Daži mākslinieka personības izpausmes veidi mūsdienu tēlniecībā
Some Aspects of Artist Personality in Contemporary Sculpture

Summary/Abstract: Ideas on the role of the artist’s personality and potential in the processes of emerging artistic paradigms involve complex, often hard to define qualities of perception, choice and stimulation on various psychic levels. In the 20th century sculpture, especially in the second half of the century, there have been especially radical changes of practice, psychological involvement and perceptual concepts. We know that French artist Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) provocative idea of the artist’s choice being the most important in defining artworks, not the physical making of objects, gave an inspiring stimulation and basis for almost all late 20th century avant-garde trends.One should note that in the multi-faceted post-modern context of intimately energetic actions, performances, coding of objects and psychological impacts (also shocking) on the viewer, some artists have paid particular interest to the experience obtained from the unconscious and transcendental layers. They have strived to use Eastern mysticism and meditation practices as well as alchemy, shamanism and elements of ancient magic rituals. A typical example is the personality of Serbian artist Marina Abramović (1946). Realising often dangerous performances with snakes, insects, and stones, and undergoing physical pain, suffering or meditation, the artist has shown both courage and the ability to coordinate the streams of pulsating energy, subjecting herself to deeply open, intuitive perception. In Latvia the mid-1980s saw a wider use of installations and various actions and performances. Representatives of different kinds of art took part in the development of these forms of expression: painters, graphic artists etc. They did not attempt to identify their environmental activities with sculpture, so a large part of the atypical manifestations of artists’ personalities in spatial solutions and actions are locally unrelated to sculpture where modes of conceptual thinking sometimes coexist with traditional means of creating form. Taking up the connection between psychophysical and mental spheres is revealed in the multimedia projects of Latvian artist Solveiga Vasiļjeva. Using drawings of material structures, photographs and digital prints (including her own medical examination results), the artist invites the viewer to inspect unusual conditions of her body and psyche. In the late 20th century, the broadening of the conceptual possibilities of sculpture, freed from heavy material modes of being, has played the role of an avant-garde movement. Nevertheless, traditional materials and techniques have retained a significant function. In Latvia several sculptors, such as Ojārs Feldbergs (1947), Ojārs Breģis (1942), Andris Vārpa (1950), Vilnis Titāns (1944-2006), Pauls Jaunzems (1951) and Igors Dobičins (1958), have maintained the traditional national attitude towards stone as an ancient cultural symbol, perfecting the means of working stone and searching for a new context for their ideas.

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