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- Title
The Primitive Intangible Heritage behind Brâncuşi's Modernist Tangible Forms of Culture.
- Authors
ŞERBAN, Oana
- Abstract
This research explores the modernist trajectories of Constantin Brâncuşi's masterpieces, raised in affinity with formal expressions of non-Western culture and art, such as Romanian peasant traditions or African rituals and artefacts. In a boarder sense, these cultural nuances trace the transnational roots of Brâncuşi's portfolio, which remain of peripheral concern for the aims of this paper. The main interest in this research is rather focused on deconstructing the nationalism behind Brâncuşi's heritage, arguing that it can ultimately be reduced to a powerful mixture of primitive, intangible forms of culture, such as mystical beliefs, folkloric narratives, peasant traditions and values of Orthodox religion, reframed and translated into modernist symbols depicted by tangible forms of culture, such as individual sculptures and installations. In the first part of the article I will extensively explain Brâncuşi's interest in particular forms of European primitive art, especially Romanian ones, closely observing the cultural contradiction between such a cultural engagement and the modernist trajectories of his artistic creations as a dominant of his artistic perspective. In the second part of my research I track the complementarity between Romanian primitive intangible forms of cultural heritage and modernist tangible forms of culture implemented in some of Brâncuşi's oeuvres, in the light of a working hypothesis that I advance along my paper, according to which all forms of intangible heritage are ultimately reduced to tangible forms of cultural heritage. The article ends up with an applied analysis on the previous failures of including Brâncuşi's ensemble "The Heroes' Way" in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, testing to what extent such argument on the mix of intangible and tangible forms of culture brought together by this monument might have increased the success of the national advocacy strategies addressed to The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) for a positive evaluation and acceptance. Final remarks of this research conclude on the urgency of redefining in a new philosophical and axiological frame core-values such as "the integrity" and "the authenticity" of this ensemble, as criteria under which the inscription was proposed and the ICOMOS report declared it as not being justified as a whole, by attentively balancing the role of tangible and intangible forms of culture embedded by the monument in fulfilling this double condition.
- Subjects
CULTURAL property; PRIMITIVE art
- Publication
Hermeneia: Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory & Criticism, 2018, Issue 21, p115
- ISSN
1453-9047
- Publication type
Article