In a broad sense folk art (folklore) - these are poetry created by the people on the basis of collective creative experience, national traditions and existing among the people of poetry (legends, fairy tales, epic), music (songs, tunes, plays), theater (drama, puppet theater, satirical plays), dance, architecture, visual and decorative - applied art. Works of folk art have spiritual and material value, they are distinguished by their beauty and usefulness. Masters of folk arts and crafts create their works from a variety of materials. The most common are: art ceramics, weaving, lace-making, embroidery, painting, wood or stone carving, engraving, chasing, etc. We can use painted dishes, lace napkins, carved wooden boards, embroidered towels in everyday life.
17. Types of folk art. There are two directions: urban art craft and folk arts and crafts. As an example of traditional art crafts, one can name: painting on Khokhloma wood, Gorodets, Northern Dvina) and on porcelain (Gzhel), clay toys (Dymka, Kargopol, Filimonovo), nesting dolls (Sergiev Posad, Polkhov - Maidan), trays (Zhostovo) , lacquer miniatures (Fedoskino, Palekh, Kholuy), scarves (Pavlovsky Posad), carved wooden toys (Sergiev Posad, Bogorodskoye), jewelry (Kubachi).
18. Decorative. Decorativeness in folk and arts and crafts is the main means of expressing beauty, at the same time it is a feature of works of other types of art. The decorative image expresses not the singular, but the general - “specific”, (leaf, flower, tree, bird, horse, etc.). A decorative image requires artistic and figurative thinking. Therefore, in folk art, it is customary to single out images-types of products of traditional arts and crafts, which reflect the mythological and aesthetic ideas of the people. For example, the image of a bird, a horse, a tree of life, a woman, signs-symbols of earth, water, the sun can be seen in various artistic materials: embroidery, weaving, lace, wood and metal painting, wood carving, ceramics, etc. Stability and the traditional nature of these images, their archetypal nature largely determine the high artistic and aesthetic value of works of folk art. At the same time, the universality of images-types in the art of different peoples of the world shows their unity, associated with the commonality of approaches to the process of aesthetic cognition of natural and social phenomena. Images in professional decorative art also reflect the ideas of this or that people about beauty. They are also often created on the basis of natural or geometric motifs, but here great freedom in the interpretation of images is allowed. Historical plots or themes of modern life are actively used in works of applied art.
19. Folk artistic traditions. The authors of modern studies in the field of art history consider traditions as a dialectical phenomenon associated not only with the past, but also with the present and future. In the understanding of S.B. Rozhdestvenskaya, tradition is a treasury of everything aesthetically perfect that has been passed down from generation to generation, a complex of visual means that are stable and changing at the same time. The formation and development of folk artistic traditions of a particular locality took place under the influence of natural-geographical, cultural and socio-economic factors. M.A. Nekrasova considers folk art as a creative, cultural, historical system that asserts itself through the continuity of traditions, functions as a special type of artistic creativity in the collective activity of the people. And each nation carries its own culture of poetic and figurative and craft traditions. They have evolved over the centuries and polished by many generations of people. With traditions in folk art, not only craftsmanship is transmitted, but also images, motifs beloved by the people, artistic principles and techniques. Traditions form the main layers of folk art culture - schools and at the same time determine the special vitality of folk art. It is impossible to underestimate the power of tradition for the development of folk art. M.A. Nekrasova rightly substantiates the artistic richness of images, forms, means and technology precisely with this. She thinks that only especially peculiar in national systems, in regional systems, in the systems of schools of folk art, can determine the life of folk art as a cultural center, only a living tradition gives way to its development. Law of Tradition turns out main force in development.
20. National character. In folk art national temperament and national character are expressed. They largely determine the diversity of forms of folk art. The integrity of folk art as an artistic structure is the key to its understanding. tradition in this case - creative method. The traditional appears in folk art as a system for which the following aspects are important: the connection of man with nature, the expression of the national, the school of folk art (national, regional, regional, the school of individual crafts). In folk art, artistic skill, technical skill, working methods, motives are passed from master to student. The art system is worked out collectively. After mastering them, students get the opportunity to vary their favorite painting motifs. And only on the basis of the acquired experience do they move on to improvisation based on the painting, composing their own compositions. If everyone goes through the stage of repetition and variations without fail, then only the most talented students who can become real masters of their craft are allowed to work at the level of improvisation.
21 . Composition as a significant ratio of parts of a work of art in folk and decorative and applied arts can be built according to various schemes. Conventionally, the following active elements of the decorative composition are distinguished: color, ornament, plot (theme), planar or volumetric plastic solution. To comprehend compositional patterns, it is necessary to perceive the image of an artistic thing or a spatial-volumetric composition as a whole.
22. Color- one of the expressive means in folk and arts and crafts - is considered as the most important component of a decorative image. It is not associated with specific features of the depicted object or phenomenon. Each center of folk art creates its own coloristic solutions for artistic things, associated with the traditional technology of processing materials, preserving archetypes and other conditions for collective creativity. Achieving expressiveness in decorative work is associated with tone and color contrasts. In decorative work, artists also take care of the harmonious relationship of colors, and the real colors of objects can be replaced by symbolic ones. The coloristic unity of all elements of ornaments is achieved with the help of color contrasts or nuances. When selecting color relationships in decorative work, the size of the parts of the drawing, their rhythmic arrangement, the purpose of the thing and the material from which it is made are taken into account.
23. Theme. In decorative sculpture or on ceramic vessels, the theme and plot can be expressed in various ways. For example, in Gzhel ceramics, the scene of tea drinking is depicted on dishes or molded in small plastic. And the vessel can easily be turned either into a beast or into a bird. Thematic decorative composition has its own patterns, its own artistic language. She, like any work of fine art, tells about people, things or events. But at the same time, the pictorial story is subordinated to decorative purposes, as a rule, it serves to decorate the object. Therefore, the decorative composition is also related to the ornament. Its options are innumerable depending on specific tasks, and artistic possibilities can be expanded by using a variety of materials and techniques, changing the purpose and scale of the image. The theme of a decorative composition can be expressed in ways that fundamentally distinguish it from the composition of a painting. The spatial relationships of real nature may be completely absent. The image of the landscape may not unfold in depth, but upwards, in which case the distant plans are placed above the near ones.
The poetry of the unusual, extracted from traditions, revealed the unusual in the experience of life material. The observation was refracted through the prism of traditions, the bearers of which were the masters themselves. Hence the vivid metaphorical nature of their art, as if translucent with its generic essence. It is in it that the content of the collective35 is revealed, and not just in the way people sometimes think that a group of craftsmen is a team - a community of talents. And also not in the formal features of art, but in its artistic structure, and finally, in the spiritual structure of the creator's personality, in the level of his historical consciousness. Here lies the source of everything bright and original. This is the reason for the flourishing of Gorodetsky and Palekh art in the 20-30s. Any attempt to break away from the generic essence of art and establish oneself outside of it ended in failure both for the creativity of an individual and for the art of craft as a whole, since its collective basis was destroyed. This is evidenced by the state of Gorodets painting, when at the beginning of the 20th century the tradition of Palekh art also disintegrated, especially in the 40s and 50s. The question then was not whether it was possible or not to violate the canons (they are always violated and recreated by living creativity), but about how to understand the canons, to understand what is special in art, in order for creativity to take place.
Any opposition between the individual and the collective, novelty versus tradition, to which the masters of folk art are often called, incorrectly seeing stylization in tradition, leads to the impoverishment of folk art.
In attempts to affirm the falsely understood modernity by opposing folk art to amateur art, first of all, the absence of a theoretical basis, installations obtained in the study of the subject itself, in the study of its own specificity, is manifested.
Breaking away from tradition leads to the futility and pettiness of art.
Meanwhile, in practice, such a tendency to put traditional folk art beyond the boundaries of modern not only discredits folk values, it disorganizes the work of masters, and adversely affects the education of a person's aesthetic taste.
Realized in the facts of specific actions, such a tendency threatens to break the integral world of folk art, where the past is always intertwined with the modern, the tradition of craftsmanship lives in the continuity of generations. And this would mean to break the spiritual and psychological, moral world of man. It was then that vulgarity could so easily be born from under the hands of a folk master. Instead of works where the ornamental culture has been molded over the centuries, something like a plastic flower appears, which is forced to be replicated by a folk craftsman, for example, in Kyrgyzstan. This is how bad taste breeds, vulgarity that kills feelings, forming a “mankurt” - a person without a past, without a homeland.
“A person without a memory of the past, faced with the need to redefine his place in the world, a person deprived of the historical experience of his people and other peoples, finds himself outside the historical perspective and is able to live only today”36.
Equating folk art with the individualized creativity of painters, graphic artists, and sculptors leads it to just such a flat existence.
Meanwhile, it was just such a danger for Palekh that recommendations to artists to work in the spirit of V. Serov or Marc Chagall, and now in the spirit of a modern poster, represented. Folk craftsmen of Yakutia and the Khabarovsk Territory are offered to replicate the artist's samples, which are far from the folk national tradition. All this, ultimately, leads to the destruction of folk craftsmanship. Folk values are replaced by fake folk, pseudo-nationality, which breeds bad taste.
All this, as we have already noted more than once, stems largely from the fact that theoretical questions about the nature of folk art, its specificity, about the collective in the aspect of generic have not been raised37. The generic specificity of folk art was not taken into account, as a result of which the idea of the collective in modern folk art was flattened. Even now, sometimes, an equal sign is affirmed between empty stylization and creativity in certain norms and rules, in the type of artistic imagery, in the methods developed by the school.
In this regard, it cannot be emphasized that each type of folk art, including the Palekh miniature, which has received world recognition, could reach its peaks only because they developed on the basis of tradition, retaining their essential generic quality. In Palekh, this was expressed, first of all, in the lyric-epic structure of the image. But dynamism, which was not previously in peasant art, plasticity, lost in icon painting of the 19th century, were features of novelty in the art of miniature. The artistic image has developed from the symbolic to the narrative-plot, from the song-lyrical to the psychological. At the same time, however, the boundaries of time38, indicating the folkloric nature of the image, were not destroyed. Its content is determined by the nature of integrity, which we have already noted above in clay plastic. There, in sculptural modeling - here in painting, the image is organized in such a way that on the lacquer surface of objects a miniature is created not by stringing parts, but as a whole organism, manifesting itself through all stages of writing - from whitewash, revealing with local color to painting contours and internal lines, whitened gold. This method of work reflects the principle of folk art as a whole, it is associated with the plasticity of the image, the capacity of its content, which is determined by the creative collectivity and generic essence of folk art in all its forms - from the existence of a tradition not isolated from the life of villages, to the synthesis of folk tradition with artistic, as in Palekh.
So, the concept of novelty in folk art is closely connected with the concept of the collective. Although it is generated by the individual principle, the collective establishes it in the life of art. “The main condition for folklore is the collective development of individual creativity”39. The feeling of modernity is always present in folk art directly or indirectly. So, at the present stage, it was expressed in the strengthening of the pictorial principle, which we have already noted. It manifests itself in the emotional liveliness of the artistic technique, in sensitivity to color gradations, in the freshness of many decorative and pictorial solutions, in new motives and plots, in those numerous signs of the time that organically entered the structure of folk art.
The free choice of traditions in the work of an individual artist dictates much greater variability and mobility in changing traditions and searching for something new than in folk art. The new in the works of the artist enters, as a rule, sharper, more dynamic, but may not leave a trace. The situation is different in folk art. Here, the new, being affirmed in the collective experience, becomes a tradition. Accumulating gradually, the new is cast into stable forms and systems, enters the experience of the school, gradually recreating its canons, constantly updating them. It is not fixed outside the generic features of collective experience. Thus, the school itself is not something immovable, frozen, it develops in the continuity of the traditions of tribal experience. An important conclusion follows from this, theoretically necessary for solving the problem of interaction between the work of a professional artist and a folk craftsman and in terms of the artist's activity in folk crafts in general. First of all, it lies in the fact, as we have already noted, that this problem should not be confused and directly identified with another problem - the interaction of folk art with the art of individual artists. This interaction is based on the differences between the two types of creativity, which are affirmed in their own specifics and principles, and on the basis of a common one, which are part of the integrity of national and world culture.
The situation is different when a professional artist enters with his creativity into the integrity of craft. This happens only when the individual becomes the bearer of the common, that which expresses and highlights art. this fishery. In other words, he seeks expression not of himself in art, but through his creativity expresses the art of this craft, seeks his connection with the collective, otherwise the creativity of the individual not only loses its meaning, but becomes destructive for folk art. In this sense, it retains the regularity of folklore creativity.
“Like a langue, a folklore work is impersonal and exists only potentially, it is only a complex of known norms and impulses, a canvas of an actual tradition, which the performers color with patterns of individual creativity, just as parole producers do in relation to langue”40.
Each master implements the principles of the common beginning of the collective in his own way, introducing his own intonation. And this is always observed in folk art. At the level of not only schools, crafts, but also at the level of regional and national schools. The folk art of each nation has its own poetic tone. For all its uniformity and the law of identity, folk art does not tolerate mechanicalness, there is no monotony in it. The individual beginning always colors the image, enhances its emotional impact. But as soon as the work of a folk master is isolated (for example, some works of the Belarusian woodcarver A. Pupko or the Russian clay plastic craftswoman V.V. Kovkina), it becomes impenetrable to tradition, loses its artistic scale, the power of craftsmanship. The image in this case, as a rule, becomes smaller. This is sometimes observed in the work of individual masters.
Nevertheless, it is impossible not to notice that the very concept of authorship in the folk art of our time has greatly increased. This is facilitated by exhibitions where folk masters present their works. But such a practice does not at all remove the significance of the collective principle, only by absorbing it, the personal finds the fullness of expression. In this case, the art of folk craft as a whole, on the basis and principles of which the creativity of the individual is carried out, is that predetermined that in one way or another determines the result. This is affirmed in one's own identity, through the identity of the schools. In this connection lies the great role of apprenticeship as one of the main forms of transferring mastery directly from master to master. This form of succession through mentoring creates a high level of artistic culture in craft, in folk art in general. The foregoing makes it necessary to formulate one more conclusion: creativity in folk art cannot develop as individualized creativity, along the lines of professional art. As soon as the activity of folk crafts switches to this path, most often under pressure from outside, due to theoretical and organizational confusion, it inevitably loses its meaning and content of folk crafts. The system of art is destroyed.
However, all of the above does not mean at all that one can deny the activity of the artist in folk crafts. It is sufficiently developed and can be fruitful if it is directed in the right direction and determined in its role, as we have shown in the previous chapters. “Thanks to sign systems, it is possible to accumulate, store and transfer from generation to generation information that ensures cultural continuity within an ethnic group”41. Let's add - and within the school. The finished material is creatively rethought and recreated, being passed down from generation to generation. This fundamentally distinguishes the creativity of an individual in folk art from the creativity of individual artists of professional art, who assert themselves in exactly the opposite way, that is, in a fundamentally new, unique. While in folk art a true work is born only on the basis of a well-known, approved by life. And this never leads to a stamp, which hinders the development of individual art so much.
On the contrary, the commonality of the features and characteristics of a type of folk art in time and in the works of the collective working at the moment creates, as it were, its emblem. It is also answered by the nature of the image, its generalization, the tendency to the emblematic expansion of the image, which A.B. Saltykov pointed out in his time, characterizing the image in decorative art42 and defining it as a specific image43.
The fact is that the creative principles in folk art and in the art of individual artists are formed on different foundations and even in opposite parameters and criteria44. So, if a folk master improvises on the basis of a well-known one, then a professional artist needs to move away from the well-known in order to express himself more fully. In folk art, creativity is present even when it repeats the prototype. It can be expressed either in varying details, or in a new interpretation of a well-known motif, or in color, or in composition, in a word, it must be affirmed in an emotional attitude to the material. The importance of improvisation for the formation and development of the text was convincingly shown by A. N. Veselovsky using folklore examples45.
The situation is different in the artist's work, which develops as an individual phenomenon. Here repetition quickly leads to a stamp. Emotional attitude to the material is in the very nature of folk art, in its man-made. Even works that at first glance seem to be pure craft, nevertheless, always bear the image of the general and can rise to the level of art. Creativity is manifested from an effective effort in overcoming material, technical difficulties. This process often reveals the unexpected from an artistic point of view, filling the thing with the warmth of the unique. That is why it seems impossible to separate art and craft in folk art. In such a division there is always something against the truth of living creativity, mechanical and schematizing.
In folk art, everything individually unique acts as a common one. That is why the development of the individual beginning in folk art is not identical to the individualized creativity of the artist. This conclusion is extremely important for resolving issues of artistic practice, in particular the issue of the artist and craft. It cannot be ignored in the system of training personnel for art crafts and their organization. Finally, in theoretical terms, our conclusion confirms that folk art, as a carrier of the collective, can never become the work of individual artists. In other words, individualized creativity, as some advocates of the point of view about the fusion of folk art with the art industry or its assertion as amateur art would like to imagine. This conclusion also has methodological significance in the study of folk art and in its management.
However, this does not at all exclude the presence of a constant process in the development of culture, when talents arise from folk art, which are defined in their work as independent individuals, either in terms of amateur art, or in terms of professional art. But this should not, in turn, mean that folk art itself should cease to exist.
It is also unacceptable to lower the content of the collective in its deep dimensions to a simple creative community or to identify it with the mass. Unfortunately, it is precisely these errors, generated by an anti-scientific approach to the problem, constantly repeated, that hinder the development of folk art as a culture.
"Mass" can be relevant to folk art only to the extent that it meets the broad demands of modernity, being close to all eras. But the concept of mass production does not mean that, say, every person must have a Khokhloma spoon, all the more wrong on this basis to create an industrial shaft of “folk” consumer goods that have little in common with folk art and undermine its roots. Millions of profits do not atone for the losses suffered by folk culture. In such a situation, economic damage can easily arise. It is important to understand that folk art by its nature and in the context of the development of technological progress is unique and requires an appropriate attitude46. The main problem in organizational practice is not to supply the entire population of the country and every person with a miniature or a Khokhloma spoon, but how to preserve the culture of folk craftsmanship, folk tradition, so that, passing through generations, into the future, it remains truly high and truly folk!
With the development of historical life, the attitude of folk art to reality naturally changes, its content and means of artistic expression develop, but the relationship to the historical past retains its strength of constancy, which allows us to speak of folk art as historical memory, the cultural memory of the people. And this also shows the power of the collective, a special type of thinking.
Summing up, we must return to the meanings of the concepts of individual and collective and emphasize the problems of the relationship of these two principles, their dialectical unity in folk art. As the key problem of his theory, which determines the solution of all issues of his artistic practice, the unity of the individual and the collective has a very important cultural aspect. “The concept of culture is connected not with the activities of people, but with a specific way of its implementation”47. This specificity of the mode of activity and the principles of development that we have been talking about is closely connected with the nature of the dialectical unity of the collective and the individual, and is carried out through the law of tradition, the law of continuity. All this brings us back to the question of genericity.
So, the content of the collective in folk art turns out to be very extended, having its own profound changes in the historical experience of the people, both in the social and psychological aspects, and in the artistic one. Reproducing its generic essence in three selected aspects - natural, national, universal - folk art asserts its collectivity, determining the relationship of the individual to the whole and self-developing in accordance with these relationships.
After all, only by virtue of generic principles, its generic essence, folk art reproduces fundamental values. It does not lose its content48, cosmologism49, there is "self-existence"50. Thus, the natural as an expression of the collective is not the beginning of an unchanging, closed, in the constant reproduction of the mythological image of the world. It is not at all identical with the primitive worldview that some wrongly impose on folk art. Mythopoetic perception in folk art is based on a sense of the natural, reproduced in new connections. Hence, this is precisely what determines such stability of mythological symbolism, but its content is different from that of the primitive. Each repeated sign has its own meaning. The spontaneous realism of folk art carries its knowledge of the world at all levels. Natural symbolism is the poetry of the human. From it, writes A. N. Veselovsky, “certain constant symbols and metaphors were selected as common places of Koine with more or less widespread use. Such are the symbols of birds, flowers - plants, flowers - colors, and finally, numbers. In these symbols there is always a correlation with real phenomena. The desire for active influence is associated with the synthetic nature of the art of other images. The traditional, the familiar is usually combined with something unusual. The closeness of a person to nature gives rise to aesthetic sensitivity, in folk art - determines its aesthetics, its artistry, its morality. The national aspect of the generic in folk art affirms the self-consciousness of the individual in the collective. Individual - in the meaning of a separate type of folk art or craft in the aspect of the national school of folk art. And, in turn, the individual in the collective experience of the school. Another level is the individual national art in the aspect of the universal. Everything that rises to the level of the universal world has an individual national expression and is deeply personal for each people. The universal in folk art bears a bright national expression.
In folk art, the three individual levels that we define - the personality of the master, the face of the school, the face of the national - carry the content, the experience of collective, spiritually valuable folk art as a culture. In the antithesis of the collective and the individual lies the internal mobility of unity. The collective in interaction with the individual creates a system of folk art. His artistic language is formed by tribal forces. The unity of natural and folk determines the creative method.
Historical consciousness, the bearer of which is folk art, creates folk images throughout history. In this sense, we can say that if there were no folk art, then there would be no professionally educated art. After all, everything great, created by individual creativity, is an expression of the collective, the people.
Can a natural human and cultural need end there? Can folk art become unnecessary in this case? Is culture possible without traditions, without the experience of the past?
Such assumptions sometimes arise, we become their witnesses and participate in the controversy. However, in the test of time, such judgments are quickly swept aside, they do not determine the course of development, since they reflect the superficial, fluid in life.
It is indicative that in recent times we have seen how more and more insistently and expressively the search by artists for their relationship to nature, to folk tradition, to the tradition of national art and, in general, to the art of the past is asserted.
The role of visual folklore is growing all over the world. The problem of folk art becomes an international problem. Is this not a sign of the desire of peoples to approach the common? After all, a similar attraction of people to nature is also observed, and folk art for civilized mankind is the same nature.
Until recently, it seemed that the theme of man - the conqueror of nature, the man of the technicalized world - absorbed all other aspects of the relationship with her. Here the edge is easily lost.
Some even now try to assert that in the age of scientific and technological revolution the connections between professional art and folk art are allegedly cut off, that the very basis of their interaction seems to have disappeared. To agree with this statement means to cross out many phenomena of contemporary art, it means to reject everything that makes a person human, it means to reject his childhood. But can that original form of “higher synthesis” that once manifested itself in humanity in its “childhood” and remained?
The conqueror of nature often becomes a consumer and a spendthrift. A man in a rigid scheme of an iron robot - who is he? The guardian of nature or her gravedigger?
Many contemporary artists want to find and understand the unity of man with nature, to find in art a new unity with tradition.
The interaction of man and nature is eternal! It, like everything human in man, forever remains the material of art, since man himself remains a part of Nature and Man only if he reproduces man in himself at all levels of development.
So, folk art is by its nature deeply organic, it is the second Nature. Man, losing his naturalness, loses his inherent spiritual nature. After all, inspiration is not just a gift of talent, but a psychological trait, it is in direct connection with the national character and with what surrounds a person. Nature in the minds of the people always remains the spokesman of Beauty, Goodness. She is merged with his moral world. Therefore, the natural acts as a criterion of human values. Through nature and race, man comprehends the meaning of the eternal. The image, acquiring its naturalness and generic meaning (social and psychological), becomes the bearer of the “general idea” and “thought of the people”. And this is in a culture that absorbs the folklore image of the world, by virtue of a chain reaction and a creative creative principle, counteracts decay. All this is very important in understanding tradition as a force of creation, a force of culture that bears the experience of the collective, stimulates creativity and acts as a formative principle in it.
On the concepts of "folk art" and "folk master"
As a rule, a theoretical study begins with the definition of a concept. In our unusual case, we conclude our work with an attempt to identify the content of the concepts of "folk art", "folk master" on the basis of the issues studied in it and give them a definition. The very fact of such a move speaks volumes. First of all, it characterizes the state of modern science of folk art, accordingly defining the place and tasks of this work in it.
In each chapter of it, step by step, we tried, on the basis of our own research and generalizations of the data of scientific thought, to identify the main knots in the development of folk art, to determine the basic concepts of its theory. Present folk art as an independent system functioning according to its own laws. A system that requires assessments and definitions according to those parameters that may correspond to its structure and its essence. Only in this case can one speak of the theory of folk art.
But before proceeding to the definition of the concepts of "folk art", "folk master" and, accordingly, summing up the necessary results, let's turn to history. After all, it is precisely the still unclear concepts, their lack of formulation on the basis of objective data and developed theoretical and methodological principles that forced us to formulate the concepts of interest to us in accordance with the research done in the conclusion of the book.
The fact is that if many methodological issues of folklore studies1 have not yet been identified, then all the more so they have not been identified and developed in the folk art of subject creativity. The science about him is even younger than folklore. Knowledge here is just beginning to take shape. Suffice it to say that on a global scale, the beginning of the study of folk art dates back to the 20-30s of the 20th century. This explains, first of all, a very weak theoretical understanding of the subject. It is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that folk art at the present stage has not been an object of serious study for a long time, since most often it remained in the role of an appendage to other arts and other sciences, and the evaluation criteria were extended accordingly.
The appeal to folk art in bourgeois science was determined by “national pride”, commercial considerations, was considered as a culture of backward peoples, which also prevented the emergence of objective criteria in determining the values of folk art and its place in modern culture, and even more so to develop the content of the concept itself.
In Russian literature, as well as in foreign literature, one can most often come across definitions of folk art that are very far from its essence, where at the present stage it is considered by analogy with the art of professional artists and is assessed, as a rule, from these positions. In another case, there are statements more definite and even very decisive, pronouncing a death sentence on folk art in an age of technological progress. In this case, it is simply not explored as a phenomenon of modern culture, as we discussed above. Hence the concept of "folk art" continues to be very narrow and does not cover the subject as a living phenomenon. Thus, we perceive the indicated disagreement with our proofs not at the terminological level, but at a deeply meaningful, methodological one. It boils down to three main points.
The first, most common definition of "folk art" in domestic and foreign literature as peasant art is quite extensively reflected in the works of V. S. Voronov2.
This point of view, linking folk art exclusively with subsistence farming, the patriarchal village, is widespread in foreign science. Hence the definitions of folk art as "manual production", "home industry". The English art critic, figure, historian Herbert Reed considered folk art as "peasant art" in the book "The Meaning of Art"3. This book had a great influence in establishing the view of folk art as peasant. But it is especially common in the West in bourgeois art criticism to explain folk art as “unconscious creativity”, “impersonal”, trying to reveal this through parallels with the natural world. Hence the comparison of folk art with how a “bird sings”, a bee “creates”, which is often found in foreign literature, also takes place in domestic literature, when they try to assert folk art as unconscious creativity.
Characteristic in this sense is the definition of G. Naumann, developed by his school: “Genuine folk art is a communal art, but nothing else, like swallow nests, honeycombs and snail shells, are works of genuine collective art”4.
Such an understanding of collectivity as a manifestation of the biological instinctive has been established in foreign science. It is connected with the spread of the point of view on folk art as something immutable, not a process of development. This point of view was quite widespread in literature and contributed to the establishment of the view of folk art as a vestige of the past or a wonderful anachronism, which was not put in connection with modern artistic culture. Such definitions began to flicker especially often on the pages of the domestic press from the end of the 50s, which we have already noted, when the rapid development of design, it seemed to many, “should have forced folk art out of life. The very definitions of “rudiment”, “anachronism”, flickered on the pages of magazines, excluded the possibility of the viability of folk art, its activity in modern culture.
In light of this, of great interest is the idea of A. V. Bakushinsky, a scientist and a practitioner, put forward by him in the 1920s about the “popularity” of art, which determines the culture of a new era. This idea was expressed by scientists precisely in connection with the determination of the fate of folk art in the new culture5, but was not developed. It was difficult at that time to predict the whole complex multi-linear process of the future development of artistic culture. Hence, the formulation of the question of the own fate of folk art had no place at that time, let alone theoretical understanding, although A.V. Bakushinsky, a practitioner and researcher, affirmed it with all his activities.
It must be said that the positive experience of all subsequent literature devoted to contemporary folk art was reduced mainly to more or less successful analyzes of works of folk art, to the collection of historical facts.
It was more a collection of material, its historical study, than a theoretical understanding, a study of artistic specificity. The evolution of the development of the art of folk crafts was assessed, as a rule, by the criteria for the development of easel forms of art of individual creativity. Many works sinned with assessments, passing off the flawed, imaginary as genuine, which, in the final analysis, as we have already seen, turned against folk art. This had a particularly negative effect on practice6. In this situation, the works of A. B. Saltykov 7 were of great importance, raising questions about decorative specificity, about the significance of tradition. However, the question of the specificity and concept of folk art proper was not raised at that time. It was decided at that time in terms of protecting the tradition as a whole and its significance for the development of arts and crafts. S. M. Temerin’s large consolidated work “Russian Applied Art”8 reflected precisely this positive position. However, it did not distinguish between folk crafts and the art industry. Folk crafts are approved mainly in terms of their decorative, subject specificity (at that time it was the most important). The folk art of the villages, in the light of such a position, did not at all fall into the field of view of art history, like modern folk art, it was the lot of pure ethnography. At that time, the evolutionist point of view on folk art dominated, supposedly developing in a straight line from collective forms to individual creativity, from folklore to industry or to easel forms.
The question of folk art in modern times continued to stand in the 60s until the mid-70s in the plane of “to be or not to be” and was discussed on the pages of the press even more fiercely, even more irreconcilably in extreme judgments. “... The social and artistic conditions that gave rise to the division of our art into “scientific” and “folk” have long ceased to exist, ... such an opposition is not only devoid of common sense, but also contradicts the nature of our society, especially since it has developed and developed ... artistically full-fledged modern Soviet arts and crafts”9 . As we could already see, there was a very tragic substitution of concepts for folk art, the vulgarization of the concept of modernity and the idea of Soviet culture, reduced to the uniformity of forms. However, due to the lack of theory, such judgments were raised on the shield by some art historians, instead of turning to serious studies of living art.
The definition of the concept of “folk art” did not take into account the topical in art history since the late 1950s and early 1970s the question posed by B. A. Rybakov10 and V. M. Vasilenko11 about the content of folk art, from antiquity to pre-revolutionary times. Between the folk art of the past and the present, there was still the same impassable line that made it difficult to study and evaluate contemporary folk art in its own specificity. In the same way, the results of the study by the author of this work of the art of Palekh12 from antiquity to the present as the art of a living folk tradition and collective creativity were ignored in the theoretical plan at that time. Although in practice this was not slow to give its positive results, as evidenced by the works of many Palekh miniaturists and the statements of the Paleshians themselves13. “It is much easier to supplement something in due time,” said V. O. Klyuchevsky, “than to reunderstand it later.” It would seem that every year life itself refuted negative judgments, calling for fundamental solutions to the issues of contemporary folk art, and yet these issues not only were not resolved, but were driven into a new hopelessness by the force of inertia of thought. The methodological mistake was that folk art was assessed from the positions familiar to the arts and crafts of individual artists and the art history of easel forms of painting and sculpture.
Meanwhile, the process of development of folk art is not similar to the process of development of easel forms of art, individualized creativity. As well as “the historical-folklore process is not similar to the historical-literary process, it does not proceed synchronously with it, it does not represent some kind of parallel movement, because it is driven by direct stimuli other than literature, it has its own conditionality, its own specificity”14. This definition fully extends to objective folk art. And if the named installation caused damage in the field of folklore, then even more damage in the field of the young science of folk fine art. As in the folklore15 of the post-revolutionary period, they tried to open all directions in it - up to socialist realism, guided by analogies with easel art. At the same time, neither decorativeness, nor the role of tradition in folk art, nor its deeply realistic essence were taken into account. And any attempt to consider the subject in a theoretical aspect led to a clear break in the attitudes in the analysis of folk art - pre-revolutionary with post-revolutionary16, as if it could or should have changed its creative and artistic principles. Hence the theoretical inconsistency of the conclusions and the inaccuracy of assessments that abound in art history literature, the assessment in it of contemporary folk art as an individual creativity. The futility of this position for folk art in the system of culture is obvious. The problem in this case is theoretically not solved in the perspective of history, as a connection between the past, present and future. Folk art finds itself in a hopeless circle of death sentence as soon as the issue is considered in the sphere of its contemporary existence. Hence, the concept of "folk art" did not take on a real shape, does not reflect a living and complex phenomenon in its entirety. Even such major researchers of the aesthetics of folklore as V. E. Gusev and P. G. Bogatyrev do not give in their works such a concept of folk art that would solve all the issues of its connection with life and culture. However, the very question of the need to see the differences between folklore and literature is posed quite clearly. “We ... have no right to abolish the fundamental boundary between oral poetic creativity and literature for the sake of the genetic point of view,”17 writes P. G. Bogatyrev. V. E. Gusev formulates this difference: “The peculiar syncretism of artistic and imaginative thinking is due not to the underdevelopment of the latter, but to the nature of the very subject of artistic knowledge, the fact that the masses cognize the subject of their art, first of all, as aesthetically whole and integral (my detente. – M.N.) in the totality of all or many of its aesthetic qualities, in the versatility and complexity of its aesthetic nature”18.
This very constructive definition, however, was not reflected in further theoretical developments. The problem of folk art as a special type of cultural creativity remained unresolved. Moreover, it was not staged for figurative and object folk art. Our first statement of the problem19 was given in the study of Palekh art as folk and decorative art and in our special articles.
On the pages of this book, we have put forward the parameters by which folk art is defined as a developing structure within itself, depending on historical factors and interaction with other structures. Having explored the main concepts that determine the development of folk art as a tradition, school, collectivity, folk art as a type of creativity that develops in modern times in four forms, identifying its functions, we got the system of meaning that gave us the opportunity to solve such important for artistic practice and for theory of the problem, as tradition and novelty, canon and creativity, individual and collective. The dialectical unity of all these opposing forces characterizes the development of folk art as a system, having in it its own specific expression and the defining relation of folk art to reality.
So, the phenomenon of folk art can now be defined by the main parameters of its system: collectivity in the aspect of generic, independence of the artistic and creative type, features of the relationship to reality, characterized by the integrity of perception, the historical consciousness of the creator. This is such a system that is included in a wider system of national culture and in the system of world culture as a structure, which is regulated at all levels by the law of collectivity, tradition.
At each level of the system, its nodes operate - schools that have developed on the basis of functioning communities, the unity of the individual and the collective operates. Folk art as a phenomenon of modernity functions and develops in the context of the whole culture. This is its great social value, its significance as a historical memory, it reflects the people's worldview, people's understanding of beauty, folk wisdom and folk morality, forged by the entire history of the people, more broadly - of humanity. This point of view, affirmed in our work, is opposed to the view of folk art as an "anachronism" doomed to degeneration. In the light of our statement, it is extremely important (which we tried to show) that in modern times it is not individual elements of folk art that are allegedly dissolved, according to some, in professional art, but a system is functioning - folk art as a type of artistic culture, as an integrity capable of interact with another integrity - the art of professional-individual creativity and capable of developing, responding to the demands of the time, expressing the people's point of view on the world as a constantly evolving organism in its generic essence. It is meaningful, constructive and bears ancestral memory.
“A truly artistic, folk work satisfies not only aesthetic interests. It is connected by the closest ties with the reality on the basis of which it arose. Thus, the existence of folk art, which confirms the experience of practice, is determined by modernity, is closely related to its needs. We have identified four forms of existence of folk art, functioning in oral-visual transmission. Having considered the main definitions, we made an attempt to reveal folk art as a type of creativity in its main principles - variations and improvisations based on the known. These formative principles allow the school as an artistic community to develop all the time as an independent integrity in the system of greater integrity of national folk art. The current of tradition, as the current of historical self-awareness, permeates the school with constant effective creation. Its dynamics stems from the interaction of the individual with the collective, as we have shown, within the school, the individual in the person of the school, for example, craft with other schools of national schools, with all folk art and with professional art. Finally, from the interaction of folk art as a system with the art system of professional artists. Thus, folk art is carried out to the extent of each species. Experiencing and reproducing ancient images in new connections and at new levels, it reproduces the measure, harmony, regularity of a holistic perception of the world in nature. It was this aspect that Levi-Strauss did not take into account at all in constructing the theory of "myth". For him, man remained closed in natural existence as a part of the material.
However, the feeling of unity with nature is experienced according to the spiritual essence of the people, its historical reality. Folk art crystallizes the attitude of the people to the reality experienced in history. Thus, Marx's definition of labor as activity "according to the laws of beauty" acts as a definition of "generic essence". So, our problem of collectivity, folk art as a creative reality, as a living tradition, receives concretization in ancestral sources. They determine the structure of folk art in its main qualities, which distinguish it from the structure of individualized creativity, which develops in the diversity of traditions of world art. But if the very object of knowledge of folk art is “aesthetically integral” and “holistic” by virtue of its qualities, then folk art itself is also integral, experiencing the world as a whole22, expressing this perception as the structure of the whole. It is this structure that folk art preserves, despite the constant differentiation of its peoples and species, schools, levels on the path of all historical development, which we have tried to show on the pages of this book. Nevertheless, in its main core, it retains its correspondence to the whole, lies in other dimensions than the art of easel forms of individualized creativity. This does not mean, as we have already said, that there are not many transitional forms. It is important that folk art, by virtue of its integrity and generic qualities, remains a fundamental structure in culture. All categories of great art are rooted in it: genre, genre, style. “After all, it is in the field of original folk art that researchers for the first time encounter such fundamental categories as “image”, “word”, “gesture”, “motive”, “plot”, “myth”, “meaning”, “function”, etc. etc., without which it is absolutely impossible to operate with such concepts as “measurement”, “beauty”, etc.”23 . “In principle, it will be impossible to derive the categories of gender, genre, style, metaphor, based on the “primary element”, understood as an artistic idea”24. This testifies to the main fundamental difference between folk art as a collective creativity, in its generic features of creativity, as a rule, on the basis of ready-made known material, images cast over the centuries, from individualized creativity, where the artistic idea turns out to be the primary element.
Nature fills a person with itself, a sense of tradition lives through a sense of the natural. Experience lives. Hence, not writing in folk art, but thinking. Not artificial constructions, but organic expediency, not reasoning, but the music of feeling. Musicality in this aspect is an expression of both individual and generic, it is a formative quality25. From the mountains of the Caucasus and the Pamirs, from the shores of Kamchatka, the Pacific Ocean to the territory Central Asia, on the expanses of the Russian plains, their structures of feelings and experiences act like a law. Folk art is connected with their deep life. It was the collective emotion that determined in folk art its multi-element nature in the experience of the fundamental principles of life. There is both a connection with nature and a connection with history. It is no coincidence that schools of folk art have a very clear historical character, systems that are stable in their principles. They are strong in that they develop on the cultural soil where from time immemorial, for specific reasons, the fundamental forces of culture have been historically concentrated. In Russia, these are the North, the Volga region, Siberia, and the southern regions of Russia. Such nodal points in the location of fisheries can be traced in each republic. They are closely connected with the history and culture of the region, never cease to enrich the art and culture of our time.
It is characteristic that the oral-visual transmission of tradition is not just a form of dissemination of folk art, but the law of continuity that restores balance in folk art and through its structures in national culture, ultimately in human culture. The national in this case is not limited and isolated in its originality, which is most often associated with this concept. We understand the national as a spiritual ability to crystallize and concentrate the universal. This is the point of refraction through which the experience and vision of the people are expressed. This is another important aspect in the content of folk art. Developing according to its generic essence, it asserts itself as a "part of culture". The law of identity in this case is the formative principle.
“The system of canons in itself,” writes D.S. Likhachev, “can be a useful factor in art, facilitating the knowledge of reality. The desire to establish literary canons (we are talking about medieval literature. - M.N.) corresponds to the desire of a person to systematize his knowledge, facilitating perception by generalization, to the economy of creativity. The canon is a sign, the canon is a signal that evokes certain feelings and ideas.
Thus, folk art is such a system that is regulated by the attitude to the corresponding essence, regulates the attitude to the past by the memory of the past. At this point, the cultural meaning of folk art is rooted in its four forms of development, and its place in the system of modern culture is determined.
Accordingly, the cultural meaning of the concept of "folk master" is revealed. It seems possible to concretize it through the concept of "folk art", defined by us in three aspects of its connections with life and with reality.
The activity of the folk master is determined by the creative principle. Tradition as a force of self-consciousness was defined by V. O. Klyuchevsky as a special property of the human spirit27. Hence its creative energy that feeds the culture. She resists the energy of destruction. The quality of sustainability is ensured by the entire system of folk art, which functions in culture as an integrity. In this case, not only folk art is integral, but also the work of a folk master. The person himself is whole, in other words, the concept of "folk master" includes the concept of a personality of a special spiritual psychological warehouse. There is a concept that is determined by the parameters of culture, and not just by engaging in one or another artistic craft. In the light of what has been said, not every person can be called a "folk master". And even more so, this concept is deeply erroneous to equate with a "craftsman" engaged in amateur performances. The absence of differences between concepts in theory leads to many painful phenomena in the organizational practice of folk art. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On folk art crafts" says: "... the role of the artist, folk craftsman, as the central figure in folk crafts, is often underestimated." The need for “increasing attention to folk craftsmen working at home” is especially emphasized 28 . Meanwhile, the issues of creativity of the folk master, as well as the very concept of it, have not yet been resolved in science, either in theoretical or practical aspects. It cannot be said that in the process of the struggle between the new and the old, the well-known discrediting of the concept of “folk craftsman”, and together with folk craftsmanship as an element of culture, took place for a long time. In the views of many, they turned out to be synonymous with the past. The folk craftsmen of the villages, the bearers of the most valuable huge layer of living traditional artistic culture, were not taken into account by the theoreticians of modern culture for a long time.
A new stage in the development of folk art in the 70s put forward the concept of "folk master" instead of the previously used "handicraft artist". The work of the folk master received public legal and economic support. The preservation of the living continuity of craftsmanship, its development as the basis of culture, and above all in the village, has become a matter of concern for the state and a matter of scientific study.
So, what does folk master mean? Exploring this problem in terms of our definition of folk art as part of culture, we can conclude that the work of a folk master appears as a structure regulated by the law of collectivity, tradition and continuity. The special in art, as we could see on the pages of our book, is special in the work of the master, and therefore special in the creators themselves, which determines their involvement in culture as bearers of tradition - from father to son, from master to master, from generation to generation. generation. It is easy to see that folk craftsmen, regardless of nationality, are united by common features that characterize their personality.
This is, first of all, the attitude to art, to craftsmanship, preserving the power of sacred action, giving birth to a living world of beauty. It is always a memory of what the senior master-teachers created, what the ancestors did, although at the same time each master retains his individual face, carrying the tradition of the common, moral, creative experience of the team.
So, a folk master is a special creative person, spiritually connected with his people, with the culture and nature of the region, the bearer of the tradition of collective experience, the bearer of the folk ethos. This is "a man of a hardworking soul", in the words of Chingiz Aitmatov. This definition is especially applicable because mastery usually includes spiritual experience.
Since the concept of “culture” includes everything that has been settled in time, the values of the enduring, then their carriers are most often representatives of the older generations, famous people, revered in the district. Those masters who are able to synthesize the experience of the team in their work. From ancient times, for example, in Central Asia there was a rite of initiation of a student into a master after fifteen years of work, when the creative face of the future master was quite clearly defined. The ancestral continuity of craftsmanship was valued. The level of the school was determined by the master's works. Such a concept of the “usto” master included not only his skill, but also the high qualities of the personality of a person respected by all. In folk representations, wisdom and experience were associated with skill. The moral criterion was inseparable from the concept of "folk master" as a creative person, carrying the poetic world. Its imagery is, as it were, soldered into the structure of the legend, is born from it and is again fixed in the legend. This essential quality of folk art forms cultural memory. The personality of the folk master, culturally valuable, is always widely known outside the village, aul, kishlak and even the region.
What is this personality? First of all, it is distinguished by historical consciousness, concern for preserving the values of the past and transferring them to the future, and a moral assessment of reality. Such consciousness creates an image of a special vision of the world. The folk master is distinguished from the team not only by the high professionalism of the school, but also by the poetic way of thinking, it is not for nothing that he is so often called a storyteller. So, about Martyn Fatyanov, fellow villagers say - "he is fiery with us", characterizing his spiritual qualities; about Khakim Satimov - "wise"; about Ulyana Babkina - "kind." Often, a folk master is endowed with the features of a special, unusual person, sometimes he is famous as an eccentric. And all these are facets of folk talent, spiritual talent. Its individual coloring does not contradict the involvement in the whole, which constitutes the worldview of the folk master, determines his cultural role as a creative person. Even A. S. Pushkin said that culture is determined by the attitude towards the past. “Without relying on the intelligent essence of traditions, a naked person would forever remain on bare earth”29. The history of the people, the natural environment form the features of national thinking. Every nationality can find its own plastic module in folk art, and this is one of the foundations of its ensemble character. But this module cannot appear without collective experience, without continuity, which make folk art a culture, and a folk craftsman its bearer.
The morality of folk art is closely merged with its collectivity; it is born and lives in history from the dialogue of man with nature, man with history. It is always a dialogue between the present and the past. The interpenetration of the natural world and the human world in folk art develops on the basis of rural life, labor on earth of a person who is not excluded from the cycle of nature, from a sense of universality. “With the kind greetings of Spring to you, Anton N. Spring came to us on March 31, 6 starlings and a rook flew to my garden on a poplar. When I saw them, I took off my hat and bowed...” In these words of the Vologda folk master, our contemporary, the attitude that permeates the images of folk art speaks, fundamental moral values are formed, a sense of the plastic, understanding of the eternal.
“The village means for me,” wrote Vasily Shukshin, “not only longing for the grace of the forest and steppe, but also for spiritual immediacy”30. The aesthetic feeling here is formed by the "power of kindred attention" and "kindred relationship" to nature, to everything earthly. This gives rise to a special system of feelings, thoughts of a person, gives him huge impulses for creativity. I remember how the famous folk master of Dagestan imperceptibly simple words expressed this connection: “I will go out at night - silence, stars in the sky, as if you and the world are alone.” The feeling of oneself in the face of the world, in front of the court of nature imparts a special poetic joy, spiritual fullness to the images of folk art. They cannot be understood by a person from the position of an office chair, with one stroke of the pen deciding whether “to be or not to be” folk art.
Only by virtue of the essence of the people, the beginning of collectivity, folk art is understandable to both the child and the adult, inexperienced spectator and spectator with a developed aesthetic taste - the emotional and artistic sphere of folk art is so voluminous, deep.
It must be assumed that W. Morris, defining folk art as “instinctive skill” and contrasting it with “conscious skill art”, that is, professional art, did not at all understand, in contrast to the latter, folk art as “unconscious”. This definition can be encountered in domestic and foreign art history. It is very unsteady and superficial, since it is devoid of historicity and does not embrace folk art as a system. The “instinctive skill” of a folk craftsman must be understood as a skill inherited in the experience of generations, in direct transmission from father to son, brought up by the environment itself, the natural environment and labor in nature, natural materials. However, creativity itself as a process and as an image of feeling and a way of seeing the world is deeply conscious. It carries the truth, the moral ideal, the understanding of beauty, which determine the spiritual essence of folk art and are expressed in it as the faith of the people. That is why folk art is a rich source of spiritual aesthetic values and can in no way be equated with the infantilism of the primitive, since the latter is an expression of the psychic, the individually special. The healthy childishness of folk art is one of the aspects of its essence,31 we have put it in a number of defining parameters. It is something that is inextricably linked with the creative principle, with the personality of the master. “Oh, childhood, childhood! Everything in his eyes is elegant, great, immense, full of secret meaning, everything calls to rise on tiptoe and look there, "beyond the sky"32. In the childishness of perception, beautifully expressed in the above lines of the writer Viktor Astafiev, there is that world-contemplative meaning, which is an important source of life and strength of folk art. In this sense, the concept of "childhood" is not at all identical with infantilism in art. Childhood in folk art is its property, which gives it a unique coloring of spontaneity and cheerfulness. This is the constantly pulsing force of a living, inexhaustible fantasy, that optimistic perception of the real, which makes folk art so charming and active. This is a huge spiritual wealth, spiritual generosity. All this carries folk art in its genuineness and sincerity, purity and kindness. In the joy of work, which always gives rise to a certain artistry. The national genius is marked by eternal childhood.
However, in the aspect of culture, this quality turns out to be deeply personal for each people. The preservation of childhood in adulthood is associated with talent. It is a gross mistake to try to replace folk art in our day with primitivism, to declare the latter the modern stage of folk art, and on the basis of this to pass judgment on folk art as collective creativity. A truly scientific approach must evaluate each phenomenon by its own measure.
Let us dwell briefly on the second aspect of the general, the collective carrier of which is the folk master. Rural life has always maintained an interpenetrating connection between the natural world and the human world. The dialogue of man with nature, man's instinctive feeling for the earth are developed and comprehended in the historical experience of experiencing reality. Hence a special national feeling, expressed with brightness in folk art, its renewing creative forces that it brings to culture.
Finally, the third - folk art throughout history concentrates in itself the image of the eternal, sensually perceived universe in the unity of the universal. All that is constantly significant for a person is a special relationship and connection with nature, about which Engels said that we “with our flesh, blood and brain belong to it and are inside it, that all our domination over it consists in the fact that we, unlike all other beings, are able to cognize its laws and apply them correctly”33.
Man, through his work and life, with all his instinctive feelings connected with nature, with the earth, has a particularly subtle, capacious sense of nature, which brings up an aesthetic sense, a sense of history, which determine the system of values. These feelings give rise to the incomparable creative joy of people united in labor. It can be given by a plowed or sown field, a field of eared rye, a harvested field, a field with harvested grain. All this is Labor and Holiday. At the same time, it does not matter (as G.K. Wagner correctly noted in one of the articles) whether the person cultivating the land will be called a peasant or a worker, and how much the machine will participate in his work34.
The spirit of collectivity has permeated the life of villages since ancient times and acts in it with the creative force of the moral law. In this regard, the new development of villages with five-story houses is vicious if only because it breaks the ties of the collective, separating people from each other and, first of all, from the land. Whoever does not remember the blow of the shepherd's whip, the calling of the horn at morning and evening dawn, gathering and breeding the herd from end to end of the village streets, and many of the signs of rural life, it is difficult for him to understand its world and feel the special threads of commonality between human and natural, which are in labor and holidays give rise to an indestructible feeling of their land, land, homeland. There is a source of poetry here, it does not burst from the fact that the village has become new (the argument of the opponents of tradition), and if it bursts, then this is a misfortune brought, as a rule, from outside.
The disappearance of folk art is not at all connected with spiritual cultural progress, which is how many try to justify the theory of the withering away of folk art. This is rather the result of the impact of anti-culture, the costs of technological progress.
"The creative impulse that prompts the search for harmonies of colors and forms often does not depend on what is usually called the cultural intellectual level" 35 .
There is no doubt that in a society where alienation, national homelessness, hatred and violence reign, folk art is dying catastrophically. In this case, those values that can regulate the level of its nationality in artistic culture are inevitably lost. These values perish - and folk art perishes. It can also disappear where there is no rural population, where the ties between man and nature are torn. In this case, the level of folk art in modern culture is far from equal for all peoples and all countries. And it depends on many factors - geographical, historical, social, psychological, spiritual and moral.
Folk art is part of the socio-economic problem - the problem of the countryside, the village and part of the problem of national culture. It is with its generic features that folk art enters modernity, interacts on this basis with other types of artistic creativity, with other forms of mastering reality. However, according to modern demands, the functions of folk art are being rebuilt. As we noted, the aesthetic function is enhanced. In this regard, even the process of labor itself, the handicraft of products created in crafts, acquires an aesthetic meaning. And therefore it is impossible to replace living creativity with a machine.
Folk art, functioning as an integrity, permeates national art with its structures, nourishes it with the strength, energy of the collective, forms its quality of nationality. Such a high role of folk art, all the more, cannot allow the living tradition of folk art in our time to break off, the cultural and historical memory to break off.
On the contrary, we are witnessing how the living tradition of folk art is beginning to occupy an important place in modern culture. It turns out to be a necessary link in contacts between peoples. There is a basis for their cultural understanding, and the chain of human memory is already stretching from earth to space.
The scientific and technological revolution raised the problem of folk art to an unprecedented height and determined the acuteness of the moral and aesthetic problems associated with it.
The farther a person goes from nature, transforming, changing it, the more acute the question of the integrity of the world arises, which is violated every day. The more artificial and tougher the surrounding mechanized environment becomes, the more acute the need for lost organics, for integrity, for the naturalness of folk art is born.
Thus, the problem of folk art acquires a global character.
So, folk art is stable, heterogeneous, polyelemental in nature. The collective, as the aesthetic, develops according to its generic essence in the unity of the natural, the national, and the community of the school. Representing the people, folk art, therefore, expresses it by no means as a mass, which is very significant (in this sense, the definition "art of the working masses" does not say anything yet), and not as a class (peasant art), and not as a social group. - but as a people's personality. In this sense, it can and should be called "folk art". After all, the personal affirms itself only in the expression of the universal. Therefore, it is natural that the structures of folk art, which are so essential for national culture, always play a formative role in it, and are also important for world culture.
Cantabria, rock art of the Paleolithic (Stone Age) era was first discovered. It happened quite by accident. An archaeologist working in the cave illuminated its vaults and saw images of animals painted in red-brown paint: goats, deer, wild boars, fallow deer. The images were so perfect that scientists doubted their authenticity and antiquity for a long time. A little later, caves with images were discovered in France. And in 1897, the French archaeologist E. Riviere proved the authenticity of the petroglyphs found in the cave of La Moute. Currently, only in France, about a hundred caves with drawings from the Paleolithic are known. The largest and best preserved ensemble of ancient paintings is located in the cave of Lascaux, which is called the "prehistoric Sistine Chapel". The paintings on the walls of the cave are among the most perfect creations of the Paleolithic era and around the 17th century BC. The origins of art go back to ancient times. Numerous works of primitive fine art - rock art, figurines made of stone and bone, ornaments on stone slabs and pieces of deer antlers - appeared much earlier than the conscious idea of \u200b\u200bcreativity. The origin of art to the primitive communal system, when the foundations of the spiritual and material life of man were laid. There are several theories about the origins of art. Supporters of the biological theory believe that artistic is inherent in man. Therefore, the appearance of art is natural and natural. The emergence of art is also associated with rituals, rituals and magical representations of ancient people. The appearance of images was stimulated by the rituals of hunting magic, which was based on the belief in gaining power over an animal through mastering its image. By drawing the silhouette of an animal whose prey was vital, primitive man got to know him. He did not separate himself from nature, but identified with it and attributed to himself the possibility of magical influence on the phenomena and forces of the surrounding world. Mastering the image of animals, it seemed to a person that he secured victory over them. This fantastic thinking embodied the desire of a person to master the world, and contained elements of aesthetic perception, from which art developed. The first magical images are considered handprints on the walls of caves, which eventually became a symbol of the possession of power. Most likely, images of animals also served magical purposes. Bison, wild horses, mammoths and reindeer, molded from clay, applied to caves, engraved on bone and stone, were, according to archaeologists, the main objects of hunting. There is every reason to believe that in the Paleolithic era, when monuments of cave art were created, there were no artists in the modern sense. Art was the result not of individual, but of collective action. The most important feature of primitive art is connected with this - fusion with all spheres and phenomena of the life of an ancient person. The art of the Paleolithic reflected a spontaneous sense of life and simplicity. But it is also distinguished by the narrowness of the content. Man has not yet known himself, therefore, in the primitive "venuses" (the simplest female figures), facial features were not depicted, and all attention was focused on the anatomical features of the body. Correctly perceiving individual objects, primitive man could not yet grasp the complete picture of the world.
TECHNOLOGY OF ARTISTIC PROCESSING OF MATERIALS
Course of lectures (40 hours)
LECTURE #1
Decorative and applied art as a form of creativity
The main features of arts and crafts
Development of arts and crafts
Folk crafts of Belarus and the local region.
Literature
1. Kaplan N.M., Mitlyanskaya T.B. Folk art crafts-M.: Higher school, 1989
2. Katser M.S. Folk applied art of Belarus-Mn .: Higher school, 1972
3. Molchanova L. Material culture of Belarusians.-Mn.: Science and technology, 1968
4. Panshina I. Decorative and applied arts-Mn.: Narodnaya asveta, 1975
5. Sahuta E.M., Govor V.A. Artistic crafts and trades of Belarus.-Mn.: Science and technology, 1988
6. Sahuta E.M. Folk art and art crafts of Belarus.-Mn.: Polymya, 2001
Folk art, its main forms and characteristic features
In order to explain why we consider arts and crafts as one of the forms of creativity, it is necessary to reveal the essence of the concepts with which we will operate further.
Creation- the process and result of creating material and ideal values that have novelty (objective or subjective) and originality, as well as the process and result of the creator's self-expression.
Folk art- the process of creating material and artistic values, the main subject of which is the people
folk art-creation of cultural material and spiritual values of artistic significance.
Applied art- creation of material values with utilitarian significance.
amateur art- the process of creating material and spiritual values, the main driving force which is the initiative of the creator. A person can engage in this type of art without special education, not necessarily following even the established traditions of the type of activity in which he is engaged. This art form is the source and main branch of folk art. The difference between the works of professional and amateur creativity lies in the degree of their artistic perfection and the professionalism manifested in them.
Art originated thousands of years before our era. By this time, mankind has passed a significant path of development. Rough tools made of stone, bone, wood, with the help of which a person got his own food, were replaced by more advanced ones. Man has mastered new ways of processing material, his horizons have expanded, and social and labor activity has become more complicated. A number of areas of folk art have survived to this day, others have been lost.
For centuries, folk applied art has been improved, acquired the completeness of forms and styles, reflecting the customs and tastes of the people. It developed mainly in two forms :
Like a home craft;
In the form of art crafts associated with the market.
These forms arose in ancient times, developed in parallel, closely intertwined and mutually influencing each other. Belarusian folk arts and crafts developed mainly in the first form. Crafts were only pottery, heeling, weaving.
Despite the diversity of types of folk art, one can distinguish main features, which are common to them. These features can be considered the principles of the existence and development of folk art.
folk art realistic in nature . It creates truthful, deep, life-affirming images. This feature of works of folk art is explained by the participation in their creation of the broad masses of the people, the great life experience accumulated by the people, their eternal desire for happiness, truth and beauty.
Creativity of the people closely related to his work . With the help of an ax, a knife, a needle and other tools, our ancestors built dwellings, made furniture, processed skins, wove cloth, and sewed clothes. Each household product is practically a necessary thing, which at the same time has beauty and aesthetics.
folk art primary in relation to professional . Works of folk art are not only the fruit of the skill of their creators, but also an integral part of their daily life. This is the basis for the origin and development of all types of professional art. The appearance of works of professional art is due to the centuries-old creative activity of nameless masters of folk art, who accumulated rich experience and passed it on to professional artists.
Born by nature and the very life of a certain community of people, folk art cannot but be in the highest degree national .
Collective nature folk art is one of its fundamental principles. In the communication and interaction of people within the team, community, society, the most successful artistic solutions, samples of artistic forms, compositions, expressive and visual techniques were themselves identified and selected. The principle of collectivity is the main factor that has a dominant influence on other features of folk art and determines its difference from amateur and professional art.
Another difference between folk art and professional is the continuity of tradition . Following the established traditions of a certain type of creativity enriched the personal experience of the creators, contributed to the success of their work. This is impossible in professional creativity, where the main guarantee of success in activity is a person’s talent and special education is needed to engage in it. Compared to professional art, folk art has more from tradition than from the master himself, whose hand is “guided” by centuries of artistic culture and experience.
Folk art more steadily , it is less amenable to fashion than professional. It openly and strongly expresses the ideals of beauty hidden in the soul of the people, thanks to which it is a direct evidence of their talent and creative power.
Source of artistic images folk art is nature, environment, everyday life situations.
Works of folk applied art play a great cognitive and social educational role. They reflect the life of the people, their way of life and work, give an assessment of social phenomena. Folk art is a testament to the talent and diligence of the people, their optimism and philanthropy.
Publication date: 2014-11-28 ; Read: 3637 | Page copyright infringement | Order writing work
website - Studiopedia.Org - 2014-2020. Studiopedia is not the author of the materials that are posted. But it provides free use(0.002 s) ...
The author of the article, Doctor of Historical Sciences B.A. Frolov, considers the emergence of art on the example of those discovered in the late 19th century in a Spanish cave Altamira the most ancient rock paintings (paleolithic), one can even probably say - rock art. He wonders, what, in fact, made the ancient man take up a completely new activity for himself? After all, creativity did not give any material benefit - there was no more food, it was not warmer, offspring did not appear, etc. So why was it necessary to engage in such a complex intellectual process - to observe the structure and behavior of animals, prepare paints, prepare brushes, think over a plot, etc.? And all this action takes place 18 thousand years BC. Well, in accordance with the concept of the publication, it opposes two points of view - scientific and religious.
Altamira Cave is located in northern Spain, a couple of kilometers from the coast.
Source: compilation « Atheistic Readings» , 1981
Disputes about the origin of art have not subsided over the centuries. Some scholars argue that art was born from the magical, religious rituals of hunters of the Ice Age, others that it is a product of a purely aesthetic exploration of the world, still others...
Doctor of Historical Sciences B. A. Frolov believes that the monuments of the creative activity of our Paleolithic ancestors should be the most important argument in these disputes.
In 1861, that is, two years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, images of two fossil bones found in the French departments of Vienne and Ariège were published in the Paris Annals of Natural Sciences (in the section of zoology). On the first bone, figurines of two fallow deer were skillfully carved with a flint chisel, on the other - a bear's head with mysterious signs. By publishing them, the famous paleontologist Edward Larte(1801-1871) argued and convincingly proved his assumption: the authors of these drawings are people of the Ice Age, contemporaries of mammoths and other fossil animals, because such are the geological and paleontological conditions for the occurrence of finds. With all the authority of Larte in the scientific world, few people believed in such artistic abilities of the "savages" of the Old Stone Age, but there was nothing to object to the accuracy of dating. Three years later, Larte was finally lucky. During excavations, in the presence of the most authoritative geologists and paleontologists, he discovered in a layer dating back to the Ice Age (Pleistocene) a plate of mammoth tusk. The image of a mammoth on this plate, made by a primitive man, has become a scientific fact.
"So sophisticated art does not fit with the miserable existence that the Quaternary troglodytes eked out! - said experts on rather primitive Paleolithic stone tools. “Hunting gave the natives of our country enough game, they were full, they had leisure as they wanted,” objected Larte. What could they do but dream of a more pleasant existence? And if necessity is the mother of industry, then it can be said with the same right that the desire for a pleasant life gives birth to art.
Larte's arguments were typical of a representative of the natural sciences of that time. Darwinian theory of evolution overturned biblical dogmas, and to many enthusiastic naturalists it seemed to be a universal key to the age-old mysteries of mankind. Art, the holy of holies of the human spirit, is it not a product of evolution? Songs of birds, dances of gibbons, a peacock flaunting its plumage, aren't these steps of the evolutionary ladder leading to our music and art? But for animals, such a “game”, such “artistic” instinctive acts, is nothing more than a way to attract a partner, that is, a way to fight for existence - one’s own and one’s offspring. Fossil man, as a natural stage in the evolution of living nature, raised the "artistic" inclinations of his distant ancestors to a higher level. And now copies of animals appear, which he constantly sees around him. Cutting out such a copy is already a complex “game”, inaccessible to the beast, but a form of “imitation” of the environment accessible to a person. Thus, a man in animal skins had fun with flint chisels in his hands, his handicrafts delighted the eyes of fellow tribesmen, decorated their cave dwelling; and if the samples of Quaternary art evoke a lot of pleasant emotions in the modern viewer, often a genuine aesthetic pleasure, then the cave artist and his contemporaries could feel something similar. Approximately in this direction, in the 60-70s of the last century, theories about the origin of works of Paleolithic art developed. Such views could not but meet with opposition from conservatives, adherents of religious traditions, who tried to use every mistake of enthusiasts of primitive archeology. In this situation of intense struggle between naturalists and clerics, rumors began to reach Paris about absolutely incredible events: first in one department, then in another department, amateur archaeologists, penetrating into dark caves, suddenly came across large drawings of animals on the walls. And the scientists were completely alarmed by a message from Spain: the hitherto unknown Don Marcelino de Sautuola, a lawyer, an amateur archaeologist, found in 1879 in the depths of the Altamira cave, in pitch darkness, a rock ceiling painted with large multi-colored images of bison and other animals. All data indicated that the cave was painted by Paleolithic people. Why did they need to climb into the damp and dangerous depths of the dungeons, where the frescoes are already indistinguishable in the darkness? No, this discovery of Southuola did not at all fit in with the rather coherent conception of the Paleolithic artist as a man having fun at his leisure!
In conflicting responses to the message about Altamira, the opinion prevailed Gabriel de Mortillet(1821-1898), president of the Anthropological Society. A well-known French archaeologist and publicist, he was brought up in the school of the Jesuits as a child: having decisively broken with them, he was carried away by the advanced ideas of anthropology, and became a passionate atheist. Mortilla often had to deal with the cunning tricks of the clerics, who, while in words recognizing the discoveries of archaeologists, in fact tried to use them as a weapon against materialistic science. Having learned about the discovery in Altamira and not having read its details, Mortillet hastily concluded that it was a hoax: “... This is the focus of the Spanish Jesuits. They want to compromise the historians of primitive times." He joined the reading of his teacher and Emil Cartagliac(1845-1921), who headed the editorial board of the main journal of Paleolithic specialists. Later, he himself would sincerely repent of his skepticism, but in the early 80s, the caution of scientists was understandable, because the grandiose art galleries of dark caves contradicted the evolutionist interpretation of the emergence of fine art in the Paleolithic from small and simple forms, and evolutionism seemed to his followers the only scientific method. The researchers of cave paintings in the Paleolithic of Spain and France had to go “against the current”, their correctness was recognized only in 1902, when participants in the International Congress of Anthropologists visited the caves of La Moute, Combarel, Font-de-Gaume (southwestern France). Here they were able to see with their own eyes the rock paintings, cleared of Pleistocene deposits. Now that the dam of old views has been broken, dozens of explorers have rushed into the karst cavities of southwestern Europe. The discoveries of grottoes with Paleolithic frescoes are growing like an avalanche. And in 1903, a new interpretation of the entire "Quaternary art" as a whole as a special form of activity that accompanied magical rites ancient hunters, is becoming generally accepted.
This idea is usually attributed to the French archaeologist and art critic Salomon Reinach(1858-1932). In fact, it was proposed before him: in 1865 - an English cultural historian and anthropologist Edward Taylor(1832-1917), and in 1880 - the Russian researcher L.K. Popov (1851-1917). By the way, the latter’s thoughts that art arose among the hunters of the Ice Age not from imitation of the forms of nature and the search for pleasure, but from the desire subdue themselves by any means, including magic and witchcraft, the elemental forces of nature and herds of wild animals - the source of the existence of hunters, at the end of the last century became widespread even in France. Both Taylor and Popov relied in their conclusions on relevant information about the life and beliefs of the natives of Australia, the Eskimos, and the Indians of America.
But the hypotheses of Taylor and Popov in the 19th century remained unrecognized, they were not accepted by naturalists who held in their hands the products of a fossil man and more trusted the categorical opinion of Mortillet: “the population of the Quaternary era did not know any cult, any religious idea”, because in his art we do not find attempts to convey the supernatural, depict religious symbols.
When the vaults of dark caves, dotted with figures of fossil animals and mysterious signs, underground “sanctuaries”, “temples”, as they soon began to be called, opened up before enthusiastic archaeologists, the old concept of the origin of art began to seem completely naive. What to replace it with? Just at this time, the fundamental work of the English ethnographers Spencer and Gillen about the natives of Australia was published, where their magical ceremonies using animal drawings are considered in detail. It was then that the idea arose again (which now seemed extremely successful!) To compare the Paleolithic drawings in the depths of the caves with those that the Australians make for magical hunting rituals. These tribes, delayed in their development at the level of the Stone Age, believe in the miraculous power of the drawing: the painted beast will no longer leave the hunter, as it is “subordinate” to the will of the person who depicted it. A primitive hunter may also, out of concern for the future of his clan, ask or demand that the painted animals multiply more, so that they do not go far from the clan's territory and deprive it of food. Probably, our Paleolithic ancestor thought so too, drawing bison, wild horses, mammoths on the walls of the cave, Reinach suggested during the discussions that stirred up the scientific world immediately after the last doubts about the Paleolithic age of Altamira, Combarel, La Moute, Font disappeared. de Goma and other dungeons with "art galleries" of the ice age. This assumption was immediately picked up, and soon it turned from a hypothesis into a solid concept, almost a theory. And now - especially in the post-war years - in many encyclopedias, reference books, popular publications around the world, you can read: Paleolithic images were created for witchcraft ceremonies, hunting rites, cults - in other words, "art originates in magic".
However, Reinach himself and his closest followers would be a little surprised by such an interpretation of their original assumption. It is enough to look at their performances in the first decade of our century, where it is constantly emphasized with great care that the "magic" goal of primitive art does not at all negate its other goals, and above all aesthetic ones. Henri Breuil (1877-1961), one of the discoverers of rock paintings, the greatest specialist in cave art, with all his authority, had to spend a lot of energy right up to the last years of his life to fight this simplified formula: "art is from magic". Breuil emphasized the dominant role of aesthetic needs in the motives for creating Paleolithic paintings and sculptures, he also pointed out the need to transfer knowledge from one generation to another, which also determined the development of the art of the Ice Age hunters. The matter was also complicated by the fact that a deep, subtle understanding of the features of their masterpieces, which was the property of a rather narrow circle of specialists, did not fit into the requirement “in a nutshell” to answer the question addressed to archaeologists and interested in the most diverse circles of readers and viewers: "Why did art appear?"
A rather confusing picture has emerged of disputes over issues to which it is difficult to bring indisputable arguments. An approximate scheme of discussion can be traced in the reports of the learned societies of France, that recognized center of Paleolithic studies, and it remains almost unchanged in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. One author shows the power of impressions reflected in the picturesque images of the Paleolithic, the height of artistic feeling, the accuracy of the line, etc. Another objects to seeing the main goal of Paleolithic art in the purely artistic merits of these images. He points to the inaccessibility and deep darkness of the caves with drawings, the remoteness of the drawings from daylight, to the specific plots of the images, and above all to the figures of animals pierced by arrows, stoned, caught in traps. What is this, if not evidence of the magical purpose of the drawings created by primitive hunters? They were worried about utilitarian concerns: how not to stay hungry, how to get the beast, and, hoping for the magical power of the image, these « troglodytes » achieved the maximum similarity of the image to a real, live animal, which they were going to hunt. Involuntarily, without knowing it, these hunters created genuine works of art, although they did not set themselves such a goal. Some authors subscribe to the first or second point of view. Others try to combine one with the other. It was difficult to move forward. Almost any new find could be used to substantiate any of these positions.
Hypotheses and facts.
Looking back at the long winding path of scientists from different schools to a true understanding of Paleolithic art, noting contradictory places on it, one can develop such research methods that will allow not to repeat mistakes.
The limitation of the evolutionist interpretation of the origins of art was primarily reflected in the fact that the fossil man was considered only as a biological individual. The social nature of himself and his creative activity remained out of sight of Paleolithic researchers until the end of the 19th century. The discovery of monumental Paleolithic rock paintings, on the one hand, and the development of ethnography, sociology, and art history, on the other, forced us to look for ways to overcome this limitation. The magical concept made it possible to turn to the analysis of social incentives for the creation of Paleolithic images, this was a completely logical step forward. But more than half a century of dominance of the magical concept did not lead to the development of such a constructive research program that would cover the entire variety of currently known monuments of the ancient Stone Age and withstand the criticism of most experts.
Why rock paintings found deep in caves? A. Braille stated that geochemical processes destroyed the first hundreds of meters at the entrance to the cave in Combarel, Niot, Font de Gomes and other largest grottoes with rock art, and thus found a natural explanation for their remoteness from the entrance. Thus, light was shed on this mysterious circumstance, usually cited by the defenders of the magical concept as proof of the secret and mystical goals that forced the Paleolithic artists to "hide" their masterpieces from the "uninitiated" in the darkness of the dungeons.
The largest modern researcher of Paleolithic art, professor at the Sorbonne André Leroy-Gourhan some time ago summed up and analyzed all the artistic treasures of the ice age in Western Europe. His extremely interesting results, in particular, clearly show the limitations of the facts on which the magical concept is based. Thus, images of animals wounded by arrows make up only 2.6 percent of the total number of images of Paleolithic animals. The remaining 97.4 percent of the images do not have those traces of witchcraft operations that would give reason to draw a parallel between them and the rites of the Australians or Bushmen.
Yes, and ethnography indicates a variety of purposes for which Indians, Eskimos, Bushmen, Aborigines of Australia and other parts of the world create drawings and sculptures. Here are memories of the most striking events in the life of the tribe, and the desire to perpetuate major events in the life of the team, and the transfer of knowledge from the older generation to the younger, and the organization of joint actions of the entire team, etc. Of course, some of these purposes are intertwined with magical and religious motifs and rituals, but this does not exclude the aesthetic attitude to images.
And here there is a fundamental difference, long pointed out by the well-known researchers of the peoples of the North V. G. Bogoraz and V. I. Yokhelson: “...Koryaks skillfully carve small figures of people and animals from wood, bone and horn. This carving stands out for its realism and transmission in the figures of movement and life. Much lower are various items related to the cult. They are carved casually, in a stylized way.(underlined by me. - B.F.). Decorations on dishes and other household items are purely realistic, but often a Koryak sculptor carves only to satisfy the aesthetic sense. In the same way, Chukchi and Eskimo carvers created their realistic life sculptures of animals only to take them out of the bag where they were stored from time to time, only to hold them in their hands and examine them, thus receiving pleasure. The difference in the quality of expression of emotions and thoughts in visual activity (intended for the cult or independent of it) was also noted by many other researchers of the primitive culture of the peoples of the world. It contradicts exaggerated interpretations of the magical concept of the origin of art (“art comes from magic”). Magnificent accuracy, expression, dynamics of artistic portraits of animals, often inaccessible even to modern animal artists, sharply distinguishes paleolithic art from all its later continuations in primitive society.
These objections to the concept of "art is from magic" would not have been necessary in order to completely abandon the very idea of the connection of some of the Paleolithic drawings with some kind of rituals, ceremonies, cults. Calls to return to the evolutionist understanding of the savage artist, devoid of even a shadow of religiosity - in the spirit of Mortillet - would now sound at least naive. And not only because Paleolithic sites have found all those examples of "abstract figures", "symbols" such as a circle, a cross, the existence of which Mortillet categorically denied. The experience accumulated by archeology and related sciences allows us not to go to this extreme and warns against striving to find evidence of a much more complex “religious background” behind the “dominance of magic” in the Paleolithic, with a hierarchy of gods and a single god, the supreme deity, the creator. The rare attempts of this kind of search for primordial monotheism, undertaken by Menage in France and Maringer in Germany, did not receive support from their colleagues, specialists in the Paleolithic, and have not been taken seriously for a long time. The factual data (more than 10 thousand Paleolithic images have now been found and are known to science) show the limitations of the magical concept in explaining origins of art.
A very fruitful was the path to solving the problem of the origin of art, which was followed by scientists in our country. Their works were based on the dialectical-materialistic understanding of ancient history. A significant role in the conclusions of the Soviet school of Paleolithic specialists was played by the excavations of P.P. Efimenko in Kostenki, S.N. Zamyatnin in Gagarino-on-Don, M. M. Gerasimov in Malta-on-Angara. Each of these researchers, in their own way, came to the discovery of long-term artificial dwellings built by Paleolithic hunters in the middle of the ice age tundra - in essence, the first monuments of architectural art.
The practical, economic purpose of the first works of architecture was beyond doubt. But even more convincing evidence of this was the traces of the activity of the ancient inhabitants, which remained on the “floor” of the dwellings: there were not only tools, but also sculptural figures of women (“Venus”), animals, birds, carved on mammoth tusk, bone, horn. Such finds used to seem isolated; archaeologists considered them each in itself, without connection with others. Now, the works of ancient art appeared in a system that corresponded, one way or another, to the system of relationships between the inhabitants of Paleolithic dwellings and their attitude to artistic masterpieces collected from their hearths and household pits. And although before full transcript these relations were still far away, a hitherto unknown opportunity to “talk” with the Paleolithic masters about their art of depiction, about the goals of this art, opened up.
It turned out that the famous "Venuses", which previously seemed to some scientists as erotic symbols, to others as naturalistic copies of ugly figures or the fruit of a momentary whim of an ancient master, are in fact deeply thought-out images that embody the special position of a woman in the Paleolithic hunting community, her role as a mother. - progenitors of hunters, keepers of the hearth, useful knowledge and traditions of the family. These properties and functions of the real inhabitants of the Paleolithic settlements gave rise to a number of fantastic ideas - about women in charge of the elemental forces of nature, mistresses of invisible animals ( magical) assistants of male hunters in their difficult trade. This is roughly the range of ideas - this is the opinion of not only scientists from the USSR, but also experts from all over the world who highly appreciated the contribution of Soviet researchers of Paleolithic art - embodied by ancient sculptors in miniature figurines "Venus".
The main mistake of the late defenders of the magical concept was that they took one of the consequences as the main reason for the development of artistic fantasy among the creators of Paleolithic art. Our Paleolithic ancestors, who had the finished appearance of Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens, possessed no less intellectual potential than we do, operated with rather complex abstract concepts. And in any generalization, in any, even the simplest, abstraction, V.I. Lenin said, there is the possibility of a flight of thought from reality. He wrote that the bifurcation of the knowledge of man and possibility idealism (religion) given already in the first, elementary abstraction(See Poln. sobr. soch., v. 29, p. 330).
By the end of the Paleolithic, people's abstract ideas contained a significant amount of knowledge about their own and the surrounding nature. This is evidenced by studies of tools, dwellings and, of course, works of art, both in terms of the technique of color painting, sculpture, graphics, and in terms of plots and themes. However, despite these conquests, the weakness of man in the struggle with nature at every step created favorable conditions for manifestations of primitive idealism, departure of thought from reality into the world of illusions, religious fantasy. It was this negative side of the abstracting work of the mind that the supporters of the magical concept tried to establish in the origins of artistic creativity, not taking into account the original positive side, which was opposite in its meaning, or sharply underestimating its value.
Meanwhile, the primitive hunter, before believing in the supernatural connection of a living animal with its image, first had to learn how to portray this animal. And for this it was necessary to be able and know a lot.
On the one hand, to know the habits of different animals and to keep in your memory many details of the animal figure, from different angles, at different moments of its movement, to the smallest detail, and the animalistic masterpieces of the Paleolithic confirm that all this mass of information was not only stored, but also actively rethought , so that every time in the drawing the most characteristic of a given animal appeared, the most important in its behavior from a clearly defined point of view - from the point of view of hunters, due to their practical interests.
On the other hand, to fix the image of the animal, it was necessary to do a lot of operations. Let's list at least some of them. To make incisors of the appropriate types of stone of the appropriate shape, that is, to make the most necessary tool, without which it is impossible to draw even a simple stroke along the stone wall of the cave covered with calcite deposits, not like a tense living line that outlines the figure of the beast. Further, in some cases, to polish the uneven surface of the rock, on which the future picture will appear, which is still living in the artist's head. Find the appropriate mineral dyes, turn them into paints (crush, stir on animal or vegetable fats, bone marrow, etc.). Illuminate" workplace". For this, stone bowls with animal fats and a wick were used - real lamps. And finally, from plants to make brushes for applying paint to the wall.
When the image process itself begins, its author will need, one way or another, from the first to the last minute, to measure the details of the image both among themselves and with the living original that is presented to him at that time, that is, constantly use something like scale. And this is not so easy, if we remember that some of the frescoes of the Paleolithic caves reach five, six or more meters in size.
This is a far from complete list of purely technical means of Paleolithic art, according to documentary evidence found to date, and it is easy to verify that the origins of these means lie in the production skills of Pleistocene hunters, crowning hundreds of thousands of years of labor practice of their predecessors from earlier eras of the Old Stone Age, who did not yet know visual arts. It is also obvious that only human society could provide such a progressive accumulation, polishing, creative transformation of life experience from one generation to another. It follows from this that art arose as a definite result of the social and industrial progress of mankind in the ancient stone age and at the same time as a new, very powerful means of further transmission of everything that was of interest to man and increased the viability of society, primarily obtained by practice and tested by it. accurate knowledge of one's own nature and the environment.
It is by following this path that the researcher will be able to penetrate more deeply into the secrets of Paleolithic art. First of all, the work of Soviet archaeologists, who study it not in isolation, but against a broad background of the industrial, economic, and social life of its creators, convinces of this.
In our opinion, the dialectical-materialistic point of view on the origin of art is very correctly expressed by Academician A.P. Okladnikov. He writes: “Magic, of course, could initially contribute to the materialization of these new for our planet qualities of a person as a social being, including art, aesthetic experience. But its role was reduced to nothing more than the role of an external stimulus - a catalyst. She could not give birth to art, because she was the opposite of him in essence. Yes, of course, cave paintings appeared because, due to their false theory of hunting magic, a person needed an image of an animal, because he needed to depict an animal. But the fact that he was able to portray the beast, and, moreover, so vividly, so similarly, no longer depended at all on any magical theory. This was entirely determined by his physical capabilities, primarily by the presence of a flexible and skillful hand, as well as all human feelings born as a result of the previous history of man. And even more - the state of his mind, intellectual abilities, creative imagination.
Anthropology and psychology about primitive creativity.
Any religious system is based on dogmas that claim to know the eternal, unshakable principles of the world and man. These claims do not withstand scientific criticism and the test of time. Therefore, in general, it is not surprising that after the collapse of the biblical chronology of the world and the myth of Adam, the church hastened to orient itself in the new archaeological and anthropological material. Fathers Wilhelm Schmidt, T. Menage, Johann Maringer, and their followers in Western Europe painstakingly collected a huge amount of factual material, which, in their opinion, was to prove that the desire for religion is an eternal human need at any stage of cultural development. This is an innate property of the psyche, they argued, and if the Cro-Magnon 40 thousand years ago, in the late Paleolithic, had the same psyche as modern people, then he worshiped a single deity; divine revelation is the source of the sudden outbreak of art. The lack of signs of monotheism among the tribes of primitive hunters of the 15th - 20th centuries in Australia, Africa, America, the Paters explained by the fact that the aboriginal pagans had lost the true (that is, monotheistic) faith of their Paleolithic ancestors and therefore degraded and vegetate in the backyards of the civilized world.
Foreign researchers, trying to penetrate the unique psychological atmosphere of the origins of art, compared Paleolithic artists with animals, with children, with patients in psychiatric clinics; not so long ago, the French archaeologist J. Maudui explained, for example, the frescoes of Altamira as hallucinations of hungry hunters recorded on the rocks. There were other variations on the theme "genius is the fruit of madness."
However, the works of Paleolithic art themselves do not give grounds for drawing a conclusion about the underdevelopment, inferiority, and pathology of the mental functions of their creators. The clues to the problem lie not here.
We are contemporaries of the most amazing discoveries of both archeology and anthropology. It turned out that not only Neanderthals, but also their predecessors (such as Pithecanthropus) built artificial long-term dwellings, conducted collective ceremonies. Neanderthals used mineral dyes, applied rhythmic cuts to bones in the form of simple ornaments: they came close in their technical capabilities to the threshold of art - to the beginning of the creation of figure drawings, paintings, sculptures. An evolution took place not only of physical capabilities, but also of social relations, and all this formed the external and internal appearance of a person in a certain direction: less and less dependence on the natural environment, more and more - on the social one.
In the late Neanderthals, evolution reached a critical point. Although Neanderthals retained certain features of animal ancestors in the face and posture, their brain reached a volume that modern people have on average - about 1500 cm3. But the structure of the brain was different. The most important difference pointed out by anthropologists is the poor development of the frontal lobes of the brain in Neanderthals. Through the normal functions of the frontal lobes, our behavior in particularly complex activities is regulated and coordinated (for example, choosing and evaluating abstract goals, predicting future situations, solving mathematical problems); they lead public behavior, in particular, they inhibit impulses that can be condemned by society. What did the lag in the development of the frontal lobes mean for Neanderthals? Crowded with an avalanche of visual, auditory, tactile, taste stimuli, his brain apparently did not have time to "filter" their impact on the individual's behavior in such a way that it corresponded to the requirements of the social environment. A man of the Mousterian era (100-40 thousand years ago) cuts a bone with flint, smears spots of ocher, but cannot “coordinate” his powerful movements in order to get an image. Obviously (this is the opinion of leading anthropologists), the Neanderthals owned sound speech, but it made it possible to transmit information only over short distances, to store it only for a short period of time after sounding. Something more solid and durable was required: after all, humanity was growing, populating the planet, complicating its economy... The growth of the frontal lobes to the proportions that characterize the brain of a modern person corresponded to the conditions in which the emerging person was placed by increasingly complex social ties and industrial relations. It was a long, gradual process.
And it is no coincidence, it is obvious that at the end of the purely biological formation of man, we see a different process: against the background of cardinal shifts in the material culture of the Old Stone Age, the first real artistic images crystallize and appear. Painful attempts to master a new means of self-expression and communication lead to the beginnings of fine art. In order to kindle and maintain the torch of art, it was necessary to rise to the highest step of biological evolution - to the species Homo sapiens. This condition is necessary, but not sufficient: if a person of a modern species, no matter what brilliant heredity this individual carries in his genes, drops out of human society for at least the first five years of his life, and he will no longer be able not only to create, but even to master the basics of drawing, painting, sculpture. Not only art, but also more elementary ways of expressing emotions and thoughts, the simplest ways of human communication become inaccessible.
There are two points that distinguish the position of Soviet archaeologists, anthropologists, psychologists, based on dialectical materialistic understanding history: firstly, the assertion of the constancy of the morphological, physiological, psychophysiological organization of people of an already established species Homo sapiens(now it is the same as in the late Paleolithic); secondly, the recognition of the decisive role of socio-historical conditions in the dynamics of needs, motives, and ideas that drive people's creative activity. This simple clear position immediately reveals the reasons for the blunders of those who approached the psychology of Paleolithic artists with criteria taken from animal psychology, child psychology, pathopsychology. Yes, the art of the Paleolithic is unique, joyful, in some ways also childishly naive - peculiar, how unique, peculiar was the social way of hunting groups of that historical era. However, it reflected not only the “childhood years” of society, but also glimpses of the enormous possibilities of the human psyche with the completed morphological and physiological qualities of Homo sapiens, with those fundamental psychophysiological properties that modern psychology studies experimentally.
An important psychophysiological side of the development of art was shown in his works by the famous Soviet anthropologist Professor I.I. Roginsky. The fact is that, unlike the lungs, heart and other organs of the human body, which work rhythmically, the brain performs its higher functions, breaking out of the usual rhythms. Allowing a person to deeply comprehend the world, to create broad abstractions, the brain tunes not to the rhythms of the body, but to the dynamics of the reflection of the surrounding world. Such an arrhythmia has a heavy, depressing effect on the thinking individual. However, who now does not know that tense brainwork need breaks and rest? This is also a way to return to the disturbed rhythms of the body. Something similar happened at the last stage of anthropogenesis, from the moment of the appearance of Homo sapiens. Under the influence of loads and overloads, the most powerful, most perfect organ of thought could not cope with the tasks of abstract thinking, hitherto unprecedented in complexity, if it were not supported by art. The universal, purely human world of rhythms - the rhythms of dances, sounds, lines, colors, shapes, patterns in ancient art - protected the thinking brain from overstrain and breakdowns.
Soviet psychologist Ya.A. Ponomarev in the course of an experimental study of the mechanism of intuition came to an important conclusion. It turns out that when solving some problem, we not only get a “direct product” (solution, answer) that we were looking for and which we are well aware of, but a number of unconscious traces (structures or moments) of the search process remain in our psyche - a “by-product”. Time passes, we are faced with a new task, somewhat similar to the first one, we are looking for a solution - and it comes “suddenly”, with a sudden “flash”, “enlightenment”. A “by-product” worked, which we had long forgotten about, or even did not even suspect about its existence. Intuition worked. The one that caused the exclamation "Eureka!" at Archimedes. There were also "eurekas" in the art of the Paleolithic. The incisor leaves random marks on the bone, which was cleaned from meat. Traces are repeated for thousands of years, they are not given importance. The moment has come - a line has been opened in them. Millennia go by. Lines are grouped by equality of lengths, by direction. After millennia, it is discovered that such groups produce patterns that delight the eye. Again a series of centuries, again "eureka": patterns can be applied not only to bones, but also to bracelets, other jewelry, sculptures; patterns can convey wool and fur on images of animals; these images can be placed on the wall of the cave in a rhythmic row, just as simple lines were placed in a rhythmic row ... Thus, one can gradually penetrate into the holy of holies - into the intuition of ancient artists.
The moment of intuitive insight, "condescending" on the artist, as it were, "from nowhere," of course, could not but become one of the sources of the aura of mystery, mysticism, and magic that surrounded the creative process already in ancient times. The magic-religious edging, the framing of the origins of art must be recognized as secondary formations, an illusory reflection of the unknown laws of the world, man, and the creative process. So, in the mythology of the peoples of the world, the statement is repeated: spiritual culture, creativity, intuitive insights are a gift from the gods or semi-divine heroes to mere mortals.
Finally, at least a few words must be said about the psychological basis of the origins of art - about that which was determined by the specific social conditions and economic structure of the Paleolithic hunting communities. The veneration of mothers-ancestresses, the cult of animals, the cult of fertility do not speak of any peculiarities of thinking that are opposite to the structure of our thinking. Especially about the original mysticism of "pralogical" thinking. Only the structure of the social environment and material production based on the hunting industry, which determined the needs, motives, and goals of people, was different. A Paleolithic hunter went into a cave with different motives than a Christian enters a church. Therefore, attempts to present the motives of the latter as the main source of Paleolithic art have no basis.
Trying to penetrate into the foundations of the worldview of the primitive masters of the chisel and brush, some researchers adjusted, voluntarily or involuntarily, the actual to the desired. Of course, it is easy and convenient to assume that Paleolithic man was stimulated in his work by competitive urges, aspirations to possess property, and hope for a single creator god, and then argue that these are the invariable properties of his psyche. But this convenient scheme is not confirmed even in what can be observed among modern hunting tribes lagging behind in their development.
Art originated in that special period of history, when a person had already developed physically and mentally and, in terms of the inclinations of the intellect, approached the modern. However, the interactions of people, their social, industrial relations were still at that infantile, undeveloped level that characterizes the era of the primitive tribal community, the era of primitive communism (as defined by V.I. Lenin). This era was handed down to us by the primitive artist in living and direct images of his work.