End of painting: black and white. Part 1
Suddenly, the artist covered the color composition with a black quadrangle, then began to write down all the forms one after another until a single black square remained on the canvas. The force of influence of precisely found proportion of size and color was so great that he became extremely agitated and for a whole week could not eat or sleep …
The bird gets out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who wants to be born
must destroy the world. The bird flies to God.
Hermann Hesse, "Demian"
End of painting
Suprematism is a concert where world art came together to die.
N. Punin
In the summer of 1915, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich worked on the backdrop for the opera Victory over the Sun.
This Suprematist opera by Alexei Kruchenykh, Mikhail Matyushin and Kazimir Malevich told about the "Budelyan" group, which set out to conquer a distant star. The libretto used a non-existent language invented by the authors. The music was built on dissonance and chromatism. Malevich worked on costumes and sets.
What can be depicted on the scenery of an opera in a non-existent language? The sun is white and round, and it can be defeated by its exact opposite - something black and square.
Suddenly, the artist covered the color composition with a black quadrangle, then began to write down all the forms one after another until a single black square remained on the canvas. The force of the precisely found proportion of size and color was so great that he became extremely agitated and could not eat or sleep for a whole week. This black square on white canvas was an incredible color form. Malevich realized that he had created something new, something after which painting would never be the same.
A few months later, an exhibition entitled "The Last Futuristic Exhibition of Paintings" 0.10 "was opened in St. Petersburg. "0" meant zero objectivity, the end of futurism and the beginning of Suprematism, "10" - the estimated number of participants. Malevich was among them. In the red corner, above all the canvases, where the icon was traditionally located in Russian huts, hung the "Black Square". "Square" was immediately dubbed an icon of the new era.
Between "sound" and "sight". Shocking or conceptuality?
To this day, many accuse Malevich of striving to become famous in the scandal. Indeed, at first glance, such an exposure of the picture resembles shocking. But if you look closely at what determined the artist's psychic, it becomes clear what latent desires actually shaped his work.
Kazimir Malevich was a polymorph with a double abstract-figurative intelligence, for which the sound and visual vectors are responsible. However, the sound vector is dominant and the largest in terms of the volume of desires. For such a person, a meaningful idea feels like absolute value. The meaning for him is God.
Whatever a developed sound engineer does, he will always do it in the name of an idea. Fame, attention, fees - all this seems small and insignificant in comparison with what he devoted his life to.
Shocking is one of the manifestations of the visual vector. This happens when a naturally high emotional potential is not developed and then realized in activities useful to society. In essence, shocking is the manipulation of attention, capturing the attention of the audience using forbidden techniques.
However, it is impossible to blame Malevich for underdevelopment or insufficient implementation. Even before writing The Black Square, he was an accomplished master, had an excellent command of the academic manner of writing and could easily create any image that evokes emotions without resorting to extreme measures.
He created something unprecedented - a paradox, a picture without an image. But not because he could not do otherwise. That was the point, the idea.
How to show this picture so that the viewer thinks, stops, changes the paradigm of perception? Consciousness excludes from the field of vision everything that is not recognized by us as an image. The viewer perceives unidentified pictures as “noise” in the communication channel, as a blind spot. The viewer simply will not waste energy on viewing if the message seems meaningless to him.
The black square is the manifesto. Malevich used the emphasized demonstrativeness in his placement in order to take the viewer out of the usual, automatic scenario of perception. He endows his work with additional shades of meaning, makes it conceptual. He seems to say to the viewer: "Look, soon it will be your shrine."
And so it happened. All the rapid development of humanity in the 20th century took place under the square flag of abstract intelligence.
I was crucified with swear words …
"The last futuristic exhibition" 0.10 " turned the art world. Boldly, shocking and incomprehensible - such an impression she made on her contemporaries. However, even among artists, many did not understand how to evaluate this phenomenon. A storm of criticism fell upon Malevich.
“I was crucified with swear words…” - this is how he begins one of his 1916 poems.
It would seem that the artist wrote a picture and wrote, in the art of the twentieth century, and not so. However, more than a hundred years have passed, and the debate about the black square does not stop.
Indeed, Malevich's canvas is least of all similar to traditional painting: what is this painting that does not depict anything?
The Russian writer, publicist, literary critic Tatiana Tolstaya in her essay "Square" does suggest that Malevich sold his soul to the devil, for which he endowed him with eternal fame and absolute influence on art and culture.
Whether we like Black Square or not, now we live in a post-square world. "Square" has had a huge impact on culture and even science.
The guillotine of its black plane, with one precise blow, divided culture in two: a pre-square world and a post-square world. And at the same time she blessed life with many new phenomena. Design, photography, cinematography, etc. were born in the post-square world.
It is not necessary to love the black square, but it is dangerous not to understand it today - like being illiterate in a big city. He is the ABC of the modern visual language.
It is not at all difficult to understand this paradox of twentieth century art if you look at painting through the prism of the knowledge of the training "System-vector psychology".
What is painting?
Painting is a product of visual measure, figurative intelligence.
The basis of the painting tradition before Malevich was always the image and the plot. They have been the flesh and blood of painting since its inception, since the first cave paintings of early man.
An image is a set of features inherent in an object or phenomenon, and an associative cocoon around it. An image can be expressed, for example, by a word in a text or an image in painting, sculpture, dance.
The image is an instrument of instant grasping. It is a capsule. An artist or writer compresses a voluminous array of information into a simple form. The capsule of the image opens up inside the perceiver's consciousness and adds those details that were not actually in the picture or text, but they could have been.
Yuri Lotman, a Soviet and Russian literary critic, culturologist and semioticist, drew attention to this feature. He said that an artistic image is capable of generating new meanings by itself.
The plot (or plot) is the context, the circumstances in which the images exist in the work. This is the main dramatic conflict that lends tension and expression to a work of art. In painting and cinematography, this tension often creates a contrast: a dynamic colorful background, many people run and shout, and in the foreground is a large static monochrome figure of a person with an impenetrable face.
The sacred status of the painting and the painting tradition
The picture is different from the picture. Than? By its special status. A painting is something that hangs on the wall, a particularly valuable painting in a museum. A visit to the exhibition is not just a walk, it is a ritual. All this sacred atmosphere ensures the viewer's unconditional trust in what is painted in the picture.
It happened so because painting originated from a fresco. A fresco in the Middle Ages introduced the illiterate to biblical subjects. She had to display the content of the Holy Scripture as accurately as possible, since her images were trusted by those who could not read the original source themselves. The painting inherited the sacred status of the fresco and the credibility of it.
The tradition of European painting begins with the proto-Renaissance artist Giotto di Bondone (1266 -1337). Giotto is the creator of the traditional language of European painting. An excellent artist and an excellent psychologist, he allowed himself for the first time to author's interpretation, rethinking the image and plot. He fills his frescoes with the most precise details and types, spied on in life. It was thanks to Giotto that all artists got the opportunity to sometimes throw in their hearts: "But I am an artist, I see it this way!"
This pictorial tradition was unshakable until the end of the 19th century, when the Impressionists appeared, then the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, etc. However, even the diversity of artistic trends of the late 19th - early 20th century was connected as an umbilical cord with the pictorial language of Giotto by the presence of an image or plot. This image could be recreated from clay, like in Cezanne's, cut into small pieces and assembled again in a random order: the nose in one part of the picture, the eye in another, like in Picasso. But it has always been - albeit in a destroyed form.
Russia under Peter I adopted the European artistic tradition and developed in it with some delay until the late 19th - early 20th century. We did not have impressionism and cubism, but at the very beginning of the 20th century, many interesting and original artists appeared who rocked the rigidity of traditions. This is the art association "World of Art" headed by Alexander Benois, "Jack of Diamonds" with Konchalovsky, Mashkov, Larionov, Lentulov. "Futurists" - brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova and others. Kazimir Malevich also began to create with futurists.
Why is a square the death of painting?
So, painting, starting from the 13th century all over the world, is an image and a plot. A pictorial image is believed because it is sacred. And they expect from him a story, history, narration with the author's interpretation of images by the artist.
And in Russia in 1915, in the exhibition space, in the "red corner", in an emphatically sacred place, a painting appears that does not depict anything!
Explosion of consciousness. It's not even a provocation - it's a sabotage. The act of destroying culture, "everything loving and tender."
How did it happen that an ordinary artist, then still a futurist, Kazimir Malevich could consciously do this?
Yuri Burlan's training "System-Vector Psychology" distinguishes between two types of intelligence: figurative and abstract. They correspond to the visual and sound vectors …
Read the continuation in the articles "Black Square": Believe or Know? Part 2 and Intelligence squared: the black cosmos of abstract thinking. Part 3
