Art Category: Other (projects, sкetches, videos, photos, documentary)
Subject – The End
Patterns of probability
The mental equilibrium tries to reassemble again after a persistent commitment to the reflection of the Eastern wisdom and Western philosophy in Patterns / Forms of Probability (2008 – 2010). In this painting phase, the artist engages in research on Confucian and Taoist philosophy, concluding that there is a supposed ‘particle motion’. By discovering the form (of probability), the artist concludes that its vastness is greater than the completeness, that the continuity between the spiritual and material reality exceeds their presence, and that the force, expressed in Leibniz terminology, is a basic element of mental and physical occurrence, i.e. the force should be expressed as a movement in order to be established.[Nedeljkovic, op. cit., 377.] This voluminous and momentous form establishes a ‘mass of living force [vita activa]’[Ibid., 378.] or an assemblage of metaphysical atoms – monads, each of which is thought to carry a small world, a microcosm. Each monad is an inseparable existence, a unit, or an individual. The reality that this ‘visual quote’ reproduces consists of forces, and behind each force stands a simple indivisible atom which is realized as motion or as space with its actual action.[Idem.] Derived from a neutral suprematic base, juxtaposed ‘patterns of probability’ illustrate and build the contours of the ‘subatomic world’. This lively and dynamic ‘biomorph’, as a parabola wraps around its own imaginary axis and twisting, like a Folium of Descartes, mirrors its “other” side – the one that exists only “in” and “for” our illusion. The thick layers of color, as Fautrier painting impasto,[Jean Fautrie, a French painter, one of the most important representatives of Tachisme.] confirm the structural presence of each particle or minimal unit in the chain of the syntagmatic axis whose transformability paradigmatically outlines the semantic verticals whose end is in the form. The facture is not only a feature of the painting surface,[For surface layers with color, “texture” or constructivist vocabulary – the facture is considered to have an inherent “expressive power” that has a different function of pure media transmission. Maria Lind, Abstraction, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013), 12.] but a bearer of different verbal data. This conceptual intention shows that “the form of content is an abstract structure of relations imposed by a particular language for the same underlined substance.”[Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 23.]
This ‘living’ reflection of the subatomic inhales and exhales, and it is quite probable that it is created at the very moment of its occurrence and of its creation. In this aesthetically concise, precise, clean and clear lexeme, Maznevski finds his impetus once again in the lonely space of thought and self-reflection. The work has its own time, a beginning and an end, but the dimension of duration is something completely different. It is like a spread ad infinitum that avoids any completeness, and belongs to the poetic act. Looking for another imagined dimension, the author assumes a certain ‘dynamis’ of the space of poetics which is deeply anchored in the bio-theological teleological ideology, dualism, phenomenology, empiricism and fiction. The two-plane visual model, as a clear reflection indicates the existence of independent planes: in the foreground, the sensory impact with the “biomorph” figure establishes a cognitively recognizable metaphor of “infinity” and a “circular line” as repetition, renewability, regeneration, or return to the initial position, and there is the second one which allows rhythmicity, vibrancy, dynamism, voluminousness, and the layered state to create an internal dialogue or relationship with the stillness.
Thus, the phenomenological contrasts do not take place primarily between the work and the receiv- er or the reader, but internally, in the media, and axially, after which they predictively present a certain at- titude towards the world and the facts. The hypothetical assumption guided by the cognitive recognition of the imagined third dimension in this open metaphysical dialogue is not along the axis of the coordinate system, but in the time, in the conceptual aspect of the time. Its excess crosses the boundaries of the preceptive, leaves the ranges of visibility, and remains or becomes a metaphysical notion.
Maznevski re-incorporates his cosmological interests in the idea of the proposal: object installation in space, Blue Resonance (2020). The ellipse, as a metaphor for the lunar, introduces the interpretation of the rebirth of the idea as a line in space that goes back in time[The impetus to give a cosmological sign in this artistic context is the observation of the lunar or the moon’s eccentric phenomenon, several times (two-three) in a month, as a natural phenomenon that recurs every two or three years. This statement is not just a cyclical record, but a cosmic, planetary phase that leads to a natural imbalance of terrestrial processes, ebb and flow, as a synonym for the appearance and retreat of the evident radiance, light, possibly interpretive as creative stages and processes of the artist.] concentrically bending inward or outward. In Heidegger’s terminology the principle of resonance or resonant suggests the first and the nearest indicator of another start. The resonance presents metaphysics as an episode comprised of the domination of beings and their truth. It is synonymous with transience and survival [dasein]. The German (continental) philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that it is not just “a transit to another time in the previous temporal space of metaphysics; on the contrary, the relation of time and space itself becomes something else, because only now it is illuminated in its essence as Da-sein.”[Heidegger, The Event, 63.] This object, which is lonely in its surrounding, illuminates itself and brightens its reflection, its shadow, or its trace in the real space where the human being is only a presumed presence or a shadow, a silhouette of an opportunity.
The plane materialization of the form suggests and informs about an attempt to transform the imaginary idiom of resonance by reducing its imaginary mass, density, intensity and energy charge to a two-plane system with its own rules of equilibrium, gravity and movement. The center of gravity of this materialized form is concrete, determined and independent. It is preserved in the coordinates of its own idea of centrism and nullifies the voluminousness at the expense of a single idea: an even distribution of radiance. The minimalist solution of this form is approaching the practices of dematerialization by subtly abandoning the physical materiality to the point of recognition or cognitive sensibility, while it is simultaneously supplementing the semantic code with a certain amount of information. Art & Language conceptualists’ letter-essay (Unpublished letter-essay, March, 1968) addressed to Lucy Lippard and John Chandler on the occasion of their publication of the essay The Dematerialization of Art (Art International, February, 1968) contains several original reflections on the current formulations of the dematerialized art: “… when dematerialization takes place, it means, in terms of physical phenomena, the conversion of a state of matter into that of radiant energy; this follows that energy can never be created or destroyed.”[Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (California: University of California Press, 1997), 43.]
It becomes “an idea that is read, more than seen.”[Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 43.] If the aforementioned suggestion is consid- ered, then dematerialization is an impossible process when talking about dematerializing of something, because the only thing that happens then is a change of the state of the matter into a luminous energy, which suggests that we are still talking about the presence. The conceptualist Lawrence Weiner came to the same conclusion when considering dematerialization as a “translation from one language to another”,[Lawrence Weiner, “Art and Project Bulletin” (1969), in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy Lippard (California: University of California Press, 1997), 116.] which in turn implies a contemplation that transformation is a kind of semiotic reduction of the sign which produces new meaningful relations while remaining faithful to the source from which the very idea of ontological deduction emerges. This process of alignment and reduction of the energy structure to plane, and to radiance, is close to what in semiotics is called planaire sémiotique as a conceptual reorganization that functions with the use of a two-dimensional signifier.[Greimas and Courtes, op. cit., 235.]
Blue, which is the first element of the combination of words: Blue Resonance, is a teleological proposition because it is not completely blue when it radiates, but only when it is numb, silent, and extinguished. However, since its supposed dimness is only connotative, what is seen and what is noticeable are only its changed tone, intensity and density. Vasily Kandinsky said: “Blue is a typical heavenly color,” and the only feeling it evokes and creates is peace.[Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911),” in Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2008), 61.] The same idea is expressed by Jean Baudrillard, who suggests that the psychological resonance of blue is a ‘sign of calm’, but adds that each color receives its meaning outside of it, and becomes a metaphor for culturally fixed meanings.[Jean Baudrilliard, “Atmospheric Values: Colour (1968),” in Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2008), 147.] We have no visual memory of color, and the only thing that is remembered is the generic blue, while the chromatic experience is a result of random events, such as light, intensity, opacity, distance, and matter.[Carlos Cruz-Diez, “Reflections on Colour (1981),” in Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2008), 111.] Henri Matisse, the master of pure colors, said: “Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist’s mind.”[Henri Matisse, “The Role and Modalities of Colour (1945),” in Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. David Batchelor (London and Cambridge MA: Whitechapel and The MIT Press, 2008), 99.] With all these characteristics, the Blue Resonance can also be interpreted as a space, or as a gate to walk through and enter. This is suggested by its ‘metaphysical’ semiplasticity, vibrancy, technological abstraction,[The “found elements” of mass production (LED cathodes), in function of artistic poetics, are twisted and reshaped through compositional streaks, forming mild plastic rhythms.] depth, and structure, which represent the interior, depth, and profundity.
Through the cycle of works defined in the concept As it is (2020), Maznevski reaches, as Greenberg would say, a degree of “intense harmony”. Early existentialism (Friedrich Nietzsche) suggests that “artists … are productive if they really change and transform”; they are not like comprehenders who leave everything as it is.[Nietzsche, op. cit., 329.] The modern existentialist idea (Jean-Paul Sartre), on the other hand, grows on the suggestion that “the ultimate goal of art is to renew this world by giving it the opportunity to see itself as it is, but as though it has its source in human freedom.”[Sartre, op. cit., 63] The series of objects as images and counterpoises extensively interprets a more recent storyline in the artist’s artistic expression which is precisely elaborated in various concepts: 17 octaves (2014-15), Golden Octave (2016-18), Quadrophony (2015-18), Stim- ulus 7 (2013), Stimulus 6 (2015), Sun (2015), Black Crossway (2015), Dark Crossway (2015), White Crossway (2015), Pauses (2016-20), Aluilit (2019-20) and Stimuli 16 (2020). With the verbalization of the years-long carefully and poetically thought-out symbiosis, the artist tries to express the assumption that in a certain aesthetic creation the elements appear as constituents of a complex formal unit, while in another, their vibrancy and immanent variability emphasize quite different meaningful connotations. All this indicates that the solubility of the content denominator is completely dependent on the formal procedure, as an inductive aesthetics that acts from within and below shaping a variety of synthesized prose works.
In the double act, the 17 octaves (2014-15) and the Golden Octave (2016-18), the selection of elements in the entire composition is not a precursor of independent sensory vibrations that have a separate mean- ing, but dimensions the dominant meaning that completes the most complex poetic form of the artist’s voice. Therefore, a conclusion is imposed that the task of the structural assembly, as a whole, lies ahead and exceeds the aesthetic details of the elements that constitute it. In this clear transition to the spatial, the canvas loses its integrity, and the subject takes its place, firmly primed on the painting frame. Reduced almost to abstraction, the ‘octaves’ present a certain analogy with music expressed as a rhythmic repe- tition, intensity, harmony and counterpoint in an extensive dialogue with the presence of ‘rests’ and ‘in- tervals’. Just as the rests in music gain meaning only because of the group of notes that surround them,[Sartre, op. cit., 38.] the meaning of ‘visual pauses’ in Pauses (2016-2020) make sense only in relation to the macrostructure of the basic model, the octaves, in the 17 octaves (2014-15) and the Golden Octave (2016-18). The pauses are pure ideas, a binding element, but also an independent and an individual one, and are manifested as the beginning of restlessness, because it proves to be essential for any creative activity. Gilles Deleuze argued that: “ideas should be treated as potentials that are already included in one way of expression or another, and are inseparable from the way of expression … ;”[Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?,” 312.] as a different way of looking at ideas that arise from some knowledge and are inseparable from the way of expression or opinion which connects the ideas and their performative nature.
The above mentioned is confirmed by the poetic language of Andrei Tarkovsky which definitely arises from the way he creates his films and the art in the art of his language, before even mentioning the film art; or as he puts it himself using sculpting terminology, the time, the interval, and the third meaning is “carved off in the process”.[Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 119.] Therefore, the interval is the carrier of time digressions which are not carved but linearly drawn into the process of creation. The complex chromatic structure of the work 17 Octaves (2014-15) articulates contradictions which make attempts to come together through a dialogue between light and darkness, between colors, and between shades – the difference is absolute. The transition from one to the other is also a real phenomenon.[Bergson, op. cit., 274.] Each individual presentation of the state As it is primarily stimulates tactile impressions which are sensibly embedded as a lyrical and perceptual abstractions, which in addition to the conceptual and symbolic or musical obsession remain devoid of narrative content.[Houston, “1965: The Year of Op//2007,” 78.]
In this cycle, the artist explores the dialectical binomials in his antinomic impression: repetition / instance, contrast / gradation, fusion / juxtaposition, organic connection / structure, and dynamics / stasis. The language which creates the syntax is a pure crafty and lengthy alignment process. It is a pro- cess of adjusting the diagram of harmony, the order and the sound of the visual. The painting palette is replaced by a thread of individual elements (buttons) which are conceived as a polychrome structural element that meets the receptive expectation through a variety of bundles and contemplative emanations, different speeds and pulsations, and optical rhythms. The octaves comprise an observation that strives for the absolute and the wholeness, and that reaches states of ritual, repetition, and event. The Quadrophony installation (2015-18) completes the principle of balance as a relation between the individual works in the spatial communication. The complexity of the handicrafts and the precision of the expression indicate that “the simplicity is not simplicity, but a clearer vision.”[Anni Albers, On Weaving (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2017), 48.] The weaving used to shape the stimuli is not just a “response to the material and the technique, but to the hand of the creator, the one who here transforms matter into meaning.”[Albers, On Weaving, 68.]
Weaving is primarily a poetic and artistic principle besides being a technique with precision performed to perfection. Anni Albers (Annelise Elsa Frieda Fleischmann) introduces an idea to textile art that the “concrete substances and also colors per se, words, tones, volume, space, motion – these constitute raw material; and here we still have to add that to which our sense of touch responds – the surface quality of matter and its consistency and structure.” She introduces the term ‘medium of tactility’ to describe the palpable experiences. The word matière is used to denote “the surface appearance of the material, such as grain, roughness or smoothness, dullness or gloss, etc., qualities of appearance that can be observed by touch.”[Ibid., 65.]
The susceptibility of the chosen material is its ‘inner structure’, while the aesthetic susceptibility is a matter of function and transformation of the ‘found object’ within the ‘imaginary structure’ that is gradually formed by the intellect, analysis, and deciphering the receptivity and sensibility, as a response to matter. Starting from the conflicting state of the chromatic spectrum which is specific for the fibrous and filamentous element as a basic material, the artist discovers the meaning of the relations among the colors used in a composition of ‘biaxial symmetry’, giving form to the amorphous in the works Stimulus 7 (2013) and Stimulus 6 (2015),.[Caroline A. Jones, “Form and Formless,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, edited by Amelia Jones (Malden, MA; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), 133.] In the last chronological model, Stimuli 16 (2020), the persistence on the presence of the intensity of the basic blue and red color is more pronounced, and their optical motion is also freer because it follows the line of the circular shape.
This leads to the assumption that in the first two examples, the presence of the chromatic intensities is mediated by the shape, while in the subsequent example, they seem to guide and determine the path of movement.
The radiance of the matter is intoned by white and yellow digressions, which, despite the quantitative representation, intrusively interrupt the harmony of the retinal.
The harmony, however, does not seem to be disturbed by the deliberate contradiction of the sequence of colors, because the polychrome structures function as an organic fusion of elements, constituting an organism separated from the physical world and from the surrounding space – the world. The meaning of the polyvalent structure indicates a virtualized “return to the real world” whose “signal originates from the direction” as a “deep, temporal expression internal in the structure”.[Oiticica, “Colour, Time and Structure//1960,” 74.]
The series of monochrome realizations: the Sun (2015), Black Crossways (2015), Dark Crossways (2015) and White Crossways (2015), suggest that the color or the coloring has a different sensitivity when illuminated – especially the white, because it is open to light alternation.
The potential ‘exit’ in space, subtly marked in the center of the painting composition, has a receptive function, a sensory one. As a center, perhaps cosmic, it generates motion which is produced optically or kinetically, and involves the body in an active aesthetic experience.[Houston, op. cit., 82.] The subtle statement of the White Crossways (2015) demonstrates that white is an ideal color or light, as a synthesis of all colors. It is assumed that it is ‘the most static’, and that it ‘favors a quiet, dense, and metaphysical duration’. The blending of two different whites shows unevenness – one of which is always brighter and the other naturally opaque, although the confrontation of the two whites shows that they are always clean and never neutral.[Oiticica, op. cit., 74.]
The essence of shaping here focuses on the structure which is shaped “when the color becomes the color of light, finds its time, and continues to discover its own nucleus, leaving it naked.[Ibid., 76.] It is said that if the color is ‘color of time’, then the structure ‘coherently’ becomes ‘time structure’, i.e. time is embedded in the structural genesis of the work, learning about its space in the spatial dimension of the work.
Time in a work of art is said to be different from its symbolic meaning given in philosophy and by the laws of perception; it is the inner, existential relation of the man with the world.[Idem.]
Final word
The syllogistic key derived from the applied poetics suggests that Maznevski quite skillfully permutes the old ontological claims that “the linguistic work is in the phoneme”, “the work of art is in the color” or “the piece of music is in the tone”.[Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, chap. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Skopje: Magor, 2006), 11-13.] When it comes to Maznevski and his works, it can be said in a Heidegger manner that the work introduces us to the ‘other’, to the ‘linguistic in the color’ or to the ‘shape of the music’. The ‘sculpture’ can be the ‘tree’, but the ‘tree’ can also be ‘music’ as well.
His abstract suggestions expressed in the form remain in the domain of the irrevocable, despite their concrete actualization in a given form or the formation of some ‘objectified’ matter that continuously changes its host or its temporary residence. This conceptual principle indicates that the ontological is not anchored in the form but in the intention.
Therefore, the legibility of a work cannot be completely or sufficiently effective and clear, because the essential side of art lies exactly in the assignment of various poetic functions that go beyond and transcend the domain of immediacy and recognizability in a given artistic context. Art in practice shows that it will always be inaccessible to any final judgment, and that the cognition will always be challenged to expose the opacity of the ‘transparent’ and the intentional determination or timidity of art before the ambivalence of interpretive methods. As long as certain aesthetic issues remain unresolved, their position of ‘now’ and ‘here’ in relation to their ‘before’ and ‘then’ could place them at a particular social and sociological moment.
The relevance of such statements will be productive and explained depending on their readiness to face the compromise or the conflict that it itself will set as a goal for analytical thinking. Any conscious or deliberate determination to be grounded in an imaginary meaningful context will mean that “form is obtained, and infinity as well”.[Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 212.]
Natali Rajchinovska Pavleska, MA
French Curve
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.]
Metal Drawings
The beginning of both forms is spiral[The spiral shape, like the circle, is a suggestion for rebirth. See Rank, op. cit., 352.] and enters the stated form as a whole or a system, while the sustainable balance of the spatial drawings follows the logic of the symbolic, metonymically changing or replacing the position of the other. Speaking of matter, Henri-Louis Bergson wrote that: “… matter is made into something radically different from the representation, something of which, consequently, we have no image; over against it they place a consciousness empty of images, of which we are unable to form any idea; lastly, to fill consciousness, they invent an incomprehensible action of this formless matter upon this matterless thought.”[Bergson, op. cit., 25.]
Yet, due to the assumption that these two undetermined forms carry the attributes essence and manner, it is unnecessary to discuss their differences because their meaning is in the oneness or in indivisibility. Aristotle’s philosophical treatise De Anima (350 BC) suggests that “the soul is inseparable if it is always connected with a body”, but it also introduces the idea that only specificity can separate it.[Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. Margarita Buzalkovska-Aleksova (Skopje: Magor, 2006), 7.]
The assumptions about the peculiarities of these two figurines are deliberately left to free interpretation, because the artist insists on unity. The remarks of the artist that one of the elements (the one with regular, orthogonal violations) is an evolved rigid form, and the other (the spiral element) is a sophisticated form, lead us to a conclusion in which perfection, evolution, or natural consequence is immanent to either of these two supposed substitutes, the soul or the body. Democritus, who suggests that the soul is the basis for the entire nature, thinks it is round, just like the particles in the air are.[Aristotle, On the Soul, 12.] Aristotle’s works suggest that the soul moves upwards and that the soul moves the body, that the movements it makes are the same as the ones with which it moves itself, but also that the ‘spatial movement’ of the soul is impossible.[Ibid., 21; 29.]
The historical illustrations of the spiral indicate that it is one of the earliest and most widespread ornaments. It is a view-point that dives into the idea that the most volatile part of the body, which is the womb, where the process of creative transformation lies, eventually creates an abstract image of the immortal soul.[Raznk, op. cit., 355.]
Consequently, the spatial drawings syllogize a supposed movement of both forms only in reciprocity, whose possibility lies in the openness of the end and the definite beginning as a foundation where they commit themselves to the sequence of sensory observations. In an extensive study of the relationship between matter and substance, Roland Barthes suggested that the signifier always manifests itself ‘materially’, as a sound, object, image, etc.,[Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, pref. Susan Sontag (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968), 47. The materiality of the signifier clearly separates the “matter” from “substance”, where the substance may be intangible (substance of content) or material (sounds, objects, pictures). In semiology there are “mixed systems” with different types of matter, such as sound and image, subject and writing, collected under the concept of “typical sign”: verbal, graphic, iconic, gestural. More in Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annete Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 47.] and that the material sometimes proves to be an essential factor for the art form by putting into practice l’art pour l’art, or art as a means of creative act – “it uses art to create.”[Rank, op. cit., 7.]
Flower to flower
Project Double
Face washing
The portrayal as a conceptual auspice of the project called In the Unknown Existence (1998),[Exhibition “1111 portrait” (8.7-17.7.1998) Fourth annual exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts – Skopje, Macedonia, location Art City, Havzi Pasha quarters, village Bardovci.] is considered to be a gesture of mutual influence, which reflects or represents the variability of the interactive relationship between the artist and the critic. In an oil-painting technique on glass, the sequences of aesthetic details metaphorically expressed by a multitude of chamomiles simplify a self-realization in the real interchanging relations between criticism and self-criticism.
In this mirror reflection, the artist observes the evolutionary phase of creation as an inferior and perhaps as an inert attitude towards the intuitive forces that foster the opposing aspect of art and its posterior manifestos. The crossing between these two dominant points is presented as a pendulum, according to which a portrait can be anything that can be looked at or vain vocabulary without connotative directions. Laconically, entering into the unknown existence may indicate a “subjective nonreductivity of the other”[Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dia- logue, trans. and forew. Jason E. Smith, (New York: Columbia University Press), 63.] in oneself, or that one sees oneself in the process of identification and the consequent transformation.[The concept of the other, “autre”, comes from Freud’s “object” or the Lacan’s explo- ration of otherness. Jacques Lacan, Scripts: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, forew. Malcolm Bowie (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 1-2.]
The work or the semantic diptych In the unknown existence is an imitation of nature in an Aristotle’s sense – non-realistic, but turned towards the human nature, just as it should be.[Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis. The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1967).] The relationship between the pictorial presentation and the verbal statement “my face is still because of the comfort of my body” appears as a codified knowledge, not a meaning. In such a way, the artist or the critic projects himself into the reality through the exteriority of the form that is and was being constituted and created at the same time, symmetrically inverting itself into the recognizable and visible world.
It and I
to the surface the creative doubt, which has constantly been trying to establish concrete concepts and truths, and re-examines the sensory cognition [dubito ut intelligam] in a Cartesian manner, believing that the visual perceptions are an illusion.
The concept of the spatial Metal drawings (2001)[Independent exhibition in Aero art gallery, 12.12 – 22.12.2001.] dyes the gap in a contour that does not close, as an occupied space by the silhouettes of the shapes, or as an inscribed variation of the potential or what that potential might become. These spatial ‘phonemes’ represent a temporal and memorized record of dynamism or of energy that is left in the comprehension of infinity or in its own intentional incompleteness. Defined as a fissure through time and space, the artist in these statements outlines and distinguishes subjectively objective idealistic rhythms of an endless debate. The 17th century theory of cognition, introduced by the philosopher and liberal John Locke, identifies ‘primary and secondary qualities’. The primary ones are those that cannot be separated from the body and are listed as: firmness, shape, movement or stillness, and number, and the secondary ones are: colors, sounds, and scents which exist only for the subject that perceives them.[Bertrand Russell, “Chapter XIII: Locke’s Theory of Knowledge,” in History of Western Philosophy (Belgrade, Podgorica: Nova knjiga plus, 2015), 515.] The primary qualities in the spatial drawings would be the supposed movement and the actual stillness as opposites in a unity.
Once again, instead of a unity, we can probably imagine the separation between the body and the spirit. Furthermore, Locke’s discussion opens up to empiricism by rejecting the metaphysical views. He divides the assumptions about the source of ideas into ‘sensory’ and ‘perceptual’, which are led by the spiritual cognition that he claims to be an ‘inner sense’.
His hypothesis is based on the viewpoint that cognition cannot precede experience. According to the philosophical unfolding of the process of naming the substance, Locke’s assumptions are narrowed down to the conclusion that ‘things’ may possess ‘real essence’ which consists of their ‘physical composition’. Yet, the essence is mainly unknown and “it is not essence in a scholastic sense.” The real essence possessed by these two separate essences (symbolically – soul and body) is unknown in the perceptual context, but it is verbalized, just as the essence that Locke speaks of is ‘verbal’ and consists exclusively of the definition of a general term.
The question whether the essence of a body consists only of the space it covers, or whether the body is space plus mass, is a debate over terminology through which the body can be defined in any way. In essence, language facts are different complex ideas to which different names are given.[Russell, Locke’s Theory of Knowledge, 519.] These two supposed figures observe themselves, or perhaps they both belong to a single conjecture of the spirit which in all its thoughts and reasoning has nothing else but its own ideas, which it observes itself, as Locke would suggest. The spirit itself cannot create a single simple idea, because such things affect the spirit in a completely natural way. According to the Locke’s assumptions, the ideas about substances must be composed of simple ideas whose existence is detected in nature. Hence, cognition is led by intuition and the reason which observes the agreement or disagreement of two parts, or by the sensory recognition as perception of the individual things.[Ibid., 520.]
George Berkeley denied the existence of matter and the external physical world, which can only exist because we observe it.[Bertrand Russell, “Chapter XVI: Berkeley,” in History of Western Philosophy (Belgrade, Podgorica: Nova knjiga plus, 2015), 549.] One of the key Berkeley’s hypotheses is that the ‘event’ deduces to a ‘percept’ that we know of without conclusions, while the ‘spirit’ is understood as the ‘structure of the event’ when the substance is rejected.[Russell, Chapter XVI: Berkeley, 556-9.] There is no doubt that the relationship generated during the perceptual act of these two ‘presences’ is also a kind of an event itself. The founder of German idealism, Immanuel Kant, advocated the philosophical view that ‘spirit’ is the opposite of ‘matter’, and he eventually came to a conclusion that there is only spirit in the end. According to Kant, space and time are forms of perception similar to the dualistic composition of these two abstract opposites. According to Kant, there are two types of spaces, a subjective one – recognized for experience, and an objective one – the one in which conclusions are drawn.[Bertrand Russell, “Chapter XX: Kant”, History of Western Philosophy (Belgrade, Podgorica: Nova knjiga plus, 2015), 599-606.]
PHT (Public horse traffic)
Maznevski’s visionary horizon for a future imaginary and different time, which is engineeringly and aesthetically sound, is confirmed by the conceptual social project for public urban transport, the Project PHT (1999),[Project PHT – Public Horse Traffic.] as a return to the meaning of the slow and fun way of circulating, not just in the transit zones, or the streets of the city of Skopje, but also in the society. In this narrative, the changeability of the meaning of the ordinary life is sketched by the artist as a reversible time progression, conceived through an elaboration of a model (analog photographs) of the contemporary city image. The cultural materialist and critic, Raymond Williams, when analyzing the term or condition industry, suggests that the meaning of this term changed and became a collective notion of manufacturing and productive institutions and their general activities in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Writing about the wealth of the nations, Adam Smith in 1776 equated this notion with an “institution” as a “body of activity” and not as a “human attribute.”[Raymond Williams, Culture & Society: 1780-1950 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), xi.] The rapid growth of these institutions led to the formation of a new system in 1830, called industrialism, which radically changed the structure of the social system, which also changed at that time. The Industrial Revolution created new patterns according to which serial transformations of production methods take place, implying to some extent the structuring of a “new society” and “culture” as a general state of intellectual development of the society as a whole. The manuscript, or Maznevski’s vocabulary in this artistic form, provokes certain cultural and sociological relations towards the utility and functionality of the industrial product – the urban transport, which is ontologically underlined and redrawn, as a process opposite and contradictory to the capitalist order and its immanent movements and speed. The complexity of the narrative plot is in the artist’s point of view and the methodology through which a particular visualization is addressed and narrated. The documentary nature of the source material, as an index link to reality, is essential to the dialectical ratio occupied by this temporal and spatial juxtaposition of the framed content.
The manipulation through the drypoint technique and retouch used on the selected cut off parts of real landscapes, spaces and urban areas, is a kind of a montage discrepant, and as a radical individualization of the new image, autonomous from the archival material, it generates a semiotic interruption with the source conflictually producing a new meaning.
The authentic two-dimensional sketches for this project (base, cross-section and layout) made on a neutral surface of a 1:24 ratio show precise thoughtfulness of the transport vehicles which are designed functional and purpose-built industrial products aestheticized according to aerodynamic, ergonomic and interior specifics to become a concrete concept proposal that could be a subject to production and reproduction. This narrative scheme reflects the artist’s deep responsibility towards the civilization. He plans and designs a useful item that would meet the human needs. It is not only an industrial design, but an ecological, global, social and culturally ethical concept as well. The redrawing of the concept in a real context on three-dimensional photographs in a 1:1 ratio, suggests moving and dislocation from the area of the presentation into the domain of the real context. Diversifying the content of the source material – the city image – critically and according to the formal expression [détournement], it conceptually [dérive] becomes experimental behavior related to the conditions of the urban society.