Time sculptures, time objects
A louder critical dimension of Maznevski’s artistic voice is shown in the series of performances in the project Temporary / Instant (51 Skopje, 52 Venice, 54 Copenhagen). If we begin from the assumption that a work of art is essentially finite because it expresses its own objective completeness in space and time, it leads us to the conclusion that it exists within the fulfillment of that unique sense of completeness.[Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Paperback, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 2004), 10-1.] This work which is always different and temporal is a fundamental anticipation of the form, of the various registers of the term form, of its impermanence, and open duration. The project simulates various constructing situations in public space, as a public comment directed at the idea or the worn-out concept ‘dialecticism’ of contemporary art practices. This lively structure composed of living building elements[The students of professor Maznevski perform according to a certain pedagogical and didactic concept.] intrusively enters various spatial absolutes (a museum, plateau, or square) whose immanence is the inconsistency of the audience and the unpredictability of the reception.[The theory of aesthetic reception proposes convergence between the structure of the work, but also interpretation that means adoption of the work. Ivan Dzeparoski, The work of art in the second half of the XX century (Skopje: Magor, 2009), 99. The representative of the German school Konstanz, Hans Robert Jauss sees the perspective of merging of the historical horizons in the concept of appropriation of the old in the new art, as a model that would move along a diachronic axis. The synchronous model, which he also proposes, and is not radically opposed to the diachronic, is the introduction of the work into a historical moment. Chris Dzialo, “Reception Theory,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, eds. Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland (London, New York: Routledge, 2014), 391. The historical essence of the work of art, according to Jauss, lies not only in the representative form or the expressive function, but in its further “influences”. The “life of the work” does not result from “autonomous existence”, but from the “reciprocal interaction between work and humanity. “ Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, intr. Paul de Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15.] Incarnated in front of the horizon of expectations, the openness of this concept simulates and inscribes various manifestations of the meaningful fulfillment of the form or of the visible, which is focused on the inner imperative of the variability of the term unity. In the next inductive instance, Temporary / Instant is exhibited as a principle of the decomposition of the monolith, of the totality of the permanent records, and of the concept of ‘institutional’, ‘permanent’, ‘preserved’ and ‘eternal’.
This manifesto of free expression protests against causality, utilitarianism and the exhaustion of the contextual and conceptual nomadism of art. The only lasting impression or confirmation of the presence of this event is the document,[The reading of the document requires synthesized knowledge, with sequences that contain the past of the meaning of what is being read. So the video and the photos from this performative action register moments from reality with index traces from the past. The significant coding of this complex poetic utterance connotes relations of art and defined states, embedding temporality in transient experience.] as a mediated experience between the art and the work. The demiurge nature of this concept is confirmed through the experience of the artist, the creator and his work, through which the single truth about his presence in a specifically defined discursive space is revealed. Similarly to Richard Serra, who once said: “I do not create art … I am involved in an activity”,[Kosuth, op. cit., 165.] Maznevski creates, undertakes activity, and does artistic practice, where the involvement or the conceptual presence comes in front of the performance action. The idiom of this imaginary space does not have an immanent topography, but an adaptable configuration, which absorbs and kernelizes the immanences of the current presence inside. In fact, that inner part is the ultimate mass which transforms the boundaries of the dynamis movement into a goal of its own realization. It is a trace constituted by fragmented and special dynamic potentials unity of the common, which does not have its own ending, but it has only an illusion of the end or an illusion of the finite. This kinetic form is a sheer certainty of the organic unity, whose mediation has not been completed yet, and whose absolute content makes attempts to possess itself in the objectness [gegen- ständlichkeit][Hegel’s phenomenology suggests that “The objectness does not change the work itself, but shows what it is, whether it is something or nothing.” This hypothesis of “certainty” extends to the causal relationship between the individual and the bodily, which if it intends to influence the bodily, it must itself be bodily. See Hegel, op. cit., 208-9. The French sociologist Marcel Moss would say that “every technique has … its own form” [Toute technique proprement dite a sa forme], but also that “every behavior of the body” [toute attitude du corps] also has its own form. This assertion is placed in a broader social context in which education has a dominant role, “education” as a superior in terms of “imitation”, i.e. as an attitude that “every society has its own habits” [Chaque société a ses habitudes bien à elle]. Moss states that “technique represents action, which is effective and traditional”, and “before instrumental techniques, there is an ensemble of body techniques [technique un acte traditionnel efficace] [Avant les techniques à instruments, il y a l’ensemble des techniques du corps], […] row placed in the ideas where previously there was no “[l’ordre mis dans des idées, là où il n’y en avait aucun]. These “techniques are organized into a system […] system of symbolic assemblages”. Moreover, all of these techniques are very easily located in a symbolic mounting system. The original French allegations are essential to the further connec- tion with Benoît Turquety’s hypotheses, because in his formulation of montage as a sociological component, he refers to the French etymology. Marcel Mauss, “The Techniques of the Body,” Journal of Psychology 32, no. 3-4 (15 March-15 April 1936).] of the representation [vorstellen]. Being chronotopic, the event that is generated as a result of the performativity of the work, concretizes, communicates, and becomes information, but as Bakhtin points out, the event does not become a figure [obraz], but it gives essence to the representativeness of the events as a poetic function.[Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 250.] On the other hand, the event [Russian: sobytie] is perceived as an act or as an experience.
The event itself is what enables the act of presentation to become an act of reality in a phenomenological sense.[Dick McCaw, Bakhtin and Theatre: Dialogues with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Grotowski (London, New York: Routledge, 2016), 75.] The time typical of the factual event that exists in and for that time,[Johanns Ehrat, Cinema and Semiotic, Peirce and Film Aesthetics, Narration, and Representation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 305-307.] is rewritten with each new exhibition of Temporary / Instant. The only invariable constant of this aesthetic expression is its substance. Formulated in Barthes’ manner, “the substance of the expression” is immanent to the semiological systems, such as objects, gestures and images, whose function is the sign-function.[Barthes, Elements of Semiology, 41.]
The sign function, according to Umberto Eco, is fulfilled when the two functions of expression and content begin a mutual communication, and then, when each of them becomes a part of another correlation, they acquire a new functionality and have a new sign function. According to this coding determinant, the sign is interpreted as a temporary result that establishes a transitory relationship between the elements. Each of these elements has the right to enter another correlation under given coded circumstances and thus form a new sign.[Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 49.]
These semiological assumptions, which help in gaining understanding of the interactive space be- tween the work and the social space where the messages receive their meanings,[Yuri Lotman points out that “the structural parallelism of textual and individual semiotic features allows us to define text on any level as a semiotic entity and to look at the entity at any socio-cultural level as a text.” See Juri Lotman, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Interaction: The Semiotic Aspect,” in Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, ed. Marek Tamm, trans. Brian James Baer (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 75-76.] gradually lead to the comprehension of the semantic aspectuality, according to which, what is meaningful in this work establishes real relations with the impermanence of the temporalization and space through the process of discursivization. One of the key points of this concept is the annulment.
From a formal aspect, this living sculpture performs an act of negation of the immanence of what is known in ancient philosophy as telos,[According to Aristotle, the term telos is considered through its meanings: tendency, intention, end or goal.] as a self-restraint in the generic state of the potential (dynamis) for full realization of the act (energeia), maintaining the plasticity of the action in its transience and incompleteness of the practical action (praxis).[Agamben, “Archaeology of the Work of Art,” 11.]
The inception of this form is accomplished through self-multiplication which is essential for the continuous annulment of the permanent and the timeless. On the principles of Neoplasticism, the Dutch artist and leading figure of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg, in Manifesto 1 suggests that the essence of the formative idea of aesthetics is expresses with the term annulment. “One element overrides another. […] In art (at least in the exact formative form) it is clearly revealed. […] The work of art becomes independent, artistically alive (plastic) organism in which everything is in counterbalance.”[Charles Harrison and Paul Wood ed., The Art in Theory: 1900-1990, Anthology of Changes in Ideas, trans. Saso Talevski (Skopje: Police, 2018), 275-76.] Communication as a principle prevails in the relationship that this work develops with the model-institution.
Its autonomy is lucidly held in the intention itself, and it belongs only to time and duration. This work discusses the conclusion that art and the work of art exhibited in a gallery or a museum space is a replica of the original coded with a new meaning. The only thing that retains the original contextuality is the artist’s intention. Once again the statement by the British philosopher, Richard Wollheim, in which he said that “if we want to say something about art that we could be quite certain was true, we might settle for the assertion that art is intentional” becomes relevant. Therefore, the work cannot be considered contextually isolated from the authentic poetic dynamis, but from the wider discursive space and context in which it is objectified for the second time.