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Blurring or distorting the boundary between the traditional frameworks of painting and sculpture is hardly a creative approach without precedent in the art world since the early 20th century. Yet, beginning in 1979, Serbian artist Miroslav Pavlovic’s neo-constructivist essays on the topic have effectively confronted viewers time and again with the issue of dimensionality within the field of artistic presentation. Aptly termed “Dimensional Works,” the majority of Pavlovic’s oeuvre literally reaches outside the convention of the framed, stretched canvas box and on into the third dimension. |
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Dimensional Constructs – Whitney May
Blurring or distorting the boundary between the traditional frameworks of painting and sculpture is hardly a creative approach without precedent in the art world since the early 20th century. Yet, beginning in 1979, Serbian artist Miroslav Pavlovic’s neo-constructivist essays on the topic have effectively confronted viewers time and again with the issue of dimensionality within the field of artistic presentation. Aptly termed “Dimensional Works,” the majority of Pavlovic’s oeuvre literally reaches outside the convention of the framed, stretched canvas box and on into the third dimension. His efforts here are to create objects that are neither representational nor abstract, but instead that exist only in and of themselves—nothing more, nothing less than a unique blending of the elements of form and space without referent. In this way too do his three-dimensional, anti-representational assemblages gesture toward his own Slavic heritage—to the heyday of Tatlin, Malevich, Gabo and to the advent of Russian Constructivism itself. Times have changed however and, accordingly, such contemporary constructions as Pavlovic’s necessarily generate updated and significant meaning.
In his Dimensional Work No. V3 is perhaps the most direct and accessible manifestation of the artist’s particular approach to activating and provoking the mind of the viewer. Here, the convention of the white square gains new layers of canvas and thus another dimension altogether. In this eye-catching application of a section of cut canvas to the face of another, the work becomes multi-faceted, dimensional and full of taught folds under the sway of a white, X-shaped harness. It is as if, upon finally achieving a third dimension, some exterior force has come down upon the newly liberated canvas to limit and control its dimensional progress. Existing outside the flat white box is here presented as taboo.
In this example however, the frame is absent entirely—an element otherwise present throughout the greater part of his corpus. In works like Dimensional Work No.25 on the other hand, the frame is re-examined, but not without another clear challenge to the two-dimensional standard. By stringing metal and wire of various widths to the exterior of the traditional wooden frame, Pavlovic references the older, entirely formulaic condition of the framed canvas, but rejects it once again. The shadows created by the externally attached wires make the three-dimensionality of the work impossible to ignore. Here again is an art format almost entirely new, but yet it too has motives. With the inclusion of the frame here, Pavlovic makes obvious his challenge to tradition in the same way that first wave modernists did before him.
In fact, in a 2003 interview, Pavlovic stated explicitly; “I have never particularly focused on a relationship between tradition and my own work. You see, the exception of my procedure is quite evident and results in an original visual object and, I’d like to emphasize this, one that is first of its kind.” Here again, art historical convention is denied in favor of the concept of the unique art object itself. Yet, at the same time, Pavlovic admits that he is simultaneously motivated by the long-standing art historical standard that his creations so consistently challenge. He has explained specifically: “My work is the result of analyzing and reanalyzing painting.” In this way, although he hopes to move beyond the two-dimensional, framed canvas, Pavlovic similarly refuses to forget or to ignore such a precedent as the painted image.
The value of his work, then, lies in its reassessment of this tradition rather than in its destruction. All facets of the West’s most conventional art must be explored and, literally, expanded upon.
