Sketch for sculpture New York Times & Village Voice

NYC, NYC

Completed on 1997
Category Installation, Painting, Sculpture

The work New York, New York (1997) appears as a direct reflection of the artist’s encounter with the city where he resided, as an illustration of the condition of the individual among the multitude of data, information, industrial and technological advances gathered in a condensed economic center. For this collection, the author uses found and gathered newspapers from the contemporary publishing houses The Village Voice and The New York Times, which are dominant in shaping the public discourse of mass information till today.

This collection constituted by parts of newspapers obscures the pop-art sources of communication between the art medium and the mass audience, because they become essential but devalued data, which exists only because of the structure of the work, not the other way around.

The rectangular shape of the sculptural work has its own density and weight which is greater than assumed, and it is not only factual, but also full of content, as a compressed synesthetic experience. The idea about the center of the global power expressed in the dark carbon eco-sculpture testifies for the compressed circulation of capital and its human resources and reserves, whose end is the presumed implosion or self-destruction. This artistic statement determines the ideological imaginarium of every artist as “a relation of the individual with his own real conditions of existence”[Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, editor Dejan Ancic, trans. Andrija Filipovic i Goran Bojovic (Beograd: Karpos, 2015), 48.] and the unattainable imperatives of recognition or valuation by some imaginary authorities in the world of art and its center as a global market for international exchange of the art product. Facing the real event in the nucleus of art and the language of causality or utilitarianism that exploits the artistic essence, the artist reexamines his own views of the world through a subjectivist optic.

The result of facing the meaning of the Western civilization, authoritarian and controlled societies, systems and subsystems, mechanization and control over the cognitive space of the creative individual in this work is a withdrawal in his own idea for intentional self-alienation, self-exclusion and distancing from the processes of unani- mous subjection.

In this fine art diegesis, the author’s voice is “a social phenomenon as much as it is individual” because “there where is a discourse, there is necessarily a voice.”[James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audience, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 44-47.] With some irony in the gestural tone in this work, Maznevski retrospectively summarizes sequences from his ‘way of seeing’ as a reflection of a seismographic impulse that records a singularazed presence of the artist in the world of possibilities.