LANGUAGE AS ART, ART AS LANGUAGE: TERMINOLOGICAL AND CONCEPTUAL TRANSFERS

The article analyzes terminological complexes where the concepts of “language” and “art” act as components and thus convey particular ideas of language (“visions of language”) in terms of art, and, vice versa, visions of art in terms of language. We address a number of contexts from the history of linguistics and aesthetics, where the concepts of “language” and “art” act as operators in various combinations according to particular conceptions. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, language did not relate to categories of art, apart from the contexts of the art of eloquency (rhetorics); the concepts of techne and ars had only to do with grammatical art. The idea of creativity, expressed in the concepts of poiesis and creatio, for its part, did not go beyond the theory of literary genres (lyric, drama, epic) and in Medieval aethetics beyond theological visions of divine creation. The concept of language began to play an active part starting from German Romanticism, which introduced the formula Sprache der Kunst. Later on in literature studies, this expression transformed into the idea of “language as creativity” and “language as art” (in Neohumboldtianism) and, in Avant-Garde poetics, language became the carrier of synesthesia. The formalist notion of “poetic language”, being itself an offspring of avant-garde literary experiments, underwent a transfer to the field of arts and transformed into semiotical notions of “languages of art” and “art as language”. Finally, the linguistic turn of the early 20th century provided for the tranfer of “language-art” terminological complex into the area of artistic activism. Conceptual art based its principles on language games and linguistic premises.