Work and artistic creativity

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Imaginative thinking is not yet art. It becomes art only when objectivized, materializing in some or other means accessible to man - in speech and motion, stone and sound. Art is a unit of a communicative system in which it is a mediator between those who create artistic values ​​and those to whom they are addressed, who must perceive the specific information contained in them. Therefore, artistic creativity is both figurative thinking and practical action, the practical creation of works of art as real carriers of artistic information. And this process proved to be possible insofar as the work provided man with the necessary tools and means for materially embodying the artistic ideas. Indeed, the work "gave" to the primitive artist the stone tool with which he cut the contours of the beast on the surface of the rock; it is in my work that I have worked out my skill in dealing with the tool, subjecting his movements to his will. It was the technical foundation of artistic creativity in the field of architecture and applied arts, and it was precisely the work that gave man a hand capable of giving aesthetically significant form to the created objects and facilities. While the first flint had been processed in a knife by the human hand, it had to take such a long time, he is compared with it, our famous historical period is insignificant. But the decisive step was taken: the hand became free and could now acquire new and new skills, and the greater flexibility thus acquired was passed on by inheritance and grew from generation to generation.

Therefore, the hand is not just a labor body, it is also a product of it. Only thanks to labor ... the human hand reached that high degree of perfection, in which he could, by virtue of magic, call out the paintings of Raphael, the statues of Torvaldsen and the music of Paganini. But not only the hand of man is the product of labor - the product of labor is also the speech that was caused by the need of people to communicate in their collective productive actions and later became the "first element" of the art of speech. And in the long historical process of mastering the articulate speech, the human larynx was transformed, developed and perfected with a complex mechanism of voice ties; thanks to this, the art of music received one of its first magnificent instruments capable of extracting sounds of a certain height and "building" the necessary for the singer intonation and rhythmic formations. And again, the work gave the music all its other instruments: the forerunner of stringed instruments was the hunter's bow, the forerunners of the wind instruments, the hunting horn and the shepherd's whistle, and the forerunners of the drums, the tares and the tatami - the hunting instruments used for hunting.

Together with the hand and the larynx in the labor actions "forged" and developed the whole human body. Only thanks to this, man gained such versatility in the physical movements and such a skill to manage every gesture that allowed him to express his mental states with the language of the dance. And only after learning how to hide in animal husbandry and imitate the movements and behaviors of the beast in the hunting process, the primitive man discovered within himself the acting abilities that he mastered the ways of imaginative incarnation. Such is the enormous role that labor has played in the origin of art. Art is not a gift of gods or nature, but a child of the labor. If the formation of the figurative consciousness determined the possibility of an artistic knowledge of the world, it was the work that allowed this opportunity to become a reality.