Art Category: Installation

On the other hand, although sounding more as a regressive address, TV landscape is a conceptually closer model to Kurt Schwitters’s concept of ambient, known as Merzbau.^{[Kurt Schwitters is one of the first artists to articulate a “composite work” whose structure is composed of convergence of collage, objects as real architectural space, stage, text and sound. Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1965), 23.]} According to Michael Kirby, a New York theorist and Happening artist, Schwitters’ Mertz Theater is a progression from painting to collage, and from the ambient to the happening, where an essential connection between the audience and the representation is made because the spectator is bypassed and becomes an organic part of the event itself.^{[Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, 26.]} This transition from passive art to active spectatorship comes from Cézanne’s painting where the process of creation replaces traditional painting. It is exactly in this transition from impressionism to experimental practice that Maznevski makes a cut i.e. a cut in time, turning the look back at the work itself, which is not seen through the lens of the audience and the expected dialogue about it, but through the artist’s lens that observes the very idea of communicativeness through the work, and sets it as the ultimate goal for its own movement, or gradation of poetics.

Just like with the other creative activities, Maznevski’s expressive gesture brings the relevance of the question ‘What is the purpose of art, of poetics?’ to a contemporary and inevitably institutional context. Jean-Paul Sartre asked this question in the context of writing as an exemplar of the activity of the engaged artist, believing that the undertaking cannot be directed towards the contemplation understood as an end of the act of crea- tion, because silence corresponds to intuition, while at the end of the language, there is communication.^{[Sartre, op. cit., 36.]} Maznevski’s poetic act utilizes the speech, the individual speech, that reveals the situation that becomes the subject of change through the act of disclosure. The prosaic conception or framework – a dimension of the concept of a dedicated artist – in this context is crucial for recognizing the essence of the term an engaged artist whose work is always associated with some deliberate change and abandonment of the idea of impartiality at the moment when “a name is given to that whose name is still unspoken.”^{[Ibid., 38.]} The concept The End identifies essential changes in a certain linguistically artistic context – the language as a poetic embodiment of the artist’s voice whose intention is to break the silence.

However, the concept of silence in newer mythologies, and especially in the modern period is understood as an attempt to eliminate the subject, or the object, or the painting, as a replacement of the coincidence with an intention which has a role to maintain the “spiritual integrity of the creative impulse” and “the distracting materiality” which inevitably become part of the conflicting distribution of the art object whose end becomes the agent of spiritual ambition.^{[Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”, in Styles of Radical Will (London: Penguin Classics, 2009).]} Despite the verbalization, this gesture ascetically silences the progressive historiographical changes in art, and therefore, silence, as an artistic principle, relies on the idea that the power of art lies in its power to deny and thus to assert itself through the act of negation. The phrase ’the end’ does not proclaim ‘the end of art’ (L’art est mort) as it is supposed, but epitomizes an artistic experience whose materialization will always be brought into a dialectical relationship with silence and creation. Once bound to the universe of language, the artist cannot remain in silence,^{[Sartre, op. cit., 38.]} and the silence and the pauses will be an attempt at speech and to verbalize the relationship between art and its representation or reflection in the material world.

On the other hand, the speech or the verbalized statement and the subject of the statement “the end” as “an opening to discursive thinking and reasoning”, enables the achievement of poetic communication that is not within the reach of the visual.^{[Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, intr. Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 104.]} “The End” postulates a wide rhizome of readability, and a branching and disseminated range of possible interpretations of art in a compressed dimension of the performative. The experience may be a delayed reception of the work of art through a specific and determined discursiveness, and it may be synchronized with the elements of time and space. But the receiver can certainly penetrate the temporal dimension of a work as well, to follow the noticeable, even in his imaginary space i.e. the projection of reality, and thus determine what is meant by a paraphrase of the evolution of art seen through the prism of a historical succession. The lexical communication of this artistic gesture takes place inside the media, in a way in which the coding is internalized and realized through the expression, besides the transit axis between what might be and what is, or is not, contained in the announcement of its end. The artistic gesture is drawn in and perpetuates within the language closure, where the word, the utterance, and the fine art print, as an action in progress, has no meaning beyond it, because the “words are transparent and the look goes through them.”^{[Sartre, op. cit., 39.]} The assumption that “the work of art is not an instrument of communication”, but utilizes the “information and communication” to express the act of resistance^{[Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2007c [1989]), 322-3.]} is close to the hypothesis by Renato Poggioli who suggests that disputing the mass culture does not mean disputing the technical progress, information and communication as a means, but it means being against the civilization that creates it.^{[Poggioli sees the perspective of avant-garde culture as a whole because alienation further motivates it to survive, because as it is said, it is “blessed in its own freedom.” See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1962] 1968), 108-9.]}

Correspondingly, the communicative dynamism of the statement “The End”, which insists on its reception, is conditioned by its contextual use, or it “has as many meanings of the word as there are contexts for its use.”^{[V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunk (New York, London: Seminar Press, 1973), 79.]} As part of the exhibition Picture Box (1994/95), this proposal explores the potential of the electronic medium and the specifics of the electronic image thematically, as a critical attitude towards space, concept, virtuality and interactivity, noted as a “television sculpture.”^{[Nebojsa Vilic, “Image Box – inside – imges – box – outide,“ in Image Box, trans. Meantie Pandilovski (Skopje: Soros Center for Contemporary Arts – Skopje, 1995).]} The digital ambience that is generated around this sculpture appears in a poetic metacon- text, as hypermediality^{[Hypermedia originates from photomontage: “The artist defines space through disposition and interaction of the forms that are sep- arate from their original context “, then creating a new combination, composition, or a new structure. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 36-39.]} of the primary carrier of the information – the record or data emanated from the television medi- um “The end” is a subject of remediation at several levels. Mediation and reform are the two principles of remediation formulated by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin who elaborate the relationship between different media.^{[The concept of remediation is “representation of one medium in another”, as a feature of the new digital media. Bolter and Grushin distinguish two types of remediation: mediation (comment, reproduction and replacement) and reform (reconstruction or reshaping). Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 45; 55-6. 75 Exhibition “9 1/2: New Macedonian Art”, Museum of Contemporary Art, November 1995-March 1996, Skopje.]} From that point on, the information sent via television is mediated within the media and is reformed into the next consolidated form or gesture through the medium of the sculpture, and consequently, emerges in the space of its own surrounding, or the ambient around, whose transformability is predetermined by the presence of the receiver.

Consequently, at the 9 1/2: New Mac- edonian Art exhibition (1995/96)75 in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, the concept is materialized differently. The interaction within the spatial syntagma is complemented by interconnected segments of television boxes whose position defines a formed prose lexeme. The wall drawing made in black creates an empty linear perspective on a white background, as a conceptual unity that integrates the activity in a three-dimensional space or the real possible space where it can be stepped in.

The ‘entering in’ or the grasping of the meaning of transparent immediacy,^{[Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 30.]} as a breakthrough in the idea of this concept called TV room construction 1995/96; TV test construction 1995, occurs exactly at the point of staring at the gap^{[For Umberto Eco, the “true reader” is the one who understands that the secret of a text is its emptiness. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Over-interpretation: World, History, Texts (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 158-159.]} of the drawn perspective. The articulation in the space of the alternately placed TV constructions suggests elasticity of one narrative consonant, whose performativity is determined by implicit and consequent recognition of the communicative act. The activity in the real space transits through the virtual field, by looking in and looking through the specific verbal data on the screens: “the end”, “fine”, “the flicker effect” or the linear vertical perspective that forms the screen polyptych. However, the general context of the first act’s preformance of this series cannot be omitted when reading the work.

The thematic concept was introduced by the museum curator Zoran Petrovski, who suggests the following about the exhibition: “The great post-modernist boom at the end of the last decade, the ninth decade, caused a series of tectonic movements in the overall cultural and political ambient.”^{[Zoran Petrovski, 9 1⁄2 New Macedonian Art, translation: Marija Hadjimitreva Ivanova (Skopje: Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), 1995).]} Petrovski states further that the continental social and political movements and events, the fall of The Berlin Wall and the implications of the Cold War reflect in ours areas, where the Balkanization of the countries in the ex-Yugoslav area occurs simultaneously, resulting in changes in the social structure and self-orientation of the nations.

The task of the artists in this engaged proposal is created as a response to the current situation at the very end of an idealized society and at the beginning of the independence of our country. In all that complexity, the materialized gesture “The End” is symbolically a kind of an end in itself, and expresses an essential relation to the world, because it cannot be simultaneously discovered and created while the creation is subordinate to the creative activity, even when it seems finished.^{[Sartre, op. cit., 56.]}

As part of the solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Skopje (4.6.-6.9.1996) this cycle is fully completed, despite the fact that it continues with the Medium installation (1996), but not as a residual from a past, but as an unproven value of a poetic reality. At MoCA, and subsequently at the exhibition in Salzburg, the cut out dark wooden letters painted in thick graphite pigment and the blank white fields positioned on a wall as a sharp negative on a black background, point out the same phrase “The End”, thus representing a deep ideological tension in the middle of the last decade of the last millennium. The historian Liljana Nedelkovska concludes that: “When isolated and fixed, the word functions like a certain type of a catalyst of the total ambient, of a space in which not only the view should be registered but the reading as well.” ^{[Liljana Nedelkovska, “Antoni Maznevski”, in the Big Glass, no. 4, 1996: 60]} This work, The End, is set in front of the historic provocation an end of art to be declared. However, through negation, the end does not indicate an end but a beginning of possibilities. The word combination of The and End suggests that “the law of two simultaneous sequences is that they are never equal.

One is the signifier, the other is the signified”,^{[Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, prev. Marko Gregorić (Zagreb: Standorf & Mizantrop, 2015), 39.]} i.e. the statement connotes and denotes at the same time when it itself is marked by the pragmatics and the pragmatism of the language. The work exposes the traces of critical thinking by clearly referring to what the subject of negation is,^{[According to Julian Grahams and Joseph Curtis, the term “contradiction” is the relationship between two binary categories, assertion and negation. Contradiction is established as result of the “cognitive act of negation”, between two terms, of which the former is “absent” and the latter becomes “present”. Contradiction, as a constitutive relationship belonging to a semantic category, is a relation of assumption, at the level of “presumed content”, where the presence of one term represents the absence of the other, and vice versa. See A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. L. Crist, D. Patte, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 60-61.]} but does not seek to challenge art and its institutional forms, but to preserve and surpass it, which is defined as aufhebung in Hegelian phylosophy.^{[In The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel uses the term Auheben, Aufhebung, as abolition, domination, retention, preservation. See Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit. The way he uses it means releasing the aesthetic potential in order to shape ordinary life. Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde, ”translation Bettina Brandt, Daniel Purdy, New Literary History 41, 4 (2010): 699. About Strydom, the way he understands the concept of aufhebung means that art should emerge from the experience of integrating art into life as a “changed form.” Piet Strydom, Sociology of Art-Theories of the Avant-Garde, Conference: Lecture Course on the Sociology of Art at: Department of Sociology, University College Cork 1984, 52. DOI: 10.13140 / RG.2.1.4925.4805]}

This verbal artistic utterance enters into complex space and time relations of commutation,^{[The Saussure principle of commutation covers the relationship between changes at the surface level and changes at the underlying level. For Buckland, Saussure’s understanding of changes within speech [la parole], like infinitely many utterances, occurs within language [la langue], which has a finite form, meaning that there are infinitely many combinations in the system that it encourages, that is, that the system is not just a set of signs, but that it consists of interdependent, “formal relations”. Hjelmslev reformulates the definition of “commutation”, pointing out that “the correlation of one plane that is related to the correlation of the other plane of language is commutation”. The term correlation is “the function between the members of the paradigm”. The system is considered a “correlation hierarchy” and the process a “relational”. See Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, translation Francis J. Whitefield (London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 38-39; 73-74. The variability of functional units to context results in change at the semantic level. The new function is certainly a way to establish a certain communication, with and through the work, with what the object of connection is. Warren Buckland, “Film Semiotics ”, in A Companion to Film Theory, eds. Toby Miller, Robert Stam (Malden, Mass. Blackwell, 2004), 86.]} simultaneously marking the end of one syntagm and the beginning of another. But the articulation of art, like any other creative act, searches for its voice among infinitely many words, pictures, spatial records, etc., trapped in a conflict between the art and the artist, as an essential dynamism for every work of art, i.e. the conflict between the artist and the art becomes the artist’s struggle against his own creation, against the fierce dynamics of this tendency for totality which forces him to accept self-surrender in his work.^{[Rank, op. cit., 385.]} The artist may be silent, but his works might resonate; the work of art will be a kind of a proposal presented as a commentary on art in the art context.^{[Joseph Kosuth, „Art after philosophy,“ in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alberro Alexander, Stimson Blake (Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press, 1999), 165.]} This proposal encourages different interpretations, and one of them is the aspect of media specificity and the historiography of media contexts.

Although not entirely declamatory, the referential iconography can be seen as comparative rhetoric, a continuation of Edward Ruscha’s 1991 concept, or as a replicated form of expression, phoneme, metaphor, sign, or symbol that Maznevski reshapes, reconsiders, internalizes and reproduces, demonstrating the generic potential of the sign function of words, gestures and their formal presentations. Objectified in such manner, the wellknown lexeme The End becomes a synecdoche, a subject of an intellectual montage,^{[The basic principles of intellectual editing are synechdoche and rhythm. The synechdoche is a rule that governs the production of meaning through: close-up (fragment which is part); this part of the whole evokes the complete structure of the whole; this applies to all elements; the chain of fragments from the montage is read not as a sequence of details, but as a sequence of complete scenes (or completely significant complexes); the sequence of fragments reproduces movement. This is the essence of Eisenstein’s understanding of “cinema as the art of synechdoche”. The relationship between abstraction (via the synechdoche principle) and integration (of the parts in astructural whole) is analogous to the relationship fragmentation-montage, analysis-synthesis, as a principle of Eisenstein’s dialectic, according to Amont. Jaques Aumont, Montage Eisenstein, trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 184.]} confirming what Ruscha stated once himself: words do not have size, and the language is not completely transparent, as the conceptualist Mel Bochner stated in 1969, if we try to establish an axiological reading of words along a vertical axis, integratively and semantically, and along a horizontal one, distributively and communicatively. However, the axiological and associative approach to words entails another hypothetical perspective – the one of the representative, or the relationship between the demonstrative and the monstrative. In that ratio, the separation of what indicates the difference between narration and demonstration, presented as aspects of narration by André Gaudreault, is essential.^{[Andre Gaudreault, “Narration and Monstration in the Cinema,” Journal of Film and Video 39, 2 (1987): 30-3.]} The iconic replica of the word model “The End” sets the concepts of a speech act and a quotation as terms of the concept of monstration.

Consequently, the visual coding is not a narrated concept, but a demonstrative one. It denotes and does not underline fully the artistic context in which this work appears, but the historical and its posterior connotations which further suggest and derive supplementarity with the subtitled lithographs on paper in the various repetitions by Ed Ruscha or in any other conceptual sign whose immanence is self-reference. Quite implicitly, a conclusion is made that The End advocates a contemporary view of what “branch routing” means,^[] including the dialectical tension between the historical practices of the avant-garde and its post-forms, such as the positioning of conceptualism before the canonical readings. This claim (The End) may not lead anywhere, and especially not to the very end of art, and it is probably autopoiesis. Niklas Luhmann suggests that it renews itself before the meaning of the subsystem of art, and, perhaps, “there is nothing outside the text,”^{[Stanley Fish, “French Theory in America (I deo),” in Fragmenta Philosophica II, edited by Dejan Ancic (Belgrade: Karpos 2009), 133.]} indeed. And perhaps it only underscores Wittgenstein’s hypothesis: (5,535) “What needs to be said about the axiom of infinity will be expressed in a language through the existence of infinitely many names with different meanings.”^{[Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinnes, intr. Bertrand Russel (London and New York: Routledge), 63.]}

The word comz bination or the syntactic game in the textual proposal The End intersects reality aleatorically, creating a correlation of that same reality. That’s why The End is a visage of what could be, and not of what is a “summary of memory” in a certain creative context. The Russian formalist Roman Jacobson suggests “if there is no contradiction between the sign and the object, there is no mobility of concepts and no mobility of signs, while the connection between the concept and the sign becomes automated.”^{[“What is Poetry?”, a lecture held in 1933. Work cited in: Yve-Alain Bois, “Formalism and structuralism,” in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, eds. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and David Joselith (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2016), 37. More at: Roman Jakobson, “What Is Poetry?,” trans. Michael Heim in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, edited by L. Matejka and I. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1976), 164-175.]} The contradiction in the concept The End does not apply only to the relationship between art and life, but argues about the immortality of the work of art despite the completeness of the poetic act in a multiplied and polysemous formal expression. In this model with an emphasized semantic sign, the artist symbolically mortalizes his own work in order to emphasize the necessity of the conflicting relations of art from and with its own time. This concept boldly enters speculative language games by “translating one language into another,”^{[Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 25, paragraph 4.025.]} but not to understand its identical meaning through substitute terms entirely, but to become familiar with its constituent structural and significant parts.

In each subsequent realization and inevitable mod- ification of the material and formal excerpt of The End, the artist once again enters into an extreme complexity of the problem, reaffirming the intention of nomination in a delayed and prolonged diegesis, as an attempt to reach the range of possible meanings, which arise from the repetition and inexhaustibility of the poetic consistency.^{[Stewart, op. cit., 2.]} The English positivist philosopher, Alfred Jules Ayer, argues that “… the proposition is analytical when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains, and synthetically when its validity is determined by the facts of experience.”^{[A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Penguin Books, 1946), 73.]}

The “The End” concept would be an entirely hermetic tautology if treated as an analytic proposition, but it would be derived from a semiotic context and presented as an experiential axiom of the creative sequence if it is approached according to the second definition. The conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth develops this argument further in a context of artistic practices (the conceptualism), considering that “the works of art are analytical suggestions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide every information about any work or fact. A work of art is a tautology because it is a presentation of the intention of the artist, i.e. he suggests that a certain work of art is art, which means it is a definition of art.”^{[Kosuth, „Art after philosophy,” 165. 97 Idem.]} The hermeticism of the tautological proposal is essentially postponed legibility of the work, and not a closed concept despite the underlined self-reference or auto-reference. The equivalence of the iconic proposal with the semantic meaning in the word copy is a tautology that distracts ambiguity and sets it in a precisely defined, visual, perceptual and cognitive framework, and the proportions of the work with the concept of artistic institution are developed in the background and register the intention of the artist who insists on the ambiguity of the concept and the idea.

Kosuth’s second interpretation of the synthetic conceptual proposal suggests that the work “goes beyond the ‘orbit’ of art into the ‘infinite space’ of the human condition.”^[Idem.] The genealogy of this discussion is based on Kant’s ‘synthetic’ system of pure philosophy, defined as a relation of contradictions whose separation forms a third area – the unity of their conflictual distribution between reason and mind, legitimacy and the ultimate goal, and nature and freedom, setting the power of reasoning (via aestimativa) as a priori principle of appropriateness, and art as a transition between the cognitive power, its principles and application.^{[Immanuel Kant, Critique of pure reason, trans. Viktor D. Sonnenfeld (Zagreb: Kultura, 1957), 327.]} The turn, or the speculum, towards the inside of art is not an identical principle with an introspection of the artist as a creative subject.

The externalized lens of art can only arise if the artist creates essentially driven by an inward urge identified as an individual will-to-form.^{[Rank, op. cit., 78-9.]} This determination places Maznevski’s artistic practice in a specific life, practical, and affecting context, closer to the sensibility and revolutionary nature of the historical avant-garde and the practices of the fluxus, clearly abandoning the model of l’art pour l’art. The episteme of conceptualism and l’art pour l’art at one point clashes with Duchamp’s assertion that the artist is more of a maker than a creator faced with the circumstances that condition and retroactively confirm and value the creative act according to his product besides the fact that many conceptualists create driven by the idea of the self-centeredness of art.^{[Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: Univer- sity of California Press, 1995), 7.]}

The replacement of “mechanical reproduction” with an aim to “redefine artistic creativity”, ^{[Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, 7.]} is transformed by Maznevski into an authentic practice that in turn emphasizes the creative work, and criticizes the global industrial trends that “reproduce” the rhetorical controversy about the aesthetics and aestheticism on the threshold of the twenty-first century, as well as the aesthetic reception of art in the context of institutional norms and canonical records. The End is a sign, but also a painting, TV Landscape is both if we try to read these suggestions.

According to the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, the sign is “an expression that points at the content outside the sign itself,” and according to his second point of view, the sign is “an entity generated by the connection between expression and content,”^{[Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 47.]} and “[…] with the introduction of the content identity mark, duality is automatically introduced in the meaning of all signs, and they either refer to the content, or to themselves.”^{[Gottlob Frege, Concept-Script: A Formal Language for Pure Thought Mod- eled on that of Arithmetic (Skopje: Magor, 2004), 40.]} The French structuralist, Roland Barthes, suggests that the sign is a “compound of the signifier and the signified”, that the plane of the signifiers constitutes the plane of expression, and the plane of the signified expresses the plane of content.

The concept of differences introduced by Hjelmslev, according to Barthes, is essential for the study of the semiological sign, but the strata of the plane i.e. the form and substance, need to be redefined due to their weighty lexical past. The form can be described “thoroughly, simply and coherently, without resorting to non-linguistic premises”, and the substance is “the whole set of aspects of linguistic phenomena that cannot be described without resorting to extra-linguistics premises.” Both strata, underlined by Barthes, exist on the plane of expression and on the plane of content of this proposal, which are further divided into: a substance of expression (articulatory), a form of expression (created on paradigmatic and syntactic rules; the same form can have different substances, one phonic, and another one graphic), a substance of the content (the emotional, ideological, or notional aspects of the signified, its positive meaning), a form of content (the formal organization of the signified by mutual presence or absence of a semantic mark).

The nature of the signifier “The end” cannot be separated and considered in isolation from the signified or its performance outputs, except for the fact that the signifier is treated as a mediator because of its possible transition into the concept of signified, which is its final interpretation.