THE ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE "OUTER" EXPERIENCE FACTS

Abstract

The essence of the artistic interpretation of the "outer" (as an opposite to inner) experience is the process of turning facts and events, whether mundane or historical, into artistic images. All the variety of themes can be roughly classified as belonging to one of the three concentric circles: human being, society and the world. The specifics of interpretation of such trans-historical macro-themes are defined by the individuality of the author and the cultural paradigm he/she represents. The culturological-hermeneutic approach allows to take this context into consideration and thus more adequately evaluate a specific work of art and a certain tendencies that manifest themselves in it.

The experience – whether personal or cultural – is one of the most immediate sources of the artistic creation. The concrete facts are interpreted by the author in accordance to the personal world outlook and to the world picture, typical for a certain cultural paradigm. It should be noted, that an author can be either more or less typical representative of such paradigm, or an agent of its shifting.

The first of the transcultural themes is the representation of a human being. There are two main approaches to it. In the first case, we see a generalized form of a human being as opposed to other creatures, or as a representative of a certain group. In the first case author aimed at showing the unique personality.

The "generic" depictions of human beings can be found in almost all ethnic cultures. Each of them developed a kind of a canon, that can be defined by two parameters: 1) what person (gender, age, race etc) is chosen as an object and 2) how they are depicted.

In some cases, art goes ahead of the science. For example, in W. Shakespeare’s works we can see quite coherent ideas about psychosomatics. The XIX ct. literature investigated different aspects of the mind and body interaction. Such tendencies continue in the contemporary culture. So, the art has a function of an alternative cognitive instrument.

The representation of a unique personality is the most clearly seen in such genres as portrait and biography. Any portrait is an interpretation of a character and life of a sitter. Sometimes it acquires a symbolical dimension, showing not only a person, but certain character type.

Any person lives – and is depicted – in a social context. So, the second of the great transcultural themes is the human interrelations. Both choice of the subject and the manner of its depiction depends on the cultural paradigm. For example, in the Western art the theme of love is one of the most prominent. But in some cultures even the word, denoting this feeling was absent, which made the depiction of it impossible.

An artist can make a generalized image of a social fact, or even the whole life of a society, taking role of a sociologist, philosopher and culturologist. It is well known, that some of the great writers coped with this task more successfully than the professional scholars. But at the same time, to become a work of art, any potentially interesting fact is to be completely reworked.

In our times we see the fact of permutation as the merging of the real and the fictional, the "objective" life and the work of art. The results can be esthetically interesting, but the process itself is potentially destructive as it disorients the recipients in their social life.

The third sphere of the artistic interpretation is the world as a whole. The most immediate universal context of a social life is the natural environment. The nature as a whole and its separate representatives were mythologized. For example, an animal could be seen as a microcosm. The whole universe was seen as a mesh of connections, linking all objects into the whole.

For quite a long time the nature was not depicted of described explicitly. There was "too much" nature as it was, so the artists were more interested in human work. Only in the times of Proto-Renaissance the landscape picture appeared. Later, as the unspoiled nature receded, the artists became more interested in it. The Romantics exulted about the wild beauty of uninhabited places. So the author had a choice: either go and find the primeval nature, or stay and depict the "second nature" as the man-made environment.

In the latter case the main object of depiction is a thing, or a combination of things. In the traditional society every object had constant symbolical meaning. In the contemporary art there are no meanings at all; every object becomes something different in a different context.

One of the results of living in such a cultural space is the nostalgic feelings about the unspoiled unity of the world. It leads to the new approaches to the interrelations of the humanity with the universe, which no longer can be seen just as the passive environment of our activity. For example, in biology the theory of Gaia – the living Earth – has emerged. Modern art as well seeks the new ways of understanding and expressing the place of human in the universal context.