Lecture
Artistic method is the system of principles governing the process of creating works of literature and art. The category of Artistic method was introduced into aesthetic thought in the late 1920s, becoming one of the fundamental concepts of the Marxist theory of artistic creation. Rejecting all irrationalist interpretations of the creative act — religious-mystical, intuitionist, psychoanalytic, and the like — Marxist scholarship proceeds from the premise that however significant the role of intuitive-unconscious moments in an artist's activity, his creative work is at bottom conscious and purposeful in character. This is attested both by the internal logic of the works of art themselves and by a variety of indirect evidence: theoretical treatises, prefaces, manifestos, letters, conversations, and instructions to pupils composed by artists — all of which speak to the writer's, painter's, composer's, or director's need and capacity to become aware of, formulate, and make public the guiding principles of his creative practice. The concept of «Artistic method», grounded in the philosophical category of Method, fixes this awareness of the fundamental impulses of artistic thought, imagination, and talent.
Since an artist's method, taking shape in a specific social and cultural milieu, reveals — for all its uniqueness — a more or less deep commonality with the methods of other artists of the same period and the same ideological-aesthetic orientation, the historian of artistic culture is entitled to single out the general structure of the Artistic method underlying entire artistic currents, styles, and movements; thus one speaks of the Artistic method of classicism, romanticism, critical realism, symbolism, and so on.
An artist works out his artistic method independently, in the course of his creative development, under the influence of his entire worldview (the system of his aesthetic, ethical, religious, philosophical, and political convictions). Naturally, serious changes in worldview lead to a transformation of the Artistic method (such was, for example, Alexander Pushkin's transition from the romantic method to the realist one, or Mikhail Nesterov's shift from symbolism to socialist realism). It is likewise natural that the presence of more or less acute contradictions in an artist's worldview inevitably leads — as Friedrich Engels showed in the case of Honoré de Balzac and as Vladimir Lenin showed in his analysis of the views and works of Leo Tolstoy — to an internal inconsistency within the Artistic method itself.
A more concrete understanding of the Artistic method — its basic elements, the nature of their connection, the relation between method and style (see Style), and so on — still provokes serious disagreement among Soviet scholars. The Artistic method (sometimes called the creative or artistic-creative method) is defined variously as «the principle of the figurative reflection of life» (G. N. Pospelov), as «the principle by which the writer selects and evaluates the phenomena of reality» (L. I. Timofeev), as «a definite mode of figurative thinking» (Yu. B. Borev), as a totality of «principles of artistic selection», «methods of artistic generalization», «principles of aesthetic evaluation», and «principles for embodying reality in the images of art» (O. V. Larmin), or as «the system of principles that the artist places at the foundation of his practical activity», a system isomorphic to the structure of the work of art being created (M. S. Kagan).
Since the structure of art is composed of the interrelation of four basic components — the cognition of life, its evaluation, its transformation, and the sign-based expression of the artistic information thereby obtained, the Artistic method must necessarily contain four corresponding orientations. Its cognitive orientation determines into which spheres of being the energy of artistic cognition is directed (for instance, into the social sphere or the biological one) and how it relates the general and the particular within the image; the evaluative orientation of the Artistic method determines the character of the system of values affirmed by the artist (or artistic movement) — religious or secular, civic-minded or apolitical — and the manner (openly tendentious or concealed, emotionally exposed or contemplative) in which this is done; the creative-constructive orientation of the Artistic method determines the principles by which the raw material of life is transformed into artistic images (preserving verisimilitude or departing from it, and so on) and the principles of the material construction of artistic form; finally, the semiotic orientation of the Artistic method determines the way in which this construction is turned into a system of figurative signs, into a special «artistic language». It should be borne in mind here that we are speaking of a dynamic system capable of changing its state owing to shifts in the relations among its constituent elements (for example, in the method of critical realism the cognitive orientation comes to the fore, and so on). One of the most essential features of socialist realism consists in the balancing of all the orientations of the Artistic method (the principle of the unity of partisanship and truthfulness, of the unity of reflection and creative transformation of reality, of the unity of content and form, of poetic meaning and artistic language), although the particularities of the various kinds, genera, and genres of art render this balance mobile, ensuring that each kind, genus, and genre preserves and develops its aesthetic distinctiveness within the bounds of a single Artistic method.
Comments