Jan Mukarovsky outlines his conception of art as a dynamic signifying system. According to this conception, each individual work of art is a structure, but one that has references to what has preceded it inhering in its very essence. Structures are thus not independent of history but a formed and determined diachronic series. Nor are they limited in size or scope. The individual work is only one example of a structure; potentially, any author’s oeuvre, contemporary art forms, and even national and international literature can be studied structurally as well.
Moreover, structures should not be conceived as independent, self-sufficient entities. Changes in any single structure, for example the discovery of a lost piece of work by an artist, will necessarily alter the perception of other, related structures.
But what is perhaps more important about these structures is that they act as signs. In fact, Mukarovsky designates the artwork itself as a complex sign, a ‘semiotic fact’ that mediates between the artist and the addressee (audience, viewer, listener). By viewing the artwork from this semiotic perspective, he is able to dismiss both the psychologising theories that identified art with the artist’s or the perceiving subject’s state of mind as well as theories that treat art merely as a reflection of social reality. And with these two hinderances removed, the work of art is placed in a propitious (a chance of success) context for examining aesthetic responses.
By looking more closely at the semiotic character of the artwork, which according to him functions in two ways: both as a communicative sign and as an autonomous structure. Its communicative element is likened to parole (the actual manifestation of speech in a given language system). The entire work should be understood as the ‘message’, it should not be seen as a ‘content’ enclosed in a meaningless container or ‘form’.
Truro College Art and Design 