Avant-garde in the Process of Transforming Anthropological and Ontological Artistic Myth-making of Modernity (19–20 centuries)

Abstract

The attempts to disclose some unity of human existence and being in European culture of modern times are characterized by the disillusionment with regard to the opportunities provided by the mainstream forms of cultural endeavor (cognition, religion and morals). The major projects in the 19th and 20th centuries were myth-making and art, both seeking new forms of establishing the unity of subject and object. The artistic mythology of Romanticism, Symbolism and Avant-garde represents different forms of the anthropological and ontological wholeness: in Romanticism through spiritual experience of the universe by the artist's individuality, in Symbolism through the reunion of artistic consciousness with the irrational creative energy of the supra-individual subject, in early Avant-garde – through the involvement of man-cum-artist in the process of creating a total harmony of existence. Early Avant-garde became the apex of artistic myth-making in European culture of the 19th-20th centuries approaching the ideal of endowing the union of man and existence with ontological reality in the act of artistic endeavor. Myth-making came to its end in the late 20th – early 21st century with the emergence of the concept of intensification of man's life by means of artistic build-up of his sensual and physical presence in reality. The refusal from the concept of culture, nature, metaphysical meaning of existence, creativity, symbolical language of art means that the potential of anthropological and ontological artistic myth-making within Moderne has exhausted itself.