Art Category: Sculpture

A more complex and condensed reverberation can be noticed in the setting of the installation Meantime (1996),^{[This work was first exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Youth Cultural Center, 1997, Skopje, and later within the group travel exhibition “Radiation: recent Macedonian Art ”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje, 1996, Paviljon Veljkovi,, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1996, Bayerische Landesbank Gallery, München, Germany, 1996 Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade, 23 May 1998. See more in Sonja Abadžieva, Radiations, trans. Filip Korzenski (Skopje: Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998).]} as a connection of found recreated and created objects in a dense and at the same time diluted dialogical shape. The threepart composition, as a spatially coordinated mise-en-scène, is composed of a spectator figure that presumably observes the movement of the small vicarious figurines placed on a soundless turntable in a process of rotation and an independent accumulation of the concept “the end” put on a pedestal. The space game between the elements creates a deeply and internally significant coded model, which is strengthened by the chromatic polyvalence of the black color, as an art monogram that prints the performative dimension of this work. The psychological penetration of the state of individualism expressed through the observer represents an inner intonation of the concept of belonging, silently declaring the dependence of what internal freedom means in relation to transience. The ritual rotation of the small animal figures placed on a rotating surface reflects the state of immutability or impossibility of free play, as a state of concentration around one’s own eidos and the transcendental which questions the presence in a certain sociological or cultural moment.

The artisan dimension of this work is impregnated in the poetic recreation of the word structure or assemblage “the end”, composed of ready-made linotype elements – letters and spaces, which are blank, geometric, minimalistic and abstracted from the authentic context – composite parts, whose non-functionality is the most immediate result of the idea of an art composition. This ‘suitcase’, similar to Duchamp’s box- es Botte de 1914 (1914) and Botte-en-valise (1934), is a facsimile of original copyright notes, packaged in a time transmission of artistic artifacts. The sensitivity of packing and unpacking is immanent for Fluxus artists as well. George Maciunas left behind a whole series of wooden and vinyl boxes with different content and assemblages of items belonging to the collective work by the artists of this movement as bearers of information for some future time.^{[Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, London: University of California Press, 2002), 33-44.]}

“There is no silence,” says John Cage, who, through his composition in three parts 4’33 (1952), fills the gap through absence, and thus confirms the conceptual oppo- site of what is left out, denied, or excluded – the sound. So, in this context as well, the silence establishes identity as a stretch of time, of the poetic time, as an eternal vacuum or a necessary process of self-closure before any sensory creation of the work of art occurs. The real dimension of this creation is the experiential, not the conceptual, that connects the different things and spaces of the artist’s continuum. The visual continuity between the separate elements, or states, occurs in the ‘virtual field’ of the ‘event’, where movement is the only possible thing that merges separate time sequences into a single whole. “The time is revealed inside the event”, says Jules Deleuze, as a simultaneity of the three implicit presents: the present of the future, the present of the present and the present of the past.^{[Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 100.]}

The composition Meantime reveals the atemporal order of the creative act and the real state of temporality of the creative energy, which is anchored, emptied or recreated, through the real form of the work of art.

The postponed teleological establishment of Maznevski’s artistic expression is most explicitly manifested in the execution of the complex proposition Absence (1998), and further in the complex series of works conceptually named Crossways (2006). Freed from its use value, the ‘found object’ (ready – made; found object; object trouve) receives a new metafunction selected and given by the artist, but almost always originating from the mass production and the result, or perhaps the hierarchy, of the technological history. In contrast to the historical ‘found objects’, such as the Duchamp’s ready-mades, whose elaboration is based on intellectual intervention, ^{[Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit, 76.]} Maznevski’s works undergo significant formal and functional changes.

On that account, the maxim of his creative work is expressed in each art work individually, even when it might be assumed that a recent statement has answered the questions asked in his early creative periods. Besides the works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Max Bill, Rene Magritte and numerous other apostles of Modernism, the collection of the Albertina Museum in Vienna possesses the work A se esse (1998)

The relevance of Maznevski’s work in this area is confirmed by broader observation of the overall artistic engagement by relevant critics, with special emphasis on the concept Absence or A se esse (1998). ^{[Friedhelm Scharf, 40 Jahre: Fluxus und die Folgen, ed. by Rene Block and Regina Barthel (Wiesbadener Kunstsommer, Wiesbaden, 2002), 166.]} This creative period in Antoni Maznevski work is recorded as a ‘pure conceptual’ ^{[Sonja Abadzieva. Idejateka: selection of documents for the conceptual discourse in Macedonia. (Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003). More in Liljana Nedelkovska’s “Who’s Afraid of the End?” in Antoni Maznevski (Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).]} phase, although the closeness or the affinity towards the sheer ‘fluxus events’ is much more apparent in the use of media than the closeness to the analytical or synthetic phase of conceptual art is. The idea for the Absence (1998), although it cannot be deduced to a plain conclusion, is encouraged by the vision of the shape, and the cognitive and the experimental observation of the found, known and always present objects, known as curvilinear objects, in the immediate environment of the artist.

This work reveals that the presence and the absence are mutually exclusive through presentation (Latin praeesse). The poetic principle in this achievement is based on indicating or presenting the absence of an object or occurrence through the object, or of the replacement of what is not present. The reflective assumptions of Buddhism indicate that: “… there is no such thing as a real existence or a being (Latin esse) but only an infinite process, a constant change, an ‘existence’ (bhava) based on ‘production’ and on what is ‘created’, and on the process of action (kamma-bhava) and on the process of reactions or rebirth.”^{[Vito Markovic ed., Thus Spoke the Buddha, prev. Srbislava Elezović Lazić (Belgrade: Grafos, 1986), 19.]} The mastery of this idea is not only in the contextual part, but in the methodology of performance or artisanship, and in the hand of the creator, just as much as it is confirmed by the meaningful relations that emerge in that correlation between the idea and the work derived from it. This antonymous form of the object, the popular Volkswagen Beetle, is synonymous to immobilized energy or dynamics in retention, structured as an internal movement between two finite potentials, the beginning and its presumed end. The ambivalence of this immanent dualism is reflected in its chosen form and in the illusion of the absent object – the cut-off element as the bearer of the idea of movement – while the absence of presence belongs to the structure of the sign. ^{[Niall Lucy, Derrida Dictionary (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 156-159.]} In essence, the naming of this work is not only an announcement of presence [présence], but more than that – it signifies a process [procès] which structurally determines the relationship between what is presented and the very act of presenting the idea.

The existence in absence (in absentia) characterizes the paradigmatic axis, and corresponds to the concept of virtual existence, as an event, and as an action, while the existence in presence (in praesentia), which is syntagmatic in nature, is the real existence or real form of the formless. ^{[The syntagmatic relation is “in presence”, while what happens outside the discourse and is not supported by linearity is in an associative relation, which unites notions in the absence of potential mnemonic series (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 123). The two modes of organization Jacobson proposes in relation to the linguistic signs are: combination – arrangement (each sign is composed of constituent characters or appears only in a combination with other characters) and selection – choice (the choice between the alternatives implies the possibility of replacing one with another, which is equal in one aspect and different in another). Making a comparison with Saussure’s in parasentia and in absentia, Jacobson believes that an appropriate analogy can be made with the concepts of agreement (two or more expressions equally present in any realized sequence) and selection (merging expressions into a virtual sequence). “The recipient understands that the given statement (message) is a combination of components (sentences, words, phonemes) selected from the storage of all possible components (codes).”Roman Jakobson, Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, trans. Ivan Martincic, ed. Ante Stamac (Zagreb: Globus, 1988), 58.]} Formally settled, the intentional contradiction creates “a relationship between two terms of the binary categories of assertation and negation”. The contradiction arises from the act of cognitive negation between two terms in which case the former becomes ‘absent’, while the latter becomes ‘present’. As a concept of assumption, “the presence of one presupposes the absence of the other, and vice versa.” ^{[Greimas and Courtes, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, 60-61.]} Through the concept of the Absence (1998), the artist expresses a certain explicit anachronism through the medium, and on the other hand, emphasizes the impossibility of the independence of art from the circumstances that determine it in a specific contextual moment.

The referential collage seems more essential and significant than the performance itself, which, despite the perfection and the precision of the performance, it specifies the primacy of the idea, and of the critical setting of this work of art in a specific social value system. This proposition is a public anti-monument that openly opposes the sameness and quantitativeness of mass production.