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.

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.]

Mozart’s boat

What Michael Fried suggests about feasibility or the sustainability of the form is its power to preserve itself and to exhaust itself from within and out, just as the credibility, narratives and symbolism do to be convincing. The internal dialogue between the shaped elements that become a complete cognitive abstraction of the perceptual is in continuous dialogue with the posterior phases, and makes an intersection and transition from a conceptually engaged thought to the new concrete spatial and temporal records, such as the Mozart’s Boat (2004) exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale of Art.

The evident transformations in Maznevski’s overall work sketch the planimetry of a Taoist ideogram. The extensive interest in various disciplines and philosophical discussions extends to precise elaborations and sketches in the pre-production process of various constructions, architecture, buildings, hypothetically functional or precisely measured structures.

But in the context of art, their purpose or function is not anthropological but spiritual; a residence for a different life; metaphysical. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that “Mozart knows how to speak for himself, for us, as much as he can reach us.”[rnst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 49.] This strong utopian vision for the projective ability of art is built in the prosaic form Mozart’s boat, and in the idea about the matter or earthliness and the spiritual by considering the physical and the metaphysical through a concrete poetic action. The Russian lyric poet, Alexander Blok, once wrote that: “Every movement has its birth in the spirit of music through which it acts, but over time it degenerates and begins to lose the musical or the primary element from which it was born, and as a result of that, fails. It ceases to be a culture and becomes a civilization. It was the same in the ancient world, and it is the same with us.”[Alexander Blok, “The Decline of Humanism,” in Art in Theory: 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harri- son and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell Press, 1995), 260.] The telos of civilization, the records of the great authors, and the creators and their artifacts, appear in this poetic circle of the artist. In a Heidegger manner, it can be said that “the circle is not only the main step from the work to art, a step from art to the work, but each of the steps we try to make goes round in this circle.”[Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Artwork, chap. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Skopje: Magor, 2006), 11-12.] The contemporary historian, Sonja Abadzieva, in her insightful reading of this work concludes that “an old sailing-boat (80 by 180 by 650 centimeters), which is flawlessly renovated, transforms into a musical instrument and retains the familiar connotations of both items at the same time: the ability to sail, but also to produce sound.”[Sonja Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard,” in Antoni Maz- nevski: Mozart’s Boat (Publication – La Biennale di Venezia, 51. Esposione Internacionale d’arte), (Skopje: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005).]

The object taken from the real world is an ambiguous structure with a new ‘exchange value’, but not a ‘use value’,[Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard”.] as Abadzieva suggests; It is an original where silver footprints are imprinted as a confirmation of the author’s stamp on the selected ready-made. However, the linguistic and visual analogies have been transformed to the point of a deliberately idealized contradiction – a discourse that tends to avoid the model of isotopic reading even by striving for interpretive coherence. The work, above all, has a mediating character when we talk about the ontological truth. Unlike music as a form of pure art that does not imitate objects but originates and obtains essence from specific elements that have no ontological origin in the visible world,[Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art // 1937,” in Abstraction, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art ed. Maria Lind (The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013), 34.] fine art is always specified in a given form, which is not final, and despite the meaningful gravity (an instrument of didactic transformation; sailing towards the unknown), it is always the source of its own cited form if dialectically verbalized.

The symbols in a language are the ones that direct and organize, and record and communicate, enabling the difference between thoughts and things. The thought (the referent) is directed or organized, but it is also recorded and communicated, while the symbols record events and communicate facts.

The symbols, such as the ‘boat’ or the ‘bow’, become instruments of thought only when they are used to produce meaning.[Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, 9-10.] Memorized in their stasis, the bow and the arches stimulate ambiguity, but they are also a measure, a measurement, or an unbreakable material, which cannot be destroyed or worn out, despite its usability or unusability. Nevertheless, their function in the structural composition Mozart’s Boat is essential. They are an integral part of the work – ergon (Greek: ergon), which gives meaning to the creative dynamism.[Giorgio Agamben, “Archaeology of the Work of Art,”, in Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, California: Stanford Uni- versity Press, 2019), 9. Mora about the potential in Aristotle, “Metaphysics: Book IX, written 350 B.C.E.,” trans. W. D. Ross. Accessed August 15, 2021. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.9.ix.html] In the medieval theory of signs, a distinction is made between articulation (articulatio) and signification (significatio), which is supported by arguments based on Socrates’ comprehension of articulation as imitation of things, or as an attempt of reproduction of the nature of those things. Thus, an iconic nature is established between the “phonological structure of the signifier” (signans) and the “ontological structure of the signified” (signatum). Having roots in Stoicism, Priscian identifies the articulation of the voice (latin: vox)[The term vox denotes the concept and indirectly indicates the thing, denotes or names (denotat, dasignat) its meaning (sententia) and names (nominai or appellat) of the thing or state of the world (res). See in U. Eco, R. Lambertini, C. Marmo and A. Tabarroni “On animal language in the medieval classification of signs: Litterata and Articulata,” in On the Medieval Theory of Signs, eds. Umberto Eco and Constantino Marmo (Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1989), 21.] with its meaning.[Eco, Lambertini, Marmo and Tabarroni, “Litterata and Articulata,” 12.] If the voice (vox) signifies the concept and indirectly points out the thing, denotes or names (denotat, dasignat) its meaning (sententia) and the names (nominai or appellat) of the thing or the state of the world (res),[Ibid., 21.] then the articulated meaning is set as a dichotomy of meaning in this context.[Greimas and Courtes, op. cit., 298-299.] The author’s divided world is understood as the one who lives and the one who lives in it, and the unity of expression consistently maintains that logical division at a metaphysical level.

The denotation corresponds to a culturally recognizable referent (“the iconic figure of Mozart”). The connotation (“the boat of”) does not necessarily have to be referential. The denotation is considered to be the equivalent of an extension and as such it is a semantic property, and not a corresponding object or thing.

The denotation is “the content of the expression”, while the connotation is “the content of the sign function”.[Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 86.] That’s why we can conclude that that this is the boat of Mozart, just as much as this is not René Magritte’s pipe (Ceache pas’est pas une pipe, The Treachery of Images, 1929), because the truth of the statement is always within the reach of the sensible, but it is never precisely there completely transparent and naked in the thing that it changes and replaces. The structure of this statement is an autonomous entity of internal relations set in a hierarchical order, as an essential difference between the expression and its content, whose mutual interaction in the sign function is the basis for every linguistic formation.[Hjelmslev, op. cit., 58.] The elementary structure, as an articulatory model and as a constitutive model, organizes and produces at the same time, emphasizing the representative character of the form (putting into form, semantic investment and formation).[Greimas and Courtes, op. cit., 313-315.]

The energy that is being shaped, transits and transforms in each subsequent dialogue with the material world. It establishes itself while it is searching for the logic of its own presence. With a “silent resistance”[Abadzieva, “Level One: The Known as Otherness. A Fine Disregard”.] against the dominant artistic discourse and the social climate that is created around, in this creative phase, Maznevski internalizes his own artistic standpoint, turning towards the so-called doctrine of l’art pour l’art – art for art’s sake. Jean-Louis Morel suggests that “art imposes a kind of narcissism on itself; it has no object other than itself.”[Jean-Louis Morel, Ambiguite et renversement. Theophile Gautier et le roman: une analyse structurale du Capitaine Fracasse et de Mademoiselle de Maupin (Diss. Rutgers Univ., 1974).] Yet, seen from modern trends’ perspective of l’art pour l’art, the self-referential art cannot be reduced to narcissism, and, hence to anthropocentrism, but to solipsism, or to one’s own cognition as the sole reality. In the preface to Miss Maupin (1835),[Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, intr. Jacques Barzun (New York: The Heritage Press; London: The Nonesuch Press, 1944).] which is considered a manifesto of l’art pour l’art, Théophile Gautier wrote that: “the only thing which is beautiful is the thing that is useless: all that is useful is ugly, be- cause it is an expression of a need, and human needs are ugly and disgusting, as is their poor and powerless nature.[[Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir a rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et degoutants, comme sa pauvreet infirme nature. – L’endroit le plus utile d’une maison, ce sont les latrines]. Theophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, La Bibliotheque electronique du Quebec Collection A tous les vents Volume 1078: version 1.0, 49.]

This dialectic power of l’art pour l’art pushes the discovery of causality, the usefulness of the communication of utilitarianism within the complex relations of society and its derivatives, subsystems, and generic overtones to which the artistic contribution refers,[Ibid., 46] not excluding the closure before the eternal meaningless thing – the ultimate stage of nihilism.[Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, trans. Aneta Paunovska (Skopje, Krodo, 2009), 37.] Nietzsche suggests that “there are no reasons” or that the “disbelief in causality” drives “the creative force constantly in search of new matter (even more force), while the creation per se is the selection and completion of the chosen.”[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 360]

Wooden sculptures

For example, there are the Wooden Sculptures (2002-3). Through these dynamic forms, the artist questions the rationality of the form through a Taoist principle that prevails almost in all of his works after 1998 as a decisive liberation from conventional opinions in an attempt to achieve harmony with nature.[Anton Kjels, Taoizam, trans. Ivana Đorđević (Gorni Milanovac: Dečje Novine, 1988), 26.]

In these sculpted works, the scope of free expression is noticed as a necessary state of the being which is presented in a form of a new life existence. The conceptual dimension of these works is expressed in their titles: Uprooted and Decomposed (1999); Without skin and shadow (2000); Chick and Thunder (2000); Initial (2001); A Drop of Truth (2001); Journey and Peace (2001), as a process of a closure in the poetic whose energy is released through the nature of the material. The pure poetics emanating from these preforms speaks of the creative suspension as a deliberate return to the primordial and the meditation in the process of creation as an autotelic phase, or a restructured discourse in which everything is interdependent and read from within, but not because of the meaning it acquires as a result of something else.[Tzvetan Todorov, Poetic Language: The Russian Formalists (New York: Routledge, 1988), 14.]

The return to nature is reflected in these sculptures as a twisted inward movement of matter despite the teleological detachment of the material from its original context. The addition to this conceptual idea is appropriately specified in the drawings titled Flower to flower (2000) made in a period of deep sensory closure into the self-presence or the survival of ranges of flowers per se.

Immanuel Kant said that: “Nature moves on the shortest path (lex parsimoniae); it also does not make a leap neither in the sequence of its changes nor in the composition of the specifically different forms (lex continui in natura); its great diversity … is a unity led by a few principles (principia praeter necessitate non sunt multiplicanda)… “[Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Viktor D. Sonnenfeld (Zagreb: Kultura, 1957), 22.] which in the context of the shaping gesture would suggest the ordering of the artisanal according to the laws of the organic energy of matter.

Although completely aesthetically autonomous, these works are not completely isolated from the linearity of Maznevski’s articulatory gesture.

Blue Resonance

Unlike the previous circular and spherically composed objects, Maznevski directs us again towards another completely different creative game. The initial perception of the game takes place along a cir- cular line of a simple but illuminated path of the monumental[The building is made of 550 m of ice neon strips, glued on fiberboard with dimensions of 280 cm by 200 cm by 10 cm.] elliptic object Blue resonance, which is conceived completely differently from all the other previous objects. Before we focus more specifically on this work, we shall dwell again in the symbolic references of its morphology. This geometric body has had a similar symbolic meaning in different cultures since ancient times. Except as a cosmic egg, the ellipse was the embodiment of the early universe, a secret source and a guardian of the word, of the mysteries of the cosmic existence, of space and time, of the unity of opposites, etc. Some of the above mentioned symbolic meanings can be recognized in this manually composed light object, in which the artist simultaneously illuminates and hides the source of his game. This monumental painting, due to its intense radiation, above all, can refer to the dance of the primordial light of space where ‘energy, frequency and vibration’ are condensed. These three are sublimed by the genius, Nikola Tesla, in the ‘holy trinity of the universe’ in his life game. Regarding the emanation of this holy trinity, Tesla left the following message to humanity: “Write that Mr. Tesla was playing. He played the whole of his life and enjoyed it … Write that he was a happy man … ”[visit: https://www.osam.rs/tesla-o-energiji-vibraciji-svetlosti-masti/] We assume that this message has also reached our artist, a player of art games who did not only play in this project, but in the previous projects as well.

At this moment we remain at the level of the visible, at Maznevski’s first-born light object which is reduced to a source, to a ‘mirror surface’ in which the light particles return to their original state, i.e. the energy.[Ibid.] Apart from the presence of pulsation of the rhythm of time and the circulation of energy, we can feel the alternating game of presence and absence of the rhythm between the noticeable and the unnoticeable, and the finite and the infinite in space. Only the vibrations and reflection of light, as well as the minimal resonance of the sound frequencies that directly affect the perceptual and auditory field of the spectator remain to emanate from the energy field of the object. The light in the work is perceived as a sound, because the sound, according to Tesla, is transformed into light and color, so that both color and light can be heard. But what remains invisible to perception, but ‘visible’ to the sensory field of the recipients, is the activity of the energy of the electromagnetic waves, which fluctuate and synchronize with the rhythm of the human bodily being. Hence, the resonance of this object, as well as the effect of the electromagnetic waves on the spectators, is related to the substance of the universe whose supreme energy possesses an infinite number of manifestations. But what this object refers to, and what the artist himself thinks and prefers it means, is the analogy and the synchronization with Schumann Resonance.[Schumann’s resonance is a set of frequencies that are at the very top of extremely low electromagnetic frequencies in the electromagnetic field of the earth. It affects all living things whose optimum value is 7.83 Hz, so humans feel best when they are in tune with the planet’s frequencies.] The artist reveals the secret that refers to the creation of this illuminating object.

The impulse for creation coincides with the time of the appearance of a celestial phenomenon which occurs every third year. It is the appearance of the full moon, popularly known as the ‘blue moon’,[There is a full moon every month, but because the lunar cycle and the calendar year are not perfectly synchronized, we get two full moons every three years in the same month.] which, in fact, is not blue, but it has a standard color. To a certain extent, this celestial phenomenon initiated the final choice of the title, because the object itself was being created in a period of time between the appearance of the first blue moon until the appearance of the second blue moon.

Although the scientific attitudes on its color are contradictory, its name still remains. The moon, which is the closest celestial body, and a natural satellite orbiting the elliptical path around our planet, does not emit its own light, but reflects sunlight i.e. the light of the sun is reflected on its surface and that light is reflected on Earth.

The influence of the Moon’s powerful energy has always been an inspiration to astronomers, artists, poets and composers,[It refers to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”.] and we can recognize in Maznevski’s object not only a simulation of its elliptical morphology, but the full energy radiation of the vibrating force of light which influences the overall sensitive field of the observers.

By participating in this circular ludic ritual dance by Maznevski, the whole As it is project can be experienced as an initiation ritual. Drawn in the game of the artist’s attractive ‘electromagnetic field’, we saw and heard how all of the works penetrate in each other and flow into the polyphonic sound which continues to resonate in our memory image, regardless of their material, morphological and compositional arrangement.

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.