TV landscape

Poetic decomposition – interpretive deduction

Maznevski’s first critical gesture is undoubtedly marked by a series of paintings – about twenty canvases in oil technique. The modification of the geometric assemblage TV test (1990, 1991, 1992), in a repetitive structural pattern, illustrates different perceptual changes in the memory spectrum of information arguing over the authenticity and the aura of digital technologies in the early nineteenth century, during the last decade of the last millennium. In the era of technological progress, the term form is replaced by information that takes the place of the real events and “supposes the existence of a system in a state of a metastable equilibrium that can be individualized.” Unlike the form, the information is a meaning that “arises from diversity”. This statement by the French philosopher and critic of individuation, Gilbert Simondon, is supplemented by the following conclusion: “(…) The good form is no longer a simple form, the pregnant geometric form, but the signifying form, that is, that which establishes a transductive order within a system of reality that carries potentials. This good form is that which maintains the energy level of the system, that which conserves its potentials by rendering them compatible: good form is structure of compatibility and viability, it is the dimensionality that is invented and according to which there is compatibility without degradation.”[Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 16]

From this philosophical aspect, the painting approach in this series is developed by using discovered iconic signs and symbols reduced to intersubjective abstraction, which only evokes, reminds or associates with well-known connotations: a television test picture, a chess field, a pin-up calendar, etc. Moreover, their informative disfunctionality levels with the formal as a direct verbal communication and interaction with the receiver set at a metacontextualized level thus becoming a replica of the mass communicative media model. When the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann explores the reality of mass media, he suggests that the “technology of dissemination ”creates formations of forms, or different communication media, that appear as carriers of communication, while the interaction with the receiver is guided by the interposition of technology, which certainly creates a distance or interrupts direct contact with the source.[Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2.]

This exact link between the source and the recipient, and in this particular case, the information re- duced and translated into the painting language, is reformulated by the artist into a dense and specified space of perception, returning the spectator to the right place and to his actual role as a reader.

As an experimental transgression, the depicted pattern of recognizable symbols and iconographic models is retained in the interpretation through identical terms: TV test I; TV test II; Love letter; Page 2; Pages; Railway station; Calendar ‘91; Calendar ‘92; Chess 12; Chess 2; Puzzle; Cut, etc., and makes a dialectical comment on the imperative of the uniform strategies, and probably the economic logic, of the mass media. Maznevski skillfully uses the information in order to inform and permutate a similarity that is optically distributed in front of the recipient’s memory pad. The series of pictures, just like
the installation TV landscape (1994), is a synonym for an arbitrary sign, inherent from the information category, but in an autonomous form with differential values structuring a different experience of reality for each marked or referential indication independently. Yet, besides the intelligibility of the message conveyed by this painting data, the statement calls for collective legibility and collective response.

This artistic proposal retains the prefix “trance” for the concept “Transmedium”, because it goes through the alternative possibilities for its comprehensibility, and the aesthetic provocation among the material, subject and semantic coordinates of the work.[Garrett Stewart, Transmedium: Conceptualism 2.0 and the New Object Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 19.] Compared to TV Landscape (1994) as an iconic suspension, and The End (1994) or Fine (1994) as a time suspension in moving pictures, the painting series is a spatial suspension, a metaphor for the immobilization of interactive media technology. These three consecutive works mark a creative phase of the artist, which mostly focuses on de-semantification and recoding of the relations of meaning. A minimal signature can immediately be recognized in each of these achievements separately, but, in essence, they are realistic, and they are comments – open-source transmedia objects with an inherited ontology which is verbalized again, and which addresses the recipient directly.

The minimalist installation TV Landscape (1994) is a consequence of the creative extension through the critical discourse of art and its various institutional contexts. In other words, the focus here is on the wider field of structural compensations that the work of art absorbs and incorporates in the intention of self-mediation in the world, in order to remain unadaptable to the dominant current developments. The screen canvases, as replacements for the emitter on television sets, painted in pure spectral gamma, repeat themselves thrice forming a semi-open concave TV landscape that punctuates the beginning and the end in black and white finality, reproducing twenty-four changes per second of a real and an assumed model of a film image. This frozen temporal and spatial spread structures a field of presence as a substitute for the infinitely multiplied moving images, placing the receiver in the center of the aesthetic reception.

Through the conceptual premise of TV landscape, we follow the evolution of art all the way back to Impressionism and to the presentation of the ‘real’ landscapes, such as those by Seurat or Manet, which are no less artificial than the contemporary landscape in which the en plain air artist stares. The resonance of this work is more auditory than visual. Saussure’s understanding of the sign as an acoustic image, a signifier and a signified, is based on the concept of the Latin term for a tree (Latin: arbor) as an idea for wholeness. By using the example with the sheet of paper, where the thought is on the front page, and the sound on the back, he outlines a concept that indicates that the front cannot be cut out without cutting off the back.[Sound and thought in combination produce form, not substance. See: Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 113.] The TV landscape’s visual map, which connects different strongly and powerfully impregnated gaps or chromatic fields, does not just relate to Saussure’s denotation, but by being cognitively cut out of the tree, of the trunk, and of its own denotation, it approaches the concept of ‘rhizome’. In semiology and philosophy, the concepts of a tree and rhizome are complementary concepts, but at the same time contradictory, similarly to the way the principle ‘art for art’s sake’ (1876)[Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) (La Bibliotheque electronique du Quebec Collection A tous les vents Volume 1078: version 1.0) Nouvelle edition (Paris: Charpentier et Cie, 1876). Gautier expressed explicit antipathy towards politics. Georges Matore, Le Vocabulaire et la societe sous Louis-Philippe (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 134.] is in contradiction with its hereditary syllogisms, which are reformulated in a hypercritical context, such as conceptual art. The answer to the abstract conceptualism that is immanent in the work of Ad Reinhardt is a result of the continual attempt to subjugate art as a means to some other ends or values,[Ad Reinhardt, “Art as Art”, in Art in Theory: 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell Press, 1995), 806.] seeking the freedom that is said to exists, although not for everyone.[Reinhardt, “Art as Art,” 807.] However, enclosing the art in art itself, and turning it inwards towards its unique principles and causalities, does not indicate complete self-reflection because such pure art is a result, a consequence or a response to the dominant cultural or sociological patterns which change not only the contextual nomenclature, but also the very idea of what it means to be an engaged artist and art.

The TV landscape concept is inward-looking and appears to be transiting in a l’art pour l’art manner through the categories of the historical features. However, it emanates rhizomatically, externally meaningfully, and in a Cartasean manner while extracting the meaning of creation as an expressed hesitation that art can be talked about just because of art. The moment of resolvability between the concepts of art for arts sake (l’art pour l’art) and engaged art is also in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea on the aparallel evolution, as a principle of creation that builds a rhizome with the world that surrounds it, a process through which the work of art will enable the world to leave its own territory and return to the work which loses its own territory in the world itself.[This idea is by no means easy to understand, especially since Deleuze and Guattari use the model of the book metaphorically in relation to the world, but the “aparallel evolution” as a concept seems appropriate, especially if we consider mimesis, imitation, etc., but also a sufficiently analogy is the poetics as a concept of closure (of the world) that does not expect regressive return of some meaning or valorization, and always gets it in return. Deil Delez i Feliks Gatari, “Rizom”, in Moć / mediji / &, edited by Jovan Cekic and Jelisaveta Blagojevic (Belgrade: Faculty of Media and Communication, 2011), 13. Source: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980).]

The further elaboration of the concept of the rhizome is equated with the idea of creating a map instead of a copy, as a model that tries to experiment with reality, does not reproduce the unconscious, but builds it in a similar manner to this built landscape, and opens in the field of consistency. The rhizome is specific due to its numerous inputs and the performativeness, and not the expected definite competencies. But the map may also contain the phenomenon of redundancy of its own copies.[Delez i Gatari,”Rizom,“ 15.] At the time when the essay Art as Art was written (1962),[The essay was first published in the International Art, VI, no. 10, Lugano, December, 1962.] Ad Reinhardt, among other conceptualists who utopianly traced their free creative and performative space, boldly stated that the only principles that art should consistently adhere to is ‘Art for art’ and ‘Art for art’s sake’. Not believing in the unity of art and life, Reinhardt suggests that freedom means unloading from the idea for their symbiosis or interdependence. Yet, such freedom then and now is not the same, or at least it is not possible in the same manner, because the conceptualist ideas themselves and their pre-revolutionary or imagined order have become unachievable in the long run, absorbed by the model of the institution. The only way out of the aesthetic norms offers a view through art, and through the landscape, if we want to talk about the real dialectics of the intra-institutional artistic principles.

In this context, it would be dysfunctional to reopen the debate between Peter Burger and Hal Foster on the failure of the avant-garde practices, on the impossible merging of art and life, and the claims that the neo-avant-garde practices are an extension of the historical avant-gardes or an experimental model that does not renew but dialectically reveals the potentials of the institutional criticism and acts from within, and thus succeeds. But the artistic deposits on the historic past in a present context cannot simply call upon the known facts, phrases, manifestos, mottos, tractates and slogans, and, as a consequence, continue to act, but have to face the state of presence at a given moment as stated by this permutation by Maznevski; or as Mieke Bal notes: “To be with is a key element of modernity.”[Mike Bal, The Contemporary Condition (Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness) (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), 49.] To be in and with the time means to live your own time with your own voice, through your own sound, and not considering the echo that reaches far away.

Art for art’s sake – it is unnecessary to dispel the boldness of such a message, the certainty and the courage it instills in every artist, because it is exactly what everyone wants to hear. But even before and after 1962, art was a part of life, valuable in its attempts to transform the artistic creation into practice. It is a fact that cannot be denied, but not because of the ‘art as a way of life’ term, as Reinhardt suggests, but because of what it owes to the living world around it as a living matter, or because of what it stands for, like this acoustic proposal by Maznevski which stops in front of the visual, and in front of the non-transparent TV screens to open back to the rhizome and to the thought. The perseverance of Reinhardt’s formula art for art’s sake is debatable, at least because of Sartre’s assertion that “what enables one definition”, for example, art, “precedes its existence”. The first principle of existentialism suggests that the artist is what they do of themselves, just like Maznevski’s poetic expression extends. That leap in existence is moral or creative, and as such faces experience and the impossibility to get out of the human subjectivity. Such contextualization allows us to consistently refer to the concept of an engaged artist, which Sartre talked about in 1948. However, this genealogy goes further and further back to Aristotle, for whom practice or praxis, as such, is superior to the poetics or poesis, and to the production activity whose end is in the work.

Through TV landscape, the artist determines the generics of the future linguistic overturn in the subsequent creative periods. Thus, undoubtedly relevant is Agamben’s hypothesis, which suggests that language creates its own discourse through linguistic revelation.[Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43-7.] Maznevski’s artistic language, as a creative ‘gesture’, is composed of different tones, and of different chords. But the language, the artistic language, is not always equivalent to the artistic gesture. It is completeness superior to its symbols and references only when there is unity between language and gesture because the undertaking and the representation are completely different relations.[Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, (first published [1923] 1946), 12.] The intention of the discourse is gesturally non-reductive of what is linguistically marked, and points at the outer world, the reality. The question of signs and their use, as long as they suggest a certain meaning, can be registered between the language and the wider semantic discourse. That distribution of meaning through signs and symbols defines Maznevski’s artistic language as an intention that can be interpreted as an equivalent to intent through the denotative aspects of the applied assets in a wider and more extensive range.

But let us go back to the modern formalism of this artist which we are trying to support with arguments as a pure form, and thus to show that it is not the unity between form and content that is brought into question, but the function of form as a way of coding meaningful relations and their distributive role in a broader discursive context. At this point, we can conclude that TV Landscape (1994) and The End (1996), as the most characteristic formal linguistic structures, articulate an interpretation of the artist, and not a pure expression driven by the logic of the content. They express negotiation, translation, and something in between, or according to the Latin etymology interpretation, which means explanation, they refer to the creation or transfer of meaning when seen in modern context.[David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1.]

Both examples point to semantic references or connotations created by previous historical artistic situations, technological progress of the industrial society which essentially conditions and regulates the artistic form, and its traced relevance at the level at which art itself incorporates technological principles and achievements with its own intention. This analogy suggests that Maznevski’s expressive gesture names its own variability in the process of reducing the form into a sign, which is undoubtedly a relevant articulation in the context of modern and temporal contemplation.

Consisting of six, almost identical elements, the structural deduction model is repeated in the work Reactor (1993/94), which is a polyptych consisting of six painted canvases in an aluminum frame, and whose surface texture is designed to express a return to and retention of the original shape of poetics, which is artistically pixelating the micro-essential movements that constitute the visible field on the screen i.e. the canvas. Developed with the aesthetics of the fluxus, the idea of TV landscape and Reactor is formally fulfilled with the installation TV constructions (1995) as a confirmation of the optical illusionism of the painting’s depth and the true perspective of trompel’oeil exalted in its own ontological origin. This aesthetic construction announces the void and emptiness of the cognitive spaces that are recreated in the geometry of the reflected digital assembly. Seen through the prism of continuous production, the installations i.e. the works of art TV landscape, Reactor and TV constructions, cut out, dissect and desynchronize the coherent image of the term – a composition which is characteristic and specific for the modern interface as a discontinued decoupage of aesthetic means immanent to digital media.

The fact that the work TV landscape (1991/93) was selected by René Block to be included in the exhibition 40 Jahre: Fluxus und die Folgen (2002) in Wiesbaden, and consequently, an anthology of the post-fluxus reflections on the occasion of celebrating forty years of aesthetics anticipations of this movement was created, is of great importance, unquestionably. This series of an elaboration of found objects does not ask what the content is, nor what the medium is, but how the work is created? What is the context of its discursivization? The Fluxus artists who experiment and establish a direct connection with music, the composition of found objects, dematerialization, time span, events, and happenings, in essence question the most essential: the relationship between art and life.[Christopher Eamon, “An Art of Temporality,” in Film and Video Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), translated version Christopher Eamon, “ An art of temporality “, in Slika / Pokret / Trans-form- acija: Pokretne slike u umetnosti, Jovan Cekic, and Maja Stankovic (Belgrade: Media and Communication Center, Faculty of Media and Communication, Universidad Singidunum, 2013), 163.]

The use of found objects in the fluxus practices, or more precisely speaking, Wolf Vostell’s practices, is not the same as Marcel Duchamp’s use, who gives them a new sign function in a certain posterior institutional and appropriating context, but is based on the idea of décollage. The ambient created as a spatial composition of six TV sets with the titles: Television Dé-collage (1963), which was first exhibited at the Smolin Gallery in New York, the Electronic Dé-collage, Happening Room installation, presented at the 1968 Venice Biennale, as well as the twelve John Cage radios named Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1953),[Eamon, ”An art of temporality,” 164-5.] were created at the same time with the experimental practices in the early 1950s movies. The historical Fluxus movement is considered to have a beginning and an end that coincides with the death of a main figure in 1978 – the founder and leader, Georgre Maciunas.[A statement by Lithuanian critic and curator Kestuitis Kuizinas on the retrospective of the thirty years of work at the International Fluxus Art in Vilnius, Lithuania (January 17 – February 25,1996). Kestuitis Kuizinas, “Fluxus in Deutschland 1962-1994 / George Maciunas: Fluxus Art – Amusement,” in The Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts Quarterly no.1, 1996: 24.] On the other hand, it has been noted that Fluxus is not just a historical movement from the 1960s, but a kind of a state which once it has appeared, it will last forever.[Milena Orlova, Russian Fluxus “Fluxus: Yesterday, today, Tomorrow. History Without Borders, in The Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts Quarterly no.1, 1996: 27.] Antoni Maznevski’s television constructions to some extent follow the intention and the meaning of the fluxus or the experimental practices that have punctuated in the juncture of technological progress and the artistic intentional retention of the poetics of the forms of expression.

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 creation, 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.

NYC, NYC

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.