Socha a kult. Evokácia národného mýtu u Dominika Tatarku a paradox etnocentrickej orientácie sochárstva (Sculpture and Cult. Evocation of National Myth in Domink Tatarka’s Essays and Paradox of Ethnocentric Orientation of Plastic Art)

Abstract

The requirements of the national specifics of creation still lingering in the art of the 1960’s from the inter-war period appear in the polemics regarding the form and function of Slovak plastic art. In the interpretations of the new plastic art forms, the influence of the domestic tradition as opposed to the universalism of internationally situated concepts was emphasized within various limits. The extensive corpus of essays of writer and influential intellectual, Dominik Tatarka are first and foremost. Plastic art, according to Tatarka, creates the prerequisites for the common understanding for all mankind through universally valid forms and signs. It should evoke the respect of memory through the representation of protective deities and as signs of the national pride objectified to preserve the metaphysical dimension and pathos of the national myth. In the course of the second half of the 1960’s, Tatarka elaborated the concept of national culture, which he developed in his interpretation of the works of members of the Group of Mikuláš Galanda. For Tatarka, a sculpture is an embodiment of a cult, and not only a private cult, but also a public cult. A cult consists of various expressions in relation to the plastic art object which are of a primarily social character – religious, state, national or power. In several essays on the works of sculptor Vladimír Kompánek, Tatarka brought the archetypal, habitual-folk, mythical together with the modern and progressive. Kompánek’s totemic sculptures represent protection and the worship of archaic values of national existence. My analysis leads towards the return to the primitivism of the folk culture analogically to the fascinations of the early modernists in the archetypal aspects of sculpture.