“Contiguity” as a process of semiotic lenition in Polish socialist realism art (1949–1953)

Abstract

This paper investigates one aspect of the socialist enterprise that was imposed on Eastern Europe starting from 1945: the reflection of Marx’s communist ideology in the art of the period. Socrealism was but a brief episode on the Polish artistic scene, spanning only several years of the apogee of Stalinism (1949–1953). The raison d’être of this type of creative output can be circumscribed by two main tenets: (i) utter repudiation of formalism in art and stressing the need of constant vigilance for any traces thereof, and (ii) a conviction of the absolute ideological utilitarianism of art. Our project aims to semiotically inquire into the repercussions of refuting formalism in art and to disambiguate the semiotic mechanisms behind ideologically loaded artistic expression of the period, focusing on the dynamic aspect of semiosis. This will be done using the paradigm of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics and tropology in art (Chrzanowska-Kluczewska e.g. 2014). In particular, we will concentrate on the Tartu concepts of entropy, vacuous interlocutor, semiotic transparency and the metaphor-versus-metonymy dyad. The emerging category is contiguity: in Peircean as well as in cognitive terms. The study is informed by materials from the collections of Muzeum Śląska Opolskiego (Museum of Opole Silesia), in particular those presented in the exhibition Sztuka musi być zrozumiała dla mas [Art must be comprehensible for the masses] (Opole, Poland 2012, curator: Joanna Filipczyk) in particular paintings and texts, and by material excerpted from selected issues of the art journal of the period, Przegląd Artystyczny [Art Review] from the years 1949–1953. The study shows that the processes underlying this type of output can be classified as semiotic reduction relying on contiguity.