Primitive Art Research Articles

Restored Behaviour and the Formation of Ethnic Identity: Critiquing the Rai Youths’ Sakela

This paper examines four YouTube videos on Sakela, a dance performance of the Rai community, in two major contexts: enormous shifts and deviations in the performances of youths and the signature of unique ethnic identity. Sakela in its primitive art form of Rai culture has a ritual connection with the transcendent forces for human health and agriculture. However, there have been many deviations and changes in its highly contextualized aesthetic manifestations like festive performances, ceremonial presentations, recreational activities, political demonstrations or urban, and diasporic discourses. Against this backdrop, the paper addresses the primary questions of why these performances recur in different forms and what role the restoration of behaviour plays in forming the ethnic identity. The study approaches these questions with the objectives of analyzing the restored behaviour in the Rai youths’ Sakela and identifying the performances as preserving the signature of ethnic identity. The examination of primary data in the qualitative study includes the analysis of selected YouTube video contents comprising Sakela performances, using the content analysis method. Primary data are selected to quantify the phenomena of Rai youths’ restored behaviours in Sakela dance, their cultural meanings, and their relationships to ethnic identity. To validate the collected data, the study draws theoretical insights from Richard Schechner’s theory of restored behaviour. Schechner's theory promulgates that people are always performing anew out of old in a continual rehearsal. The behaviour is replicated and thus performances gradually emerge. Such behaviors ranging from small gestures to ritualistic performances become part of lives but they are no longer sticking to the original source. Pursuant to this conceptual framework, the paper argues that Rai youths’ Sakela demonstrates the signs of restored behaviour, the symbolic and coded aspects of their culture. It also posits that embodied ethnic traits evident in the performance ensure the persistence of membership in their community. Thus, Sakela continues to be the signature of ethnic belief system and unique identity in the lives of Rai youths. In all its aspects of the repetition of never the same, the embodiment of ethnic identity keeps on sticking to youths’ Sakela.

A Comparison of Folk Printmaking in China and the West

Chinese and Western popular printmaking art share common roots in primitive art. Deeply ingrained in the daily lives of the masses, Chinese and Western folk printmaking art, with its vibrant artistic energy, has become an integral part of people’s lives. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of popular printmaking in both regions, encompassing its history, representative works, and materials. The development of Chinese art can be broadly categorized into official art and folk art. Chinese popular printmaking art, as an art form directly derived from the people, possesses the characteristics of originality and authenticity. However, throughout Chinese art history, class status and artistic status were intertwined, leading to popular art being often as low-level and vulgar, rather than being recognized as art. In contrast, Western folk printmaking art did not harbor such hierarchical distinctions, instead directly acknowledging the originality and origins of art.

Les elevés des Wandjina de George Grey. De L’art Aborigène à L'art primitif (1838–1906)

George Grey’s Wandjina Copies. From Aboriginal Art to Primitive Art (1838–1906) The history of the recognition of Palaeolithic art has been written from the perspective of European discoveries in the last third of the 19th century. Through this case study of the publication of the Wandjina paintings (Australian Kimberley) by George Grey between 1838 and 1841 and through the contextualisation of the interpretations attributed to them the article investigates the intellectual and political space in which conceptions relating to the ability of Aborigines to produce this art emerged within the debates of contemporaries and, later, of English and French prehistorians. It also provides an insight into the different contexts that shaped the will to reconstruct the heritage of non–European cultures in a colonial context.

Klyment Kvitka. About syncretism.

The proposed essay by K. Kvitka, written probably in the late forties of the last century and has significant methodological and theoretical interest. Here, for the first time in global practice, the popular theory of the existence in the dawn of human de- velopment of a primitive polyelemental form – choral play – has been criticized. This form encompassed words, music, dance, and action as a unified whole, from which, in the process of evolution, not only separate artistic forms emerged - literature, mu- sic, choreography, and theater, but also genres specific to each of them - epic, lyrical and dramatic. Through a comprehensive analysis of the main points of this concept, the scholar concludes, albeit presented in a thesis-like manner, its complete logical incapacity. This conclusion is drawn not only based on the Eastern European folklore, containing numerous rituals comparable to the creative expressions of non-European peoples, for constructing assumptions about the essence of primitive art but also re- futes the theory of universal primordial syncretism both worldwide and in ancient Slavic cultures. K. Kvitka’s essay, still lost in his manuscript heritage kept in the archives of the K. V. Kvitka Center of Folk Music at the Moscow Conservatory named after P. I. Tchaikovsky, is being published for the first time in Ukrainian translation. Therefore, one should hope that the reservations of the great scientist, becoming the acquisition of broad literary and art circles, will be taken into account, and the pseudo- theory of primitive syncretism will fade into obscurity.

Primitive art in the Archipelago: Meaning and Continuity in the History of Indonesian Fine Art

The discussion about Indonesian art in this paper is deliberately limited to modern art. It seems appropriate that the name Nusantara is more popular with art in Indonesia which is still in the categories of primitive, classical and traditional art. A little bit about primitive art, which is easy to understand, is that works of art which, in terms of technique, materials and symbolic meaning, are still categorized as simple in nature. Usually primitive art is identified during the prehistoric period and relates to the early period of human culture, but if all artifacts are from the mesolithic or middle rock period or neolithic or new rock. Then, with regard to classical art, it could be said that the rise of this type of art occurred after entering the historical period or when life had settled down and there was already a regulated community through the institutions it created. Judging from the word classic etymologically means it has received a Nobel title. Such a non-lexical meaning is conventional, usually classical art is a work of art that has experienced its peak of beauty. So what can be said is that classical art is also a paradigmatic system of values that is widely adhered to by its supporters, so that works of art are usually always produced in palaces and are constantly celebrated, especially in terms of their perfection.

Epistemological specificity of art: from the «psychophysiology» of the primitive world to the «practical philosophizing» of the modern era.

The subject of the study is the epistemological specificity of art through the «prism» of the Paleolithic and modern eras. The focus of the research is aimed at analyzing the phenomenon of «eidetism», which is a link between modern and primitive art. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the epistemological specifics of art, which began with the «psychophysiology» of the primitive world and developed into forms of «practical philosophizing» of the modern era. The research methodology includes a review of literary sources, a dialectical approach to historical and art historical reconstruction, analysis of paleopsychological data, comparative analysis, elements of systems psychology and sociology. An element of novelty is the author's position that already in the lower, early layers of its evolution, the status of art «as one of the most ancient forms of human activity» is enriched by the status of «a form of practical philosophizing». The generalization is made that the art of the XX-XXI centuries, on the one hand, abandoned both mimesis and humanism, on the other – it continued the path of «practical philosophizing» begun in ancient times, based on the perceptual-empirical method of cognition of reality. The evolution of art from its primitive origins through archaic, classical to its modern state is, at the same time, the transformation of human consciousness, and the comprehension through artistic and creative activity of one's being and place in the universe, etc. - the development of its «depth» (the content of art). This is the development of art «in breadth» (the development of artistic form): the proliferation of its types and genres, the growth of stylistic and technological polyphony, etc. As a result, «art has come a long way from its purely psychophysiological hypostasis to «practical philosophizing». Artistic and creative activity itself as a whole continues to be the most important component of the global «mechanism» of mastering reality.

Fanonian Art Practices: Toward A Decolonial Grammar of Being

Frantz Fanon’s thought has been key to the understanding of the lived experiences of black colonized subjects in the modern contemporary world including in the discipline of visual art. The modern world is constructed on systems of coloniality that border on the appropriation of African knowledge and indigenous knowledge systems, misrepresentation of their artifacts, and distortion of their languages. Decolonial epistemic perspective is a theory that is instrumental in this article to situate Fanon’s thought to foreground a conceptual language of analysis and critique of black lived experiences in contemporary visual art. History of art is one of westernized disciplines in which the language of representing and interpreting African art and black art is absent. The colonial gramma of art history reduces African art to the language of an unknown artist and primitive art which led to the misrepresentation of the African and black narratives. This article deploys Fanon’s thought from a decolonial perspective to formulate a decolonial grammar of being that will be applied to the interpretation of African and black art.

Two Danish Artists—Two Not So Divergent Paths: C. C. A. Christensen, Carl Bloch, and the Evolution of Latter-day Saint Art and Aesthetics

Two Danish Artists—Two Not So Divergent Paths: C. C. A. Christensen, Carl Bloch, and the Evolution of Latter-day Saint Art and Aesthetics

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

A Symbol behind the Image: Reading the Painting by Alexander Volkov

Alexander Nikolaevich Volkov (1886–1957) is one of the Soviet Uzbekistan fine art founders. He actively taught in Tashkent and had a significant impact on the younger generation of the artists. He was a member of the association "New East Masters", headed the informal group "Volkov's Brigade" trying to solve the problems of monumental painting. In addition, the artist's work has some traces of symbolism and impressionism, cubism and primitive art. This article is devoted to Volkov's painting "Teahouse with a portrait of V.I. Lenin”, created in 1928 and stored in The Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art. This picture was painted at a time when the master, in his own words, again turned to human. Therefore the masterpiece corresponded the request to design a new Soviet way of life, to invent the heroes among workers and dekhkans (peasants). However, behind the simple interpretation of "Teahouse", there is a deep symbolism, thanks to which the images go beyond the scope of an ideological statement, turning into a kind of myth. The novelty of this research can be found in the formulation of a problem that has not previously been considered in the scientific literature - the symbolic interpretation of the works of A.N. Volkov of the "socialist realist" period. This symbolic layer in the artist's works is the additional evidence of his sincere passion from the ideas of the cultural revolution and socialist movement in Central Asia. In addition, Volkov's paintings of the late 1920s and 1930s are often overshadowed by his earlier creative experiments. The purpose of this article is to consider and analyze one of the most revealing work belonged to the late period of the artist oeuvre, to identify the semantic layers behind the “tangible breath of the flesh”.

A Modern Expression of Primitive Art

Primitive art is the childhood period of human art, representing primitive people’s lofty ideals of nature, and its works are the materialized expression of their beliefs. However, in today’s unprecedented prosperity of modern painting, few people talk about primitive art, instead, it starts to fade into oblivion. Primitive art is generally considered crude and rough. In fact, many famous modern artists have absorbed nutrients in primitive art, and finally formed a school of their own. Primitive art has a strong ability of recreation. The implantation of primitive elements and the expression of primitivism are the manifestations of original ecological creation concepts that are rare in modern art.

THE PLASTIC AND SYMBOLIC INDICATIONS BETWEEN CHILDREN’S DRAWINGS AND PRIMITIVE ART DRAWINGS

The research sheds light on the plastic and symbolic indications between children's drawings and rock paintings of primitive art, through the expressive methods and the distinctive features of each of them. The research aimed to reveal the similarities between children’s drawings and those of primitive rock art in the period from the Paleolithic and New Age and BC -30,000-2500 and to examine the employment of those drawings in new works of art. The research sample consisted of 20 children of the age group (7-9) years. The descriptive approach was adopted, and the data were collected from children’s drawings and primitive art drawings. The plastic and symbolic indications in children’s drawings and primitive arts were described and analyzed by clarifying their similarities and differences. The results revealed a relationship between the children’s drawings and the primitive drawings on rocks in the methods of expression and the symbolic meanings of the topics that express feelings. Contemporary artists can draw inspiration from their expressive symbols to reach innovative works of art, by analyzing some drawings of primitive arts and children. The research recommends conducting more theoretical and practical studies on the methods of drawing inspiration from children’s drawings and primitive rock paintings in creating fine artworks in various fields of art. Keywords: Plastic Indications, Symbolic Indications, Symbol, Children’s Drawings, Primitive Arts DOI： https://doi.org/10.35741/issn.0258-2724.58.1.31

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and Byt

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and <i>Byt</i>

Pikaso i pozorište - od Arlekina do Pegaza - modernistički likovni i teatarski obrt

Following the method of interdisciplinary studies, this paper analyzes Pablo Picasso's relation to theater through his paintings, theater work, and the influence of theater not only on the themes of his paintings but also on the affirmation of the Avant-garde, the Cubist experiments and practices, the breakthrough of Cubist ideas across the medium of theater. The entire Picasso's art is presented in the light of several major artistic Avantgardes of which he was the founder and ideologist (the "father" of Cubism, inventor of Collage, the first Ready-mades and Constructivist sculptures, initiator of so-called Primitive Art, early Surrealism, etc.). However, it seems that the most significant field of his work, the "Cubist Revolution", has entered a new dimension through the presentation-performance-on the theater stage and in high culture circles. The influence of the stage and the early "Total Design" concept on his art and the perception of space/ object within Cubism and beyond are exceptional, as is the performative act and the presentation of his ideas through the language of the stage. In this case, one medium, by its nature the more communicative one (theater), takes the role of presenting the other, more hermetic one (fine art). That influenced, in multiple ways, the affirmation and acceptance of Pablo Picasso's art. Starting with the early fascination with characters such as Harlequin, Pierrot, circus horse riders, dancers, and jugglers, present in his paintings ("Blue Phase" 1901-1904, "Pink Phase" 1905-1907, and beyond), this paper focuses on his collaboration with Serge Diaghilev and the "Russian Ballet" ("Ballets Russes", 1917-1924), the elite troupe of Russian dancers who settled in Paris as the epicenter of modern art and started their productions there. Picasso was chosen to design the stage, the Cubist costumes, and the monumental theater curtains. Among other ballets, an outstanding piece, "Parade" by Erik Satie (1917), is seen today as a borderline performance, a turning point in ballet art, the start of its revolutionizing process towards contemporary ballet. By creating costumes resembling totems and the stage design based on Cubist division and perception of space, made from geometric shapes and particles ("facettes"), Picasso has taken the theater back to its primordial origins, its shamanic character. The paper elaborates on the relation of the ballet "Parade" with the ideas and theater theories of the theatrologist and sociologist Richard Schechner. Additionally, it addresses the question of a slow, postponed social reception and the (un)acceptance of Picasso's work and his comrades, a theme elaborated by the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard in the field of aesthetics and post-aesthetics.

A STUDY ON THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF METAPHORICAL THINKING IN MYTHOLOGICAL LANGUAGE AND THE CHANGES OF EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR

Backgroundhuman cognition is not static. Early human cognition is different from modern human cognition. In the cognitive process of modern people, the information received by the senses from the external world is encoded and translated, and then presented in the form of abstract causal logic through the logical analysis and empirical verification of scientific thinking. However, the cognitive model of early human beings depended on mythological language and metaphorical thinking. Therefore, our purpose in this work is to study the basic operation principle of this mythical metaphorical thinking and the psychological motivation of human beings to use this way of thinking, and to explore the relationship and significance between human scientific cognition and myth. Metaphorical cognition, and emotional behavior.Subjects and MethodsBased on Cassirer's mythological metaphorical thinking theory, this study analyzes the comparative texts of ancient and modern human mythological language, and obtains a similar understanding of digital cognition, orientation cognition, attribute cognition and language cognition. Knowledge information is followed by comparative research. In this way, we can confirm the principles followed by human beings and the psychological motivation to apply these principles in the cognitive model of metaphorical thinking relying on mythological language. In order to better study the basic principles of metaphorical thinking and the changes of emotional behavior in mythological language, this study uses the measurement tool and the interpersonal emotion regulation scale (ierq) compiled by Hofmann et al. (2016) to measure how individuals regulate their emotions through others.The scale includes 4 factors and 20 items in total. Five point meter, The higher the score, the greater the degree of using interpersonal style to regulate emotion High. In this study, the results of confirmatory factor analysis are as follows: χ 2 / DF = 7.921, RMSEA = 0.077, CFI = 0.904, TLI = 0.889, indicating that the scale has good structural validity in this study. Internal one Consistence α The coefficient is 0.94, which is the sum of the above four factors α The coefficients are 0.84, 0.77, 0.84 and 0.82 respectively. At the same time, the implicit positive emotion subscale is adopted. The scale adopts the implicit positive emotion subscale compiled by Quirin et al. (2009) and revised by Dong Shanchuan (2016). The scale adopts 4-point scoring to evaluate the correlation between 6 meaningless synthetic words and 3 positive emotion words. The higher the total score, the higher the implicit positive emotion and the internal consistency α The coefficient is 0.93.Resultshumans who rely on mythological language and metaphorical thinking show a specific cognitive model. Mythology and early language reveal human cognition of themselves and the external world in an intuitive and concrete way. Modern languages are usually more abstract and logical. However, the comparison between scientific cognitive group and mythological metaphorical cognitive group reflects the principle of “replacing the whole with the part”. On the other hand, the psychological motivation of human beings to use this way of thinking is to replace all unfamiliar and difficult to understand abstract things with concrete real things. The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between psychological expectation and emotion regulation ability (P < 0.01). Tested by multiple linear regression, interpersonal emotion regulation, regulation difficulty and their interaction items significantly predicted implicit positive emotion. Simple slope analysis showed that when the level of regulation difficulty was low (m-1sd), interpersonal emotion regulation significantly positively predicted implicit positive emotion, β= 0.33，t=12.54，p＜0.001; When the adjustment difficulty level is high (M + 1sd), the prediction coefficient is β= 0.26，t=8.93，p＜0.001. This shows that the predictive power of interpersonal emotion regulation on implicit positive emotion is significantly enhanced with the decrease of regulation difficulty level.Conclusionthe principle of “part rather than whole“ is the basic principle of mythological language and metaphorical thinking. It is rooted in and reflects the basic characteristics of primitive thinking, and runs through the early forms of human understanding of the world, such as myth, early language, primitive art and so on. Metaphorical thinking is an intuitive and concrete way of thinking and cognition. The psychological motivation for humans to use this way of thinking may be that they cannot understand abstract things. Therefore, they must replace these inexplicable abstract things with concrete real things. Therefore, the psychological activity process of early humans seems to be different from that of modern humans. Among them, direct Feiling is stronger than logical abstraction, and emotion is stronger than rational thinking. At the same time, in this study, we find that these principles and motives still exist in modern human cognition.

Eccentric Primitivism: The World of Jan “Eskimo” Welzl

Eccentric Primitivism: The World of Jan “Eskimo” Welzl Václav Lucien Paris (bio) For almost thirty years, beginning in the early 1980s, the richest vein of scholarship on primitivism was its critique. During this period, numerous studies were published explaining how the primitive is an invented category whose invocation leads, via a kind of “Hegelian determinate negation,” back to the reaffirmation of “our” modernity.1 And primitivist modernism—represented primarily by the 1984 MoMA exhibition, Primitivism in the 20th Century: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern—was exposed as appropriative, abusive, and complicit with colonialism.2 More recently, this mode of engagement has waned. As the critique of primitivism appears to be running out of steam, other kinds of study have become more prominent, tracing primitivism’s strategic and situational uses in particular cases on both sides of the conjectural divide between the West and the Rest.3 There are good reasons to be cautious about this general development. Does a new approach to primitivism not simply cloak old epistemic violence? In his 2006 study, The Neo-Primitivist Turn, Victor Li warned that although we tend no longer to talk about the “primitive” as such, the evolutionary “primitivist logic” exemplified in Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1877 Primitive Cultures continues to inform our thinking about related concepts such as “alterity,” “culture,” and “modernity.” Even when approached as an “incoherent cluster of qualities” (James Clifford) or as a kind of weak theory, primitivism requires an “unending critical vigilance and reflexivity on our part.”4 On the other hand, bracketing our endless suspicion in regard to primitivism, at least temporarily, has certain practical advantages. It allows us to appreciate how contradictory, processual, and variable primitivism was, as well [End Page 241] as the ways in which it developed differently in different places, and how it informed modernism differently at different moments. As Ruth Phillips writes, developing a reading of Susan Stanford Friedman, “[m]ore than any other constitutive component of modernism in the visual arts the modernist appreciation of ‘primitive art’ accounts for its [modernism’s] global adaptability.”5 How can we think about primitivism both in general—as a widescale period-specific collective fantasy—and as a diverse array of potentially contradictory practices that need careful describing and narrating? By way of responding to this problem, this article explores what, drawing on Tirza True Latimer’s Eccentric Modernisms, we might call primitivism’s eccentricity.6 Classically, primitivism is narrated as an épatiste project: upsetting the Western tradition by bringing the outside in. But within the modernist period and especially by the 1930s, primitivist art and literature was not always very shocking, and the “other” was not always outside.7 Rather, primitivism was associated in most cases with milder and queerer affects of curiosity and bemusement: the affects of eccentricity that were often quite compatible with a bourgeois market. Primitivism was also not, until its postwar theorization, a particularly well-defined field. In the writings of Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, Wyndham Lewis, Hans Prinzhorn, Cesare Lombroso, Adolf Loos, Jean Dubuffet, and Josef Čapek and others, it is presented on a continuum with prehistoric art, various forms of art brut, folk art, and surrealism, as well as the work of the so-called primitifs such as Henri Rousseau. In this regard, primitivism was also an eccentric pose, a way of producing something that was not categorizable in familiar ways. In order to reflect on these connections between eccentricity and primitivism, this article will look at the life of, and work associated with, the so-called Czech Eskimo, Jan Welzl. The story of Welzl, as I hope will become clear over the coming pages, is remarkable and deserves to be better known by scholars of the period. In particular, his semifictional memoir, Třicet let na zlatém severu (Thirty Years in the Golden North), I will argue, can helpfully serve as one—appropriately unlikely—starting point for a thinking anew about primitivism and its global spread in some of its messiness. In part, this reading builds on—and aims to complicate—Ben Etherington’s recent study, Literary Primitivism. Etherington launches his theory of “emphatic primitivism” from a slightly different imaginary cartography to that of...

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE EIDETICS OF PRIORITY IN THE CONTEXT OF NEUROART THEORY

The article analyzes historiography, which reveals the eidetics of early art in the context of the latest scientific field – neuroart, which in this scientific context is almost not represented in the Ukrainian space of art history. The study of historiography on aspects of the origin of Paleolithic art, the study of primitive thinking and the study of the kinship of artistic heritage of different eras has shown that Ukrainian and foreign scholars have conducted a number of thorough studies. Active search for new dimensions of interpretation of artistic processes contributes to the growing interest of scientists in studying certain components of this complex issue, such as eidetic and other dimensions of primitive art, the essence of neuroart and its role in artistic processes, the relationship between primitive and contemporary art. The interdisciplinary nature of the study of the problem of the eidetics of primitiveness on the background of the theory of neuroart led to the consideration of historiographical sources of a wide range of research, which includes archaeological, anthropological, historical, art, cultural, scientific achievements, philosophy, psychology and some branches of neurons. Defining the criteria of the category of eidetics as a process of figurative reflection of reality on the basis of memorization of objects and translation of experienced feelings in art outlined the source base of the study. According to Ukrainian scientists, the origins of Paleolithic art are connected with memory as a function of human thinking. It was thanks to eideticism that primitive people had the opportunity to clearly reproduce what they saw. Thanks to eidetic memories, unlike ordinary ones, one can perceive an image in its absence. It is important to emphasize the lack of ideological influences on the eidetics of primitive art and unity with natural processes and phenomena, which distinguishes primitive art from contemporary art as a socially determined phenomenon.

ЭСТЕТИКА ПРИМИТИВНОГО ИСКУССТВА: ПЛАСТИЧЕСКИЙ ЯЗЫК ТАНЦА

The article draws parallels between primitive and naive art. The language of dance is analyzed in the plane of its rhythmoplastic constructions in the context of primitive art, the role of the spontaneous state of consciousness in the process of creating the language of naive dance forms.

Инфантильный дискурс в прозе Дмитрия Горчева

The work of Dmitri Gorchev is regarded as a phenomenon genetically related to “electronic literature.” This paper deals with his two books: Zhizn’ bez Karlo: Muzyka dlya ekzal’tirovannykh startsev (Life without Carlo: Music for exalted elders) (2010) and Ya ne lyublyu Pushkina: Iz Zhivogo Zhurnala (I don’t love Pushkin: From the LiveJournal) (2013), both based on the author’s blog in the Live Journal. Both books reveal a plot unity, defined by an infantile worldview of an autobiographical hero, whose reception is indistinguishable from the author’s. The central image of the first book, Pinocchio, becomes the embodiment of freedom and childhood for the author. The image of Pushkin in the second book is associated with the adult world. The Soviet childhood evokes ambivalent feelings in the protagonist: nostalgia and traumatic experience. The unity and artistic originality of Gorchev’s books are ensured by the childish, infantile view of the world of the autobiographical protagonist and his life-creating strategies of escapism, as well as by the density of the allusive layer dating back to the children’s reading and animation. The childish, naive view of the author defines his poetics that is close to primitivism. Nowadays, the Internet has become a breeding ground for the emerging phenomena of primitive art, combining folklore/mythological images with the images of mass culture and high culture. The images of Pinocchio and other characters of children’s books and cartoons used by Gorchev have become archetypes of the new mythology of the “mass” / post-Soviet person.