Marksisma mantojums un mākslas interpretācija: Starp estētisku vērtību un sociālu simptomu
The Marxist Legacy and the Interpretation of Art: Between Aesthetic Value and Social Symptom

Summary/Abstract: The basic premises of Marxism in respect to art are well known – art is a social phenomenon impossible to explain outside the economic structures of the society in which and for which it is made. The challenging switch between aesthetic and social readings is reminiscent of the duck-rabbit dilemma known from the psychology of perception – it is impossible to perceive both images at the same time. Although primitive, deterministic versions of Marxism are largely of historical interest only, seeing art processes as a field of interaction of social, ethnic, gender, race and other contextual factors has not only been recognised but also became a dominant set of interpretational strategies, contesting the Western art-historical canon, the ideas of art’s autonomy, aesthetic contemplation and creative genius of the artist. Some local critics, echoing these developments, also have voiced discontent with reproducing traditional canon-type conceptions of national art history and descriptions of works’ formal attributes while disregarding the social factors. If such strategies as feminism, gender studies or the post-colonial discourse are relatively new on Latvian soil, Marxist ideas have circulated in the local intellectual milieu since the late 19th century. In line with the dominant Soviet ideology, they have been comparatively well documented. Most Latvian Marxist authors of the early 20th century focused on literature, only marginally touching upon the visual arts. In the interwar period Marxist ideas developed from more radical, expressionist-style echoes of proletarian culture to gradual restoration of order. Art as the indicator of the class struggle also sometimes left room for the concept of artist-genius, his gift consisting precisely in an ability to sense the social change first, as described by art historian Kristaps Eliass. The writer Andrejs Kurcijs who attempted to introduce the trend of Activism, a term coined in the melting pot of European Avant-garde trends, also voiced a compromise between the understanding of form and sociological assessment, each illuminating the other. Though politically unacceptable, leftist views emphasising serious content instead of the bourgeois formalism coincided with the European-wide renaissance of realism and neo-classicism in late 1920s and early 1930s. They were selectively institutionalised as “progressive” in the following period of Soviet domination. The tension between the aesthetic value and social symptom seems to inhabit a middle zone whose extremes are perfectly described by the sociologist Michael Schudson – neither science nor any other means are precise instruments to render the world and its objects as they are but reducing everything to just ideology or the projection of the observer’s own position onto the world is equally misguided, both approaches denying the problem of mutual interaction.

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