Ends, Means, and Art Objects

According to the same essay I quoted last time about X. J. Kennedy, literary critic Randall Jarrell once wrote the following about the great American poet William Carlos Williams: "We want to explain why Williams' free verse...is successful, not to make fools of ourselves by arguing that it isn't." I would like to take this sentiment as a starting point for talking about the Russian avant-guarde painter Kazimir Malevich. I am no critic and have only the most superficial knowledge about art, so I can't pretend explain why his paintings are successful, but I am fairly sure that they are. Take, for example, the following painting, Black Circle from 1915:



I suspect even those who roll their eyes at abstract and minimalist art might like Black Circle. Again, I am not sure exactly why, but we might begin by asking what other sorts of choices Malevich could have made: he could have made the circle smaller, or centered it, or changed its color, or made the background a different color (for instance, truly white). The result of these proposed alternatives would be a completely different painting and very likely a worse painting; the existence of bad abstract art works opens the possibility for good ones. And I believe Black Circle is a good painting.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1878-1935) was born and raised in Ukraine, though his parents were Polish and he was baptized Roman Catholic, and he was educated and spent his artistic career in Russia. His art spanned the period of transition between the late imperial and early socialist periods of Russian history, and his art can in some ways be seen as a symptom of the tremendous sickness of Western civilization which gave rise to social turmoil, feverish artistic and intellectual experimentation, and culminated in the devastation of the First World War and the rise of communist and fascist totalitarianism. He called his art Suprematism, wrote a manifesto about it (anybody who was anybody wrote manifestos back then) and was heavily influenced by the Futurists and the Cubists and, I suppose, a few other early 20th century ists as well.

Though Malevich spoke of art for its own sake, apart from naturalist forms, apart from human beings, his theory of art was very much a reaction to earlier movements. In this respect he reflects the spirit of his time. A few other futurist artists in St. Petersburg wrote a manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" in 1913 proclaiming:

The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics... Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity... He who does not forget his first love will not recognize his last.

After considering the artists who came before them, they add: "From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance!"[3] So they said, and so it was with Malevich, whose art has been described as follows:

[His paintings] bluntly announced the end of representation and the advent of new, superior, and limitless possibilities for painting, which was not liberated from what Malevich designated as its "enslavement by forms of nature."[4]

Malevich also wrote that "Creation exists only where paintings present shapes that take nothing from what has been created in nature"[5]. In retrospect, the bizarre iconoclastic optimism of the Futurists "gazing from skyscrapers" and Malevich's liberation from the "enslavement by forms" seems a little naive. There is something particularly adolescent about the whole business. At any rate one wonders if the artist, after proclaiming the greatness of taking nothing from nature, was ever troubled by the embarrassingly numerous examples of squares, triangles, and circles in nature.

It might be helpful to compare the Black Circle with a painting made by another Russian about thirty years before, Ivan Kramskoy's Unknown Woman painted in 1883.



On one hand the two paintings couldn't be more different. Unknown Woman is detailed and skillfully realistic, and, worse than simply showing natural forms, the painting portrays a human being, the worst of all forms to a superartist of the future, and with the gaze of the woman the painting acknowledges a human viewer. Whatever the painting may have been for, it certainly wasn't for art's sake. However, there are some striking similarities. Both Black Circle and Unknown Woman were controversial and probably intentionally controversial, they employ similar contrasting colors, both employ chiaroscuro, and both attempt to draw the viewer beyond the canvas (in the one to a worldly form, in the other to the world of forms). In a way also, but here I might be going a little far, although Unknown Woman is a representative picture, it doesn't necessarily have to be: one should probably understand it to be a painting of a young woman, but it can also be understood merely as a bunch of painted shapes on a canvas. Any representational painting with discipline and perhaps a little squinting can be viewed as an abstract painting (at the very least within the narrow logic of an artistic ideology such as Malevich's), and I suppose psychoanalysis has taught us that any abstract painting can be viewed, with the revealing help of our imagination, as an representational painting.

If I had more time I might research what real art historians and critics have to say about Malevich's work and his artistic theories, because I think that a lot of what he had to say about art being liberated from natural forms and so on was mostly just posturing. He was painting less about the future and more about the past. The only proof I have is a couple of the paintings themselves and an anecdote relating to his painting's religious themes. Take the following painting, Suprematism (1921-1927):



Had the artist really wanted to abandon form, to boldly embrace pure creativity, to throw all the relics of the past (the baby, the bath water, the tub) overboard from the good ship Modernity, surely it would be better to paint something other than a cross. No symbol in Western culture, particularly in Russian culture, steeped as it is in the rich and fertile soil of the Christian tradition, is more central than the cross. It is a symbol not just of a brutal method of execution or a simple emblem of religion, but it represents a very specific cross, a cross of sacrifice and salvation, of murder and suffering love, the cross of "the Cross, the grave, the third day resurrection", the cross that Christianity has called "the beauty of the Universe", but also the cross of the victorious empires (it is fitting that today is the feast day of Ss. Constantine and Helen). But, whether one loves the cross or hates it, merely appreciates its significance in history, or simply shrugs at it indifferently, one simply can not ignore it. Whatever he was saying in Suprematism (honestly I am not sure), surely he is saying something more than that a couple of rectangles merely look pretty good on a canvas.

Another example is his Black Square which, when exhibited at the 0-10 exhibit in St. Petersburg in 1915 was hung in a high corner, the location where icons are traditionally placed in Russian homes; its comparison with Orthodox iconography is explicit (even if it was just a mean-spirited and sarcastic joke of a comparison--I am not sure what his exact intentions were).



A detailed comparison and analysis of this painting from the perspective of the history and theology of Russian Orthodox Iconography would be helpful and interesting, but it is beyond both this blog entry's scope and this blogger's abilities. What is important, I think, is that, by being made in reaction his paintings never break away from what they were made in reaction to. Malevich, in the end, was just as much a slave as Kramskoy or any other painter of the past.

At this point I want to stress that I like Black Square and I wouldn't be too unsettled if I learned in the painting sold at auction for an enormous sum of money (I don't much care about the economics of art); I like paintings of squares as much, if not more, than the next man [6]. Yet I am scandalized by Malevich's artistic ideology, the ideas which made him paint the way he did. In fact, I find his ideas repulsive: arrogant, blasphemous, and inhuman. I love what he wanted so badly to toss away. I like his paintings in spite of his best intentions, because he could not, however much he may have wanted to ,separate them from the natural world and because they were created (even against his own definition), they were created by a human being. This perhaps is the beginning of an answer to my question, which is this: if ends do not justify means, and, in fact, as Wendell Berry wrote, "corrupt and false means inevitably corrupt and falsify ends" then what are we to make of great and undeniably beautiful works of art, so often created by artists with ethical, moral, or philosophical influences which are equally undeniably false and corrupt?

I don't really know, but as I said in the beginning we should not make fools of ourselves arguing that certain things aren't beautiful, but we should probably also not try to explain too much about why they are beautiful, and just be grateful that they are. That beauty exists in the the most corrupt and unlikely, the most dark and horrific, locations in spite of our intentions and our will is a reason for hope.

[1] Here, you might remember, is the link:
http://www.alsopreview.com/columns/foley/jfmisrule.html

[2] All painting displayed are from Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons.

[3] "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste" by D. Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, V. Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov. You can read it here:
http://www.391.org/manifestos/futurists_slapintheface.htm

[4] From the Guggenheim Museum's "Russia! Catalogue of the Exhibition." I was fortunate enough to see this exhibition in New York a couple years ago. Among other great things, they had an icon painted by Andrei Rublev and Vasily Perov's Portrait of the Writer Fedor Dostoevsky which is on the cover of most paperbacks of F. D.'s works.

[5] http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/malevich.htm

[6] I own more than one Rothko print, after all.