Black Square: Believe or Know? Part 2
Malevich's legendary painting unconsciously frightens many. After all, I, the spectator, am afraid of what I do not see. And I do not see the black square, for many visual people it is a blind spot. How could just one unusual painting change reality? How does the Black Square define our life today?
… The great image has no form.
Tao is hidden from us and has no name …"
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching
End of painting: black and white. Part 1
Alexander Benois to Kazimir Malevich:
- A black square in a white setting is not a simple joke, not a simple challenge, … it is one of the acts of self-affirmation of that beginning, which has its name the abomination of desolation and which boasts that it is through pride, through arrogance, through trampling on everything loving and tender will lead everyone to death. [one]
Kazimir Malevich:
- When the habit of consciousness to see in pictures the image of corners of nature, Madonnas and shameless Venuses disappears, then only we will see a purely pictorial work. I transformed into zero forms and fished myself out of the pool of rubbish of the Academic art. [2]
Alexandre Benois:
- Mr. Malevich speaks very simply about the disappearance of the habit of consciousness to see images in paintings. But do you know what it is? After all, this is nothing but an appeal to the disappearance of love, in other words, of that very warming principle, without which we are all destined to inevitably freeze and perish. [3]
Malevich:
- But what kind of warmth has to do with creativity … Despite the fact that your "fair" is fun and hot, but why is there no creativity? … And on my square you will never see the smile of a cute psyche. And he will never be the mattress of love. [four]
In art, truth is needed, but not sincerity. [five]
There has never been such a dialogue between the father of Suprematism Kazimir Malevich and the refined graphic artist, the leader of the creative association "World of Art" Alexander Benois. However, it can be easily summed up from the controversy they waged in articles and letters.
Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism was a new and unprecedented phenomenon. However, it was difficult to understand and evaluate him, because the evaluation criteria were developed by Malevich and other artists of his circle much later. Subsequently, they turned these criteria into a coherent scientific theory and pedagogical methodology for teaching universal creators: artists, designers, architects.
In the meantime, someone perceived "Square" as a prophecy, while someone saw signs of decline and degradation of art.
Benoit, like many others, remained Malevich's opponent all his life. And this dislike was more than just outrage or professional disagreement. He saw in the square the killer of culture and art as conductors of moral values.
The system-vector approach allows us to understand why such irreconcilable misunderstanding and hostility arose between the two masters.
What makes a person an artist?
The visual vector seeks to know the world through visual images. The psychic of the owner of the visual vector is manifested at the physical level with supersensitive eyes. Such eyes allow not only to capture the subtle nuances of color and tone, but also to instantly and accurately recognize images.
What makes an artist an artist? The ability to think visually. The visual periphery accumulates information and transforms it into a compact, capacious form of images. The desire to convey them with paints on canvas is also characteristic of the owners of the visual vector. And the fact that the artist has an anal vector allows him to master the technique of painting, to work with his hands as if he were to become a professional, a master of his craft.
Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Benois, like any other artist, possessed an anal-visual ligament of vectors. The developed visual vector, which was present in both artists, endowed them with imagination and imaginative intelligence. The anal vector allowed both of them to become masters of their craft: just like Alexander Benois, Malevich impeccably mastered the classical realistic style of painting.
However, Kazimir Malevich, in addition to the visual, also had a sound vector. This means that he was the owner of a double, abstract-figurative, intelligence.
What is the art about? Values of visual measure
What made a man a man? Law and culture.
The primary limitation of human animal nature is a law that arises due to the development of an additional desire in the skin vector. The secondary limitation of animal urges is humanistic in culture.
Culture as a limitation of hostility was created by the collective skin-visual woman. Thanks to her, during evolution, all of humanity has received the opportunity to learn a great sense of deep empathy and empathy for another. Moral limitations in culture are formed through sensuality and compassion. The owners of the visual vector by their example teach everyone to empathize, to feel the experiences of the other as their own.
The formation of art as a cultural tool originates from the jewelry business. The jeweler in early society was and is to this day the anal-visual man, and this is his secondary specific role in culture.
It was the anal-visual men, developed in their properties, who created art as a way to popularize culture, express humanistic ideas through visual images, transfer these images between generations to form a humanistic personality, that is, not capable of causing harm to another.
For the anal-visual artist Alexandre Benois, the absence of an image and a plot in the picture was subconsciously felt as the absence of an object for which one could experience love, which one could sympathize with.
A picture without an image for the owner of the visual vector is an ugly picture. Such a work does not form humanistic imagery and does not carry value for visual measure.
"Black Square" as a source of superstition
The specific role of the owner of the visual vector is the daytime guard of the flock. The life of the pack during the day depended on the vigilance of his eyes, on the ability to see and recognize danger. Anything that cannot be discerned and identified as a visual image can deeply frighten the visual person.
For some visual people, the "Black Square" to this day is like a black cat. For some, it's just an animal, but for a frightened spectator - a source of superstition.
Malevich's legendary painting unconsciously frightens many. After all, I, the spectator, am afraid of what I do not see. And I do not see the black square, for many visual people it is a blind spot. They cannot identify him with their sensor. Therefore, the picture can cause them unconscious fear and rejection.
However, for many, and above all for people with a sound vector, the Black Square is an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
But what is there to look at? He's nothing, he's not alive! Yes, not alive. And therefore he has no image. It is an abstract quantity - like a number in mathematics. To the question: "How much will 2 + 3" children sometimes answer with the question: "2 what + 3 what?" It doesn't matter what - in any case it will be 5. Abstraction to categories, ideal "pure" composition, harmony of pure colors and forms - the essence of Suprematism. Formal composition is a permanent category. Image and plot are variable. You can take a formal composition and, using its plastic basis, depict any image and plot. Every outstanding genre painting is always based on a strong formal composition.
Asking what the black square represents is as inappropriate as asking what the music is about. In Suprematism, as in music, combinations of sounds, the duration of notes, pauses, dimensions, harmony, and dissonance are important. Suprematism and music affect the soul, bypassing the figurative layer.
The square does not represent anything. Absolutely nothing. Zero form. And this is where innovation lies. He is the formula of all colors and shapes. If we mix three base paints in equal proportions, we get black. If we mix three light beams, we get white light. The wave is white, the particle is black. The paint is dense and material, light is more subtle, immaterial. If we start rotating the square, we will see a cross, if we rotate it even faster, the cross will turn into a circle. Having discovered this, Malevich created two more "formulas", and the square turned into a triptych: "Black Square", "Black Cross", "Black Circle".
“The world, as a sensation outside the image of an idea, is the essence of Art.
A square is not an image, like a button or a plug is not current.
Suprematism is only a new method of knowledge, the content of which will be this or that sensation. " [6]
What do sound-visual abstract artists strive for? Research artist
“It turned out, as it were, that you can't reach with a brush what you can with a pen. She is disheveled and cannot reach in the convolutions of the brain, the feather is sharper."
K. Malevich "The World as Non-Objective" [7]
The sound vector is dominant and has the largest volume of desire. To penetrate deeply, beyond the boundary, through the surface, to cognize the hidden, to comprehend the general principle, the laws of the universe - these are the desires of the sound vector. These desires forced Malevich to abandon the existing, refined language of European painting. As a true sound engineer, he became a pioneer, created his own pictorial language, started from scratch, not relying on the old system.
This new pictorial language made it possible to express the hidden essence of painting, which until then was lost behind the magnificent forms of the physical shells of objects. A clean composition without a visual image.
What are all the elements striving for in any composition? Towards balance. Which of the three simplest shapes (triangle, circle, square) is the most balanced? Of course, a square! After all, all its sides are equal. The square is the geometry of the psyche of the owner of the anal vector. The anal vector is a phenomenal memory, an analytical mind, the ability to teach and learn, and in combination with the upper vectors, sound and visual, this is a scientific mindset, research talent.
Kazimir Malevich was a creator in the broadest sense of the word: researcher, philosopher, scientist. He wrote articles on the nature of art, revealed experimentally and confirmed the laws of composition with an evidence base, studied the effect of color and shape on the human psyche.
To see the unity in the external diversity, to reveal the general, natural behind the particular, to discard the accidental and leave the essence is only capable of the owner of an abstract intellect. This research approach appears again in art for the first time since the Renaissance. Malevich is an artist-researcher, not inferior in scale to Leonardo Da Vinci.
Painting is not obliged to engage in description: "this is a chair - they sit on it, this is a table - they eat at it". She has the right to express the essence in abstract universal categories. Such a formal composition can easily become both a genre (subject) painting and a drawing for fabric, forms of ceramics or an interface element; it can be easily recreated an infinite number of times. Ultimately, it is not the canvas with the applied paint that becomes unique, but the compositional essence, the artist's thought. Versatility creates the possibility of transition from handicraft to conveyor, to technological and massively reproducible.
Art is elite, mass culture - circulation - has a much broader impact, it is everywhere, in every home. Mass art shapes people's lives. It was to this that Malevich was drawn. He called Suprematism the theory of life, and his theoretical studies - pictorial microbiology.
One of the areas of his activity, which he and his students were engaged in at GIHUK, is the theory of the surplus element. They collected an extensive evidence base and brought the theory of the surplus element to the level of a full-fledged scientific concept. Malevich believed that each new period in art penetrates into the old plastic-expressive system a new element, the atom of form-making. It, like a virus, takes root in old forms, causes mutations and completely changes the plastic structure of art. For example, the oval took root in the rounded, symmetrical forms of the Renaissance, and the Baroque aesthetic emerged.
Malevich wanted, using this concept, to create a methodology for managing artistic practice, looking for an opportunity to minimize artistic subjectivity. He tried to make one of the most mysterious and uncontrollable processes - the process of creativity - more technological, independent of the subjective internal states of the artist, and the result of creativity - predictable. He was looking for a way to regulate painterly behavior, just as a doctor, by prescribing a medicine, regulates a patient's condition.
Formal composition is still the basis for training designers, both in Russia and in Europe. After all, versatility and manufacturability is impossible without an abstracted understanding of the expressive essence of form and color. Malevich and his associates worked to give us a clear technology of creativity and universal criteria for evaluating beauty. We no longer have the right to throw up our hands in confusion when asked "Why is it drawn like that?" We have a fulcrum - the basis of a formal composition, developed by Kazimir Malevich.
The aspirations of the sound vector formed a universal artist from Malevich: researcher, philosopher, scientist. He wrote articles on the nature of art, revealed experimentally and confirmed the laws of composition with an evidence base, studied the effect of color and shape on the human psyche.
To see the unity in the external diversity, to reveal the general, natural behind the particular, to discard the accidental and leave the essence is only capable of the owner of an abstract intellect.
This research approach appears again in art for the first time since the Renaissance. Kazimir Malevich is an artist-researcher, not inferior in scope to Leonardo Da Vinci.
How could just one unusual painting change reality? How does the Black Square define our life today?
Read the sequel Intelligence squared: the black cosmos of abstract thinking. Part 3
[1] A. N. Benoit. The last futuristic exhibition. 1916
[2] K. S. Malevich. "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" Collected Works in five volumes, M, Gilea, 1995, v.1, p.35
[3] A. Benois. "Speech", 1916
[4] K. S. Malevich 2004. T.1. P.87.
[5] Malevich 2004. Vol. 1. P. 150
[6] From a letter from K. Malevich to K. Rozhdestvensky, April 21, 1927, Berlin.
[7] K. Malevich. Collected works in five volumes, volume 2, Moscow "Gilea" 1998
