Margarita Matulytė (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2016.7.8
The article, applying the term of destructiveness, focuses on the features of the aesthetic paradigm in photography during the Khrushchev Thaw when a new, good-quality expression appears or an illusion of renovation of the visual language is created, loosening, if not destroying, the structure of communication practised up to that time. One of the dominant forms of language and image in the cultural press of this period represented the time of reformation when dissociation and certain liberation from functioning dogmas were implemented with ‘soft’ means. The style of social and political journalism enables the place of open and hidden codes of meaning in writings and illustrations of the time. The archives of the photographer Adauktas Marcinkevičius (1936–1960) have been taken as a basic source for contextual analysis. His works were considered innovative at the time, reflecting a breaking point in Lithuanian photography and a general transformation of cultural values. Marcinkevičius participated in the general processes of political-cultural transformations and tore out photography from socialist realism, legitimising artistic documentalism. The aesthetic destructiveness has two layers, one of which correlates with the transformation of values of the epoch, and the other, hidden and non-articulated even on the level of his self-reflection, unconsciously bursts out in the photographs. The artist’s motivation, which influenced his photographic view of the world, is revealed in aspects of erotic heresy and death fetish. Due to overcoming his internal conflicts, raising maximum requirements for himself and recklessly sowing the seeds of idée fixe in the cultural soil frozen over the winter of Stalinism, Marcinkevičius should be ascribed to the ranks of those reformers who shook up the foundations of Soviet ideology with their destructive thinking and acting. Matters supposed to be unanimously decided and accepted were split into various opinions, behaviours, tastes, interests and styles. The first steps of Marcinkevičius towards individuality turned into a multi-trend unstoppable movement in just a few years.
Keywords: destructiveness, paradigm, transformation, documentalism, Soviet ideology