Vladimir Koshaev
Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts, Russia
Art as spiritual purity comes from a paradise garden — a secret desire of a creator to achieve a revelation, i.e. to open boundless worlds of love and to make a human immortal. Immortality is acquired through Salvation, inseparable from repentance, a sacrifice and communion as a reverse side of beauty and joy. An artist brings Gifts of the Holy Spirit to restore the spiritual fullness in human’s mind, to print the expression of divine beauty.
The core of the ontology of art and artistic life of a spiritual truth is sacrificial predetermination, in which cult permeates art, showing relations of the natural and the supernatural. The ontology of art is a sacred experience (of God) gained through the re-creation of the image of the atoning sacrifice and fulfillment of the covenant of the Lord’s Supper “Given me his body as food”. Recreating of the Feat promoted the development of the confessional canon. Things and actions, space inside and outside the temple represent the feat.
People take their liturgical experience beyond the walls of the temple, and an adopted sacrifice holds the Christian world with the grace of God, which can be used as a method of art to reveal human divinity expression in the world.
Artistry in the performance of the universal moral law in Christianity aspires to connect a human to the transpersonal Son of the God. Art contributes to the transformation of a subject into an object, into the inseparability of the total creation. One discovers the latter in the works of St. Basil the Great (4th century): “The essence has no independent existence, but is seen in person”. Interpretation of inseparability of nature and a thing inside an object is in sacrificial manner the ontological content of art, including contemporary one:
• ontology as a sacrificial predestination of the relationship between the God and a human;
• a sacrifice as the rule of art: the subordination of a “text” to the voice of the divine Will;
• the identity of the sacrifice and plastic ways of a composition (lines, colors, spots, spaces), their specifics in the post-Soviet time;
• the image as a divine prototype of notions not only in art, but also in public enlightment, education — the fundamental principle of ethical word-meaning sacrificial predestination;
• examples of religious themes in the post-Soviet art.