LANGUAGE OF ART

Mikhail Zaborov

“The language of art” is a common expression, but what is it? No one seems to have really explained it. Here is what one of the most brilliant minds in this field, Yuri Lotman, writes: “In order for the recipient to understand the sender of the message, they must have a common intermediary - language.” You can’t argue with this, but here’s the problem: I don’t know the Greek language and therefore I don’t understand Greek texts, but I understand, I feel the ancient Greek plasticity, what kind of language is this that mediates between me and the ancient Greeks?

Here is another statement from Lotman: “Fiction, as one of the types of mass communication, must have its own language. “To have your own language” means to have a certain closed set of meaningful units and rules for their connection, which allow you to transmit certain messages.” This completely confuses the matter, because in art there are no such significant units, everything is fused there, flows into one another, and it is impossible to draw any distinctions into separate significant units. Lotman understands this perfectly well, for he writes that a literary work is a single sign, so what kind of distinctions are there into meaningful units? But what about the rules for connecting signs in reading literary works? There are no such rules and cannot exist, and if there were rules for connecting artistic signs, then art created according to the rules, as Kant rightly noted, turns into a craft, so where is the language of art? The linguistic system is a stretch for art.

And yet art is communication, there is no doubt about it; can we abandon the linguistic-semiotic scheme altogether when studying art?

Yuri Lotman also outlines a way out of the impasse, he writes: “an artistic message creates an artistic model of any specific phenomenon - artistic language models the universe in its most general categories, which, being the most general content of the world, are a form of existence for specific things and phenomena.” Brilliant idea! All that remains is to explain what this universe is, and where to even look for it?

Since we started with ancient Greek sculpture, it is quite clear that the universe is none other than man. And, as they say, there is no need to go far here, for such a conclusion was already made by a contemporary of the ancient Greek plastic classics, Protagoras, with his famous statement: “Man is the measure of all things...”. This means that the human measure is the language that mediates my connection, my understanding of Greek sculpture today. But Protagoras says “man is the measure of all things,” and not just marble statues of man! All things - that means also non-artistic things? In a general philosophical sense, one can challenge Protagoras, because there is both materialism and objective idealism... but in an aesthetic sense, Protagoras is absolutely right, man is a universal measure. And this means that the measure of man is not only the language of art, but also the language of beauty - a general aesthetic one. That is, both the artist and nature speak to us in this anthropomorphic language.

But how exactly does a person become an aesthetic measure? Heraclitus answers this question simply, not to say simplistically: “... the most beautiful monkey is ugly in comparison with the race of people... the wisest of people in comparison with God seems like a monkey - both in wisdom and in beauty, and in everything else.” Here a new and very important character appears - God. The only trouble is that neither Heraclitus nor anyone else saw God, so it is worth remembering not the Greek, but the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach and his famous statement: it was not God who created man, but man created God in his own image and likeness. This means we have to turn again to Protagoras: Man is the measure of all things!

Let us repeat, in philosophy we may or may not be anthropocentrists, but in aesthetics we are ultimatum anthropomorphists. When we say that something is like a person, or, on the contrary, contrary to him, the point of reference remains the person, and this is the decisive moment for aesthetics.

Man is a biological being, and therefore some of his features, qualities, parameters can be a measure in relation to any bio-being, or bio-similar object. But man is also a social being, and this greatly complicates the picture of aesthetic attitudes. Without going into all the complexity of aesthetic issues, we will conditionally designate the similarity, or better yet, the “agreement” of an object with human nature as a kind of positive consonance, and disagreement as a negative dissonance. Then we can say that a person needs this agreement between the object and its nature, he needs consonance, but still with an admixture of negativity. Art that does not contain dissonance at all becomes “sweet”; beauty turns into prettiness, which Picasso considered the main enemy of beauty. It’s even appropriate to compare aesthetic taste with gastronomic taste: we all love to add a little pepper, mustard, horseradish to a delicious roast, that is, the need for dissonance already exists at an elementary, physiological level. This problem of negativity becomes almost the main difficulty in aesthetics.

The need for consonance is understandable, it is in human nature itself, but the need for dissonance is more complicated, it can be explained at different levels: physiological, psychological, aesthetic... we will offer an explanation at the most general level - systemological. The principle of movement in nature is a spiral, and this is like a broken circle (dissonance). A vicious circle is the principle of immutability and statics. The natural system needs this circular stability (heredity), but it also needs development (mutation) and this is a spiral. Without development there is no life, a living organism is not a closed system, and, apparently, there is no true beauty without dissonance.

And it is at this systemological level that we can come closer to understanding the universe that Lotman called the language of art, and we also called the language of beauty. Speaking about beauty in general, we have already essentially left the framework of linguistics and semiotics, but the semiotic scheme developed in detail by scientists will help us understand at least the specifics of the language of art, to understand how this language differs from ordinary language.

Let us dare to make a revolutionary statement: art is not linguistic communication. Let us clarify this statement. When we see a tree in a picturesque landscape, it seems to us that the denotation (designated) of this artistic sign is a real tree, but this is not entirely true or not at all true. What is “signified,” or rather what is expressed, it is important to emphasize, here is not a tree, which may not exist at all, but an image, a certain mysterious mental process that took place in the artist’s soul when creating this landscape. This spiritual “denotation” is already in quotation marks, because it is not visible, not heard, not touched, not perceived by any means, i.e. for the recipient of art it disappears; let’s call it a phantom denotation. He is and he is not, he is not and he very much is, for this phantom decides everything, and his invisible presence in art creates a feeling of magic. A tree drawn in this way, losing its denotation-semantics, becomes pseudo or quasi-semantic.

The specialness and uniqueness of the spiritual “denotation” changes everything, all linguistic categories turn into quasi, or pseudo. A sign ceases to be a sign in the usual sense of the word, for it does not designate, but expresses, how? This is a special conversation. In addition, the denotation is not perceived and thus falls out of the semiotic context, and with it the semantics of the artistic message is lost.

Thus, we first recorded the disappearance of the rules for connecting signs from the language of art, and then the disappearance or mutation of the sign itself, the disappearance of semantics, and therefore we must now record the disappearance of the language of art itself, so the once mighty Union fell apart, finding itself without union republics.

When semantics (the signified) disappears from the language, what remains is syntactics (the combination of signs) and pragmatics (the impact of signs on the receiver) - this is no longer quite a language and not quite signs, which therefore should be renamed special signs - signals. That is, the language of art is actually a signaling system, and the “language of art” in the usual sense is a conditional expression.

A signal differs from an ordinary sign in that it does not mean anything, but is a stimulator of some action, energy, process, and here we come to an aspect that has always been missed in aesthetic research - the energy aspect of art.

Various studies list the various functions of art: epistemological function, pedagogical, compensatory, hedonistic, etc. But there is no indication of the energetic function of art, and yet the perception of art excites energy in us, we call it emotional perception, but emotions are a manifestation of very strong mental energy. Clearly, artistic impact is very different from simply cold reporting of facts, although the facts themselves can be very exciting. In art it’s the other way around; it can be about nothing like music and really excite, captivate, and impress us. That's the nature of signals, they don't mean anything, but they are very significant. Therefore, the information approach that equates artistic communication with a linguistic message is incorrect.

Signals should be divided into artificial and natural: the commander shouts “fire!” - the soldier shoots, without going too deeply into the commander’s considerations, the command is an artificial signal. But the form acts on us directly, also without logical arguments and without being too frank in revealing its essence - this is a natural signal.

Language is a means of communication, art is communication itself, that is, it is not only a utilitarian means, it is a means-end. The medium of art is a signal, but again with a reservation, because a signal is also a linguistic term, and we use such in the non-linguistic concept of art only partially and conditionally. The fact is that in a work of art, again, it is impossible to distinguish individual signs-signals, it is all a single signal, and here we have to prefer the traditional word “form” to the term signal, which operates in art according to the principle of a signal. She excites our emotions - energy, thoughts, and the whole question is how does she do this?

Here we must return to the beginning of our article and to our discussions about consonance and dissonance in a very broad sense of these concepts: positive consonance as the agreement of a form with human nature and negative dissonance as opposition to it. In this sense, the unity and struggle of human and alien, anti-human forms and forces is the specific, aesthetic language of art. These unity and struggle create emotional, energetic tensions in art that excite our soul, and which distinguish the artistic form from a simple linguistic message.

The struggle between consonance and dissonance is the syntactics of artistic language, if we still use a semiotic term. Pragmatics, that is, the impact of this syntactics on us can be very strong.

The struggle of human and anti-human forces, factors, forms is most clearly expressed in modernism, in its deformations, for example in the art of Picasso, it reflects the struggle of the same forces in society.

What is obvious in Picasso is in most cases latent, hidden. So the Greek sculpture with which we started, and which seems to embody pure harmony, is still not “sweet”, the beauty in it does not turn into prettiness, and this indicates the latent presence of dissonance.

The non-semantic, art-specific language of “consonance-dissonance” is connected to very different degrees with what we called artistic quasi-semantics, right down to texts when it is already difficult to distinguish an artistic text from a utilitarian one, or when a utilitarian text only uses artistic elements for emotional self-strengthening, for example, oratory.

To summarize, we repeat: language denotes realities - art expresses them, and not all of them, but only subjective ones - these are deeply different processes, and here lies the gulf between language and art. And not all subjective realities are expressed by art, but by special creative ideas, we called these creative ideas phantom, because each is unique, effective and elusive, cannot be detected, designated, it can only be expressed and only by a given work of art. This is what Tolstoy meant when he said that if he tried to explain what his novel War and Peace was about, he would have to write the novel again.

Language names not things, but types of things: a house is all houses, a forest is all forests... since a creative idea is unique, it can only be designated by a proper name, but this will say absolutely nothing about it. Yuri Lotman defined the language of art as a universe; the extra-linguistic concept of art contrasts this with the uniqueness of an undesignated creative idea.

The language of art is anthropomorphic: since the measure in art is human, all forms are perceived as anthropomorphic in a positive or negative sense. Even when we see a still life, or a landscape, an abstraction, here too we perceive objects, closed forms as subjects, and the surrounding space as the living environment of these subjects.

The anthropomorphic language of art operates on the principle of a signal that does not mean anything, but is very significant, giving impetus to the process of aesthetic perception with all its emotions and thoughts. Our signal interpretation allows us to identify the role of what is called thesauros - the internal baggage of the receiver, because an artistic impulse excites and organizes what is already contained in the human brain, which is why people’s reactions to artistic influence are so different and individual.

Throughout this text we have deliberately sharpened the distinction between the artistic and the non-artistic, but in reality there is a wide “neutral zone” where elements are mixed and the boundaries are difficult to distinguish. The more semantics in art, the less strictly aesthetic, poetic, and more prose.

There is hardly any need to abandon the generally accepted term “language of art,” but I would like to believe that our modest text has explained the specifics of this language; the language of art is based on special, anthropomorphic, non-semantic signs-signals, to varying degrees combined with quasi-semantic signs; there are no rules for connecting signs-elements of an artistic form.