Geramatrix / 2006 / pastel on paper / 70x100cm
Completed on | 2008 |
Category | Installation, Other (projects, sкetches, videos, photos, documentary), Sculpture |
Metaphysical highlights
The drawings, as well as the sculptures, installations and objects named Crossways (2007) and French Curve (2008) are a kind of axiomatic shapes that suggest their own possibility. The found and the created according to a well-known curvilinear pattern in the chosen artistic context are morphemes – the smallest units gifted with meaning,[Jakobson, Halle, Fundamentals of language, 68.] that construct the semantic plane of expression. In fact, the idea for this concept is illuminated after many years of accumulation which was once realized and partially materialized in the work Absence (1998). However, the generic statement speaks of the inexhaustibility of the creative potential for multiplication and restructuring of the presumed signifier. The forerunner of the drawings Crossways (2007) optically simulates an assumption of an organized area or space with its own understanding of order. The historian Bojan Ivanov suggests that these works, the twenty-seven pastels on paper, made during the year 2006, “originate from the renewed interest in the expressive powers of drawing and planar sculpture.”[Bojan Ivanov, “In the world of basic particles,” CAT Antoni Maznevski: Crossways (Skopje: Mala galerija, 2007).]
The titles of the works: Geramatrix and Synthetic Biogens, which are numbered consecutively, suggest a developmental stage of the research of the form, which as a cross-section in the overall work appears as an aesthetic engraving, as mimicry, or as a gesture of famous worlds. This variable and at the same time static form represents some kind of autonomy which is not objective. The empty fields that outline the geramatrix are announced as a potential of the tangible world, and at the same time simulate a retreat before the object reaches independence and before its independent life begins, which is also synesthetic and alchemical, and whose only possible anchor is the rationality of form. Therefore, making curvilinear structures instead of compositional assemblies of human-like forms, is a clarifying circumstance which does not limit, nor reduces the interpretive possibility. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky advocates the notion that “art in a given work results from the way we perceive it.”[Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in Russian Formalist Critique: Four Essays, trans. Lee T Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 8.] In one of his most significant essays on restructuring the idea of formalism, Art as Technique (1917), he suggests that “the purpose of art is to impart sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”
“The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, and to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way to experience the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”[Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), 12.] However, in Maznevski’s poetic line, the object is important, and the curvilinear is the source of form, or as Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics, it is “the source from which the primary motion in every natural object is introduced in that object as such,” according to its essence.[Aristotle, “Metaphysics: Book V.”] The final form of the geramatrix, despite its ‘completeness’, still revolves around its own axis and resides in the domain of potency, unlike the ‘synthetic biogens’ which are built up and confirmed by the symmetrical matching and repainting of the joints. Their pale eccentricity stabilizes in the contact, thus becoming a positive element of the basic movement of the ‘basic particles’. Aristotle’s records on the substance suggest that first it manifests itself as simple bodies which are not notional, but everything else derives from them; Second, the absence in what they will become is the cause of their being; Third, the parts that are essential to the structure, should be indestructible; and finally fourth, the essence or the formula that forms a certain definition is the substance of every single thing.
Consequently, the conclusion is that the substance has two senses; it is a finite ultimate substrate, which is no longer predestined by anything else. What it means to “exist as” or “to be this” is also separable and of the same nature – the shape or form of every single thing.[Aristotle, “Metaphysics: Book V.”] This would be the closest philosophical association of the formal models in the Crossways series with the chosen model, i.e. the curvilinear, as the basis of its own reproduction. The artist’s statement on the possible theoretical background suggests that “the philosophical thought underlying this research … corresponds and sympathizes with the onto-theological technological burden of cognition”, emphasizing that “the derivative forms and figures are actually crossed and multiplied curvilinear objects which should trigger an anthropological interpretation and obtain individuality or even identity above all.”[Antoni Maznevski for his art production from 1966 …, entitled “Crossing” in CAT Antoni Maznevs- ki: Crossways (Skopje: Mala galerija, 2007).] The second part of the statement completely coincides with the third definition on substance by Aristotle, according to which “… the parts … limit and mark them as individuals.”[Aristotle, op. cit.] The following cycle of objects, sculptures and assemblages of multiplicity enables the idea for planimetric intertwining to transform into spatial, and become a temporal or time structure: the French Curve (2008)… ‘space and time’ are inseparable, and the fusion of elements as a dimen- sion of unique phenomenological occurrences takes place in the works.[Helio Oiticica, “Colour, Time and Structure//1960,” in Abstraction, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art ed. Maria Lind (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013), 73.]
The contrast between the artificial basic units (which are synthetic according to the material) – the curvilinear and the wooden technically perfectly created and replicated shapes of the chosen prototype – emphasize transformability as a principle and the non-functionality of this object in the original (engineering), authentic context. The element, as a structural unit, becomes a means and a goal of the artistic imagination, and it gains its meaning exclusively in the artistic context, because it refers only to art. “Every variable is a sign of a formal concept,” as Wittgenstein[Wittgenstein, op. cit., 34, paragraph 4.1271.] suggests, and “every procedure in which the multitude is registered as an event” is an “intervention” according to Alain Badiou.[Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), 202.] Yet, Maznevski despite the variability and the intervention suggested by Heidegger, leaves the being, the object, or the source itself in its actual occurrence.[Heidegger, The Event, 24] The event that is recorded in each assemblage or form generated individually belongs to the multitude as a single unit, because it is different from any other.[Badiou, Being and Event, 90.] Being dynamic and variable, the aesthetic idiom specific for the French Curve series (2008) is structural. Its order, or formation, is confirmed with every future materialization. The study of the potential of the progeny of the form whose successors are always representatives of various successive substances is most evident in the plasticity of the three-dimensional form of the ‘crossways’. If the drawings were a matrix, a diagram, or a pattern for the birth of the ideal shape, and if the anthropogenic shapes were separated there, divided and subjectified at the extremes of the polarity of identity, the biogen would be created, metaphorically representing the idea of the existence of the most ‘protein life-giving particle’ in spatial propositions.
Independent organisms, objects, inceptions, and ara- besque constructions: Morphological unit f (2007); 39 ̊ (2007); 36 ̊ (2007); Uranoplasty I (2006/7); Uranoplasty II (2006/7); ?! (2007); Erogenous (2005/6), herald a new creative line preoccupied with the multitude, which conceptually, identically and abstractly formalizes in the project Singularity 49 (2013) and underlines a new iconic superimposition. The consequent elaboration of the principle of unification of multiplied identical forms from which an “order that has no a priori to things”[Wittgenstein, op. cit., 69, параграф 5.634.] is created is “cosmic implication”, as Victor Vasarelli suggests.[Joe Houston, “1965: The Year of Op//2007,“ in Abstraction, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Lind (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013), 81.] The historian Bojan Ivanov suggests that “the encounter with Maznevski’s works constantly announces the contemporary order for continuous improvement of the language of art.”[Bojan Ivanov, My Craft (Skopje: Cultural Institution Blesok, 2009), 71.]