Soap 1994

Mladen Stilinovic made this artwork called Soap out of, well, soap and glass. It's so easy to see the history in this artwork. I can imagine Stilinovic finding a bar of soap and thinking about minimalism. It’s kinda like a joke, right? But jokes are interesting. The glass makes it seem so clinical, like something from a lab. There’s a certain poetry that emerges from the relationship between these objects that goes beyond their physical properties. The soap seems worn, it might be aged, and the glass appears to be broken. It’s as if Stilinovic is inviting us to meditate on the nature of cleanliness, the nature of art, or maybe something about the everyday that could relate to Joseph Beuys or Piero Manzoni. Ultimately, the goal is not to arrive at one definitive meaning but to recognize artmaking as a conversation between artists.