent, Stilinovi? let go of his staunch commitment to 
resisting anglocentric expectations with the decision to read ?In Praise of Laziness? aloud 
in English. This is both a symptom and indicator of several changes that took place in the 
years between which are beyond the scope of this chapter--but for Stilinovi??s work, it 
marks a shift in his methods of asserting laziness. In some ways, his refusal to translate 
for his audience at De Appel can be considered a lazy decision. ?In Praise of Laziness,? 
however, is not lazy--it is a carefully composed text about laziness, advocating (rather 
than performing or practicing) laziness. The brand of laziness implemented in the case of 
                                               
105 Amy Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University 
Press, 2017), 323. 
106 Stilinovi? and Vasiljevi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?: Work is Disease,? 89. 
53 
 
the De Appel lecture is rooted in indifference as a mode of resistance. It is a deliberate 
and meaningful denial of linguistic hegemony, classified as lazy for Stilinovi??s refusal to 
do the work of translation, while also exposing the (lazy) expectation held by the 
English-speaking art world that outsiders will adapt accordingly. Knowingly speaking 
Croatian to audiences unequipped to comprehend the language qualifies as yet another 
form of laziness, namely indulgence in futility. Stilinovi? knows that the content of his 
lecture will fall on deaf ears, but decides to recite it anyway. This could even be read as a 
shaming tactic aimed at the anglocentrism of western art institutions, meant to expose the 
hypocrisy of their communicative double standards. In this case, his lecture might not be 
considered a genuine occurrence of his own laziness, but a performance of laziness 
intended as a provocation, calling out the linguistic laziness of his audience. Thus, his 
work becomes laziness, and vice versa--demonstrating one example of how work and 
laziness, in his view, are not only supplementary but can sometimes emerge as 
inextricably linked. 
In addition to its performative laziness, Stilinovi??s lecture at Works and Words 
can be understood as an imposition of laziness on an unsuspecting captive audience. Its 
unapologetic incomprehensibility defies audience expectations and surely disappoints 
anyone without humility, a sense of humor, or a taste for the absurd. In this way, it 
functions similarly to his other works which not only embody his own lazy practices but 
also create lazy conditions for his viewers. Stuck listening to a lecture in a language they 
can?t understand, Stilinovi??s audience was caught off guard by what those disinclined to 
laziness might consider a major waste of time. For those prepared to embrace laziness, 
this experience can be liberating. Without knowledge of the language, the lecturer?s voice 
54 
 
is reduced to a sequence of meaningless sounds. In the absence of graspable meaning, 
minds become free to wander aimlessly for the duration of the lecture, allowing them to 
experience a time of nothingness, to indulge in laziness. By confronting his audience with 
foreign matter which they are incapable of deciphering, he also exposes their impotence. 
Ultimately, Stilinovi??s performance of laziness (i.e. his seemingly obtuse insistence on 
remaining within his linguistic comfort zone at the cost of successfully communicating 
his thoughts to an interested, international audience) is draped with layers of laziness. It 
imposes conditions suited to the practice of laziness on his audience. His performance of 
one kind of laziness (resistance, indifference, futility) creates an atmosphere conducive to 
other kinds of laziness (doing nothing, idle time, impotence). His works reward those 
who are willing to heed his call to inaction. By defying our expectations, Stilinovi? 
provokes our submission to laziness. 
His tendency toward repetition is further developed by a series of works dealing 
with the theme of pain. Pain (Cross) (fig. 12) consists of two perpendicular, intersecting 
lines, forming the x and y axes of a graph, with the word ?BOL? (Croatian for ?pain?) 
written at both ends of each line. It uses the visual language of statistical analysis to 
objectively illustrate the pervasive, inescapable nature of pain: no matter which direction 
you stray from the graph?s center, you will always be approaching pain. The Pain Game 
(fig. 13), a die painted white with ?BOL? inscribed on all six sides, sends a similar 
message: pain is the only possible outcome. Igor Zabel compares The Pain Game to a 
famous scene in Georges Bizet?s 1875 opera Carmen, in which Carmen repeatedly 
attempts to see her future in cards only to find that they always read ?Death? no matter 
55 
 
Figure 12. Mladen Stilinovi?, Pain (Cross), 1989. pencil on paper, 20.6 x 29.2 cm. 
(Source: https://dailyartfair.com/artist/mladen-stilinovic#vm--mladen-stilinovic/flow/-1) 
Figure 13. Mladen Stilinovi?, The Pain Game, 1977. Acryl on wooden dice, 2.3 x 2.3 x 2.3 cm.  
Instructions: Only one player, the die is cast according to his own rhythm, the game lasts 7 minutes.  
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/625-2/) 
 
56 
 
how she shuffles them.107 Due to the nonreciprocal nature of audience-performer 
relationships in opera, Carmen?s audience passively receives this forecast of doomed 
fate, comfortably distanced by the buffer of Carmen?s character. The Pain Game, on the 
other hand, invites its audience to actively endure a simulation of experiencing this fate. 
Stilinovi? included the following instructions: ?Only one player, the die is cast according 
to his own rhythm, the game lasts 7 minutes.?108 It would be easy to interpret this work as 
a playfully cynical prognosis based purely on its description--but Stilinovi? prescribed a 
duration, and this proposed temporal element begs to be experienced rather than merely 
contemplated or analyzed. What, if any, further insight might be gained from following 
Stilinovi??s instructions? We already know the sole possible outcome of rolling the die. 
Playing the game does not reveal any new information, nor does it produce any tangible 
reward. Intended for only one player, it offers no opportunity for social interaction or 
competition. In a lazy gesture of indifference to conventional values and definitions, The 
Pain Game eludes game theories and refuses to fulfill the basic requirements of its own 
label. According to the ?difficulty view,? a game?s value corresponds to its level of 
difficulty: overcoming the challenges presented by a game rewards us with a sense of 
achievement, and the greater the challenge, the greater the value of the game.109 The Pain 
Game poses no apparent challenge and thus does not seem worth playing--it hardly 
qualifies as a game. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, repeatedly rolling a dice 
alone for seven minutes to reveal the same unsurprising result over and over again as a 
                                               
107 Zabel, ?General Equivalent,? 8. 
108 Tihomir Milovac and Branka Stipan?i? eds., Mladen Stilinovi?: Pain (Zagreb: Museum of 
Contemporary Art, 2003), 30. 
109 Jonathan Gingerich, ?Freedom and the Value of Games,? Canadian Journal of Philosophy (January 
2018): 1-2.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2017.1423224.  
57 
 
means to no apparent end (essentially, doing nothing) seems like a waste of time. As 
articulated by Zabel, Stilinovi? wants us ?to experience the emptied time of pain and 
nothingness.?110 Thus, it cannot truly be said that The Pain Game poses no challenge. Its 
challenge, which has only become greater as the pace of the world has continued to 
increase since this work?s debut, lies in its demand that we lend it our time without 
expecting anything in return. In the context of the ongoing time-poverty epidemic, it 
becomes an extremely difficult game. The Pain Game challenges us to slow down and 
face our temporal horror vacui. 
Dictionary - Pain, executed first in his native Croatian in 1979-80111 and again 
using an English language dictionary in 2000-03 (fig. 14), applies the same idea to a 
dictionary as The Pain Game does to a die. Stilinovi? covered up all the definitions with 
white paint, materializing the lazy notions of erasure, negation, absence. Because this 
erasure is applied to a dictionary, it also functions as a rejection of codified knowledge 
and embodies the ?sheer stupidity? of Stilinovi??s laziness. He then replaced the original 
definitions with the handwritten word ?PAIN,? effectively homogenizing the entire 
language. This work is by far his most labor intensive undertaking and represents a 
massive convergence of previously used methods, including erasure, repetition, 
materiality, sequentiality, and systematic (sometimes absurd) juxtaposition. As with The 
Pain Game, we could easily dismiss engagement with the object in favor of reflection on 
its description: it is a statement about the limitations imposed by the inherently 
                                               
110 Zabel, ?General Equivalent,? 8. 
111 For the original Croatian language version, each word from the dictionary was hand-copied onto a sheet 
of paper and followed by the word ?BOL? (Croatian for ?pain?). The later English language version, 
however, was made subtractively by painting over the definitions with white in a copy of the Oxford 
English dictionary and handwriting the word ?PAIN? over top of them. 
58 
 
 
Figure 14. Mladen Stilinovi?, details from Dictionary - Pain, 2000-2003. 
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/625-2/) 
ideological nature of language. As seen in his earlier works, Stilinovi? constantly 
attempts to free words from the grasp of ideological meaning through ceaseless repetition 
and absurd juxtapositions. Dictionary - Pain uses these same methods, i.e. juxtaposing 
?PAIN? with literally every other word in the dictionary, essentially rewriting the 
foremost authoritative text on language. It also contains the same cynical message as The 
Pain Game: there is no escaping the pain caused by the limitations of language. 
However, such conclusions are drawn from knowledge of the works rather than 
experience of them. Recalling Stilinovi??s convictions about laziness will help us arrive 
at a different conclusion: ?Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and 
59 
 
perfected.? Zabel heeded this wisdom: ?The only appropriate way to understand it would 
be to read slowly, carefully and patiently, in a long and painful process, all 523 pages, 
word by word.?112 While the work has not been reproduced and made accessible in its 
entirety, I was able to access and read the first 114 pages (letters A through C).113 What 
sounds like an incredibly boring and tedious read turned out to be profoundly 
introspective and at times amusing. Certain words evoke real and relatable physical pain 
(?back pain,? ?chronic pain?) while some trigger memories of loss (?cancer pain?). 
Others form utterances of laughable nonsense (?? la carte pain,? ?chic pain,? ?confetti 
pain,? ?cucumber pain,? ?cute pain?). Some are redundant (?ache pain,? ?agony pain,? 
?bad pain?) while others are oxymoronic (?bliss pain,? ?congenial pain?). Pain is defined 
according to its era (?ancient pain,? ?baroque pain,? ?contemporary pain?) and acquires 
all kinds of other odd descriptors (?artful pain,? ?brackish pain,? ?cosmic pain?). Some 
rhyme (?aeroplane pain,? ?brain pain,? ?complain pain?) and some are poetic in other 
ways (?abstract pain,? ?boundless pain,? ?concrete pain?). Verbs form a long list of 
sometimes strange, sometimes contradictory commands (?abolish pain,? ?accept pain,? 
?Anglicize pain,? ?ban pain,? ?befriend pain,? ?boycott pain,? ?cause pain,? ?cure pain,? 
?commodify pain?). Beneath the white painted surface, faint traces of the original 
definitions linger like ghosts. The associations arising from each pair of words will differ 
according to each reader?s particular past. Stilinovi? anticipated this uniquely personal 
reading experience cultivated by Dictionary - Pain when he declared that ?this work is 
dedicated very directly to every individual observer.?114  
                                               
112 Zabel, ?General Equivalent,? 5. 
113 Milovac and Stipan?i? eds., Mladen Stilinovi?: Pain, 41-156. 
114 Tihomir Milovac and Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Pain Opera,? in Mladen Stilinovi?: Pain, 19. 
60 
 
As with his other books, the reading experience of this work approximates 
meditation through its mantra-like repetition. However, each repetition in Dictionary - 
Pain is punctuated by a totally unique thought experiment in the form of word 
association. This dynamic oscillation between constant and variable terms approaches 
styles of meditation categorized as open awareness.115 Reading Dictionary - Pain is not a 
monotonous and predictable experience--it conjures unexpected memories, thoughts, and 
emotions. Just as in open awareness meditation, the mind is allowed to wander and have 
distracted thoughts. However, the goal is to acknowledge these distractions, build 
capacity for nonreactivity to them, and continuously return to an object of focus despite 
these distractions. This highly introspective process is necessitated by the structure of 
Dictionary - Pain.  
As they involve not only erasure but also rewriting, his dictionary works 
thoroughly breach the boundaries of the author?s domain, drawing attention to the 
?problem of authorship.?116 This vigorous display of disregard for the authorship of 
others might be seen as functioning in oscillating tandem with the passive principles of 
laziness: passivity entails relinquishing one?s rights to act, to affect, to produce, to 
consume, to intentionally impose upon anything in any way--passivity revokes authorial 
rights. Stilinovi? tests the waters of authorship near the end of ?In Praise of Laziness? by 
attributing an obviously fabricated quote to Karl Marx: ?Work is disease.? In Croatian, 
?Rad je Bolest.? This quotation is a recycled phrase that Stilinovi? appropriated from his 
own work over a decade earlier, the message painted by hand on cardboard, similarly to 
Rad je Rije?. The Croatian word for disease contains ?bol? (pain), which seems to hint at 
                                               
115 Brown, Creswell, and Ryan, eds., Handbook of Mindfulness, 190. 
116 Nikitovi?, Mladen Stilinovi?, 42. 
61 
 
an underlying connection between work and pain--a linkage already implied by 
association with the inclusion of ?pain? in his definition of laziness. 
In addition to its rejection of language at large, Stilinovi??s ritual defacement of 
dictionaries necessarily includes an expression of contempt for the treatment of 
?laziness? in particular, as its negative connotations are reinforced by dictionary 
definitions. By rejecting dictionaries, Stilinovi? rejects codified wisdom and embraces the 
?sheer stupidity? of laziness. Considering Roger Conover?s definition of ideology as ?the 
opposite of biology,?117 it appears significant that Stilinovi??s preferred term (pain) for 
obliterating the ideological powers of language denotes a biological phenomenon. This 
idea that biological experience provides some means of defying or combatting 
ideological dogma seems to find a parallel, or perhaps even an extension, in the 
materiality of works of art. Stilinovi? opts for intensive and time-consuming manual 
production because physical engagement with the material world, especially when 
performed lazily, approaches a mode of existence immune to ideology. However, the 
repetitive physical work that contributes to lazy materialization is not merely for the sake 
of subverting ideology--it might also be a means of creating new space to allow new 
things to flourish. Perhaps the reverberations of Stilinovi??s physical labor, as well as 
lack thereof, are capable of extending beyond the objects of his material manipulations. 
  
                                               
117 Conover, ?Against Dictionaries: The East as She is Spoke by the West,? 352. 
62 
 
Chapter 3: Remapping the Political Particularities of Lazy Landscapes 
 
 
Many attempts to contextualize Stilinovi??s work tend to either ignore important 
particularities or overemphasize certain factors at the expense of others, creating a 
narrative in which the logic of his laziness is either oversimplified or overshadowed. The 
previous chapter?s reassessment of his work avoided reliance on political context in an 
effort to liberate it from carelessly imposed yet firmly entrenched frameworks of pre-
packaged political meaning. I have heretofore suspended critical discussion of his 
political context not only to allow previously unearthed lazy qualities to emerge, but also 
to create the space necessary for weaving his work a new contextual fabric properly fitted 
to his political particularities. This chapter aims to restructure and properly attune the 
contextual relationships between Stilinovi??s life, work, and laziness, which I contend 
will reveal the positive potential of laziness as an interrelated set of attitudes and 
practices that constitute a pacifist toolbox. 
In her essay ?Happy End of the Cold War,? Zdenka Badovinac asserts the 
importance of proper contextualization: ?Socialist and post-socialist art demand 
contextualization; they cannot be separated from local cultural traditions and the histories 
of their respective public spheres without distorting them beyond recognition.?118 While 
this statement arguably holds true for art of any political context, there does seem to have 
been a post-1989 tendency among western art institutions to gloss over the specificities of 
former socialist countries in surveys of Eastern European art. This trend might be 
condemned as a reductive means of maintaining the Cold War-era illusion of otherness, 
                                               
118 Zdenka Badovinac, ?Happy End of the Cold War,? in Comradeship: Curating, Art, and Politics in Post-
Socialist Europe (New York: Independent Curators International, 2019), 242. 
63 
 
or it might be excused as an innocently overeager yet underprepared effort to incorporate 
Eastern European artists into the contemporary canon. In any case, it has not spared 
Stilinovi?. Addressing his resulting mischaracterization and complicating these 
contextual oversimplifications is one goal of this chapter. 
 Badovinac also observes a tendency among artists critical of both communism 
and capitalism to propose alternative ?ideal worlds? with their work.119 While Stilinovi? 
certainly falls into this critical camp, he does not propose any sort of alternative world to 
be inhabited. Rather, he attempts to dismantle the dogmatic fixtures of our existing world 
and proposes an alternative way of inhabiting it. Laziness for him is ?a positive way of 
being, a ?yes? to life.?120 By working within the landscape of laziness mapped out in the 
previous chapters and reconstructing Stilinovi??s political context upon this foundation, 
this chapter seeks to expand his notion of laziness to include not only what it means and 
entails, but what it can achieve.  
 The formerly socialist nations of Eastern Europe constitute a vast and diverse 
region with a multitude of different historical trajectories at play. Socialism, while 
geographically pervasive, was certainly not implemented uniformly across the region. 
This was especially true of Yugoslavia. By leaving the Cominform (Communist 
Information Bureau) in 1948 under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia cut 
political ties with the Soviet Union and instead pursued its own brand of ?self-managed? 
socialism.121 The Non-Aligned Movement, ?an international coalition that refused to 
comply with the ideological division of the world into two opposing camps,? was 
                                               
119 Badovinac, ?Happy End of the Cold War,? 259. 
120 Daoust and Stilinovi?, ?Idler // Mladen Stilinovi? // An Artist Who Invents Nothing.? 
121 Dubravka Djuri? and Mi?ko ?uvakovi? eds. Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-
gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003) 10-11. 
64 
 
founded in Belgrade in 1961.122 With these moves toward independence and neutrality, 
Tito?s Yugoslavia fundamentally distanced itself politically from the rest of the Eastern 
Bloc. Its liminal geography and neutral policy combined to form a sort of gap in the Iron 
Curtain: ?...the remote world lying between the East and West, the world that exists in the 
borderland between democratic and totalitarian states...Yugoslavia stood, politically 
speaking, wedged between the Eastern and Western Blocs.?123 
 These conditions gave rise to certain cultural privileges that were not always 
enjoyed by citizens of other socialist states, such as greater freedom of mobility across 
international borders. Yugoslavia moved toward liberalization soon after the Tito-Stalin 
split and had begun opening up to western influence and exchange by the 1950s. For 
artists, who were among the first Yugoslav citizens allowed to study abroad, this 
presented opportunities to participate in western cultural spheres and art markets decades 
before they became accessible to artists from many other socialist countries.124 While 
there was not much of an art market in Yugoslavia, there was an infrastructure developed 
for housing experimental and collaborative artist activities in the form of Student Culture 
Centers (SKC). These were established in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb after the 1968 
student protests (as a venue to allow, but also to contain, rebellious expression); artists 
and students moved freely and frequently between these three capital cities. The SKC 
Belgrade played a particularly important role in the development of Yugoslav 
experimental art and in fostering international exchange during the 1970s: it regularly 
attracted locals like Marina Abramovi?, hosted foreign artists such as Joseph Beuys, 
                                               
122 Maja and Reuben Fowkes, "Introduction: Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism," Third Text 32, no. 
4 (2018): 376, doi:10.1080/09528822.2018.1532719. 
123 Djuri? and ?uvakovi? ed., Impossible Histories, xi, 10-11. 
124 ?imi?i?, ?From Zenit to Mental Space,? 315-16. 
65 
 
staged a Phillip Glass opera, and even published a Serbian translation of texts by John 
Cage.125 Though Tito?s dictatorship was generally considered benevolent, it was not 
always benign--those who made jokes at the expense of certain state officials could be 
risking their job or even their freedom.126 However, as Stilinovi? recalls, artists were 
typically aware of these boundaries and censored themselves accordingly: ?We artists 
knew: Tito and the army, those were two things you weren?t supposed to touch...you 
could screw around with ?uvar, but with Tito--no.?127  
 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Yugoslavia had become ?the most open country 
of the Eastern Bloc.?128 This was the world in which Stilinovi? came of age. He 
developed his artistic practice during these decades by taking full advantage of the 
available resources, making himself at home in this network of artist venues and 
communities, and exercising his Yugoslav mobility. He spent the 1960s ravenously 
consuming art and literature, soaking up avant-garde films, and burying himself in books 
by authors of diverse origins. He also wrote and published poetry, and by age sixteen 
witnessed John Cage perform at the Zagreb Music Biennale. The 1970s, however, were 
spent in constant motion: In the earlier part of the decade, he showed his films at amateur 
festivals in West Germany, Poland, and cities all over Yugoslavia, including Zagreb, 
Split, Pula, Belgrade, Skopje, Ljubljana, and Kranj. Frequently bouncing between the 
SKCs in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, he met numerous other artists and regularly 
participated in programs such as Belgrade?s annual April Meetings. In 1973, he and his 
                                               
125 Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, 56-58. 
126 Kri?i? Roban, ?Laughter Protocol,? 179. 
127 Stilinovi? and Stipan?i?, ?A Talk with Mladen Stilinovi?,?20. Stilinovi? is referring to the politician 
Stipe ?uvar (1936-2004) who served as the Croatian Minister of Education from 1974-82. 
128 Djuri? and ?uvakovi? eds., Impossible Histories, xiv. 
66 
 
partner Branka Stipan?i?129 began hitchhiking through Italy, Austria, France, Germany, 
the Netherlands, and Great Britain, where they studied art in museums and galleries. He 
followed opportunities to exhibit his work (and visit some Biennales) in Warsaw, Venice, 
Modena, Paris, Innsbruck, Graz, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, and concluded the 
decade by spending a year studying Italian in Perugia.130 
 Tito remained in power until his death in 1980, after which things in Yugoslavia 
gradually began to head down the path toward its dissolution. As the following decade 
became increasingly characterized by economic uncertainty, rising ethnic tensions, and 
growing nationalist sentiments, many of the student centers that had helped foster 
dialogue and collaboration between artist communities began to close.131 By the end of 
the decade, the constituent republics of Yugoslavia had elected new nationalist 
governments who would soon begin declaring their independence from Yugoslavia 
(starting with Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, then Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992), to which 
the central powers in Belgrade would fiercely object. Thus began the violent dissolution 
of Yugoslavia: a series of wars for independence resulting in hundreds of thousands of 
refugees, territorial disputes followed by mass exodus of ethnic-national populations, 
genocide of Bosnian Muslims, rampant war crimes demanding UN intervention, and 
levels of death and destruction reminiscent of the 1940s.132 As the Iron Curtain was being 
                                               
129 Stipan?i? was a student of art history at that time. She and Stilinovi? remained partners until his death in 
2016. Today (as is evident from the bibliography of this text), she is among the foremost scholars of his 
work. While her personal relationship with Stilinovi? is advantageous because it lends her scholarship on 
him a great deal of unique insight, I have tried to remain wary of how it might also potentially influence her 
critical approach. 
130 Branka Stipan?i?, ?Biography,? Mladen Stilinovi?, accessed September 13, 2020,  
https://mladenstilinovic.com/bio/. All of the endeavors listed in this paragraph were retrieved from this 
source. 
131 Bryzgel, Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960, 61. 
132 ?Timeline: Break-up of Yugoslavia,? BBC News, last modified May 22, 2006, 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4997380.stm.  
67 
 
pulled back and the rest of the formerly divided continent was undergoing a unification of 
sorts, Yugoslavia?s internal borders were being violently redrawn. 
For many artists, who remained unsubscribed to divisive nationalist rhetoric and 
?lived through the 1980s enclosed in subcultural enclaves,? these violent developments 
seemed to come out of nowhere.133 Having split his early career between the former 
Yugoslav republics, the terrain across which Stilinovi? once freely moved had become 
dangerously divided territory. This was especially true of the highly contested border 
between his home of Croatia and his birthplace of Serbia, where much of the violence 
and destruction was concentrated--he had spent more time in their respective capital 
cities, Zagreb and Belgrade, than anywhere else. Many of his friends and colleagues, 
including Serbian artist Ne?a Paripovi? to whom he had dedicated Artist at Work, were 
now considered enemies by the state and their previously shared Yugoslav identity 
ceased to exist. The Croatian War of Independence ended in 1995, but the entire string of 
related conflicts would drag on into the twenty-first century. While the first few decades 
of Stilinovi??s career were characterized by freedom of movement and abundant 
opportunities for collaboration and experimentation, the 1990s marked an abrupt, 
devastating, and irreversible change. The political entities responsible for drastically 
altering the course of his future also tried to rewrite the past with historical revisionism 
?whose goal was to irreparably throw Yugoslavia into the ?dustbin of history,? labelling 
the fifty-year experience of peace, modernization, and relative prosperity as a ?totalitarian 
prison house of nations.??134  
                                               
133 Janevski ed., As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film, 51. 
134 Vladislav Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, eds., Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma 
in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Literature and Culture (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Inc., 
2016), 11. 
68 
 
Some of the residue from this revisionism has crept into western understandings 
of the Yugoslav experience. Post-1989 surveys of Eastern European art conducted by 
western art institutions frequently tend to ignore the substantial differences between 
Stilinovi??s experience as an artist in pre-1990s Yugoslavia and that of artists in other 
formerly socialist countries of the Soviet Bloc. For example, a 2013 exhibition at the 
German Historical Museum in Berlin, The Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe Since 
1945, included a page from Stilinovi??s 1979 work Rje?nik - Bol (A). Grouped according 
to themes, this work was placed in a section claiming to deal with civil rights issues such 
as ?the struggle for minimal freedoms? and ?the uproar against state repression and 
patronising cultural policy.?135 The catalogue description of Rje?nik - Bol (A) reads: ?The 
artists regarded pain as the dominant emotion in late 1970s Yugoslavia. In the prevailing 
atmosphere of fear and hopelessness, there was an overwhelming sense of being trapped. 
Everything one could think of was associated with pain.?136 This description 
demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the Yugoslav artist?s experience. As discussed 
earlier, Stilinovi? was far from ?trapped? in the late 1970s--he was hitchhiking across 
Western Europe, visiting museums, exhibiting his work and studying abroad. The 
catalogue accompanying the 2013 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh demonstrates 
similar misunderstandings: Stilinovi? is said to have been ?isolated from both state 
sponsorship and the commercially driven art world of Western Europe and the United 
States? and his work?s amateuristic aesthetic is attributed in part to ?restricted 
                                               
135 Heinrich Wefing, ?The Precariousness of Freedom,? in The Desire for Freedom: Art in Europe Since 
1945, ed. Monika Flacke (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2013), 159. 
136 Wefing, ?The Precariousness of Freedom,? 177. 
69 
 
communication with a wider creative community.?137 The claim about his lack of state 
sponsorship disregards his inclusion in the major 1978 exhibition The New Art Practice 
in Yugoslavia: 1966-1978 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art Zagreb.138 As we have 
seen, he had ample access to and contact with western art markets and creative 
communities, not only through his own travels, but also through visits from prominent 
foreign artists such as John Cage and Joseph Beuys to local Yugoslav venues. 
Another curiously common tendency plaguing readings of Stilinovi??s work from 
the 1990s is a complete disregard for Yugoslavia?s extremely turbulent political context. 
This tendency is demonstrated by the critical treatment of two of his most frequently 
invoked (and most overtly laziness-themed) works: Artist at Work and ?In Praise of 
Laziness.? Artist at Work was created during peacetime in 1978, when Stilinovi? enjoyed 
ample freedoms and was thoroughly immersed in artistic communities spanning 
Yugoslavia and beyond. ?In Praise of Laziness? was written in 1993, when the ruthless 
wars ripping Yugoslavia apart were well underway. Despite the fact that Artist at Work 
preceded ?In Praise of Laziness? by fifteen years and originated in an entirely different 
global political world order, these two works have consistently been reproduced 
alongside each other as if they were companion pieces. While they obviously have 
overlapping themes, too many authors have taken the liberty of presenting the 
photographs as illustrations of the text.139 Still others have treated the text as a mere 
                                               
137 Lauren Wetmore, ?Mladen Stilinovi?,? in 2013 Carnegie International, ed. Michelle Piranio and Katie 
Reilly (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2013), 164. 
138 Marijan Susovski ed., The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978 (Zagreb: Gallery of 
Contemporary Art, 1978). 
139 Some examples of this can be found in: Kunst, ?Art and Labour: On Consumption, Laziness and Less 
Work,? 120.; Kri?i? Roban, ?Laughter Protocol,? 191.; Filippo Maggia ed., Contemporary Photography 
from Eastern Europe: History, Memory, Identity (Milan: Skira Editore, 2009), 182. 
70 
 
caption for the photographs, for example: ?Stilinovi? advocates laziness with his series 
Artist at Work, which lays claim to an influence from Marcel Duchamp.?140 Both of these 
claims are made explicit by Stilinovi? in his text but neither are obvious takeaways from 
his photographs. While such interpretations of Artist at Work could certainly be defended, 
none of the authors guilty of this anachronism bother to make the argument. 
 Conflation of these two works limits their potential meanings. Particularly 
because Artist at Work initially sets itself up as a punchline, pairing it with ?In Praise of 
Laziness? precludes deeper engagement with and serious consideration of the text. By its 
linkage across time between two temporally distant works, Stilinovi??s notion of laziness 
is stretched thin, robbed of its depth, and denied the opportunity to evolve in critical 
understandings. While there is no strong indication that his basic notion of laziness 
fundamentally changed as a result of any local or global political events occurring 
between 1978 and 1993, it does appear that these events contributed to the articulation 
and urgency developing in his rhetoric. As discussed in previous chapters, ?In Praise of 
Laziness? is a formal anomaly because it concedes to conventional means of 
communication in three significant ways. First, its coherent composition breaks from his 
commitment to ?de-symbolization,? which most often manifests as nonsensical, repetitive 
words or symbols isolated from meaningful contexts. Second, it articulates a definition, 
which he normally regards as an inherently ideological enemy that deserves to be 
painstakingly obliterated. Third, it employs the English language, and he ?prefer[s] [his] 
mother tongue.?141 As discussed in the previous chapter, this decision acquires more 
                                               
140 Christine Macel and Nata?a Petre?in-Bachelez eds., Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of 
Art in Former Eastern Europe (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2010), 146. 
141 Stilinovi? and Vasiljevi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi?: Work is Disease,? 89. 
71 
 
significance in light of his 1979 refusal of English in his lecture at the Works and Words 
exhibition in Amsterdam. This lecture offers a more apt comparison for Artist at Work 
than ?In Praise of Laziness.? First of all, his 1979 lecture and Artist at Work are separated 
by only one year and essentially originate from the same context. Second, as we have 
seen, both can be considered laziness performed (by Stilinovi?), as well as laziness 
imposed (on his audience). ?In Praise of Laziness,? however, neither enacts nor enforces 
laziness. It is a text about laziness, defining laziness, advocating laziness--it employs all 
the didactic modes of communication normally rejected by Stilinovi?.     
I would like to suggest that the formal compromises characterizing ?In Praise of 
Laziness? can be at least partially explained by a new sense of urgency developed in 
response to the crisis of war-torn Yugoslavia. Suddenly confronted with a new violent 
reality that cannot be combated with his usual set of artistic tools, Stilinovi? compromises 
his commitment to anti-ideology in favor of employing language that will clearly 
communicate his ideas to the widest possible audience. These concessions are made in 
order to share a valuable piece of knowledge that he?s mostly been keeping to himself: 
the importance of laziness. Stilinovi? had always known about the importance of 
laziness--he faithfully practiced, represented, performed, demonstrated, suggested, 
materialized, and imposed various aspects of laziness in his work, but he never quite 
articulated its concept or advocated its practice until 1993. Though he explicitly positions 
his advocacy of laziness within the broader context of East-West macro-politics and the 
receding Iron Curtain, the influence of his much more dire local circumstances at that 
time should not be overlooked. As we have seen, several authors prior to and since 
Stilinovi? have suggested various valuable potentials of laziness, e.g. as a requisite for 
72 
 
work, a mode of resistance, an artistic process, a research method, a health measure, and 
a pleasure in itself. While these values may also apply to the laziness conveyed by 
Stilinovi? within his post-socialist context, I propose that consideration of his more 
particular post-Yugoslav context reveals an additional positive potential of laziness as a 
form of pacifism. 
Many of the practices and attitudes we have identified as strains of laziness can be 
seen as approximating and/or supportive of pacifist solutions. Stilinovi? illustrates one 
such example while discussing his book I have no time by condemning the global time-
poverty epidemic and identifying it as an impetus for war: 
People who had no time always got on my nerves. Today in particular, the excuse 
of not having time has become the worst kind of rhetoric...?I have no time? can be 
stretched so far as to become an excuse for murder...Bush has no time, so he has 
to attack Iraq. But it is not true. The war in Yugoslavia too is the result of this. 
Someone had the idea that there was no time and that the country had to collapse 
in five minutes. But if everyone had sat down and talked, perhaps for a couple of 
years, it would be better for everyone.142 
 
Laziness as a time-based notion, as a reconfiguration of our perception of and 
relationship to time--perhaps in other words, the cultivation of patience--has obvious 
benefits for de-escalating conflict. This example also points to non-reactivity as a 
property of laziness (as inaction necessarily excludes reaction), which is an essential 
characteristic of non-violence. Laziness as a mode of resistance can be employed not only 
to resist externally imposed demands, but also to resist acting on one?s own impulses. 
Following in this vein, intentional passivity can be considered an assertion of will-power. 
This is a reminder that inaction is not merely the default state that occurs in the absence 
                                               
142 Sabolovi? and Stilinovi?, ?Mladen Stilinovi? in Conversation with Sabina Sabolovi?: I?ve Got Time,? 
45-46. 
73 
 
of action, but an option that may be deliberately pursued as an alternative to action--and 
when the action in question involves violence, inaction certainly qualifies as a preferable 
alternative. 
When Stilinovi? suggests that wars could have been avoided ?if everyone had sat 
down and talked, perhaps for a couple of years,? he proposes (patient) dialogue as an 
alternative to violence. Effective dialogue requires its participants to practice at least as 
much perception as expression, and, as previously demonstrated, the passivity practiced 
in laziness induces a perceptive state. Thus, perceptivity is both an outcome of laziness 
and a fundamental ingredient of dialogue. Describing the process of making his 
Dictionary - Pain, Stilinovi? said: ?I whited out all the explained words, and opened up a 
space for dialogue and interaction.?143 His erasure is not motivated merely by what it 
seeks to negate, but by what might materialize in its absence. Just as Tanizaki?s parasol 
roof sweeps away the dust of the sun to make room for building a home, Stilinovi? 
declutters the dictionary to make space for new meaningful dialogues. The voids created 
by his lazy endeavors become potential sites of positive discourse. 
During the 1990s, Stilinovi? began working on a series called White Absence (fig. 
15) in response to the horrors of war for which he could find no appropriate words. This 
series consists of both two-dimensional works and seemingly random objects and 
assemblages, most of them painted all or partially white, sometimes covered in white 
fabric. Unlike nearly all of his previous work, it makes no attempt to be subversive or 
humorous. Merely poetic objects embarking on a refrain from politics, these works are  
                                               
143 Milovac and Stilinovi?, ?Pain Opera,? 19. 
74 
 
Figure 15. Mladen Stilinovi?, selection of works from White Absence series. top left: Spectacles, 1992; 
bottom left: Protected Nothing, 1995; center: Shoelace, 1995; right: A Board in a Bag, 1992.  
(Source: https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/11-2/) 
enveloped by the color he associated with pain and absence.144 White, described by some 
of the same terms used to define laziness, also happens to be the color that signals 
surrender. When exhibited in galleries, these works blend into their environment: ?The 
white space between the works creates intervals, emptiness is as eloquent as the works 
themselves. White objects are lost on the white wall, dematerialized by the monochrome 
and require additional concentration to establish the connection.?145 As is often the case 
with his works, these objects materialize certain aspects of laziness. Their precarious 
presence invites viewers to meditate by demanding ?additional concentration,? 
coincidentally recreating the scene from Artist at Work?s inspiration in which Paripovi? is 
repeatedly pictured staring at a blank white surface. As white works on white walls, they 
negate themselves, formlessly receding into the background of life. They approach 
invisibility--another term with which Stilinovi? associated the color white. Why, he asks, 
                                               
144 Wystan Curnow and Branka Stipan?i?, Mladen Stilinovi?: White Absence, trans. Maja ?oljan 
(Auckland: The Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland, 2001). 
145 Curnow and Stipan?i?, Mladen Stilinovi?: White Absence. 
75 
 
do people paint the walls in their houses white? His answer: Because they don?t want to 
see them.146 These dematerializing formal qualities of White Absence also function on a 
metaphorical level not seen in his earlier work: perpetually performing their never-fully-
realized disappearing act, the painted objects begin to embody the painful sites of 
convergence between personal and political loss. Just like humans unable to cope with 
overwhelming hopelessness, these objects turn inward, retreating from painful reality. 
Like Yugoslavia unraveling in a tangled web of wars, they flicker in and out of the 
visible realm, teetering on the edge of existence. And, like anyone who outlives the place 
they once called home while carrying its memory and retaining its influence, these works 
are absence embodied. When faced with the unspeakable tragedies of war, Stilinovi? 
produced works that silently surrender to their surroundings. 
When interpreted metaphorically in this way, White Absence reveals a new mode 
of impotent laziness: a type of absence or passivity that is not approached deliberately, 
but induced by a sense of hopelessness so overwhelming that it erodes one?s very 
existence. Whereas laziness as pacifist orientation may be employed to avoid or de-
escalate conflict, this version of impotent laziness emerges as an automatic emotional 
response to crisis. Like ?In Praise of Laziness,? White Absence marks a significant 
departure from his usual formal approach, but in a very different way. White Absence is 
nearly devoid of content, while ?In Praise of Laziness? incorporates an unusually high 
amount. They approach laziness from opposing ends of the spectrum, as White Absence 
helplessly submits to it while ?In Praise of Laziness? staunchly supports it. What these 
two divergent examples have in common are the adverse conditions under which they 
                                               
146 Stilinovi?, ?Abeceda nezavisne kulture: Mladen Stilinovi?, intervju,? (interview). 
76 
 
were produced. Taken together and measured against the notions of laziness construed 
from Stilinovi??s own definition, they demonstrate the absurdity of his concept and the 
futility of attempting to reconcile its contradictions. Yet, these contradictions prove 
absolutely essential: First, if laziness is a ?way of being,? it requires adapting to one?s 
environment (and not vice versa). Second, if laziness is ?a ?yes? to life,? then its 
principles must reflect life?s contradictions. The absurdity of laziness, like the absurdity 
of life, defies rationalization. Perhaps the practice and perfection of laziness means 
coming to terms with absurdity and learning how to put it to use, or in Stilinovi??s words, 
?how to manipulate that which manipulates you.?147 
  
                                               
147 Mladen Stilinovi?, ?Footwriting,? trans. Maja ?oljan (first published in catalogue for solo show at 
Studio of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1984), https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/5-2/. 
77 
 
Conclusion 
 
 
Noticing the increased interest in Stilinovi??s lazy-themed work in recent decades, 
Jonatan Habib Engqvist suggests that this might be ?a symptom of a desire for a kind of 
leisure, laziness or spare time that we no longer have.?148 While this remark rings true, I 
have tried to demonstrate how certain notions of laziness might possess the potential to 
serve purposes beyond merely offering a break from work. Inaction need not be the mere 
lack of intentional action. Rather, as articulated by Stilinovi?, inaction can and should be 
practiced intentionally for its own value. Engqvist?s ruminations ultimately lead him to a 
similar conclusion regarding the value of laziness in the twenty-first century: ?In the 
post-slacker age, people?s passivity might be as important as their activity.?149 
There are precedents in art and literature for my contention that certain aspects of 
laziness contain pacifist potential. Robert Louis Stevenson explained his conception of 
idleness as the cultivation of tolerance and appreciation for difference, writing that those 
who practice it ?will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and 
opinions...while others behold the East and the West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will 
be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things.?150 This 
conceptualizes a lazy worldview in which the divisive and polarizing classification 
systems used to justify conflict are rendered obsolete. Overtly pacifist (in)activism is 
perhaps most potently exemplified by Yoko Ono and John Lennon?s 1969 ?Bed-Ins for 
Peace?--which produced images remarkably similar in content to Stilinovi??s Artist at 
                                               
148 Jonatan Habib Engqvist, ?Just as Money is Paper, so a Gallery is a Room,? in Work, Work, Work: A 
Reader on Art and Labour, ed. Annika Enqvist et al. (Stockholm: Sternberg Press, 2012), 121-22. 
149 Engqvist, ?Just as Money is Paper, so a Gallery is a Room,? 124. 
150 Stevenson, Robert Louis. ?An Apology for Idlers.?  7. 
78 
 
Work. Considering how Ono and Lennon took advantage of their celebrity to bring media 
cameras into their hotel room for this idle spectacle, these events also foreshadowed 
Stilinovi??s methods by perfectly demonstrating ?how to manipulate that which 
manipulates you.?151 My research here has been limited to lazy manifestations and the 
extraction of their potential in Stilinovi??s work alone, but this topic yields ample 
comparisons to works by other artists which I believe would prove especially fruitful and 
hope to pursue in the future. 
The notion of laziness as a pacifist attitude, informed by its recontextualization 
within the hostile environment of 1990s Yugoslavia, has not been put forth with 
intentions of overshadowing the validity or significance of any other previously discussed 
or as yet undetected potential meaning of laziness. If any conclusion can be drawn from 
all of this, it is that Stilinovi??s notion of laziness is full of useful but also contradictory 
potential and ultimately defies definition. With this in mind, I find it appropriate to 
conclude with a brief discussion of a painting by Stilinovi? that succinctly captures the 
undefinable defining factor of laziness. Perhaps due to its apparent simplicity, 1 + 2 (fig. 
16) has received relatively little critical attention. Here, he has avoided the problem of 
having to choose between his native Croatian, English, or some other language by using 
the more universal language of numbers. He humorously conveys laziness simply as a 
matter of apathetically not doing by introducing this unsolved equation as an example of 
?lazy mathematics? because it ?avoids completing.?152 However, rather than the common 
equal symbol ?=,? Stilinovi? employs the more obscure, multivalent, ??? used in a 
                                               
151 Stilinovi?, ?Footwriting.? 
152 ?Mladen Stilinovic - Lazy Birthday,? uploaded October 12, 2011, by Kunsttransport, video, 2:46, 
https://youtu.be/ftyMMPgdi0s. 
79 
 
Figure 16. Mladen Stilinovi?, 1 + 2, 2005. Acrylic on canvas, 15 x 20 cm.  
(Source: Ekaterina Alvarez Romero ed., 1 + 2 = Mladen Stilinovi?. Mexico City: Museo Universitario 
Arte Contemporaneo, UNAM, 2015, p. 6.) 
variety of different contexts to indicate such things as a chemical bond or a more 
complex notion of equivalency in math or logic--but it does not indicate equality in the 
same straightforward sense that ?=? does. So, even if the problem were to be completed, 
the presence of  ??? allows more than one potential solution, thereby precluding its 
definitive evaluation. In the spirit of defiance, Stilinovi? could have simply used ??? as 
the opposite of equals--but that would allow the equation?s potential to be limited by 
defining what it is not. Excluding both ?=? and ??? is the numerical equivalent of erasing 
the dictionary?s definitions--it rejects definition not necessarily for the content of any 
particular meaning, but for the limitations it imposes. With the simple addition of a single 
line, an easily overlooked detail, Stilinovi? transforms an illustration of incompletion into 
one of boundlessness. This subtle yet radical adjustment formulates laziness as a 
80 
 
celebration of freedom that ?avoids completing? in order to avoid restricting its potential. 
Accessible only to those who are willing to take a closer look at Stilinovi??s laziness, the 
message encoded in 1 + 2 provides an ideal note on which to end this text because it is 
one of open-endedness. 
  
81 
 
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