Kdy je obraz a co je umění / Metastruktura obrazivosti –⁠ Jaroslav Vančát

The publication aims to introduce a “pragmatic” approach to visual arts and the creation of images. It presents images not primarily as aesthetic objects, which they seem to be through subjective perception; instead, it uses a body of evidence to examine images as a significant social process that cannot be substituted by anything else and that is essential for the inventing and testing of new visual signs required to deal with new social contexts.
This concept of image, visual art and its theory, history and pedagogy is used here to represent the entire area as a coherent system with a certain functionality and orientation; in some parts this concept contradicts the opinion that nothing of that sort can be sought in art because the most valuable aspect of art is its absence of focus, its freedom and striving for an independent existence and for a maximisation of its aesthetic effect, which, in line with the Kantian tradition, rules out any other purpose. In this context, however, it is no longer enough only to learn how to use (or criticise) these visual signs as such; it is necessary to understand the entire process in which these signs are created and socialized.
This examination process gradually reveals certain connections related to the restoration of the term “structure” as it was understood by Jan Mukařovský: a structural idea of the development of art and its functional, pragmatic integration into the active functioning of the society; an idea of image, or depiction, as a gradually evolving structure of visual signs (which also implies, of course, an increasing amount of their mutual relations!), functionally striving, through individually conditioned unique perception and cognition, for social cooperation and coordination. Keywords: visual art, image, structure, interaction, social cooperation and coordination