The Gakhn Dictionary of Artistic Terms, 1923–1929
The GAKhN Dictionary of Artistic Terms, 1923–1929 The State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN, 1921–1931), like other early Soviet state institutions, was organized by the famous artists, scientists, and philosophers of this critical time (it suffices to name Kandinsky, Shpet, A. Gabrichevskii, A. Sidorov) with the personal support of the People’s Commissar for Education, A. Lunacharskii. GAKhN was originally conceived as an interdisci - plinary project combining psychophysiological, sociological, and philosophical approaches, and was aimed at establishing a synthetic science of art in a new insti - tutional form. Two items were on the agenda: creating a purely scientific approach to understanding contemporary art, including that of the avant-garde (INKhUK collaborators such as Malevich, Eisenstein, Vygotsky, Ginzburg, Arvatov, and many others either joined GAKhN or presented there at various moments); and aligning the cultural policy of the Soviet state in the fields of science and art (the organiza - tion of international exhibitions, the development of criteria for original art, and even control of the activities of scientists and artists). But GAKhN played an equal - ly important role in transforming the most traditional currents of scientific knowl - edge, from physics and psychology to philosophy and literary criticism, as they applied to the study of such an important anthropological experience as the pro - duction of artistic images in the broadest sense of the word. In its study of the tem - poral and spatial arts (primarily literature, painting, and theater), GAKhN placed an emphasis on analyzing the internal form of works of art and on explicating the particular “language” of the diverse arts, which resulted in a general reorientation of the sciences of art from metaphysical concepts like truth and beauty to the spe - cific problems of meaning and value in concrete works.
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