Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Lyubomir Mikov: Rituális emberábrázolás - Jel: jelkép: művészi hasonmás

differentiation as plastic metaphors whose symbolic aspects contain the meaning and the essence of the creative act as a unity of "marriage

11 and "death". The sign ambivalence of the anthropomorphic ritual plastic art also includes its aesthetic interpretation, moreover not only as autonomous contemplative value. This is also largely determined by the dialectics of its symbolic nature.

8 The social and the natural (agrarian-cosmogonic) androgynism of this type of plastic forms, together with the context of the unity of the dimensions opposite to it, cooperate and impose such a specific way of their aesthetic perception and reflection, which corresponds to the highest degree to the grotesque mastering and reproducing of events and values. In folkloric plastic art, as well as in folkloric culture in general, such a way of creative interpretation is a peculiar transformation of the aesthetic and cultural heritage bequeathed by the different cultural and historical types of grotesque. There are quite numerous examples bearing evidence that modern specialized art in its turn also processes grotesque motifs and images that are widely represented in the archaic (mythological), mediaeval, renaissance and folkloric forms of art and culture, thus developing and shaping a new, contempopary type of grotesque. Irrespective of the cultural-historical type it represents, the grotesque has never been and it should not be considered only as a product of the world outlook or as a norm for reinterpretation of reality.

9 It is also a means of building artistic systems, structures and images. In other words, it is also a means of artistic impression, of artistic reinterpretation and reflection of reality and of artistic modelling of notions about the world."

1 In ritual practice comprising anthropomorphic attributes the grotesque understanding of the world acquires it maximum expression predominantly through the attributive component." This is the result of its doubling function with respect to the participants in the rituals. The binary structuring of the anthropomorphic images in the process of their plastic formation and the sign ambivalence of their functional-semantic manifestation are based on an open set of mutually penetrating dichotomies. Their joint existence at technological, game and semantic levels is manifested through plastic images incarnating the aspects of the male and female principles, of "marriage" and "burial" (life and death, fruit-bearing and destruction, vital and dead, youth and old age, laughter and crying, mirth and sadness), of „high" and „low" (celestial and terrestrial, divine and daemonic, sublime and debasing, beautiful and ugly), etc. The coexistence of these opposites and their constant intertransformation, incarnated in the plastic structures of the images, approaches most closely the grotesque principle of thinking and reflection. In this sense anthropomorphic images arc differentiated as grotesque bodies, as grotesque images, thus confirming their synthetic and generalizable structure of aesthetic and artistic structures and of artistic images. ANTHROPOMORPHIC RITUAL PLASTIC ART - SIGN : SYMBOL : ARTISTIC IMAGE (Summary) Anthropomorphic ritual attributes in Slav ethnic and cultural traditions are studied. I. The sign characteristics contain observations on the basis of which the following generalizations are made: The final formation of anthropomorphic plastic images as semantically identical, functionally universal and socially outlived signs, as well as their emotional and aesthetic interpretation, can be referred in principle to the period of Slav national revival. It was precisely during that period in their historical development that anthropomorphic images were above all socially meaningful signs, while their identical, universal, aesthetic and artistic nature was expressed predominantly as immanent characteristics. The present-day interpretation of the images differs