Talk
Igor Chubarov: Limits of the Formalist Method in Understanding Portraiture: The Russian Avant-Garde and The Art of the Portrait.
From a dialectic perspective, portraits are seen to be the result of the application of distinct, expressive and constructive methods. Such a perspective examines how these methods can be combined in the overall structure of an artistic image to express the uniqueness and even the personality, the aura, of a piece of art. However, neither the synthesis of distinct, expressive and constructive forms, the detachment dialectic of art, nor the self-expression of the artist were considered sufficient by GAChN theorists. According to The Art of the Portrait, artists did not simply produce something for display but rather they tried to recreate what they saw or to depict the awareness of the subject portrayed. To achieve this they turned to an ancient social technique: invoking the realm of the primitive so common in religious artefacts. Thus on this point, the position of the GAChN philosophers was basically compatible to the intuitions of the LEF Productivists. The problem of the portrait could not be solved without also addressing the notion of the object itself, which could not be reduced to its mere artistic composition.