Conceptual picture of the world and its functions.

06.02.2019
Fundamentals of linguoculturology [ tutorial] Khrolenko Alexander Timofeevich

3. Conceptual and linguistic picture of the world

Associated with mentality is the idea of ​​a picture (sometimes a model) of the world. Going back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the position that language reflects the “naive” model of the world (picture of the world) has now become generally accepted. " Cards-on the world* in contrast to a worldview, it is the totality of ideological knowledge about the world, “the totality of the objective content that a person possesses” (Jaspers). The picture of the world is born of the human need for a visual representation of the world. It is believed that the picture of the world is a synthetic panoramic representation of concrete reality and about everyone's place specific person in it.

One can distinguish a sensory-spatial picture of the world, a spiritual-cultural, and a metaphysical one. They also talk about physical, biological, philosophical paintings peace [FES 1998: 201]. It turns out that there can be many more hypostases of the picture of the world: this language picture the world, folklore picture of the world, ethnic picture of the world, etc.

The concept of “linguistic picture of the world” has several terminological designations (“linguistic intermediate world”, “linguistic organization of the world”, “linguistic picture of the world”, “linguistic model of the world”, etc.). Used more often than others linguistic picture of the world.

The concepts of “mentality” and “picture of the world” are distinguished by the degree of awareness: the “picture of the world” is a conscious representation, and “mentality” is not reflected by consciousness. And yet, the originality of the mentality is judged by the specifics of the picture of the world.

“Picture of the world” is becoming one of the central concepts of many humanities– philosophy, cultural studies, ethnography, etc. There are a considerable number of definitions of the term picture of the world. Each definition depends on what differentiating feature is indicated before this phrase, for example, linguistic picture of the world. According to Yu.D. Apresyan, every natural language reflects a certain way perception and organization (“conceptualization”) of the world. The meanings expressed in it add up to a certain unified system views, a kind of collective philosophy that is imposed as mandatory on all native speakers. The picture of the world reflects naive ideas about inner world of a person, it condenses the introspection experience of dozens of generations and, because of this, serves as a reliable guide to this world [Apresyan 1995].

The most rigorous of the humanities - linguistics - even takes the idea of ​​a picture of the world as a methodological device, and this allows you to see what was not noticed before (see, for example: [Yakovleva 1995]).

The idea of ​​a picture of the world took shape at the beginning of the 20th century. It was implied by O. Spengler in his work “The Decline of Europe”: “Each culture has a strictly individual way of seeing and cognizing nature, or, what is the same, for each There is its own peculiar nature, which no other species of people can possess in the same form. In the same way, in each culture, and within a separate culture, with smaller differences, in each individual person, there is absolutely special kind history..." [Spengler 1993: 198].

The Russian poet A. Bely around the same time convincingly demonstrated the presence individual painting world from Pushkin, Baratynsky and Tyutchev. These poets have different skies: Pushkin’s “firmament” (blue, distant), Tyutchev’s “favorable firmament”, Baratynsky’s “native” sky, “living”, “cloudy”. Pushkin will say: “The distant firmament shines”; Tyutchev: “The firmament looks fiery”; Baratynsky: “cloudy native sky” [Bely 1983].

Pictures of the world are structured by categorical, classification schemes, which should be studied by the history of mentality. M. Foucault believed that a person has a “network” of ideas – a skeleton of the world picture. The sum or intersection of different “grids” gives mentality. The picture of the world, like a mosaic, is made up of concepts and connections between them, which is why it is sometimes called conceptual picture peace.

The concept, in the understanding of the Voronezh scientific school, led by prof. Z.D. Popova, is a global mental unit that represents a quantum of knowledge (hereinafter – a presentation of the concept from the book: [Popova, Sternin 1999]). Concepts are ideal and are encoded in the mind by units of a universal subject code, which are based on individual sensory images formed on the basis of a person’s personal sensory experience. Images are concrete, but they can be abstracted and turn from a sensory image into a mental image. Many, if not all, concepts retain their sensory nature, for example, concepts represented by words sour, sweet, smooth, cigarette butt, pit, spoon, table, chair and under. A concept, unlike a concept, does not have a clear structure, a rigid sequence and the relative position of layers.

The concepts are divided according to their content as follows: 1) representation (mental picture)– apple, pear, cold, sour, red, rough, heat, etc.; 2) scheme– a concept represented by some generalized spatial-graphic or contour diagram: a schematic image of a person, a tree, etc.; 3) concept- a concept that consists of the most general, essential features of an object or phenomenon, the result of rational reflection and comprehension: square - rectangle with equal sides; 4) frame - conceivable in its entirety components a multi-component concept, a three-dimensional representation, a certain set: a store, a stadium, a hospital, etc.; 5) scenario– a sequence of episodes in time: a visit to a restaurant, a trip to another city, a fight, an excursion; 6) gestalt– a complex, holistic functional structure that organizes the diversity of individual phenomena in consciousness: school, love, etc.

Conceptual features are identified through the semantics of language. The meanings of words, phrase combinations, sentence patterns, texts serve as a source of knowledge about the content of certain concepts. Concepts are represented by words, but the entire set speech means does not give full picture concept. A word with its meaning in a language represents only part of the concept, hence the need for synonymy of the word, the need for texts that collectively reveal the content of the concept. “The agony of the word,” drafts, self-editing and literary editing are a consequence of limitations linguistic means to verbalize the concept. Hence the conclusion that word creation, speech creation and artistic creativity- the eternal right and duty of man.

There may be cases when there is a concept, but there is no lexeme for its verbalization. This is called a lacuna (in Russian there is newlyweds, but no - old-timers). There are illogisms - the absence of lexemes and sememes in the presence of a concept, due to the lack of need for the subject (there is rabbit breeders, but there are no lexemes for rhino breeding specialists).

The ethnic community subjects the image to a certain standardization, as a result of which the concepts become national, group or personal. The set of concepts in the collective consciousness of an ethnic group began to be called concept sphere. Concepts have national specifics. The national concept sphere is a set of categorized, processed, standardized concepts in the minds of the people. A number of concepts are inherent in one ethnic group, and therefore non-equivalent (untranslatable) vocabulary is possible (for example, savvy, everyday life, waiting list, fellow countryman and etc.). However, a significant part of the concept spheres of different ethnic groups coincides, which explains the possibility of translation from one language to another.

Verbalization, linguistic representation, linguistic representation of a concept by means of lexemes, phrasemes, statements are the subject of cognitive linguistics, which is interested in which aspects, layers, components of the concept entered the semantic space of language, how they categorize it, in which parts of the system specific language the concept under study is discovered. The goal is to present in an orderly form and comprehensively describe the part of the language system that verbalizes this concept.

So, concepts are realized primarily with the help of lexemes. As a result, a linguistic picture of the world emerges. <Языковая картина мира - this is an image of everything that exists, developed by the centuries-old experience of the people and carried out by means of linguistic nominations, as an integral and multi-part world, in its structure and in the connections of its parts comprehended by language, representing, firstly, a person, his material and spiritual life activity and, secondly, everything what surrounds him: space and time, living and inanimate nature, the area of ​​man-made myths and society” [Shvedova 1999: 15].

It can be assumed with a high degree of confidence that the conceptual and linguistic picture of the world are correlated. Pictures of the world, and especially linguistic ones, are ethnically specific. National identity is seen in the presence/absence of certain concepts, their value hierarchy, system of connections, etc. This can explain the observation of a French researcher that the relatively poor system that the Homeric language has cannot give the same division of the color spectrum as possible say, in modern French [Turina 1998: 408].

The logical question is about the genesis of the linguistic picture of the world in the minds of each speaker of a given language. At first glance, it seems that it develops in a person gradually as he gains everyday experience and masters the language. According to the French philosopher and language theorist J. Derrida (born 1930), from childhood a person, without thinking, acquires the names of objects and, at the same time, a system of relationships, some accents that define ideas, for example, about politeness, about masculinity and femininity, about national stereotypes, that is, virtually all the initial postulates that determine the picture of the world, which are “smuggled” in linguistic expressions (see: [Weinstein 1992: 51]).

However, there are also opposing judgments about the picture of the world as an innate phenomenon. According to J. McIntyre of the European Applied Neuroscience Laboratory, who has studied the "intuitive" physical knowledge that is characteristic even of people uninformed in science, the experiment supports the idea that the brain is based not so much on direct observations, but on an internal model of the physical world that and are used to predict the “behavior” of objects around us [Search. 2001. No. 27. P. 15].

It becomes obvious that the study of individual linguistic and speech units to identify what is ethnically unique in a language is very limited. Today it is impossible to understand why Homer calls the sea “wine”, and it is difficult to explain why it is impossible to translate the English word into French humor[Turina 1998:408]. We need a “total”, systematic approach to solving the problem. HELL. Shmelev, for example, believes that it is very promising to compare the “Russian picture of the world” that emerges as a result of the semantic analysis of Russian lexemes with the data of ethnopsychology. Such a comparison will clarify the conclusions made within the framework of both sciences [Shmelev 1995: 169]. The realization of this perspective was the work of A.D. Shmelev “Russian language model of the world: Materials for the dictionary” (Moscow, 2002).

The solution is also seen in the study of entire linguistic fields corresponding to fragments of the picture of the world. House, as the participants of the ethnolinguistic conference “Home in Language and Culture” (Poland, Szczecin, March 1995) showed, it is a very important element of culture, language and literary texts. The report on the topic “House in Polish and English phraseology” showed how much there is in common in the structure of Polish and English phraseological units and proverbs on this topic [Plotnikova, Usacheva 1996:63].

The idea of ​​a linguistic picture of the world is heuristic in nature. Thus, a comprehensive analysis of Old English lexical units naming an arable field makes it possible to clearly imagine what an important role in the economic activity of the Anglo-Saxons the field that was sown (32 names) played, the less significant role of the fallow field (7 names) and even less - the compressed field (2 titles). It turns out that the cult of the field passed to the Anglo-Saxons from the ancient Germans and Indo-Europeans [Hopiyainen 2000: 331].

Through the picture of the world, mentality is connected with culture. The naive picture of the world of native speakers of a given language is reflected in the structure of the meanings of words and is determined by the culture and mentality of the era, a person’s place in social space, his self-identification as “I” and as “We” [Frumkina 1999:8].

It is believed that the basic unit of mentality is the concept of a given culture, implemented within the boundaries of a verbal sign in particular and language in general and presented in meaningful forms as an image, as a concept and as a symbol (Nikitina 1999]. The idea of ​​a profile picture of the world, or “pictures”, is also being developed of the world" [Shvedova 1999: 5]. For example, the folk cultural and linguistic picture of the world within various folk poetic genres can appear in the form of "pictures of the world" with one cultural model.

It turns out that the seemingly purely theoretical concept of “image of the world” should be taken into account in the process of training specialists of various profiles, for whom the problem of “building a professional destiny” is important. (See the textbook “The Image of the World in Different Types of Professions” [Klimov 1995].)

Summarizing the achievements of linguistics of the 20th century, among the problems that have not yet received a complete solution, along with the problem of language and thinking, the closely related problem of the national picture of the world is also included [Alpatov 1995: 18].

1. Babushkin A.P. Types of concepts in the lexical and phraseological semantics of the language. Voronezh, 1996.

2. Baksansky O.E., Kucher E.N. Modern cognitive approach to the category “image of the world” // Questions of Philosophy. 2002. No. 8. P. 52–69.

3. Popova Z.D., Sternin I.A. Language and national picture of the world. Voronezh, 2002.

4. Radchenko O. A. The concept of the linguistic picture of the world in the German philosophy of language of the 20th century // VYa. 2002. No. 6. P. 140–160.

5. Uryson EV. Linguistic picture of the world VS Everyday ideas (model of perception in the Russian language) // VYa. 1998; No. 3. P. 3-21.

6. Shmelev A.D. Russian language model of the world: Materials for the dictionary. M., 2002.

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Factors influencing the formation of a picture of the world Among such factors are almost everything that determines existence, everyday life and history. These are natural-geographical, climatic, civilizational, ethnic, religious-confessional, historical-cultural factors, level

The formation of any picture of the world occurs during two main processes - conceptualization and categorization. Conceptualization is one of the most important cognitive processes, consisting in the comprehension of information entering the consciousness, leading to the formation of concepts. Exactly concept as a certain sensory image to which knowledge about the world is “attached”, and is the unit of any picture of the world, and therefore the picture of the world itself is most often called conceptual, or - in the terminology of D.S. Likhachev – concept sphere.

Let us consider the nature of the “attachment” of knowledge to the corresponding sensory image using the example of the concept of “house”. In its first layer, one can identify those features of the concept that are recognized by all representatives of a given culture. Some of them, which form the core of the concept, are enshrined in the dictionary definition of home (“a house as a place of residence of a person”). Others are well understood by people (the house has a roof, there is a door, etc.). The second layer of the concept highlights features that are recognized only by certain social groups within a given culture (for example, a builder will immediately imagine the foundation of a house, the main stages of building a house, etc.). The third layer of the concept contains features that are recognized only by researchers conducting targeted surveys and familiarizing themselves with texts in the language of the culture in which the concept of “home” was formed.

Each concept, as defined by Yu.S. Stepanova, is a peculiar a clot of culture, since it groups knowledge, ideas, associations and experiences that are specific in each culture. Therefore, it is concepts that are often used as supporting elements for comparing cultures, which, due to their vagueness, are themselves difficult to analyze.

This feature of a concept—being a clot of culture—is most clearly manifested if the concept is key for a given culture. A key concept of a culture is a concept that has no analogues in other cultures, but is significant for a given culture in an emotional or intellectual sense. Thus, the concept of “melancholy” is key for Russian culture. In English, it is conveyed using the words melancholy, depression, longing, grief and the like, but the main content of the concept cannot be captured using these words. Russian “longing” is directed towards a higher world and is accompanied by a feeling of insignificance, emptiness, and the perishability of this world. The same emotions that are conveyed by the above-mentioned English words, as noted by N.A. Berdyaev, are aimed at the lower world. Fear speaks of danger threatening from the lower world; boredom is about the emptiness and vulgarity of this lower world. In melancholy there is hope, in boredom there is hopelessness.

In part, concepts from different cultures may cross. Thus, we usually talk about the coincidence of the content of the concepts conveyed by the words “friend” and “friend,” but for an American the word “friend” is applicable to any person who is not an enemy. This reflects Americans' reluctance to form too deep relationships, which is often attributed to their individualism and geographic mobility. Russians, for their part, are much more selective about who they can call a friend.

In order for concept spheres to synchronize, so that the mental formations of the native culture coincide in basic features with the mental formations of another culture, extensive experience in living and communicating with representatives of this culture is required. However, it is believed that a person who is not familiar with the concepts of another culture does not experience any discomfort from this.

As noted above, the formation of a picture of the world occurs not only in the process of conceptualization, but also in the process categorization. Categorization is the subsuming of objects or phenomena under a certain rubric of experience (the so-called category), recognizing them as members of this category on the basis of similarity in some respect. Categorization allows you to systematize and organize the elements of a person’s mental life. For example, a table, a chair, a wardrobe and a refrigerator fall under the category “furniture”.

All of the above allows us to assert that the conceptual picture of the world of representatives of any local culture appears in the form of a complex system.

In the life of its bearer - be it an individual or an entire nation - the conceptual picture of the world performs two main functions:

1.Regulatory function. The picture of the world serves as a guide for its bearer in carrying out life activities, regulating the peculiarities of his perception of new information about the world around him, the processing and storage of this information, as well as the external activity of a person in certain life situations in accordance with the information received.

2.Interpretive function. The point here is that knowledge about nature and social reality, which makes up the picture of the world, is not just combined within the framework of this picture of the world, but is also evaluated. Each culture builds its own idealized model of the world, and if new acquired knowledge corresponds to the idealized model of the world, then it is assessed as “good”; if it does not correspond to at least one of its inherent parameters, then it is assessed as “bad”. If knowledge is not involved in the idealized model, it receives an “indifferent” rating. In this regard, it is often said that, depending on the angle of view on the phenomenon of the picture of the world, not only knowledge, but also so-called values ​​can be distinguished in its composition.


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Conceptual picture of the world

The result of the coordinated work of all cognitive mechanisms of human consciousness is a body of knowledge that reflects a person’s ideas about the world in a certain way. Such a body of knowledge in philosophical and linguistic literature is called a “picture of the world.” However, the picture of the world is not just the totality of a person’s knowledge about the world. If the world is considered as a picture of the world (PW), then a person’s position in this case should be understood as a worldview, which is a system of views and beliefs of a person, formed in the process of his life and determining his attitude to reality. N. Abieva believes that the picture of the world reflects the position, views and judgments of the individual regarding the world around him. In addition, a person’s attitude towards certain objects of reality can change them through activity. “Picture of the world” in this sense means the image of a certain world, both reflected and created by consciousness. Thus, KM is a global image of the world, the result of a person’s spiritual activity and his contacts with this world.

The process of reproducing CM in human consciousness, although it is a single, indivisible whole, is usually presented in the form of conceptual and linguistic models. This point of view is shared by many researchers: G.A. Brutyan, Yu.N. Karaulov, G.V. Kolshansky, R.I. Pavilionis, Z.D. Popova, I.A. Sternin, V.N. Telia, A.A. Ufimtseva and others. The conceptual picture of the world (CPW) is a CP obtained as a result of direct knowledge of the surrounding reality. It can be defined as cognitive, since it is “the result of cognition (cognition) of reality and acts as a set of ordered knowledge - the conceptosphere” [Popova, Sternin 2002: 4-5]. The linguistic picture of the world (LPP), which can also be designated by the terms “linguistic intermediate world”, “linguistic representation of the world”, “linguistic model of the world”, arises in the process of cognition due to the active role of language. This is the result of the fixation of the concept sphere by secondary sign systems that materialize and externalize the direct cognitive picture of the world existing in the mind.

As E. Balbina notes, conceptual and linguistic CM are very closely interconnected and interdependent. However, the linguistic picture of the world is not equal to the conceptual one; the latter is much broader. The JCM covers only a certain part of the conceptual picture of the world. YCM is the result of reflecting the unique socio-historical experience of a certain nation. Language does not create a picture of the world that is different from the objectively existing one, but only a specific coloring of this world, determined by the way of life and national culture of a given people. In light of the above, it seems necessary and appropriate to consider conceptual and linguistic CM, without dividing them according to the degree of significance for the human understanding of the world. As L. Gazizova notes, a person lives in a linguistic society. He enriches his conceptual system thanks not only to his personal life, but also to socio-historical experience, and therefore thanks to language, since it is in it that the universal and national experience is enshrined. The picture of the world that is formed and reflected in the human mind is the secondary existence of the world, recorded in a special material form, which is language.

Language is the most important way of forming and existing human knowledge about the world. Reflecting the objective world in the process of activity, a person records the results of knowledge in words. The totality of this knowledge, captured in linguistic form, represents a linguistic picture of the world. So, YCM is a set of ideas about man and the world around him, reflected in specifically national linguistic forms and semiotics of linguistic expressions.

The center of the linguistic picture of the world is man as the pinnacle of the universe, the starting point, the meaning and purpose of all its components, in contrast to the systematized and consistent scientific picture of the world, where man is not the main character, but occupies a modest place along with many other system-forming elements of the universe.

E.S. Yakovleva understands the JCM as a scheme of perception of reality fixed in language and specific to a given linguistic community. “The linguistic picture of the world is a kind of worldview through the prism of language.”

The concept of YCM goes back to the ideas of W. von Humboldt and the neo-Humboldtians about the internal form of language, on the one hand, and to the ideas of American ethnolinguistics, in particular the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity, on the other. Modern ideas about NCM as presented by academician. Yu.D. Apresyan look like this. Each natural language reflects a certain way of perceiving and organizing (“conceptualizing”) the world. The meanings expressed in it form a certain unified system of views, a kind of collective philosophy, which is imposed as mandatory on all speakers of the language. The way of conceptualizing reality inherent in a given language is partly universal, partly nationally specific, so that speakers of different languages ​​can see the world slightly differently, through the prism of their languages. On the other hand, the linguistic picture of the world is “naive” in the sense that in many significant respects it differs from the “scientific” picture. At the same time, the naive ideas reflected in the language are by no means primitive: in many cases they are no less complex and interesting than scientific ones. Such, for example, are ideas about the inner world of man, which reflect the introspection experience of dozens of generations over many millennia and can serve as a reliable guide to this world. In the naive picture of the world, one can distinguish naive geometry, naive physics of space and time, naive ethics, psychology, etc. .

According to V. Borisenko, the concept of YCM includes two related but different ideas: 1) the picture of the world offered by language differs from the “scientific” one and 2) each language paints its own picture, depicting reality somewhat differently than other languages ​​do . Reconstruction of the JCM is one of the most important tasks of modern linguistic semantics. The study of NCM is carried out in two directions, in accordance with the two named components of this concept. On the one hand, based on a systematic semantic analysis of the vocabulary of a certain language, a reconstruction of an integral system of ideas reflected in a given language is carried out, regardless of whether it is specific to a given language or universal, reflecting a “naive” view of the world as opposed to a “scientific” one.

On the other hand, individual concepts characteristic of a given language are studied, which have two properties: they are “key” for a given culture (i.e. they provide the key to its understanding) and at the same time the corresponding words are poorly translated into other languages: there is no translation equivalent at all , or such an equivalent exists in principle, but does not contain precisely those components of meaning that are specific to a given word.

Conceptualism from lat. “conceptus” – concept, thought, – direction in the culture of the twentieth century. It was formed during the course of postmodernism in the 1960s–1980s.

Conceptualism is aimed at creating compositions whose purpose is to present some artistic idea. He combined the process of creativity and its research. This creativity is engaged in the analysis of its own language. Its task is the transition from the formation of artistic works to the announcement of “artistic ideas”.

Discussing pop art, which focused on the objective world, conceptualists explained that the only deserved task of the artist is the generation of ideas and concepts.

As a direction conceptualism formed in the late 60s and 70s among artists from Great Britain, France, the USA, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union and Italy. As the apologists of this movement believe, since the concept of a work is more important than its physical expression, the goal of creativity is to convey an idea or testify to the events containing it, which can be done with the help of photography, various texts, tape and video recordings, and so on.

The instructions for explaining the art object play a huge role.

Conceptual artists

The trend quickly grew and became international. Artists who worked in conceptualism: L. Levin, LeVito, H. Haacke, R. Berry, J. Kosuth in the USA, J. Dibbets in the Netherlands, V. Acconchin in Italy, Craig-Martin, B. McLean, Bergin, Arnatt, Long , Kelly in the UK and others. The work of Dadaist practitioner and theorist Marcel Duchamp had a huge influence on conceptualists, who, back in 1913 in New York, began to exhibit mass-produced objects rethought in a new key - readymades: a bicycle on a stool, a urinal "Fountain", "Mona Lisa" with mustache and so on.

Conceptualism- intellectual creativity, mostly ironic - arose initially as a counterweight to commercial art.

There is no point in buying or selling a conceptual composition; the components for them were selected from everyday objects, sometimes the author himself became the artistic object. Stuart Brisley spent hours in a bathtub filled with black, dirty liquid in a London art gallery for two weeks (alluding to environmental pollution). Ingrid and Ian Baxter turned everything in their apartment into plastic bags and created an exhibition (the object of observation can be any thing). Keith Arnatt put up a sign saying “I am a true artist”, took a photograph of himself and placed the image in the exhibition (an artist is someone who considers himself to be one). Acconci photographed and then commented on how he got up and went to chairs every day, then compared the different methods in which he did this (varieties of modus operandi).

A conceptual object, with a comment, can be any object (telegram, photograph, diagram, text, graph, reproduction, diagram, object, copier, formula). The conceptual composition was a pure artistic gesture, freed from any plastic form. Natural materials were often used - grass, earth, ash, bread, fire ashes, snow. An integral part of the composition is the environment in which conceptual objects were demonstrated - the sea coast, a settlement, a street, a field, mountains, a forest, an engineering structure, a building, and so on.

Conceptualism is a movement that emerged in America and Europe in the 1960s, but also has a rich heritage in Russian culture. This distinguishes him from contemporary movements - abstract expressionism and pop art, which on the territory of the Soviet Union were transformed into completely different ones (see article)

1987. Plywood, acrylic. 24×30 cm

The main object of conceptual art is an idea, so it often works with text. Essentially, it explores the boundary between text and visual images. A work of conceptual art can be not only a painting, but also a sculpture, installation, and performance.

The most prominent representatives of conceptualism on the Western Front can be called Joseph Kosuth, Yves Klein, and in some periods of creativity - Piero Manzoni, Robert Rauschenberg. Apart from Kossuth, other artists came to conceptualism and after some time abandoned it.

Among the Moscow conceptualists, the main ones are Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, then Andrei Monastyrsky, Igor Makarevich and the “Collective Actions” group, in some of their works the “Nest” group.

Please note that we don't write "style", we write "direction" - conceptual art does not have a single "style" - like, say, impressionism. The most characteristic stylistic features can be called the frequent presence of text in the painting.

“The text is present in the work either literally, or the text is assumed, it seems to glimmer, shine through the picture - as, for example, in Pivovarov’s paintings - it is clear that a story is told there, but it is told by figures, color, spots, color segments" - Natalya Sidorova, ( art critic, teacher of the educational program “In the Footsteps of Contemporary Art” at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, senior researcher in the department of Contemporary Movements at the State Tretyakov Gallery )


Victor Pivovarov “Moscow speaks...”.1992

The most significant example of the concept of “conceptual art” is the work of Joseph Kosuth “One and Three Chairs”, or his numerous self-describing works of neon lamps. Kossuth summed up his art beautifully: “The main meaning of conceptualism, it seems to me, is to fundamentally rethink the way a work of art functions - or, how culture itself functions: how meaning can change even if the material does not change. ...the physical shell must be destroyed, because art is the power of an idea, not a material.”


Joseph Kosuth, “One and Three Chairs”. 1965

What's interesting about this chair? For example, the fact that Joseph Kosuth did not personally come to the store to choose a chair so that his work could be exhibited in a new place. The chair was chosen by the assistant curator - in fact, it didn’t matter who. Each time, with each repetition, this work will be the authorship of Joseph Kosuth, because the artist is the author of the idea.

Kossuth's works describe themselves in most cases, without being an object of aesthetic pleasure. It is important for an artist to appeal to your consciousness without affecting the emotional spectrum. If we think in a historical context, then this is quite understandable - the emotional spectrum of the viewer was completely squeezed out by the existential revelations of expressionist artists bursting onto the canvas.


William de Kooning, "The Exchange". 1955

What is the difference between Moscow conceptualism and Western? The main author who dissected and defined the concept of “Moscow conceptualism” is Boris Groys. He is the author of the term that is still in use today - “Moscow romantic conceptualism”. The fact is that Western conceptualism did not contain literature at its core (meaning “great” literature).

“Both founding fathers of Moscow conceptualism, Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov, cite great Russian literature as the origins of their work. Kabakov very often bases his works on some characters. Among his heroes appears a mediocre artist. Or a person who doesn’t throw anything away - as in his installation “10 Characters”, in which Kabakov works between 10 fictional characters, each of whom is a little hero who lives in a small apartment, downtrodden, no one knows him, he’s so shy and marginal character, and he secretly, quietly, does some things for the soul. When he is in the public eye, he lives the quiet life of a clerk, a factory worker, and so on. A very inconspicuous person. And this hero, this little man - this same “little man” from the works of Gogol, Chekhov,” Natalia Sidorova.

The works of Moscow conceptualists are often “literature”, a story told not in literary language, but in the form of installations, paintings, or a set of objects.
Besides, it's always a bit of a confession. Kabakov does not talk about himself, but he “let it slip” about himself, trusting his story, dividing himself into several heroes. Something that is in him - some small, hidden trait - he talks about it, inventing a character who carries this trait in a more pronounced form.

“This is important, given that on the global stage, conceptualism and confessional art are perfect antipodes - you cannot compare conceptualism with expressionism - there is a confession, a tear in the soul, when the artist expresses himself to the utmost. But in Moscow conceptualism there is a certain confessionalism, even a certain emotionality, which is simply not manifested by shouting,” N.S.

Take, for example, the work of Kossuth described above - “One and Three Chairs” - there is no author in it. The author in these works is removed, and even the specific object on display can be picked up by anyone - from these works we learn nothing about Kossuth’s character. In the Western European direction, this absence is deliberately provided; there the author does not have a personal manner and cannot have one, there is no personal history, and there is only the primacy of the concept.

Pivovarov and Kabakov are the whales, but there is another generation, for example, Yuri Albert - he is a very consistent conceptualist. His work “Painting for the Blind” is a black shield covered with oil enamel, and on its part are attached small hemispheres, also covered with this color. Walking a short distance away, the viewer realizes that this is Braille. This font contains the phrase “Inspiration is not for sale, but painting can be sold.” The Braille font is large and a blind person could not read it, because the inscription is too large, and a seeing person cannot understand what is written there - for him it is just minimalism (see article about). It turns out that the main thing here is the concept, how much we understand or do not understand art.


Yuri Albert “Painting for the blind. Visual Culture N3" From the series "Elitist-Democratic Art" 1989

“There is a temptation to talk about what is most important for Albert - to state that the viewer very often does not understand contemporary art, but, in fact, how the artist himself comments on this project - we are talking generally about the degree of understanding of art - is there this ideal viewer , who truly understands what the artist is expressing. Moreover, contemporary art can be understandable to us because it comes from our time, and because we can easily, standing in front of a work, go online and immediately receive a certain number of texts about both Albert and EDI. What to do with the art of past centuries? You can talk about the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch as much as you like, cite historical facts, features of culture, people, eras as much as you want, we will not be able to rebuild our optics, because we are not people of the 16th century,” Natalia Sidorova.

If the “first wave” of conceptualists took their work very seriously (“Art before our time is as much art as a Neanderthal is a man!”), then the followers of this trend fully allowed themselves self-irony in their works - however, never refusing from the principles of the work, reflecting on the theme of itself and from the textual content.



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