Synteza i wypowiedź : poezja i filozofia w sztukach wizualnych na przełomie XX i XXI wieku wybrane zagadnienia

Abstract

The author of the work entitled Synthesis and Statement. Poetry and Philosophy in the VisualArts at the End of the 20th and at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Selected Issues is trying to show the possibility of finding objective beauty in the modem art of installation and video installation by means of analyses utilizing the methods of literary poetics research. This means the necessity to recall the research concerning the question of kinship and synthesis of arts, including in particular, the relationship of visual arts and literature, and of word and image. The studies of philosophers and aestheticians indicate the common occurrence of poetic elements in different art disciplines, which is supposed to cause special cognitive possibilities of the works of art. Art historians and literati, on the one hand, indicate various elements in common, especially in contents, and the possibilities of comparison; and, on the other hand, they think about the possibilities to apply the research tools connected with one discipline in another one. Trials related to applying semiotic analyses of literary poetics in visual arts were particularly developed, which, however, was criticized by art historians (who contested the role of the word in visual arts in general, and suggested application of tools appropriate for visual analyses, in relation to text). Finally, most frequently, the possibility to call a work of art a statement was accepted, and a modification of structural methods was suggested, particularly by means of assuming an anthropological perspective, or a phenomenological concentration on the work of art. According to those suggestions, the proper argument starts with consideration of usefulness of the term statement in relation to visual arts, indicating the common presence of such elements as the subject, the recipient, the message, and the poetic procedures (e.g. building narration, using symbols, allegories, metaphors, stylisations), which however, discuss the function of speech and words. Those indications are used in analyses of the examples selected among the works presented at the last exhibitions of Documenta and at the Venecian Biennale, and at the exhibitions in Poland. Structural and phenomenological analyses of the poetics of works of art show the artists’ frequent thinking of the problems related to philosophical anthropology which determines the structure and the aesthetic expression of the works. Noticing that situation is possible thanks to hermeneutic interpretation which is based on analyses of poetics and which is challenging for the recipients. Such an interpretation evoked by an image, but requiring the effort of deciphering the poetics, revealing the role of philosophical problems, takes part in the mind - the space appropriate to art as an intentional creation, and one which uses the word. It turns out that the synthesis made in a visual statement, concerning not only different art disciplines, but mainly the word and image, is happening in the thought area, and it is that anthropological truth that is exposed in modern art. At the same time that creation, through being poetizing, is still art, and not philosophy, or philosophical anthropology. It is not philosophizing, but philosophizing poetizing, combining the primacy of aesthetics with the cognitive function. Works of contemporary art fulfill their aesthetic and cognitive functions thanks to an intensive image that has a tremendous impact on philosophical poetizing, which is, obviously, aesthetically marked. Fulfflling those functions through selfless existence, exposing the synthetic role of the thought, reaching the space of the idea through poetizing its aesthetic structure, in connection with the sphere of directly presented contents (however, not as illustration of the assumed philosophical idea), the work of art finally reveals two other and equally fundamental as the role of cogito, thruths about man. Thruths about the need for sense and beauty, which together; and that is still another platform for synthesis; may be satisfied with the experienced and discussed art, including the contemporary one. Works of contemporary art, which are perceived as iconic utterances, make poetic statements in a philosophical way in order to indicate that the concept of synthesis refers not only to the relations between various arts, but also to the relation between the word and the image, and, first of all, to the relation between sense and beauty, whereas the area of those synthetic links is the thought which, together with the need for sense and beauty fulfilled with the use of the image and the word, constitutes the core of human nature.