Sketch for installation Meantime
Completed on | 1995 |
Category | Installation, Sculpture |
A more complex and condensed reverberation can be noticed in the setting of the installation Meantime (1996),[This work was first exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Youth Cultural Center, 1997, Skopje, and later within the group travel exhibition “Radiation: recent Macedonian Art ”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, 1996, Paviljon Veljkovi,, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1996, Bayerische Landesbank Gallery, München, Germany, 1996 Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, 23 May 1998. See more in Sonja Abadžieva, Radiations, trans. Filip Korzenski (Skopje: Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).] as a connection of found recreated and created objects in a dense and at the same time diluted dialogical shape. The threepart composition, as a spatially coordinated mise-en-scène, is composed of a spectator figure that presumably observes the movement of the small vicarious figurines placed on a soundless turntable in a process of rotation and an independent accumulation of the concept “the end” put on a pedestal. The space game between the elements creates a deeply and internally significant coded model, which is strengthened by the chromatic polyvalence of the black color, as an art monogram that prints the performative dimension of this work. The psychological penetration of the state of individualism expressed through the observer represents an inner intonation of the concept of belonging, silently declaring the dependence of what internal freedom means in relation to transience. The ritual rotation of the small animal figures placed on a rotating surface reflects the state of immutability or impossibility of free play, as a state of concentration around one’s own eidos and the transcendental which questions the presence in a certain sociological or cultural moment.
The artisan dimension of this work is impregnated in the poetic recreation of the word structure or assemblage “the end”, composed of ready-made linotype elements – letters and spaces, which are blank, geometric, minimalistic and abstracted from the authentic context – composite parts, whose non-functionality is the most immediate result of the idea of an art composition. This ‘suitcase’, similar to Duchamp’s box- es Botte de 1914 (1914) and Botte-en-valise (1934), is a facsimile of original copyright notes, packaged in a time transmission of artistic artifacts. The sensitivity of packing and unpacking is immanent for Fluxus artists as well. George Maciunas left behind a whole series of wooden and vinyl boxes with different content and assemblages of items belonging to the collective work by the artists of this movement as bearers of information for some future time.[Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, London: University of California Press, 2002), 33-44.]
“There is no silence,” says John Cage, who, through his composition in three parts 4’33 (1952), fills the gap through absence, and thus confirms the conceptual oppo- site of what is left out, denied, or excluded – the sound. So, in this context as well, the silence establishes identity as a stretch of time, of the poetic time, as an eternal vacuum or a necessary process of self-closure before any sensory creation of the work of art occurs. The real dimension of this creation is the experiential, not the conceptual, that connects the different things and spaces of the artist’s continuum. The visual continuity between the separate elements, or states, occurs in the ‘virtual field’ of the ‘event’, where movement is the only possible thing that merges separate time sequences into a single whole. “The time is revealed inside the event”, says Jules Deleuze, as a simultaneity of the three implicit presents: the present of the future, the present of the present and the present of the past.[Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 100.]
The composition Meantime reveals the atemporal order of the creative act and the real state of temporality of the creative energy, which is anchored, emptied or recreated, through the real form of the work of art.