Today’s post is yet another scan of a classic of socialist Albanian aesthetic theory, Alfred Uçi’s Estetika Jeta Arti [Aesthetics, Life, Art] , published in 1970. The book presents an admirable overview of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist aesthetic theory. As an introductory statement in the volume states, the book was published in response to the simultaneous intensification in Albania’s ‘class war’ coupled with the development of socialist art in the country, producing a lamentable situation in which artists, critics, and others lacked a solid theoretical foundation from which to assess the new art in its contemporary context. Uçi’s text aims to correct this, giving a historical introduction to the genealogy and categories of aesthetics, including the sublime and the beautiful, the tragic and the comic. Uçi also deals with issues such as art’s connection to reality and the relation between form and content. Obviously, these issues were familiar to artists active in Albania at the time (thanks to their education, frequently completed in foreign academies elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc), but Uçi’s book represents the initial effort to summarize them in the Albanian language, under one cover.
Although Uçi essentially never says anything specific about Albanian art, the theoretical framework is historically useful (and historically useful when one considers the fact that it comes after the intense cultural production of the late 1960s in Albania—essentially, Uçi’s text serves as a kind of belated attempt to grasp what was happening in socialist Albania during one of its most prolific periods. In this sense it is both woefully disappointing (in its generality) and fascinating (one again, because f its willful generality, which has little to say about what was actually going on in Albania’s relatively unique case… The final chapter is particularly interesting: it focuses on various ‘revisionist’ theories, from those of Lefebvre in France to Lukács in Hungary to Vidmar in Yugoslavia, laying the groundwork for parts of Uçi’s subsequent Labirintet e Modernizmit: Kritika e Estetikës Moderniste [Critique of Modernist Aesthetics].
Happy Reading!
afterart 