CC BY
73
УДК 130.2:7.016.4:316.324.3
Sultanova M.E., Nikolenko N.N., Mikhaylova N.A. THE TRADITIONAL NOMADIC ORNAMENT AS A SPIRITUAL AND AESTHETIC PHENOMENON. The article aims to investigate the spiritual nature of ornament as of the original genetic code in the traditional art of Central Asian nomads. Authors consider it as a peculiar embodiment of the centuries-old philosophical conception of steppe's worldview basis merging the dualism of time and space. That would help to clear the specificity of nomadic thinking which has allowed ornament to overstep the bounds of pure artistic technique and to be transformed into a spiritual constant responsible for preservation and transfer of folk's creative potential.
Key words: ornament, expressive language, information code, world-view, nomads, traditional art, heritage.
М.Э. Султанова, канд. искусствоведения, ст. преп. каф. «Академического рисунка и методики преподавания специальных дисциплин» Казахского национального педагогического университета им. Абая, г. Алматы, E-mail: madina-sultanova@yandex.ru; Н.Н. Николенко, магистр искусств, докторант PhD Казахского национального педагогического университета им. Абая, г. Алматы,
E-mail: nikolette.n@gmail.com; Н.А. Михайлова, канд. пед. наук, доц., зав. каф. «Графики и дизайна» Казахского национального педагогического университета им. Абая, г. Алматы,
E-mail: natalia-a.kz@mail.ru
ТРАДИЦИОННЫЙ ОРНАМЕНТ НОМАДОВ КАК ДУХОВНЫЙ И ЭСТЕТИЧЕСКИЙ ФЕНОМЕН
В статье исследуется духовная природа орнамента как своеобразного генетического кода в традиционном искусстве кочевников Центральной Азии. Авторы рассматривают традиционный орнамент номадов как своеобразное воплощение многовекового философского осмысления ключевых основ степного мировидения, объединяющих дуализм времени и пространства. Это поможет прояснить специфику мышления кочевников, которая позволила орнаменту выйти за границы художественного средства и трансформироваться в духовную константу, ответственную за сохранение и передачу творческого потенциала народа.
Ключевые слова: орнамент, выразительный язык, информационный код, мировоззрение, кочевники, традиционное искусство, наследие.
Time, being ruthless, has changed the face of that culture that remained unprotected. Today we can hardly understand once perfect system of traditional Great Steppes nomadic culture. Analyzing what acts as the protection of the spiritual kernel of any culture including the nomadic one, we can come to a conclusion that it is the ornament which has absorbed energy and aesthetics of the thousand-year sacred traditions. Admiring what we perceive as “ancient samples of national handicraft art”, we generally take it for just valuable factological material allowing us to penetrate deep into centuries. And the ornament that covers artifacts we regard as nothing else but an intricate pattern created by imagination of national craftsmen and forgetting, or most likely simply not understanding that we deal with a special type of symbolical texts, with a ligature which narrates the genesis and the flowering of the world.
It is difficult to believe that traditional ornament is not a pattern possessing only artistic value. Ornament correlates aesthetic uniqueness and specific world outlook, generated at the dawn of culture's genesis. Perhaps, ornament is the only witness remained in centuries and called to prove the deepness of the symbolical consciousness, created by the unity of a myth and a person.
Ornamentology as a scientific concept of shapes formation endured different periods of its development, though the beginning of the most consecutive searches can be collocated with the time of industrial revolution. With the advent of purposeful researches in history and theory of arts' area, the ornament's nature was repeatedly analyzed. It drew attention of many eminent western philosophers. Kant and his followers considered ornament as a successful substantiation of the theory of pure art (Kant 1966). The concept is that ornament, mainly geometrical as the basic and the most archaic ornamental type in general, was considered as a special “version of art creativity in which art in general releases itself from communication with real life, from any substantial moments and becomes “a pure form”, an aimless “form's game” [1, c. 89].
It is necessary to notice that the whole 19th century is characterized by concentrated researches in the field of theory and philosophy of art. But the basic material used by these researches as their foundation was limited to well-known cultural epochs of the countries considered “responsible” for genesis only of the West European art. Therefore practically all offered theories at that time had certain contradictions, especially in view of political and social contacts' expansion to Middle and Central Asia where Europeans have faced an enormous cultural layer of unknown ethnic groups that first of all had the other way of life.
One of the most eminent theorists of art of the 19th century A. Riegl wrote that “transforming the nature, an artist creates freely submitting only to the artistic will, therefore the superior manifestation of a person's artistic ability are those kinds of fine arts which represent nothing - architecture and decorative art” (Arslanov 2005, 147). Riegl
also believed that a true creative ability of a person appears in its most bright form more and mainly in ornament than in fine art in general.
The Viennese school, which A. Riegl belonged to, as well as all the others at that time, generally forwarded rather contradictive theories, but in their internal dialectics was clearly revealed an aspiration to analyze and to argue with the unique purpose to search for the truth. Exactly the representatives of the above-mentioned school brought a solid contribution to a scientific study of the ornament's nature and place which it occupies in the whole system of fine arts. They deny ornament's independence as a phenomenon, condemn «ornament's transformation from a decoration to a representation» because in this case it destroys a plane, and at the same time they scrupulously develop the idea about its exclusiveness and artistic merit based on convention. Riegl wrote: “an image in order to become artistic needs convention; the artistic will manifests itself by means of transformation of something naturelike to a conventional one” [2, c. 150].
The artistic will was meant as a special internal vision of artist, allowing constructing relations close to inorganic crystal structures in which artist could idealize and harmonize imperfect images of organic origin.
The artistic will has already brightly proved itself during the primitive epoch, and further it underwent changes only in forms of its manifestation but not in its essence.
Any ornament, even by cursory examination, reveals the features of its structure consisting in symmetry and rhythm as bases of natural origin. It is often possible to notice a comparison of harmony and proportionality of ornamental compositions with the perfection of crystals' structure, as fundamental principles of everything that is in the nature. Riegl and his associates have faced the fact, which unfortunately they could not offer an objective explanation to, that “art is simultaneously natural and out-of-natural, ideal and real; being a reflection of the subject's form at the same time it is not reduced to its literal reproduction” [2, c. 153]. It was the result of extreme complexity of the problem and of a large quantity of the material under the study. It is necessary to notice that the western theorists based their researches on standard decorative concepts of plant character originating from Ancient Egypt and Antiquity, and then on classical Islamic twiddle samples based on strict geometrical proportions.
However it does not belittle the relevancy of researches in this area because they have defined ornament not as a dead, stiffened formula, but as something special, capable to revive when a person masters natural laws of him independent, such as a rhythm, symmetry, proportions. A person can embody in ornament a sort of a game where natural laws act like its objects; after all “real plant motives act here in abstract-harmonious communications unusual
for them and consequently they are a demonstration of human imagination's freedom” [2, c. 154].
Apparently these statements are also correct for images of fauna: simply in the 19th century practically nobody faced the similar phenomenon in practice. But in this case freedom doesn't act in sense of arbitrariness. In course of searches, if a certain degree of game with the necessity is supposed, it is possible to create something absolutely new that is absent in the nature and “an artist in some cases (first of all in geometrical ornament) underlines even excessively the absoluteness of the existence's necessity and regularity, recognizing their authority” [2, c. 154].
In the end of the 19th century the enlightened artistic community often spoke about “the destruction of ornament” in the modern society, resulted from the statement that the unique ability of ancient masters' artistic imagination to created ornamental compositions was almost lost. According to A. Riegl and G. Sedlmayer, the representatives of the Viennese school of Art Studies, this radical conclusion had real bases because “the artistic sense of ornament, as well as of all folk art, disappears when it loses relations with national life feeding its creativity” [2, c. 155].
It was also noticed that the artistic creativity is much freer beyond the civilization influence, and the artistic will of a person manifests in “a pure form”. Therefore ornament can be with full confidence defined as “the most generalized image of harmony of freedom and necessity between a person and the nature, representing one of the earliest expressions of a public ideal in history” [2, c. 154].
A new life was inhaled in ornament by the 20th century when modernism and abstract art appeared; the disputes on it do not cease till nowadays. On the one hand there acted opponents of ornament's separation to an independent artistic unit. They asserted that actually ornament can exist only in straight correlation with architecture and applied arts, but it cannot be an independent artistic unit. They condemned “the senselessness” of abstractionism, trying to give ornament the status of an easel picture. On the other hand there is a concept developed by cubists and improved by abstractionism. It announced that “the present world is the world of pure geometrical forms comprehended by our mind, and perceived by eyes, because what we see is a deviation from the pure form” [3, c. 100].
The above considered problem was not topical for nomadic world. The phenomena which in the settled world for a long time were already considered mostly as decorative elements were perceived as a specific language with its communicative, artistic-aesthetic, ethnically symbolical, magic and religious destination by nomads.
An original exception is represented also by Islamic ornamental traditions where the pre-nomadic and for some time now the settled way of life world-view was harmoniously combined with a special role of artistic symbol. Religious dogmas strictly forbade realistic images of living beings, so there was generated an absolutely unique sign system based on geometrical and plant ornaments under this press. Certainly, not only religious interdictions were the main reason of such formation; an important factor was represented by an unprecedented prosperity of sciences, especially the exact ones, which became a sort of an original mathematical substantiation of a new iconography. Therefore in Islam “an ornamental-decorative principle exists as a basic one, penetrating not only a twiddle, but also all plastic structure of art, subordinating both figurative images and color” [4, c. 144].
Besides, the interrelation between artistic principles and the informative sense ciphered in a word or in a sentence acts as rather a specific factor, because font is also ornament and it submits “to the general laws of artistic construction and artistic influence of ornament” [1, c. 115]. Font is to not be viewed but to be understood. If there is no understanding, any word will be a senseless set of some letters that separately express nothing. In this connection becomes clear a special sense of such phenomenon as. In religious and artistic traditions of Islamic art there is such concept as sifat, comprehended as the divine sense spiritualizing the writings on the walls of a mosque. The force which is invisibly present in Islamic ornaments and writings is identical to that one that fills with sense Kazakh kiuys (pieces of instrumental music peculiar for Turkic nomadic folks, mainly for Kazakhs and Kirghiz, both in ancient time and today. Along with musical value, kiuy has a deep philosophical sense, being an original reflection and a message to the ethnic group which it belongs to) and spatial infinity of nomadic ornaments.
The history of ornament is correlated very strongly with the history of proper folk and it is almost impossible to define accurately whose influence is dominant here: whether the national spirit creates ornament or its characteristic conventional signs direct people through time. Probably it will be right to consider ornament as a certain “blood group” or a gene inherent to this or that ethnos or
culture. It can be often noticed that people having rather distant relations with art, or not having it at all, define intuitively and correctly the culture by ornament which it belongs to. It occurs as simply and ordinary, as well as we “guess” a nationality of people judging by their appearance. In this case, proceeding from our supervisions, we are ready to draw certain conclusions and to develop an appropriate line of behavior.
Having a good orientation in the history of a folk, it is possible to comprehend the specifics of its art. The complexity of Middle East streets in the centuries-old cities-witnesses of their fallings and victories is closely related with the floridity of the Islamic ornaments. The immensity of Asian steppes' spaciousness gives freedom and openness of perception and as consequence the expression of it in variations of the traditional ornament, in its rhythmical, as the argamak's run (a thoroughbred race horse, marked by rare mind and endurance. It was extremely appreciated by nomads for its nobleness and fidelity to the owner. Argamak is one of the most widespread characters of nomadic mythology, eposes and fairy tales), smooth movements filled with latent energy.
It is inexpedient to consider ornament as something exclusively distinctive and consequently stable because ornament is a true ethnic story recorded by the unique visualized language. This history is formed by climatic, political, trade and economic processes, not to mention powerful cultural contacts.
The world of nomads is enormous and like a carpet it is webbed of many threads, where each of them is important and unique. Nomadic art also having a general concept was generated by loads of folks throughout hundreds of years in search of harmony.
The semantic kernel of traditional nomadic ornaments is composed by fundamental concepts of Chaos and Order, of Way and Search, of Infinity. But besides these philosophical imperatives general for all without any exception cultures, ornament acts also as an ethnic-social identifier allowing an unmistakable orientation in society with the following choosing of a line of behavior and developing a further strategy.
From aesthetic point of view nomadic ornament, besides the ideological content and artistic value, was perceived also as a final brush stroke; the integrity could not be reached without it. It is some kind of “Alpha and Omega” finishing the shape of everything made by hands of the master. The subject which has not been decorated with ornament was considered incomplete, faded and insignificant as it had only a utilitarian function; only ornament could bring sense and revive the material uniting the substantial and the spiritual one.
Ornament is not a decor though, certainly, it has such function. First of all it is a symbol which passes from generation to generation. Ornament developing infinitely in space often has a semantic sense of Way. That is why it was required to reproduce key elements of ornaments with accuracy, it was forbidden to change or supplement them, as people have no right to interfere in what is granted from above. As a rule, any ornament is formed of separate rhythmically repeated elements. Although such independently considered element gives certain information, it is a simple pattern, lifeless and motionless. But joining the general rhythm this pattern transforms itself into ornament as “the rhythm cements and correlates together isolated, homogeneous or diverse objects or their signs in a comprehensive whole” [5, c. 115].
Ornament is an extremely capacious concept; therefore we examine its traditional or primary form. There is a sufficient quantity of scientific and informative literature trying to reveal ornament's essence. But the more we learn about it, the more clearly we understand that much from what we know now is only superficial conceptions. It is inexpedient to consider it as a decorative phenomenon concerning exclusively the world of art because it is a special sacral knowledge of the Universe structure. It becomes easier for us to find its analogies among intelligible and habitual things. Therefore any traditional ornament is considered from the point of view of iconography where the main stimulus, according to Aristotle, is “the pleasure of recognition” [6, c. 34]. And we truly “recognize” in separate ornamental details the elements of an animal, of floral and geometrical worlds. But it does not give us possibility to penetrate the essence of ornament, and only a deep analysis of its semantics is capable to throw light on ornament's real destination as of the spirit's treasury.
Despite well-known formulations considering ornament as a rhythmically repeating pattern, called to organize and decorate a surface of something, we still inquire of what it represents actually: a natural need of a person to decorate or a certain code, some kind of nation's spiritual tree? Each folk possess this treasure that stores the fatal specific information about itself and is recorded by means not of simple patterns, but of special signs.
Any ornament is a special sacral language, some kind of a code, called to immortalize the dominating world-view concepts of proper culture. And as any language, it has its laws, morphology and genesis. Comprehending this so called parent language, we can imagine the paradigm of this folk, its character, thoughts and aspirations.
Almost all traditional ornaments of mankind had outlived the time of domination of their culture, but they have preserved its thoughts and voice. That is how we consider the traditional Kazakh ornament, whose organic matter is born by world-view codes of different ancient steppe folks presently not existing, but not forgotten.
3. ОБЪЕМ ДИСЦИПЛИНЫ И ВИДЫ УЧЕБНОЙ РАБОТЫ
By means of these codes ornament forms spiritually and visually the universal Model of the World. The symbols which have incorporated religious, secular, and universal formulas, allow ornament to become a sacred language.
Throughout centuries ornament remains an integral part of celebratory and daily clothes of the Kazakh-nomad, a decoration of his weapon, dwelling, wedding and funeral ceremonies, i.e. it is something special that accompanies a person from birth to death or, to say it differently, it is a certain constant representing quintessence of culture's spiritual consciousness.
The specifics of nomadic way of life have caused the formation of a special word-view radically different from the settled one.
Вид Всего Семестры
учебной работы Часов 1 2 3 4 5
ОБЩАЯ ТРУДОЕМКОСТЬ ДИСЦИПЛИНЫ 300 61 61 59 59 59
АУДИТОРНЫЕ ЗАНЯТИЯ 170 34 34 34 34 34
Лекции 85 17 17 17 17 17
Практические занятия (ПЗ) 85 17 17 17 17 17
Семинары (С)
Лабораторные работы (ЛР)
и(или) другие виды аудиторных занятий
САМОСТОЯТЕЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА 130 26 26 26 26 26
Курсовой проект(работа) 20
Расчетно-графические работы
Реферат
и(или) другие виды самостоятельной работы 5 5
ВИД ИТОГОВОГО КОНТРОЛЯ (ЗАЧЕТ, ЭКЗАМЕН) 3 Э - Э - Э
4. СОДЕРЖАНИЕ ДИСЦИПЛИНЫ
4.1. РАЗДЕЛЫ ДИСЦИПЛИНЫ И ВИДЫ ЗАНЯТИЙ
Информация приводится в сокращении)
N Разделы Лекции Прак. Лабо-
п/п дисциплины занятия ратор.
(или се- заня-
минары) тия
1 СЕМЕСТР
1 Введение в курс «Педагогическая культурология». 1 -
2 О современном понимании понятия «культура» и его общественно-личностном характере. 1 1
3 Педагогическая культурология как наука. Предмет, понятия и категории Педагогической культурологии. 1 2
4 Место и роль курса «Педагогическая культурология» в социально-гуманитарном знании. 2 3
5 Человек: его жизнь и бытие. Об общем определении человека как явления культуры, т.е. как Homo culturis. 2 2
6 Некоторые результаты личностного самопознания человека в истории мировой культуры 2 2
7 Идеи антропологии чувственности и воспитания культуры личности 2 2
8 Основы философской антропологии в контексте современных представлений культурологии 2 2
9 Воспитание детей как развитие их внутренней культуры. Идеи культуролого-психологической школ Л.С.Выгодского 4 3
Information blanks in this area do not allow estimating the current situation in the objective way. Based upon the recent data contemporary researches allow the attempts to explain major factors of nomadism's phenomenon: a widespread presence practically in all parts of the world, communicative functions in various societies and cultures and a special character of social and economic structures. But nevertheless the most distinctive feature of this phenomenon is the openness of nomads to the outside world and an indestructible indispensable interrelation with other social types. Thus the latest researches in this area notice that “their economic isolation which has led to obvious independence from southern cultures became the brightest of steppe semi-nomadic folks' achievements” [7, c. 256].
Nomadic culture, despite millennia of its existence, has generally undergone minor alterations in comparison with the settled one. Huge territories and caused by them internal freedom allowed nomads to create such graphic forms which did not attach them to any certain place and did not limit their independence. The specifics of a similar way of life have caused the occurrence of a precious gift brought by
nomads to world treasury of arts - the unique animal style. Dynamical and expressive animal style being very rich spiritually has incorporated all major cosmogonical and usual components of nomadic philosophy and social life. According to Guwnon, “nomads acted in a special way in fauna, mobile, as well as they are” [8, c. 157]. At the same time settled cultures preferred to the dynamics of animal style the stability of plant and mineral worlds and it was fixed in semantics of ornaments where plant or geometrical motive acts as a basic expressive unit of artistic language.
In the Kazakh national art ornament is considered as a carrier of the artistic form's main idea, as a basis of traditionality. If in professional art ornament is more often used as a pleasant decorative addition, in folk art it acts first of all as a language. A well-known researcher of the traditional Kazakh art K. Ibrayeva names ornament “the graphic folklore” [9, c. 18], and it is extremely important for disclosing of its sense because after all the folklore is a sort of a “foundation stone” in the basis of any culture.
Ornament is characterized by two artistic parameters - motive and composition - where “motive - is a space category in ornament,
whereas composition is a time category” [4, c. 30]. Therefore in nomadic art ornament acts like an independent philosophical and artistic system uniting time and space, which is a spiritual basis of nomad's existence and undergoes minor alterations of the form in comparison with the constancy of contents.
The attempt to comprehend the essence of the Kazakh ornament existing as a reality in space is possible only by means of meditative contemplation, “by means of bifunctional switching occurring in time” [10, c. 61 ] because in nomad's world-view ornament was a carefully protected treasure that embodied the spiritual universum in the highest aesthetic form.
Central Asian nomads “closely connected ornament with the aspiration to embody plant and animal worlds surrounding them not only from the point of their “watching”, but generally from the point of “seeing” [11, c. 80]. Researchers notice that this ornament is penetrated with smells and images of the steppe nature, transformed by a creative thought into visual forms.
There are no coincidences that for a definition of artistic process of ornament's creation Kazakhs have an extremely capacious expression “oyu-oy” that can be directly translated as “pattern-thought”. According to an eminent Kazakh researcher of philosophy and semantics of the national ornament A. Kazhgali, one more meaning of the word “oyu” is significant, because it means also an action - “to cut out, to hollow out”; it means that the formula of “oyu-oy” assumes the meaning “to embody thoughts”, a possibility to mark them by notches and signs [12, c. 116].
Throughout centuries nomads did not change their way of life, and accordingly thoughts, keeping in inviolability their spiritual constants. Their embodiments in the form of ornamental creativity became as a result the dominating form of fine arts which processes its genesis not by means of realistic perception, but by those of transfer of its sense in the abstracted form. A. Kazhgali underlines: “the thing we use to call only a decorative motive actually represents a very high phase of development of a person's ability to think abstractly” [12, c. 150].
Nomads have stepped very far in comprehending of the essence of ornament as the world's pattern. Here we should explain that the habitual formula “the main thing - the secondary thing”, that Kazhgali named “method ornek” (the most common type of decorative ornament of Asian nomadic tribes, including Kazakhs. It is characterized by the contrasting of a neutral monochrome background and a bright pattern that has a clear, concise outline. This expressive method was widely used, especially in applied arts clothes decorating), was never let out of nomad's sight (in this case Kazakhs') and was actively used by them in their applied art. But for the true nature of nomad the method “oyu” (a unique ornamental compositional method, which ideological basis is the dualism of all existing things, the infinity, “the eternal now.” Oyu is not a peculiar feature of nomadic art in general because it can be found only among Kazakhs and Kyrgyz; this fact gives the right to talk about the originality of their thinking) was much more significant “when a projection of this or that figure or object is equalized with a background, i.e. the object and the background are equal” [12, c. 7]. The division according some criteria is absolutely absent here and we can observe the ability to see the essence of things, without emphasizing one at the expense of another. A distinctive feature of this ornament is the principle “center - periphery” where the center can become itself only with the help of other adjoining components that consciously and voluntary act as minor ones. It is like a pulsation helping ornament to obtain a certain rhythm that correlates isolated parts; this is “nothing but communications established once and for all and graphically recorded and called to display hierarchy of the World order” [5, c. 263].
Generally the reconsideration of the Kazakh oyu, which embodies the most ancient spiritual concepts of Central Asian nomads, gives scientists an opportunity to mark out key features that form the idea itself of this ornament:
- A spiral is a basis of all the Kazakh oyu's patterns;
- The entire artistic concept of oyu is based on combinations of motives Uly Ana (Great Mother) and Ul (Son);
- The motives named above are united by the central image of Uly Tau (World Mountain);
- An inexhaustible semantic richness of the Kazakh oyu is capable to become accessible through the mentioned four basic elements - a spiral, Uly Tau, Uly Ana and Ul.
It turns out that such a little quantity of sign instruments of this ornament becomes the language of unlimited possibilities, capable to express all depth of world-view imperatives of Kazakhs-nomads. A core of the traditional ornament is not any concrete artistic image, but a character of its interaction with the others. According to A. Kazhgali, “ornament is not a treasury of forms, but of interrelations
expressed by “pure” (signs-symbols) or not absolutely pure (signs-indexes) forms” [12, c. 245]. In order to implement it completely nomads have chosen the most perfect basis as they could find according to their mentality - a plane without perspective which is formed as a result of harmonious combination of co-balanced parts
- a carpet.
A carpet's plane, as one of any other surface, was comprehended by masters as an infinite space where they placed, “incised” their thoughts in ornamental form capable to develop endlessly. Singers and storytellers used words in the same way and musicians used sounds, combining space and time because “time for nomads is not the vector time passing from the past towards the future, but a cyclic gyrating one” [13, c. 222]. These are the factors that generate a special iconographical system of ornament where the most often basic graphic unit is a spiral or its derivatives.
Thus, ornament for Kazakhs-nomads is the highest form of philosophical conception of the artistic image embodied in original abstract stylistics whose sense was not radically modified until their way of life has not changed. And even then, when Kazakhs assumed the settled lifestyle, these images continued to inspire (and still inspire) artists, the adherents of the new art.
The dominating motive in nomads' ornament is represented by images of animals and not by plant and geometrical motives though these are adequately present. This fact is related with a heightened dynamism of life and a special social organization of a society where animals acted as extremely important elements not only in material but also in spiritual sense. Art is to reproduce the most significant aspects of life; therefore such specific tendencies in nomadic iconography demonstrate the balance between a person and fauna.
An extremely interesting and important point of view belongs to Spengler, who reflects about the nature of plants and animals in the context of philosophy of history and culture: the destiny of a plant is predetermined and it has no right to choose. “They do not have freedom of expectation, excitement or choice”, - he wrote, meanwhile animals can be independent and their existence is “small worlds for oneself inside the other bigger world”. Here we can notice the nuance between these two very important natural components because “dependence and freedom is the deepest distinction between plant and animal existence” [14, c. 6]. Spengler underlines the dual nature of animals as they combine animalistic and plant properties basically because of the loneliness in which they have appeared thanks to their freedom. In the ancient time a plant was comprehended as something cosmic, and an animal - as a microcosm in a macrocosm. Perhaps, nomad's choice was determined in favor of animals instead of plants because of that primary freedom inherent to fauna in the same measure, as to nomad himself.
The earliest samples of ornaments are coevals of the arising, improving and trying to reflect the immense human thought embracing the universe. According to the absolute majority of theorists of art, an artist's internal vision developed rapidly and has reached the peak before massive invasion of the civilization, as “civilizations are the most extreme and most artificial conditions that a higher type of people is capable to create” (italics by Spengler) [15, c. 198].
If ornament is a language it should have a certain system and exist in system, like music or poetry, as “ornament is the art of system relations of visually perceived signs” [5, c. 6]. One of the most important and peculiar its inherent qualities is the rhythm, the same as it is in “temporal arts”, music or poetry, although ornament itself has a spatial character. Thus, ornament possesses dual essence that harmoniously unites time and space.
This feature allows ornament to realize its potential in both spheres: as in the traditional nomadic art so and in the professional fine art that has the status of the spatial one. As ornament is dualistic by its nature, its task consists in interrelation, in synthesis of macrocosm and microcosm, hidden and manifested, traditional and modern. The synthesis projected on art's sphere, can be located much more above analysis level in methodological hierarchy, or in our case, above the individualistic aspect.
The uniqueness of ornament as of a concrete sign embodiment does not depend on the way it is presented - in the form of an integral plane or as a separate fragment; in each case we see an integral myth, “pressed and concentrated in one capacious symbol” [5, c. 48]. On the example of oriental carpets it is possible to illustrate most visually the unity and the contradiction of internal content: larger single symbols compete with numerous edge compositions, just like the color scale that has a character of a negative and a positive. It is possible “to enter” the space of an ornamental composition in any place, just as in a myth which this composition embodies.
Ornament visually demonstrates the basis of primary reflections of a person about space; now we consider this basis as an
inexplicable intuitive confidence in rightness (knowing) peculiar to the ancient world, and also as an indisputable logic of concrete knowledge, characteristic for contemporary comprehension.
We would like to mention one more feature of ornament: it was also comprehended as a symbol of protection or a talisman. “A symbol is sensual signs, definite, indivisible ..., a certain line of validity and a feeling of uniformity of understanding which allocates the whole families, estates, tribes and at last cultures from the general human mass, and closes them together”, - affirms Spengler [14, c. 387]. Ornament exists not only as the carrier of energy's information, but also as a defender.
The traditional nomadic ornament is destined to keep and protect the one who or that “calls” it. Ornament here shows clearly its sign function as “ornament as sign is intended to reflect the essence of being and not of a thing because the being of a thing is nothing but its transformation in time and space” [5, c. 113]. Ornament's sacral sense has determined its power and eternity. It is “everything and nothing” that is capable to be endlessly developed in space and to lead in depth. This fact explains its universality and viability: departing from natural forms, ornament creates abstract images of the highest artistic and content's level.
Initially in every culture ornament acted like a symbol of immortality, eternity and constancy fixing a ritual place. In nomadic world of cyclic time there is no death. Tombs of every epoch, irrespective of the culture they belong to, were always marked by ornament, thereby symbolizing the deliverance from fear, or per contra, aspiring to fill with it. This let ornament maintain its binary nature, i.e. in this case it still defends and protects. That is why Oswald Spengler has drawn a logical conclusion: “in motionless symbols of death, and then in temples of gods and cathedrals representing a continuous ornament, it is not any more an expression of any race but a language of a concrete world-view, an entire pure art” [15, c. 430].
The researchers absolutely equitably named ornament “a treasury of forms possessing durability and not subordinating to an arbitrariness of a single person” because they fully realized its value for the existence of the spiritual consciousness. Everything that is correlated with imitation is conditional and is capable to exist only in a projection of a single separate destiny. Ornament as a symbol embodies destiny in general, characteristic for one given ethnos. In comparison with western settled cultures' ornamental compositions formed by plant motives attached to a concrete place, the basis of nomadic ornament is formed by animal images and was embodied in a special sign system identifying the destiny of a free in space microcosm. Therefore appears a topical question on comprehending and perception of the information translated by art, including ornament, as the individualism can apprehend quite adequately the destiny of a certain person, but being isolated from the collective consciousness and strictly destined only for intellectual elite it is not capable to comprehend the sacral microcosm of an ornamental work of art.
The nomadic culture is a vivid example of such traditional world. It can be perfectly observed on the example of the Kazakh folklore, “where time acts as a whole, as a synthesis of the past and the present” [16, c. 12]. Nomads did not need cathedrals and temples as their function was fulfilled by the space surrounding them. This space was the original cause of everything; nomads have embodied it forever in vibrating symbols - in music and word, and also in a visible image - in ornament.
In the 19th century the researchers of the Viennese school considered ornament as “a product of space fear transformed into the artistic will not in its individual form, but in a mass dynamic force creating abstract beauty of the highest artistic value” [2, c. 229]. As we have already mentioned, for the consciousness of western person space acted like something frightening. Spengler wrote that “there is a deep, comprehensible even to animals, fear of microcosmic free life in space, of space itself and its forces” [14, c. 340].
But for nomads space did not act like anything frightening as it was their natural element which caused an extraordinary breadth of perception. Space like a philosophical category has generated a special sign system, capable to keep all spiritual potential of the traditional consciousness. This system did not change throughout centuries. This testifies that initially it embodied world-view concepts, free from ideological, political and religious feeble efforts and acted like the most perfect and universal structure, satisfying all spiritual needs of nomads.
It developed in a spiral, ascending necessarily on a qualitatively new level, without breaking its internal “crystal lattice”. Folklore is an excellent indicator of a society's spiritual condition; it reacts sensitively to all nuances in human world-view. If we aimed to investigate the stages of nomadic world-view's development it would
be possible to discover that it endured certain qualitative changes during each new historical epoch, forming new systems that, however, did not affect the integrity of its kernel.
The purpose of any cultural tradition is the transformation of an external macrocosm into an internal microcosm. During the archaic epoch it was implemented by means of a ritually-mythological concept which with time began to assume a cosmogonical character, changing into the artistic creativity. But in the basis of any traditional culture there can be found traditional science that has a sacred sense and destination - the cosmogony; and in the heart of the cosmogony there is a myth, as the most ancient form of the world's assimilation. According to the opinion of the eminent Russian expert in the field of philosophy of art A. Losev, “a myth is always extremely practical, essential; it is always emotional, affected and vital” [17, c. 40]. He also underlined the fact that mythology is not a science in a contemporary sense of this word as “such contemporary science is always accompanied by mythology, moreover there it draws all its initial intuitions and is nourished by it” [17, c. 42]. He meant that a myth possesses a deep sacral value being a fundamental basis of the traditional consciousness. Nietzsche affirmed that “without a myth any culture loses its healthy creative character of a natural power: only a mythically conditioned horizon closes cultural movement in a complete whole” [18, c. 180].
Oriental settled cultures recorded cosmogonic knowledge by means of alphabetic characters, whose direct consequence, known as calligraphy, became high art thanks to its aesthetical qualities combined with a powerful energetic-informational charge, and also by means of fine arts. But nomads in conformation with their proper world-view aspired to create “vibrating symbols” and special visual systems “working” in all conditions, on all planes and surfaces, irrespective of sizes and ways of further consumption. Those were ornaments that embodied all necessary for a successful spiritual assimilation of the world functions: the function of preservation of information about spiritual force of ethnos and the expressive-semiotic one.
Ornament is the eternally living language as it expresses topical absolute truth. A myth being ornament's basis is “a vital, subjective intercommunication comprising its own, extra-scientific, purely mythical validity, reliability, basic law and structure” [17, c. 58]. It is independent and is capable for the development.
It is necessary to mention the fact that in the conditions of growing spiritual discord at the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries an increasing quantity of researches in the field of philosophy of culture, art and history in some way turn their investigations to ornament, to its genesis and essence, thereby confirming its status. Besides general theoretical questions the aim of searches was also to find that moment when art lost any spiritual support and was shaken for the first time perceiving itself “a colossus on clay legs”. Perhaps, no one but Spengler has investigated it so scrupulously and responsibly. He wrote that “any art is the expression's language” [14, c. 424], and as usual it does not demand any witness. But it is equitable for any art while “only a higher art decisively becomes “art in front of witnesses”, and particularly in front of the highest witness: God” [14, c. 425]. Spengler also underlined that the above-mentioned expression can be either ornament, or imitation where the first is global and motionless in its primordiality, self-sufficient and identified with eternal “I” while the second is equivalent to a performance based on mimesis and is comprehended as “You”.
Against a background of a constantly changing imitation as a derivative of the category of time, “ornament, on the contrary, looks like something escaping time: a pure, fixed, staying extent. It is the reality that does not reveal any trace of its origin and that possesses only duration” [14, c. 428] in another absolutely different world that has other outlines and laws.
Although the concept of ornament is firmly associated with the world of art, nevertheless, it is broadly used in other scientific areas rather distant from art. In microbiology and genetics scientists qualify as ornaments certain combinations of protein domains in the DNA chain, because these are formed by analogy with various ornamental matrixes, for example, with “Greek key” or a well-known Greek meander. Here the obvious visual similarity does not represent the single aspect important to us; the second one is the inner meaning of this ornament that symbolizes eternity as a transition from one condition to another: from old to new, from death to immortality. There is no doubt that DNA is a basis of biological life. Ornament probably is also a sort of DNA, but in spiritual sphere, because all traditional ornaments transform a crystal-clear and powerful vital energy into space. For this reason wishing literally to absorb them a person aspires to be surrounded by ornaments and “to be charged” even by means of a simple contemplation of these clear amazing forms.
In order to make the result of a person's creative efforts to be significant, it must be nourished by all means with a special type of energy. Energy does not appear from nowhere and does not vanish; it changes, but does not disappear. If a handicraftsman or an artist produces something by means of the creative energy which possesses sufficiently and if he is still capable to draw it from the divine source frequently called inspiration, he aspires to “pour” its part in his creation. This energy should assume a form that would keep its nature and fulfill the function of expression of certain information. Therefore, the main task of an artist is not only to express emotions, but also to aspire for finding the universal and pure form, free from everything superficial and artificial which would fully possess the characteristics embodying the quintessence of a concrete traditional culture's spiritual energy. In this case we consider the ornament to be such a constant in the ancient and modern Kazakh artistic consciousness which had its further development in the 20th century. It is the ornament that represents the symbol of the ancient world-view system that nowadays is still valid as it has always been through centuries.
Traditional ornaments of every folk are similar to a brook, hundreds of which form a uniform mighty stream of human spirit and consciousnesses improved by the power of art.
Irrespectively of how far and high the crone of our ethnic tree stretches, the roots that feed it are still alive; it depends only of us how much we are distant of close to them. Therefore, if for some
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Статья поступила в редакцию 04.09.12
time ornaments disappeared from the visible reality, we should understand that they exist in the genetic memory of people and can be revived at any point in all their integrity and magnificence.
While ornaments embodying nomadic spiritual constants are alive so is the nomadic world, despite all historical collisions endured by Great Steppe. Ornament as the most stable gene, is capable to keep, transfer and develop the precious heritage of the past.
On the basis of the present research authors have drawn the following conclusions:
- Central Asian nomads, and to be concrete - the nomads of Kazakhstan, organically entered the general structure of the Eurasian nomadic world on the one hand; on the other hand, existing on a joint of different cultural conglomerations, they have managed to create their own unique artistic world that reflected their world-view and spiritual potential;
- In the context of the studied problem, ornament is considered as the carrier of the main idea of the basic for Kazakhs-nomads traditional artistic form that united space and time. Ornament here is some kind of the higher form of philosophical comprehension of the artistic image embodied in original abstract stylistics and called to keep the spiritual kernel of folk's creative force;
- Ornament being a certain philosophical constant still continues to be a source of the creative force and inspiration, filling with sense Kazakh contemporary art.
