Art with a focus on special military operation: in search of an adequate methodology

The present paper is focused on the works of visual arts, graphics and applied arts devoted to the military issues, the methodological aspects of their analysis, in particular. The conducted analysis of the modern authors has led to the following finding: at the present stage monitoring of a large amount of works on the subject of special military operation needs to center not only on the special military operation itself, but also on its historical parallels. The empirical basis of the research covers illustrations of paintings, graphics images, objects of applied arts represented in the Internet discourse on the authors’ channels in Telegram and on the personal websites of the artwork’s creators. The object of the culturological study is based not only on the samples created by the special military operation participants, but also by those artists whose pieces represent military realities of the historical past and present. In this connection the authors’ reception of the artworks under analysis in terms of both artistic reflection (a group of works by the artists not participating in fighting of the special military operation) and self-reflection (works by those directly participating in fighting of the special military operation) has been carried out. The graphic illustrations created by the army volunteer, nicknamed «Teacher», (the Telegram channel «Volunteer Z#art»), artworks by Niki-SVOD and Lazerсraft TAG have been examined. The artistic peculiarities and the genre specificity of the paintings by the following artists Voligamsi (R. Ismagilov), E. Solovyova, E. Korneev, M. Poletaev, I. Pozharov, J. Savicheva have been identified. The semiotic research method has been applied to the works by Niki-SVOD and Lazerсraft TAG. The authors of the article have concluded that both the artworks executed in the realism and surrealism manner and the objects of applied arts visualize metaphysical connection between the historical military past and present.