The Target 1975

Mladen Stilinovic made "The Target" with what looks like a red wax crayon, and the simplicity is quietly profound. The texture of the crayon is so present, you can almost feel the give of the wax on the paper, a physical process made visible. It makes me think about Cy Twombly and his scribbled, chaotic lines, but here, everything is so much more reduced, more pointed. There's this one little squiggle at the bottom left of the left target, where the line just gives out and stops. To me, that's the whole piece right there: the beauty of imperfection, the human touch in something so starkly geometric. It reminds you that someone made this, that it’s not a machine. Like much conceptual art, "The Target" embraces a certain ambiguity, a resistance to fixed meanings.