One of the
evolutionary tasks of the avant-garde consists
in succeeding to show that the creative process
is something into which anyone can engage, thus
rendering to the life of the human kind as a
whole a more creative character - as the only
way of being saved from the globalistic and
individual manifestations of the universal evil.
The performance
of this mission by the avant-garde implies that
schooling, the entire experience accumulated,
are not obligatory not only for the amateur,
but also for the professional artist as the
leader of this process.
The rational
researching element of the avant-garde has happened
to find itself in paradoxical intertwining with
the «mass culture» which culture stays ignorant
about the heuristic character of art.
The rhythmical
, vectorial structure has always been used in
the composition of the «grand style». This level
of the hierarchically spatial structure was
attained in the arts of Ancient Egypt, Ancient
Greece, in the Gothic art, and, particularly
so, in the icon and in the fresco of Ancient
Rus. The artistic style was acquiring these
properties under the influence of the profundity
and wholesomeness of the religious perception
of the events of the real life in the world.
The orientation in life permeated in art.
The gradual
secularization of life, the pluralistic character
of the values and interests, have altered the
concept of the wholesomeness of a piece of art
and composition thereof. The interest in depicting
the world of objects as revelation has put on
equal bases artist's attention towards principal
and secondary details of a picture, the European
art of the 16th-19th centuries having paid for
this with the loss of the hierarchical structure
of the composition and its clarity.
The Russian
avant-garde of the beginning of the century
and the artists of suprematism were among those
who felt the need for returning to composition
the structure of the hierarchically oriented
elements. However, the spirit of the times of
the advancing epoch consisted in the loss of
the religious reverence was which confronted
with the richness and the many manifestations
of life and made it possible for the art of
these artists to discover for itself only the
formal ways of submission in the composition
of abstract-geometrical content.
But the very fact of the resurrection
of the principles of the composition of the
high style turned out to be promising for the
modern art as a whole. The language of the geometrical
abstractions was quick to have exhausted its
emotional resource, while the potential possibilities
of the newly discovered understanding of composition
came to require new saturation, one that would
be taken immediately from life, this time -
according to the laws of the traditional fine
arts, the representationism.
When an artistic discovery
happens, taking part in the process are all
the psychical and spiritual powers of the artist,
this factor often compensating for the relative
objectively restricted character of the discovery,
which discovery may just the same to bear upon
the individual creative evolution. However,
when further use is made of the artistic discovery,
lost appears the most valuable component of
the artistic revelation - the creative daring,
which is achieved at times only as resulting
from a long-time process of study and humility.
Left staying without alimentation remain the
aesthetic premonitions of the spectator, which
are the most important ones for art and which
are connected precisely with the creative challenging
of the artist. The discovery is little by little
being turned into an artistic device. But the
life of art constantly demands of artist his
creative courage, but that has always been dramatic
and is but a sacrifice.
It would be interesting to
follow the way that is being taken in our times
by the avant-garde in order to resolve this
problem in its practice. Since the moment of
its inception and till this day, the creative
nerve of the avant-garde has consisted in the
spirit of negation, a beginning that is opposite
to the creative veneration of the traditional
art. The spirit of negation is particularly
characteristic of the extreme methods of the
avant-garde, which methods, being used by the
artist, make him turn to an ever more opened
and non-sublimated form of spectator's unaesthetic
experience, that being violence, the instinct
of self-preservation, and sex, thus making the
artist negate in this way art as such. Another
extreme feature of the avant- garde of today
- the intellectual complexity of the conceptual
art - stays in its considerable part also outside
of the framework of aesthetic experience and
pre-supposes a relocation of the interest to
the field of associations of conscience in a
definite context. And finally, the entire arsenal
of the avant-garde is concentrated in an action,
a direct and plain event of life, which event
is invoked to be the symbol of a myth that is
undergoing the process of its making.
It is in the action that accomplished
is the final «reverse» evolution of the avant-garde
as the branch of the fine arts to its synthetic
source - the man as the cosmic and spiritual
phenomenon.
The «intermediate» stages in
the development of the avant-garde have taken
each one its own niche in the picture of the
modern art and they continue to vary the creative
methods that were discovered some time in the
past. Profanation of the first discoveries that
were once made by the avant- garde is posing
now as its classical tradition which may satisfy
a searching artist at the stage of his schooling
only. New generations of artists, having received
the instruction of the avant-garde, are imparting
to it their own talent and their sincerity,
and these phenomena «make brighter» certain
specimens of their creative work. But on the
whole, the process of mastering the artistic
language of the avant-garde, does not concern
the development of the higher spiritual interests
of the human personality. These aspects of our
«ego» are developed by the fine arts when there
is contact with the psychology of the image,
with its brightness and its sacrificial character.
The same process takes place with an artist
when he works in the effort of rendering those
states. The language of the avant-garde (not
this language alone, at that) possesses no means
of expressing those states through the focus
of the spiritual image - the face, the front.
On the other hand, an artist who once attained
this level, considers it henceforth as the aim
of his artistic work. He may use, or he may
interpret, certain formal discoveries that have
been made by the avant-garde, the positive or
the negative sign of those discoveries depending
upon the context of the particular work of art.
But, taken within the hierarchical range of
the work, those discoveries will always have
been carrying an auxiliary character, serving
merely to expand the sphere of human life and
the content of the image.
A true piece of art, just like
its foretype the human being, presents a microcosm
which has a definite hierarchy of meanings that
have been accumulated by the particular culture.
In order for the artist to express any of these
meanings, the corresponding artistic language
is used, the stylistic distinction of which
corresponds exactly to the wealth of the culture
content, that has been accumulated by the moment
at which a piece of art is born. The experience
of all the preceding styles is present in a
mature work of art just like present in it is
the conceptualization of the ideological universum
of culture. Elements of the artistic language
of the avant-garde can be discovered in every
piece of art that has been created after the
epoch of the blossoming of that trend and that
belongs already to a different time.
The influence of information
dooms art to the unity of the artistic process,
regardless of the ideological and stylistic
self-determinations undertaken by the artist
himself.
The avant-garde, while producing
forth its influence, is also foredoomed to compare
its values against the best achievements of
the traditional fine arts, both in the past,
and in the present time, from which it has continued
to draw its energy of negation. Here the school
of avant- garde, which has become so widely
spread in the world, comes into an inescapable
dialogue with the traditional art - in the soul
of the very artist, the wholesome development
of whose soul implies meeting spiritual experience
at all its levels.
Valery Yevdokimov
Moscow. November - December, 2002 |