Mladen Stilinović was a Croatian conceptual artist and one of the leading figures of the so-called "New Art Practice" which developed in Yugoslavia in the late 1970s. Stilinović was also a part of the Group of Six Authors, active in Zagreb from 1975 to 1979. Over the course of his career, he developed a grammar involving concepts like money, time, power, pain, work, and language. He sustains a constant exercise of resistance waged from a standpoint of absurdity and irony against systems of power and their apparatuses of reproduction. Stilinović’s works have been shown in many institutional settings including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Istanbul Biennial; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; documenta 12, Kassel; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; the Venice Biennale; and many others. 

In his early work, Stilinović explored the relationship between the visual sign, vernacular speech, and language by attempting to decode rhetorical and visual triviality. By trying to rescue language from political banality, Stilinović showed his understanding that the exit from ideology is a prerequisite for personal freedom. It is in this context that one should read Help!..., which reveals, with a measured component of humour and irony, the fundamental premises of a democratic or totalitarian society. The greatest danger for totalitarianism is the people who take ideology literally, and for Stilinović, this very literalism has the status of an ethical attitude. By avoiding simple metaphors of disclosure and rejecting veils that conceal raw reality, Stilinović has developed an art practice that critiques socialist and post-socialist ideology in a wholly original way.