Mozart’s boat

Mozart’s boat

Completed on 2004
Category Installation, Sculpture

What Michael Fried suggests about feasibility or the sustainability of the form is its power to preserve itself and to exhaust itself from within and out, just as the credibility, narratives and symbolism do to be convincing. The internal dialogue between the shaped elements that become a complete cognitive abstraction of the perceptual is in continuous dialogue with the posterior phases, and makes an intersection and transition from a conceptually engaged thought to the new concrete spatial and temporal records, such as the Mozart’s Boat (2004) exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale of Art.

The evident transformations in Maznevski’s overall work sketch the planimetry of a Taoist ideogram. The extensive interest in various disciplines and philosophical discussions extends to precise elaborations and sketches in the pre-production process of various constructions, architecture, buildings, hypothetically functional or precisely measured structures.

But in the context of art, their purpose or function is not anthropological but spiritual; a residence for a different life; metaphysical. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that “Mozart knows how to speak for himself, for us, as much as he can reach us.”[rnst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 49.] This strong utopian vision for the projective ability of art is built in the prosaic form Mozart’s boat, and in the idea about the matter or earthliness and the spiritual by considering the physical and the metaphysical through a concrete poetic action. The Russian lyric poet, Alexander Blok, once wrote that: “Every movement has its birth in the spirit of music through which it acts, but over time it degenerates and begins to lose the musical or the primary element from which it was born, and as a result of that, fails. It ceases to be a culture and becomes a civilization. It was the same in the ancient world, and it is the same with us.”[Alexander Blok, “The Decline of Humanism,” in Art in Theory: 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harri- son and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell Press, 1995), 260.] The telos of civilization, the records of the great authors, and the creators and their artifacts, appear in this poetic circle of the artist. In a Heidegger manner, it can be said that “the circle is not only the main step from the work to art, a step from art to the work, but each of the steps we try to make goes round in this circle.”[Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Artwork, chap. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Skopje: Magor, 2006), 11-12.] The contemporary historian, Sonja Abadzieva, in her insightful reading of this work concludes that “an old sailing-boat (80 by 180 by 650 centimeters), which is flawlessly renovated, transforms into a musical instrument and retains the familiar connotations of both items at the same time: the ability to sail, but also to produce sound.”[Sonja Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard,” in Antoni Maz- nevski: Mozart’s Boat (Publication – La Biennale di Venezia, 51. Esposione Internacionale d’arte), (Skopje: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005).]

The object taken from the real world is an ambiguous structure with a new ‘exchange value’, but not a ‘use value’,[Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard”.] as Abadzieva suggests; It is an original where silver footprints are imprinted as a confirmation of the author’s stamp on the selected ready-made. However, the linguistic and visual analogies have been transformed to the point of a deliberately idealized contradiction – a discourse that tends to avoid the model of isotopic reading even by striving for interpretive coherence. The work, above all, has a mediating character when we talk about the ontological truth. Unlike music as a form of pure art that does not imitate objects but originates and obtains essence from specific elements that have no ontological origin in the visible world,[Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art // 1937,” in Abstraction, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art ed. Maria Lind (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013), 34.] fine art is always specified in a given form, which is not final, and despite the meaningful gravity (an instrument of didactic transformation; sailing towards the unknown), it is always the source of its own cited form if dialectically verbalized.

The symbols in a language are the ones that direct and organize, and record and communicate, enabling the difference between thoughts and things. The thought (the referent) is directed or organized, but it is also recorded and communicated, while the symbols record events and communicate facts.

The symbols, such as the ‘boat’ or the ‘bow’, become instruments of thought only when they are used to produce meaning.[Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, 9-10.] Memorized in their stasis, the bow and the arches stimulate ambiguity, but they are also a measure, a measurement, or an unbreakable material, which cannot be destroyed or worn out, despite its usability or unusability. Nevertheless, their function in the structural composition Mozart’s Boat is essential. They are an integral part of the work – ergon (Greek: ergon), which gives meaning to the creative dynamism.[Giorgio Agamben, “Archaeology of the Work of Art,”, in Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, California: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2019), 9. Mora about the potential in Aristotle, “Metaphysics: Book IX, written 350 B.C.E.,” trans. W. D. Ross. Accessed August 15, 2021. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.9.ix.html] In the medieval theory of signs, a distinction is made between articulation (articulatio) and signification (significatio), which is supported by arguments based on Socrates’ comprehension of articulation as imitation of things, or as an attempt of reproduction of the nature of those things. Thus, an iconic nature is established between the “phonological structure of the signifier” (signans) and the “ontological structure of the signified” (signatum). Having roots in Stoicism, Priscian identifies the articulation of the voice (latin: vox)[The term vox denotes the concept and indirectly indicates the thing, denotes or names (denotat, dasignat) its meaning (sententia) and names (nominai or appellat) of the thing or state of the world (res). See in U. Eco, R. Lambertini, C. Marmo and A. Tabarroni “On animal language in the medieval classification of signs: Litterata and Articulata,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, eds. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989), 21.] with its meaning.[Eco, Lambertini, Marmo and Tabarroni, “Litterata and Articulata,” 12.] If the voice (vox) signifies the concept and indirectly points out the thing, denotes or names (denotat, dasignat) its meaning (sententia) and the names (nominai or appellat) of the thing or the state of the world (res),[Ibid., 21.] then the articulated meaning is set as a dichotomy of meaning in this context.[Greimas and Courtes, op. cit., 298-299.] The author’s divided world is understood as the one who lives and the one who lives in it, and the unity of expression consistently maintains that logical division at a metaphysical level.

The denotation corresponds to a culturally recognizable referent (“the iconic figure of Mozart”). The connotation (“the boat of”) does not necessarily have to be referential. The denotation is considered to be the equivalent of an extension and as such it is a semantic property, and not a corresponding object or thing.

The denotation is “the content of the expression”, while the connotation is “the content of the sign function”.[Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 86.] That’s why we can conclude that that this is the boat of Mozart, just as much as this is not René Magritte’s pipe (Ceache pas’est pas une pipe, The Treachery of Images, 1929), because the truth of the statement is always within the reach of the sensible, but it is never precisely there completely transparent and naked in the thing that it changes and replaces. The structure of this statement is an autonomous entity of internal relations set in a hierarchical order, as an essential difference between the expression and its content, whose mutual interaction in the sign function is the basis for every linguistic formation.[Hjelmslev, op. cit., 58.] The elementary structure, as an articulatory model and as a constitutive model, organizes and produces at the same time, emphasizing the representative character of the form (putting into form, semantic investment and formation).[Greimas and Courtes, op. cit., 313-315.]

The energy that is being shaped, transits and transforms in each subsequent dialogue with the material world. It establishes itself while it is searching for the logic of its own presence. With a “silent resistance”[Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard”.] against the dominant artistic discourse and the social climate that is created around, in this creative phase, Maznevski internalizes his own artistic standpoint, turning towards the so-called doctrine of l’art pour l’art – art for art’s sake. Jean-Louis Morel suggests that “art imposes a kind of narcissism on itself; it has no object other than itself.”[Jean-Louis Morel, Ambiguite et renversement. Theophile Gautier et le roman: une analyse structurale du Capitaine Fracasse et de Mademoiselle de Maupin (Diss. Rutgers Univ., 1974).] Yet, seen from modern trends’ perspective of l’art pour l’art, the self-referential art cannot be reduced to narcissism, and, hence to anthropocentrism, but to solipsism, or to one’s own cognition as the sole reality. In the preface to Miss Maupin (1835),[Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, intr. Jacques Barzun (New York: The Heritage Press; London: The Nonesuch Press, 1944).] which is considered a manifesto of l’art pour l’art, Théophile Gautier wrote that: “the only thing which is beautiful is the thing that is useless: all that is useful is ugly, be- cause it is an expression of a need, and human needs are ugly and disgusting, as is their poor and powerless nature.[[Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir a rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et degoutants, comme sa pauvreet infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile d’une maison, ce sont les latrines]. Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, La Bibliotheque electronique du Quebec Collection A tous les vents Volume 1078: version 1.0, 49.]

This dialectic power of l’art pour l’art pushes the discovery of causality, the usefulness of the communication of utilitarianism within the complex relations of society and its derivatives, subsystems, and generic overtones to which the artistic contribution refers,[Ibid., 46] not excluding the closure before the eternal meaningless thing – the ultimate stage of nihilism.[Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, trans. Aneta Paunovska (Skopje, Krodo, 2009), 37.] Nietzsche suggests that “there are no reasons” or that the “disbelief in causality” drives “the creative force constantly in search of new matter (even more force), while the creation per se is the selection and completion of the chosen.”[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 360]