These
few notes are only intended to deal with certain problems which have
arisen in the field of art criticism from the observation that one
cannot speak of 20th Century art without mentioning the Suprematist
revolution. A Malevich fashion is currently to be seen which, just
as much as the Kandinsky fashion in its time, provokes much emotional
discourse carrying with it a mixture of snobbery and sensationalism
to the detriment of rigour. In fact, many people are nowadays
convinced that 'wishful thinking' is more interesting than rigour.
We
are still a long way from having all the information needed to form
definite conclusions about the meaning of Suprematism. Many events
from the story of Russian art in the tens' and twenties' remain
hidden in shadow. The greater part of the writings of Malevich are
not published in Russian and the inevitable inaccuracies of
translation give rise to ambiguities. Lastly, important works
(canvasses, architectones, drawings) remain inaccessible, stored away
in Soviet museum reserves or kept in private collections. Mistakes
and omissions are the natural outcome of such a lack of information.
It would be pointless to blame western researchers for these faults.
It should not be forgotten that it is thanks to these same western
researchers who have at a great price assembled the diverse elements
of a story doomed to mental oblivion, that Russian art from the first
quarter of the 20th Century in general, and Malevich in particular
has escaped the amnesia of humanity's collective memory. For it has
now won back in Russia itself a following, which though still feeble,
holds out much promise for the future.
One
can understand the errors and omissions arising from such unfavorable
conditions. However, it is altogether different when it comes to the
distortions and tendentious interpretations made from areas of
concrete knowledge. It is here that rigour must intervene and calm
the ardours of a wayward imagination. By enquiring: 'What is
Suprematism?' we are led to ask questions about ideas often invoked
in a vague and confused way concerning this enigmatic 'ism' among the
'Kunstismen' of the 20th Century.
1.
Suprematism is anti-constructivist.
Only
too often we find Constructivism and Suprematism lumped together.
Upon seeing some geometric form, the unwise critic immediately cries
Constructivism. Despite superficial similarities between
Constructivism and Suprematism, the two movements are nevertheless
antagonists and it is very important to distinguish between them.
The confusion arises from the fact that several artists, either
formerly part of the Suprematist movement like El Lissitzky, or who
had once worked under its influence like Liubov Popova and Rodchenko,
soon became exponents of the culture of materials. They celebrated
this latter in their creations, deliberately opting for the way
opened, from 1914, by Tatlin's reliefs. Constructivism aims to
employ the material as foundation, it involves the cult of the
object. For Constructivism, 'the object is work of art and the work
of art is object'. It is firmly based on a materialistic and
utilitarian philosophy. Its aim is the functional organisation of
life under all its aspects. The easel-painter must give way to the
artist-engineer, to the productivist, the painting to the 'shaping'
(oformlenie) of life. The principles of Constructivism, though
already accepted in practice, were not formulated until 1922
('Constructivism' by A. Gan, Tver; 'And yet it moves' by I.
Ehrenburg, Berlin; two numbers of the Berlin review
'Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet' by El Lissitzky and I. Ehrenburg...).
By
contrast, Suprematism, whose first writings date from the end of
1915, was born of an awareness of the insignificance of the object.
For Malevich, the object as such does not exist, it dissolves in the
energy stimulus (rozbuzhdenie) of non-objective beingness.
Suprematism is therefore an active negation of the world of objects.
It endeavors to exhibit a world without objects and without
objectives, die gegenstandslose Welt, the only one to have a real
existence. When Malevich speaks of Suprematist 'utilitarianism' or
'economy', he means neither functionalism nor rational
schematisation. Suprematist economy and utilitarianism seek to
transform 'this green world of flesh and bones', the world of
'nutrition', into a world of desert, of absence, aimed towards the
unveiling of essential beingness. Although Suprematism is both
painting in ontological action and meditation on being, it does not,
however, neglect the technical problems of construction. The skill
(umenie) is very important for Malevich (we should remember his vast
pedagogic work in Unovis in Vitebsk and at Inkhuk in Petrograd), but
it is neither the major factor nor the aim of creation. Artistic
mastery should yield to the demands of the flux of being in the world
and should not exhibit the material in its skeleton-like nudity as
Constructivism does. It ought to show the non-existence of form and
colour. This is why the squares, circles and crosses of Suprematism
are quite unrelated to the squares, circles and crosses occuring in
nature -- they are the irruption of non-existence, and constitute
FORMING and not INFORMING elements.
2.
Is Suprematism mystical?
The
word 'mystical' has been misused so often in the field of Russian art
that one hesitates to apply it to the thought and works of Malevich.
In this particular case, there is no question of vague and imprecise
religious agendas nor theological states of the soul. But if one
accepts that mystical vision bypasses the intermediaries and
transforms the ordinary perceptions of the five senses into a
contemplation of the world in its total being, then it can be
asserted that Malevichian Suprematism is mystical. This does not,
however, attribute
special
status to Malevich since true art has always and will always be
linked to this direct penetration of the total beingness of the
world. The mysticism of Malevich stands out all the more because of
its fundamental antagonism to the dominant postrevolutionary thought
of Constructivism and materialism. There are, however, similarities
in approach and in thought not only to certain aspects of Buddhism
(undoubtedly through the books and articles of P. D. Uspensky) but
also with the apophatic theology of the Greek Fathers and with
Hesychasm. Though not wishing to overestimate these elements among
so many others in Suprematism, one cannot ignore them.
3.
Suprematism as absolute Non-objectivity.
There
are many ambiguities in the names applied to the different
manifestations of the plastic arts which in the 20th Century no
longer represent the elements of reality as we see them around us.
The most usual term to designate this art which refuses all reference
to any known thing in the perceptible world is that of ABSTRACTION.
Though this term with its nuances may be appropriate for Kandinsky or
even Mondrian, it will not do for Suprematism which is not the
triumph of 'abstraction' but of 'bespredmetnos' (non-objectivity).
In
abstraction, there is always a RAPPORT WITH THE OBJECT, there is
always an interpretation of the world by rapport to a REPRESENTATION
(in the sense of the 'Deutung' discussed by Erich Auerbach in his
celebrated book on mimesis). But Malevich is clear on this subject:
Man CAN NOTHING REPRESENT. The artist must only favour the epiphanic
appearance of beings as manifestations of being in the world.
Whereas abstraction wants to know the object in its essence such as
we intuitively know it and not according to our normal eyesight,
Suprematist non-objectivity refuses all reference to the world of
objects and only recognises ONE WORLD, that of the abyss of being.
Where Kandinsky's abstraction is still dualist-symbolist, where
Mondrian's abstraction is a system of pictorial and semiological
equivalences, Malevichian non-objectivity is the radical destruction
of the bridge by which metaphysics and traditional art spanned this
'great abyss' separating a world accessible to reason or intuition
from a world which is not. For Malevich there is but one sole world
— absolute
non-objectivity. It is the SENSATION of this world which consumes
all vestige of form at the two poles of Suprematism -- the Black
Square and the White Square.
Though
Malevich, with pedagogic intentions, wanted to explain in his Bauhaus
book in 1927 what conditioned artistic vision in different epochs in
terms of the environment, this is not to say that Suprematism is the
pictorial reproduction of that environment (an aerial view of the
earth). It means that the environment has made possible the
Suprematist consciousness. Aerial vision has not given rise to new
geometrical forms, abstractly conceived by viewing forms from above.
It explains the Suprematist liberation from the terrestial gravity
of objects, their annihilation in the 'liberated nothingness'.
Malevich calls Suprematism a 'new realism' in so far as it embraces
the only true reality of the non-objective world.
4.
Suprematism as an All-embracing Philosophy.
The
pictorial is for Malevich the privileged site for Suprematist
revelation, but the latter is not limited to what is traditionally
called the plastic arts. Suprematism reaches out to all branches of
human activity. It wants to transform life in its entirety
(economical, political, cultural, religious). If the perspective
inherited from the Renaissance, or the inverted perspective of iconic
art has been radically suppressed, this is because man's place in the
universal movement is not totally new. Suprematism is not humanist.
It is not the triumph of man as the centre of the universe, the
centre of converging or diverging vision, but the triumph of
'liberated nothingness'. Man in general and the artist in
particular, is the emitter and transmitter of the energies of the
world which pass through him. He himself is this world. He is not
the enterpreter but the prophet in the etymological sense of the
word. It is by light of this new perspective that the new world must
be erected. It will be built out of pain, for the figurative
resists, and whenever there is resistance, there is war. Wars and
revolutions are inevitable phenomena in the world march towards the
liberation from the burden of the figurative, reinforced through the
centuries by humanity's anthromorphism and its need of comfort and
convenience.
It
would be hazardous to identify the ideas of Malevich with any kind of
idealism, subjectivism, psychologism or pantheism. Rather they are
phenomenological, in Heiddeger's sense —
and a few years before him —
in so far as they constitute a 'deciphering of being in its beings'.
From
the catalogue for: Kasimir Malewitsch – zum 100. Geburtstag;
Galerie Gmurzynska, Köln, Juni – Juli, 1978
_____________________________
In a note for his essay,
"Malevich, Painting, and Writing: On the Development of a
Suprematist Philosophy" (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New
York, 2003), Jean-Claude Marcadé explains: "Bespredmetnost …
is usually rendered as 'nonobjectivity' or 'nonobjectivism,' but, for
reasons that I will explain, I prefer 'the objectless.' "
Macardé explains: "First and foremost,
Malevich was unique in that he gave philosophical significance to the
pairing of figuation (predmetnost) and the objectless
(bespredmetnost), which emerged in the theory and art criticism of
the 1910s as a way to designate a new reality – the rise of
nonfiguation and abstraction. In1919, the Polish-Ukrainian-Russian
painter stated: 'In mentioning the objectless [in 1913-16], I only
wanted to point out clearly that Suprematism does not treat of
things, objects, etc., and that's all; the objectless, generally
speaking, wasbeside the point.' Thus, the painter clearly
distinguished between the objectless as an operative mode in the
plastic arts and 'the objectless, generally speaking' – that is, in
a philosophical, Suprematist sense. He deliberately did not seek a
different word for the philosophical objectless. Malevich could have
used objectivity (obektivnost) and nonobjectivity (neobektivnost) to
describe both the philosophical objectless and nonfigurative art,
which he does elsewhere, but according to my hypothesis, he did not
choose to do so because 'objectivity/nonobjectivity' did not
acknowledge his project, instead associating his thought with that of
various other doctrines. There is almost a certain 'objectivity' in
Suprematism, the objectivity of the objectless, of the total absence
of the object. Although the painter denies objectivity in terms of
picturing an object since 'the human being cannot picture anything,'
and although the traditional conflict in philosophy between the
subject and object means nothing to him, it is still the case that
all is one, that if there is nothing outside, then nothing is what
is. It is this nothing that Suprematism wants to release from the
weight of the figurative (i.e., of objects [predmetnyi]). This is
precisely the crux of the painter's philosophical thought: the
impossibility of being able to picture, to picture oneself, to
represent, to represent oneself. The 'Suprematist mirror'
(Suprematicheskoe zerkalo) is the zero, 'the zero as the ring of all
that is with-object [predmetnoe] into the objectless
[bespredmetnoe].' It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of
being begins. None of the traditional philosophical oppositions are
appropriate in this case, which is why Malevich used vocabulary from
the plastic arts in his reflections on being. Suprematism is not a
philosophy of negation in a dialectical process; it is a philosophy
of ' without,' of absence."
Website of Jean-Claude Marcadé:
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