The Buddhist Component of the Symbolic Meanings of Street Art Objects in Elista

Abstract

The article describes the city sculptures, monuments and buildings of Elista that have a Buddhist theme. The relevance of the research of city streetscape semantics through the optics of religious studies and culturology is due to the role of communal traditional values in modern culture. The identified objects of art including urban and religious buildings, and various art forms such as hurals, stupas, gates and fountains actualize traditional values at a new level, and directly and indirectly through symbolic forms indicate the religiosity of the Kalmyks. The study aims to catalog and describe through the prism of Buddhist references street art objects with a Buddhist component. It requires achieving the following objectives: 1) to systematize key specificities of secular and religious meanings in urban objects of art; 2) to describe the spatial location of the objects identified, including their location, appearance and origin; 3) to analyze religious, especially Buddhist, semantics. The materials for the study were firstly street art objects in Elista; secondly, an extensive body of religious literature containing data on the semantics of religious images visualized in the studied monuments, as well as religious practices that concentrate knowledge about the studied symbols and images; thirdly, data described in catalogues and research literature to date were also used. The main method of studying street art objects was direct observation and the descriptive method. The participant observation method was used to acquire necessary knowledge from the field of religious practices. As a result of the conducted research, a unique description of art objects currently existing in the urban environment of Elista, containing references to Buddhist themes, was obtained. It was established that currently there are twenty-nine single and complex art objects containing references to Buddhist themes in Elista. Whilst conclusions on the analysis of the empirical material obtained cannot be fully generalized and partially remain private conclusions on individual objects. At the same time, they allow the following conclusion to be drawn. Firstly, the objects in question have been systematized and cataloged.Three large groups of monuments were identified: 1) pagodas, park and garden sculptures and fountains; 2) temple and city sculptures; 3) other forms of urban art objects. The last group includes architectural forms that have predominantly secular content (city gates, and a monument to the repressed people); however, even here the presence of visual images of religious content was discovered. Secondly, the location, appearance, and authorship of the studied art objects do not speak of their systematic introduction into the urban environment; rather, a number of objects represent a permissive reading and interpretation of canonical religious semantics. Thirdly, the national-cultural form of Kalmyk Buddhism, embodied in art objects in Elista, contains references both to its other interpretations (in India, China and Mongolia), and to the archaic layers of the autochthonous cultures of the regions where Buddhism is spread. There are also motives of secondary mythologization of religious subjects within their adaptation to secular cultural symbols with an educational value.

Keywords

• elista
• northern buddhism
• urban sculpture
• national and cultural features of kalmyk buddhism