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CULTURE AS A TEXT AND A PROJECT IN THE POST-SOVIET DISCOURSE (BY THE EXAMPLE OF KAZAKHSTAN) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 1 (35). P. 30-47

The article presents an analysis of the semiotic aspects of significant texts and visual samples in the discursive art practice of post-Soviet Kazakhstan from the 1990s to nowadays. Literary centricity as a universal property of the entire post-Soviet visual culture is revealed on the previously unstudied material, which has intermedial and intertextual specifics. Art discourse is analyzed on the thematic and rhetorical levels, using verifiable scientific methods for these levels (content analysis, critical discourse analysis, the deconstruction method). As a result, the art objects of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, with the texts included in them, are analyzed in the article in the local historical and political context. Three projects were identified: Eurasian, Pan-Turkic, and liberal. As given intertexts, they determined the social and cultural boundaries and assessments of Kazakhstani artists. The projects, as written and proved in the article, had their historical foundations and still determine the real policy. The art ideas which appeared within the framework of these projects find a modern medial reflection. The work, for the first time in the scientific literature, proves that medial experiments in the practice of Kazakhstani contemporary art (texts and performances by Sergei Maslov, Ziyakhan Shaigeldinov (Shai-Ziya), Yerbol Meldibekov, Elena and Viktor Vorobyov, as well as modern actionists) documented the process of what is happening, reflected the traumatic nature of reality itself. For the first and only time in the public space of the country, as the article shows, by means of art practice, these experiments have criticized the quasi-real world of Kazakhstan's social and cultural space. In the Kazakh contemporary art itself, there have always been a lot of texts and subtexts, which are often directly included in art objects or have created them. The article traces that these were such text samples that generated their own meaning along with a visual idea at a given point in time, which can be called the creation of discourse. The work also reveals that representatives of contemporary Kazakh art used the aesthetics of the absurd as a mechanism for transforming post-Soviet everyday life into a different and new reality, similar to how it happened in absurdist fiction of the twentieth century. At the same time, visual samples in Kazakhstani practice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries became real cultural aggregators, they replaced the written text and influenced its functioning in culture. The article reveals the still practically unexplored usage of the aesthetics of television intermediality in Kazakhstani contemporary art. Art projects and manifestos of Kazakh artists of the 1990s and the 2000s are presented as unique socio-political discursive texts that predicted the specific socio-political realities of the post-Soviet country.

Keywords: art project, discursive practice, literary centricity, intermedial, intertextual, cultural text, performance, post-Soviet, aesthetics of absurd

AESTHETICS OF FILM EDITING IN THE ART PRACTICE OF PAVEL ZALTSMAN // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2024. Issue 1 (39). P. 30-43

An analysis of the use of montage techniques as a literary method in the works of Pavel Zaltsman is presented in this article for the first time. The influence of the concept of analytical art and the practice of film editing of the 1930s on the formation of Zaltsman’s aesthetic views is revealed. At the time, the idea of montage became a kind of a cultural “fashion” of the time, and the basic principle of montage was applied not only to cinema, but also to poetry, prose, and painting. The research focus in the case of Zaltsman is retrospective. The authorial attitude of the writer Zalsman is compared with what Sergei Eisenstein did in the movie. The idea of post-utopian modernism – the portrayal of history and/or modernity in personal and social experience as a series of painful ruptures – is presented as the main narrative in Zaltsman’s unfinished novels: Puppies and Central Asia in the Middle Ages (or The Middle Ages in Central Asia). The article justifies that Zaltsman’s texts, which have become famous in our time, were generated by time itself and implement the artistic principles of the early avant-garde. The forms of interaction of the verbal, the intermedial, the cinematic, and the visual lead (in the case of Zaltsman’s texts, as described in the article) to the creation of a discourse that transforms reality in the reader’s mind. Zaltsman recodes the word in the specific and thoughtful way of structuring the text, which turned out to be possible thanks to the use of film editing techniques. The main feature of montage aesthetics in Zaltsman’s texts is dividing the text not into chapters, acts or scenes, but into fragments and episodes that reveal the writer’s montage optics. As a result, montage in the text, just like in the movies, creates subjectivity – the opportunity to perceive the reality through the eyes of the character. In the aesthetics of the novels, the montage of both planes (images) and episodes (actions) can be traced, which shapes the polyphonic novel as a film discourse. Despite the incompleteness of Zaltsman’s novels, the ideology and aesthetics of the literary texts are interesting from the standpoint of our time as they give a detached and objective view of what is happening that the author outlined using film editing techniques, and are expressed in the most original form of presenting a historical narrative that resonates with our time.

Keywords: avant-garde, discursive practice, intermediality, cinema, literary text, narrative, montage, poetics