Russell Alt

Reaction Paper

Kasimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting”

 

In this text distributed at ‘0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition’ (1915) in Petrograd, Russia, Kasimir Malevich briefly details the development of Futurism, Cubism and Suprematism and their iconoclastic schism (and there is cause, I argue, to use such a religiously connoted term) from Academic art.  Malevich’s chief objective in the treatise is to limn the necessity of, and the methods for, creating what he terms “pure, living art” (173).  Academic art, to be sure, does not fall under this category.  Malevich does not even consider Academic art to be art as such, but rather a contrived transferal of a form from nature onto the canvas, an anathematic representation.  Malevich’s animosity (the text often reads as a pointed diatribe) toward naturalism stems, in part, from his claim that the framework of an object gives “meaning” only to the object depicted, and obviates the creation of living art.  Elucidating this stance, Malevich decries the Academy’s rigid aesthetic of beauty.  This particular aesthetic (‘realistic’ cohesion of form and color and the inviolability of the subject), he believes, ultimately coerces the human of the modern age (an age where airplanes, electricity, the telegraph, etc. proclaim the new beauty of speed) into the old forms of time past.  Though he doesn’t explicitly state it, could we not infer that the pictorial framework of subjects from nature, found in the old codes, is incommensurable with the modern experience precisely because ‘speed’ or ‘speeding objects’ (as seen from a stationary view) blurs the contours of natural forms in any case?  This suggests a rudimentary understanding of Malevich’s penchant for the accelerated pace of modern life.  Malevich perceives velocity as an agent for destabilizing, disintegrating and violating the wholeness of natural form.  Only through the “violation of the wholeness of things” (178), as with the Cubists’ fragmentation of life, does one discover the “hidden meaning” of art and an approach to non-objective creation—to the creation of a new, living form that does not mimic or replicate nature.

 

Malevich’s statement “[a]rt approaches creation as an end in itself” (174) reeks of “Art for art’s sake.”  Yet that can only be a surfacial reading of Malevich’s words.  When we consider other statements such as “to create a living art” and “target of destruction” (with regard to the Academy), we discover that the new Suprematist art and artistic culture Malevich advocates boldly declares its agency and seeks to express and impose its will.  The old codes (artistic, social or otherwise) must be toppled.  The distinctly political tenor of this reading is buttressed by a fascinating religiosity with which I feel Malevich imbues this text.  For the Suprematists, Futurism had already become part of the old codes (because they could not give up painting subjects, even though the objects depicted were of new technological innovations), so “we, the most daring, have spat on the altar of its art” (176).  The image of this sacrilegious act suggests the Suprematist desire to reconfigure and even rupture the sacrosanct bond between art (which has, until now, been purely imitative) and nature.  The icons of traditional art must be desecrated to make way for a new god, a new religion, or, at the very least, a new space in which to worship and understand the world.  Furthermore, the very appellation “Suprematism” bespeaks a certain religiosity.  The role of “Supreme Being” or “Supreme Creator” has been taken on by Malevich & Co., for it is the goal of these artists to create a living art.  As Malevich writes, “a painted surface is a real, living form” (179).  But I have to wonder: the Suprematists’ conflation of the political and the religious (a clear nod to Communism?), though critical to combating the Academy’s hegemony, seems antithetical to its purpose.  The Academy is derided for its prescriptive notions of aesthetics and beauty, for its final say in the question “What is art?”.  The Suprematists assert that there has been no art until the breakdown of form in Cubism and that natural form, in fact, cannot exist in true art.  Though revolutionary, the Suprematists are acting as didactically and prescriptively as the Academy.  Is this not, more or less, the replacement of one ideology for another?

 

The importance of the violation of form for Malevich’s understanding of art touches on one final issue I would like to address.  As stated, the Academy deemed that the beauty of objects was preserved when they were transferred “whole” into the picture.  Malevich takes the opposite view that the new beauty of modernity, and in this case, Cubism, lies in “the dissonance obtained in the collision of two opposed forms” (180).  He continues: “Objects embody a mass of moments in time. [….] All these aspects of time in things and their anatomy – the rings of a tree – have become more important than their essence and meaning. [….] [W]e have freed ourselves from the impression of the wholeness of objects” (180).  Malevich’s sense of time contains an important duality.  Initially it would seem that he understands time atomistically, i.e., time is marked, or broken up into moments, like “the rings of a tree.”  But these increments of time are bound in a larger unbroken continuum (a mass of moments suggests they are separate though indistinguishable from each other; a tree never ceases to grow though its trunk is punctuated by rings denoting a specified amount of time).  How are we to understand Malevich’s space-time continuum then?  Does the object exist in a space where time is atomistic in nature, though inherently qualified by containment within an unbroken temporal continuity?  And if so, does this, or can this, perspective agree with Bergson’s view of space and time?  Furthermore, what defines the “wholeness of object?”  Is it the accumulated presence of the past the object carries with it?  And what is accomplished by destroying an object’s wholeness?  How does this destruction yet again reconfigure space and time?