Plastic Culture: an Approach to the Study and the Main Characteristics

The author discusses the phenomenon of plastic culture and art. An expanded understanding of body movement is proposed, including gestures, poses, facial expressions, expression, the involvement of the artist and the viewer in external social rhythms and in music, internal movements and rhythms of the soul. All these movements are organized within the framework of plastic culture, although they exist by themselves, they have different sources of formation and areas of functioning. The immersion of a person into an aesthetic, more broadly artistic culture that has permeated, since antiquity, even the ordinary life of a person, not to mention specialization in a particular kind of art, triggers the process of organizing human movements and rhythms. The author identifies two factors that significantly determine this organization: the conditions and requirements of the sphere of art and the artistic language, understood extremely broadly. He characterizes the sphere of art with the features of publicity, differences from ordinary life and work, art opens an outlet to another, usually attractive, reality (to gods, beauty, ideals, to another world), sets a special type of communication. Describing the artistic language, the author points out that meaningful constructions of this language perform a different task than ordinary signs: they do not set unambiguous denotations, but should introduce into artistic reality and help the viewer to construct events in this reality. On the basis of these provisions, an analysis of the formation of dance is proposed and a characteristic of plastic art and culture is given.