Animalistic style in creative practices of contemporary artists and creative industries

Abstract

The beginning of the 21st century is marked by the global demand for innovative (creative) industries, based on unique authorship, experience and personal talent. Cultural industries are systematically transformed into the main factor of the socio-economic transformation on the basis of updating the industrial culture of production, creation and cultivation of artistic geniuses. The new challenges of the global art development transform the infrastructure of intellectual and creative entrepreneurship, production and export of artistic works. This article explores the author's style formation on the basis of the creative interpretation of Old Turkic (Scythian, Central Asian) menagerie, widely represented in the artistic heritage of the region. The incorporation of the animalistic style of ancient civilizations in the creative practices of contemporary artists is accompanied by a deep philosophical, artistic, technical and technological reworking of the traditional code of the artistic culture. The article conceptualizes three types of the artistic continuity: the craftsmen type that reproduces the Mongolian craftsmen canon; the cultural institutions that convert the craft heritage into the contemporary creative industries and the rare type of craftsmen-artists who synthesize both approaches, rethinking the canon, traditional techniques and technology of working with traditional materials. All three types are represented by different systems of styling, the core of which is the animalistic style. Contemporary artisans Zhigzhit Bayaskhalanov and Dashi Namdakov create unique artistic images and metaphors, use innovative ways of shaping, and apply illogical, provocative and asymmetrical compositional solutions, transforming regional artistic traditions into leading global trends. The success of this experience is caused by socio-cultural, institutional factors (education, ethnicity, social origin from the rural handicrafts circle), ethno-cultural backgrounds (craft heritage, the presence of the family art collaboration). The empirical basis of the research consisted of 6 in-depth interviews and dozens of case studies from the participant observation.