Language of Contradiction: Conceptual Art and Politics

In my paper I want to discuss the formal aspects of witnessing the political in conceptual art in Yugoslavia in the seventies. By looking at Mladen Stilinovic's work from the time I want to show that formal aspect of witnessing of political in conceptual art is delegated by the contradictory nature of language construction. With reference to language of Yugoslavian self-management socialism, Stilinovic has produced a corpus of works analyzing the relation between ideology and language as inherently contradictory. By looking at theoretical references on ideological construction of language (particularly Mikhail Bakhtin and Ferrucio Rossi-Landi) I want to discuss the heurism of conceptual art as a distinct set of forms which depart from normative notions of epistemology. As conclusion, by discussing works of Stilinovic as well as other conceptual artists of Yugoslavia I will show that contradictions of ideology and language in art are determinate by political position.