A se Esse in Der Standard (Austria)
Completed on | 1998 |
Category | Installation, Sculpture |
The postponed teleological establishment of Maznevski’s artistic expression is most explicitly manifested in the execution of the complex proposition Absence (1998), and further in the complex series of works conceptually named Crossways (2006). Freed from its use value, the ‘found object’ (ready – made; found object; object trouve) receives a new metafunction selected and given by the artist, but almost always originating from the mass production and the result, or perhaps the hierarchy, of the technological history. In contrast to the historical ‘found objects’, such as the Duchamp’s ready-mades, whose elaboration is based on intellectual intervention, [Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, 76.] Maznevski’s works undergo significant formal and functional changes.
On that account, the maxim of his creative work is expressed in each art work individually, even when it might be assumed that a recent statement has answered the questions asked in his early creative periods. Besides the works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Max Bill, Rene Magritte and numerous other apostles of Modernism, the collection of the Albertina Museum in Vienna possesses the work A se esse (1998)
The relevance of Maznevski’s work in this area is confirmed by broader observation of the overall artistic engagement by relevant critics, with special emphasis on the concept Absence or A se esse (1998). [Friedhelm Scharf, 40 Jahre: Fluxus und die Folgen, ed. by Rene Block and Regina Barthel (Wiesbadener Kunstsommer, Wiesbaden, 2002), 166.] This creative period in Antoni Maznevski work is recorded as a ‘pure conceptual’ [Sonja Abadzieva. Idejateka: selection of documents for the conceptual discourse in Macedonia. (Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003). More in Liljana Nedelkovska’s “Who’s Afraid of the End?” in Antoni Maznevski (Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).] phase, although the closeness or the affinity towards the sheer ‘fluxus events’ is much more apparent in the use of media than the closeness to the analytical or synthetic phase of conceptual art is. The idea for the Absence (1998), although it cannot be deduced to a plain conclusion, is encouraged by the vision of the shape, and the cognitive and the experimental observation of the found, known and always present objects, known as curvilinear objects, in the immediate environment of the artist.
This work reveals that the presence and the absence are mutually exclusive through presentation (Latin praeesse). The poetic principle in this achievement is based on indicating or presenting the absence of an object or occurrence through the object, or of the replacement of what is not present. The reflective assumptions of Buddhism indicate that: “… there is no such thing as a real existence or a being (Latin esse) but only an infinite process, a constant change, an ‘existence’ (bhava) based on ‘production’ and on what is ‘created’, and on the process of action (kamma-bhava) and on the process of reactions or rebirth.”[Vito Markovic ed., Thus Spoke the Buddha, prev. Srbislava Elezović Lazić (Belgrade: Grafos, 1986), 19.] The mastery of this idea is not only in the contextual part, but in the methodology of performance or artisanship, and in the hand of the creator, just as much as it is confirmed by the meaningful relations that emerge in that correlation between the idea and the work derived from it. This antonymous form of the object, the popular Volkswagen Beetle, is synonymous to immobilized energy or dynamics in retention, structured as an internal movement between two finite potentials, the beginning and its presumed end. The ambivalence of this immanent dualism is reflected in its chosen form and in the illusion of the absent object – the cut-off element as the bearer of the idea of movement – while the absence of presence belongs to the structure of the sign. [Niall Lucy, Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 156-159.] In essence, the naming of this work is not only an announcement of presence [présence], but more than that – it signifies a process [procès] which structurally determines the relationship between what is presented and the very act of presenting the idea.
The existence in absence (in absentia) characterizes the paradigmatic axis, and corresponds to the concept of virtual existence, as an event, and as an action, while the existence in presence (in praesentia), which is syntagmatic in nature, is the real existence or real form of the formless. [The syntagmatic relation is “in presence”, while what happens outside the discourse and is not supported by linearity is in an associative relation, which unites notions in the absence of potential mnemonic series (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 123). The two modes of organization Jacobson proposes in relation to the linguistic signs are: combination – arrangement (each sign is composed of constituent characters or appears only in a combination with other characters) and selection – choice (the choice between the alternatives implies the possibility of replacing one with another, which is equal in one aspect and different in another). Making a comparison with Saussure’s in parasentia and in absentia, Jacobson believes that an appropriate analogy can be made with the concepts of agreement (two or more expressions equally present in any realized sequence) and selection (merging expressions into a virtual sequence). “The recipient understands that the given statement (message) is a combination of components (sentences, words, phonemes) selected from the storage of all possible components (codes).”Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, trans. Ivan Martincic, ed. Ante Stamac (Zagreb: Globus, 1988), 58.] Formally settled, the intentional contradiction creates “a relationship between two terms of the binary categories of assertation and negation”. The contradiction arises from the act of cognitive negation between two terms in which case the former becomes ‘absent’, while the latter becomes ‘present’. As a concept of assumption, “the presence of one presupposes the absence of the other, and vice versa.” [Greimas and Courtes, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, 60-61.] Through the concept of the Absence (1998), the artist expresses a certain explicit anachronism through the medium, and on the other hand, emphasizes the impossibility of the independence of art from the circumstances that determine it in a specific contextual moment.
The referential collage seems more essential and significant than the performance itself, which, despite the perfection and the precision of the performance, it specifies the primacy of the idea, and of the critical setting of this work of art in a specific social value system. This proposition is a public anti-monument that openly opposes the sameness and quantitativeness of mass production.