Lazy Objects: Viewing Mladen Stilinović's Exploitation of the Dead

Abstract from the publisher's webpage for this article:

Mladen Stilinović’s artwork Exploitation of the Dead 1984–90 comprises a huge group of objects concerned with the history of the avant-garde and the ideology of labour as seen from the perspective of late socialist Yugoslavia. This article analyses the role of the object in Exploitation of the Dead and argues that the work positions the object at the uneasy interface between labouring bodies in Yugoslav history and the labour of making and viewing contemporary art.