Kazimir Malevich: A New Gospel in Art

KAZIMIR MALEVICH: A NEW GOSPEL IN ARTBy Gleb Sidorkin HAA 176m, Spring 2011

Introduction

The subtitle of this essay has two possible meanings, and the difference between

them corresponds to a dividing line within the critical appraisal of Kazimir Malevich and

his legacy. The phrase "novoe Evangelie v iskussvte" appears in a personal letter from

Malevich to Mikhail Matyushin, dated June 23, 1916, in which the Suprematist painter

tries to convince his friend of the need to emulate Jesus Christ by creating a book that

would "lock up" (zakliuchit') the story of their art and become the "key" (kliuch) by

which the path to the heavens could be opened for others .1 Translating this phrase as "a

1 Kazimir Malevich, "Letters to M.V. Matyushin," in E. Kovtun, ed. Annual of the manuscript department of the Pushkin House for 1974 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976) 195.

new Gospel in art" maintains a syntactical ambiguity present within the Russian "v

isskusstve." One could dispense with the literal translation and erase this ambiguity by

translating it in one of two ways: "a new Gospel in the field of art," or, "a new Gospel in

the form of art." A translator who views Malevich either mostly as a formalist or mostly

as a mystic might select one of these disambiguations, the first to prove that Suprematism

was a statement about art as such, or the latter to show that it was a transcendent vision of

a messianic order.

Malevich himself, however, was always careful to maintain his ambiguity, and

preferred to write in Russian. And if one sticks to the ambiguous original version of the

phrase, the Russian tradition provides a productive note of resonance: the words are

borrowed from an Orthodox Christian discourse about the relationship between the divine

word and the holy image. Orthodox theologians have described icons as "Gospels in

images" at least since the defence against Iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries—a

time in which the equivalence between word and image came to mean much more than

simply illustration. In Iconophile thought, the phrase became imbued with meanings

related to the Christological doctrine of the "Logos made flesh," and the incarnation

became the basis for aesthetic theory. Thus, the formal and philosophical system of the

Byzantine icon responds to both meanings of the phrase "evangelie v iskusstve." That is,

an icon of Jesus Christ contains not only a representation, but also a theory of

representation. Byzantine iconography is both theology in images and a theology of

images.

The analogy between the Christian and Suprematist "Gospels" points to a basic

similarity between Byzantine and Modernist art: both are highly politicized aesthetic

systems in which questions of form are bound up with moral and philosophical

considerations. Given that Byzantine writers were much more straightforward in

articulating the specific nature of the relationship between theory and practice than

Malevich was, pushing this analogy further could be illuminating. The following essay

attempts to account for Malevich's development as an artist and thinker by thrusting him

into the conceptual framework of Byzantine icon theory, trying to make sense of what it

might mean to create a Gospel in art while still preserving the ambiguity of the phrase.

Methodology

This reading of Malevich is part of a larger project in which I am interested in

finding connections between Byzantine art and Suprematism on three different levels: the

formal, the historical, and the theoretical. On the formal level, the art-historical

importance of Russian artists' encounters with icon painting in the development of

abstract art has already been established, but quality research and compelling

comparative analyses are just beginning to emerge. A daring historical analysis was

suggested by Annette Michelson on the pages of October magazine in 1990, wherein

Leninist art was presented as a continuation of the Orthodox "textual system."2 Her

"prolegomena" remains unfinished, but she has opened the door for Nikolai Berdyaev's

account of Communism as a "Christian heresy3" to inform the study of Modernism.

These historical trajectories combine to make Russian artists like Malevich

compelling subjects for the third, theoretical level of analysis, on which this paper will

concentrate. In developing an account of Malevich by using the terminology of Byzantine

2 Annette Michelson, "The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System" October, Vol. 52 (Spring, 1990) 16-39.3 See Nikolai Berdyaev, "Communism and Christianity" in The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) 158-189.

icon theory I follow in the footsteps of Marie-Jose Mondzain, whose ground-breaking

work on the philosophical texts of the Iconoclast period has led her to the following

conclusion and new path of inquiry:

"There is no alternative system of thought concerning the image capable of competing with the theoretical and political power of the one that the church developed during its first ten centuries… We have always been, and are still today, heirs to a Christian iconocracy… What, then, can I add to all this? First, I will pause at the point on which the [Iconoclasts and Iconophiles] agree—their mutual condemnation of idols and idolatry—in order to investigate… what Patristic thought can bring to the study of a few examples of modern works in the fields of painting, photography, and cinema. What exactly are our icons today, our iconoclast signs, our idols?"4

In making all of these connections between Malevich and iconography, I am not

interested in erecting my own personal idol of Malevich the crypto-Christian and

asserting that the Orthodox tradition is the one true path to understanding Suprematist

theory. As Aleksandra Shatskikh repeatedly warns in commentaries on her edited

volumes of his texts, Malevich's thought has a paradoxical property of being almost

impossible to grasp as a totality, while also making it easy for critics to totalize it within

some other system of thought, and to use it to further their own agenda. Competing

attempts have been made to associate Malevich with projects ranging from the analytical

to the mystical: from the philosophies of Shopenhauer, Kant, and Bergson to the poetics

of the transrational zaum movement to non-euclidean geometry and the theosophical

variations on the idea of four-dimensional perception.5 Shatskikh rejects all such

reductive accounts of Malevich as a partisan of specific philosophical movements, citing

4 Marie- José Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005) 173-174.5 See Christina Lodder, "Introduction" in Rethinking Malevich, ix-xxii

his aversion to all bookish culture, and finding no evidence to support a popular theory

according to which he read philosophy "in secret" so as to appear original.6

While I take to heart Shatskikh's warning about the futility and danger of equating

Malevich's work with any other aesthetic system, her strong use of the terms samobytnyi

and samorodok, meaning Selbstständigkeit or "self-originating",7 strikes me as too

categorical. After all, later in the essay Shatskikh isolates some important currents within

the cosmopolitan intellectual milieu that shaped Malevich's thought.8 She also writes that

among the few texts Malevich did read, the Gospels stand out as by far the most cited. In

fact, Shatskikh concludes that the New Testament was the one book that remained on his

desk throughout his life, and was his "primary reference and metatext."9 Given that a

number of book-length studies have been devoted to claiming the influence of books

Malevich didn't read, a comprehensive volume on "Malevich and Christianity" is long

overdue. Direct Christian references in his writing are numerous, ranging from a

comparison between Lenin and Christ10 to an account of the faktura of an Orthodox

temple11 to the theological tour de force God is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory.

Some of the language in his "biographical sketch," which concludes with a monologue in

the voice of Jesus, would almost suggest that one could view Malevich as a radical

Protestant who saw his own work as the true fulfillment of the Gospels. At the very least,

6 Aleksandra Shatskikh, "Aspects of Malevich's Literary Legacy: A Summary" in Charlotte Douglas and Lodder, C., eds., Rethinking Malevich (London: Pindar, 2007) 317-328; 3237 Shatskikh, "Teoreticheskoe Nasledie Kazimira Malevicha" in D. Sarab'iankov and Shatskikh, A., eds., Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis', Teoriia (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1993), 179-190, 183, 1858 ibid. 184.; Shatskikh's essay includes an interesting account of the influence of the Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev on the intellectual scene of the time, detailing his potential link to Malevich via the mutual friendship of Mikhail Gershenzon. However, she sees Malevich's incorporation of Berdyaev simply in terms of a general messianism. 9 Shatskikh, "Kazimir Malevich: Volia k Slovesnosti" in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gileia, 1995-2004), v.5, 11-30, 2510 Malevich, "Lenin" (1924) in ibid., v. 2 (1998), 25-29, 2711 Malevich, Letter to Gershenzon, "21 Dec. 1919" in ibid., v.3, 334

these texts indicate that he saw the twentieth century as still firmly attached to the

Christian era, and looked at the rise of Communism primarily in religious terms.12 But

looking at these more obvious moments only scratch the surface of Christianity's imprint

on Malevich's worldview, in the same way that formal comparisons with icons and

cursory mentions of the "icon corner" placement of the Black Square in the 0,10

exhibition have so far glossed over the deeper connections between Suprematism and

Byzantine art. A more theological engagement with the Orthodox tradition has the

potential to open a rich dialog with Malevich's seemingly idiosyncratic philosophy.

Ultimately, Shatskikh does not claim that strong readings of Malevich in relation

to other philosophical or political projects have no value; she just condemns those that

pretend to offer a conclusive synthesis. In fact, she celebrates the ability of Malevich's

work to spawn a profusion of productive misreadings. The aim of this essay, then, is

simply to generate a productive misreading, in the hope that a fresh vocabulary might

help to bridge the impasse between mystical and formal interpretations of Suprematism.

In the following pages, I will apply this vocabulary by comparing three stages in the

development of Christian art with three moments from Suprematist theory, and show how

by being both a Greenbergian formalist and a New Age mystagogue, Malevich ended up

becoming an Iconophile in the strict Byzantine sense of the word.

1. This Reasonable and Bloodless Worship

"The Christians, having defeated the pagans, turned their temples into Christian ones, replaced their Gods with their own Gods, and erected their understanding of

12 Malevich, "Biograficheskii Ocherk" in ibid., v. 5, 338-377

the objectless world… Modernity seeks to establish the new light, that is, new knowledge, in the study of nothingness."13

The spread of Christianity in the first centuries of our era was not just a religious

movement, but an aesthetic revolution that overturned the representational order of the

Mediterranean civilization it eventually came to dominate. The characteristically

evocative flourish of Malevichian historiography quoted above is an account of this

Christian revolution, which Malevich considered a forerunner to the current, Suprematist

one. Interestingly, he begins his narrative after the moment of victory, when the pagan

images are already discredited, and the task at hand for the Christians is figuring out how

to create a new, legitimate image of the divine. Written in the mid 1920s when Malevich

was head of the State Institute of Arts Culture in Leningrad, this reflection on post-

revolutionary art is typical of the rhetoric of late Suprematist theory. The pathos of earlier

Suprematist texts, written before Malevich's move to Vitebsk and his transition into a

new life as a theorist and pedagogue, was quite different. In the pamphlet From Cubism

and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, published in Moscow in

1915, he wrote:

"We have cast aside Futurism, and we, the ones with the most courage, have spit on the altar of its art. But will the timid ones be able to spit on their idols?—Like we did yesterday !!! I tell you that you will not see the new beauties or the new truth until you work up the courage to spit."14

Clearly, the historical moment in which these words were written is not analogous to that

of the victorious Christians he identifies with in the later text, who have cast off the

chains of idolatry and seized the power to redecorate the temples of the old regime. For

Malevich in 1915, it seems, the idols still had a power to be reckoned with, since spitting

13 Malevich, "Khristiani, pobediv iazychnikov…" in ibid., v.5, 271-272, 27114 Malevich, "Ot Kubizma i Futurizma k Suprematizmu" in ibid., v.1, 35-56, 43

on them took so much courage. In this way, the early period of Suprematism corresponds

to the early centuries of the Christian movement, when Christian art was a set of secret

symbols, and Christians who got up the courage to spit on Roman idols were likely to be

executed. Within the framework of the development of the Byzantine icon, then, early

Suprematist theory represents the period of struggle against idolatry, and early

Suprematist canvases function as Iconoclast signs.

Since the Byzantine icon is a conceptual as well as a material construct, the

history of its development cannot be said to start with the emergence of images of Jesus

and Mary on the catacomb walls. The icon's roots reach back to early antiquity, to

critiques of the idol that were first articulated in the Jewish scriptures and later elaborated

by Pagan philosophers. These critiques, which were adapted and radicalized by the

Christian movement, attacked the idolaters from all possible angles. The following list of

charges against idolatry compiled by second century writer Justin Martyr sounds like it

could just as easily have been written as a manifesto by Malevich ca. 1916:

1. It is folly to give to the gods the form of men, for this is not fitting to the divine.2. These images are soulless, and dead—like corpses. 3. The images of the gods are made of the same material as the most dishonourable

objects. It is a chance whether a workman turns out a god or a common utensil. 4. These sacred images are the work of base and depraved handicraftsmen.5. The richness of the statues serves to tempt theives, and then guards are sent to

protect Gods!6. The idols have the names of demons and bear their form. 15

The mixture of moral invective and complicated theoretical reasoning is what makes

Justin's arguments especially reminiscent of early Suprematist texts. Whole sections of

From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, are devoted to calling the academy bad

names like "torture chamber" and "rag peddler," comparing it to the Inquisition and

15 Arguments from Justin Martyr's Apology, cited in the essay "Idolatry and the Early Church" in Norman Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955) 118-119.

expressing a wish to see its artworks devoured by wild animals. The manifesto is an

explosion of vicious attacks on the old ways of making art, but at the same time manages

to develop a sophisticated critique of academic art.

The critique that is most fundamental to From Cubism and Futurism, and which

ultimately allows Malevich to discredit all prior forms of art, is the assertion that

Suprematism is the first time artists have tapped art's true potential as pure creativity:

"Nature is a living image, and it is proper to take pleasure in its beauty. We are the living heart of nature. We are the key mechanism within this giant living image. We are its living brain, which expands its life force… The artist is given a gift so that he may contribute to life his share of creativity and increase the yield of life's elasticity. Only in absolute creativity will he find his justification."16

The passage quoted here is important not only because it articulates the basic principle of

Malevich's anti-idolatrous critique, setting up the moral opposition between those who

"steal" from nature and those who "give back" to nature. These sentences also contain the

kernel of Malevich's complicated conception of the sacred, which he articulates more

fully in his writings of the Vitebsk period, and which is necessary to understand if one is

to relate him to a theory of sacred images.

At its most basic level, the worldview expressed in the corpus of Suprematist texts

represents a sacralization of the idea of an infinite material world. The two terms invoked

most often to embody this materialist spirit of the universe are "vozbuzhdenie" (stimulus)

and "nichto" (nothingness). Both of these terms describe an undifferentiated totality in

which the human being can participate, but which becomes distorted and blocked by a

utilitarian world of thought-objects. Thought, for Malevich, is almost like an original sin

that allowed for the building of the human world, but was responsible for casting man out

of the Garden of pure stimulus. Salvation, then, resides in rekindling this lost one-ness 16 Malevich, "Ot Kubizma i Futurizma k Suprematizmu" in Sobranie, v.1, 35-56

with pure being, and the path to this recovery of divine essence lies in the doctrine of

"absolute creativity." This Suprematist economy of salvation closely resembles the

Orthodox doctrine of theosis, which rewards prayer—participation in the divine energies

— with a rejuvination of the divine nature of man, cleansing the body and senses of the

stain of fallenness and death.

Whether it be through prayer or creativity, both the Orthodox and Suprematist

pathways to the infinite require a special kind of participatory contact with the divine— a

logike laetria. This phrase from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is

rendered in English as "reasonable and bloodless worship," is used in Greek theology to

distinguish Christian practice from idolatry. "Logike" here refers not only to "reason," but

also to the Christ as "incarnate Logos," who took on the form of a human person so that

humanity could interact with God on a new level that was both personal and spiritual.

Whereas pagans worshipped material things and placed sacrifices of flesh at the altars of

corporeal Gods, the worshippers of Christ sought communion with a divine Logos.

Christian prayer, like the pure creative act of Suprematism, is a give-and-take process of

expressing one's love for the divine through an activity of pure logos, which is then

rewarded by participation in the divine energies.

In her brilliant essay entitled "Kazimir Malevich: The Will to Language"

Aleksandra Shatskikh picks up on a word that, for her, perfectly encapsulates Malevich's

view of his writing: liturgy. Shatskikh brings in this term, which Malevich used to

describe his ideal of poetry, in talking about the aftermath of Malevich's famously

ecstatic moment of painting the Black Square. According to her, this experience

transcended mere painterly creation, and stirred in the artist a desire to impart the

teachings of Suprematist metaphysics. For Shatskikh, the texts he was inspired to write

over the ensuing years were liturgies—verbal hypostases of his discovery of the infinite

through absolute creativity.17 I would expand on Shatskikhs use of this term, however, by

taking the theological meaning of the Greek term laeturgia, which literally means "the

work of the people." This meaning of the word resonates with the Suprematist ideal of

the artist as a worker who actively participates in the creative process of the universe. In

this sense, liturgy can be used to describe both the paintings and the texts produced by

Malevich, since both participate in that great call-and-response interaction between the

resonant instrument of the human skull and the eternal vibration of stimulus, which

Malevich called God.

Reading the texts of early Suprematism, what strikes me most is not the conceptual

elegance of the liberation of painting into the realm of pure form, but rather the emotional

intensity of the drive to topple the images of the past. The fine critical edge with which

Malevich cuts through art history is contrasted by the blunt force of his rhetoric, which

expresses a demand to burn all art of the past in a crematorium in rather menacing tones. 18

What does it matter to him, one wonders, if other people continue to make bad art? Clearly,

art had higher stakes for Malevich than just as an intellectual or proffessional endeavor. He

thought about art in a Christian way, believing that if the wrong kind of art were to triumph,

it would drag humanity ever further into the slavery of imitation.

The comparison with Christian anti-idolatry is productive here in contextualizing the

relationship between absolute formal rigor and absolute moral purity, doing so while

avoiding the muddled notion of "political art" and its attendant categories of "critical" and

"affirmative" art. In Christian art, as well as in Soviet art, the line between critical and

17 Shatskikh," Kazimir Malevich: Volia k Slovesnosti" in ibid., v.5, 11-30, 1218 Malevich, "O muzei" in ibid., v.1, 132-136, 133

affirmative quickly loses its footing. On one hand, most of the attacks directed by the

Christians against Idolatry are straightforwardly critical, and Malevich adopts much of the

same rhetoric in his attempt to utterly discredit the academy. However, as I have tried to

show, the core principle that differentiates Suprematism and makes it truly revolutionary—

pure creativity— is at once affirmative and critical. Malevich doesn't simply inveigh against

worshipping in front of a shameless Venus or a hollow Christ—he invites all to join him in a

new logike laetria of creative, communal participation in the sacred liturgy of stimulus and

form.

Both Christian and Suprematist iconoclasms went beyond the level of critical art in

the simple sense of questioning or undermining a certain set of images. Their revolution was

on the level of worship, not just on the level of representation. They aimed to completely

change the way we relate to images, access the divine, and construct the social imaginary.

How does one get to an external position from which to pass judgment on such

revolutionary projects, if our experience of ourselves as part of something greater than

ourselves depends on being inscribed in one or another such regime of representation?

2. The Ascetic Image

The second stage in the history of the Icon is characterized by a proliferation of

diverse popular image practices, which the Church constantly struggled to keep in check.

As Hans Belting writes, "Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within

the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power… Rather than

introducing images, theologians were all too ready to ban them."19 However, theologians 19 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 1.

were often the weaker party in this constant back-and-forth with everyday worshippers,

as many popular image cults were grudgingly adopted by the authorities. Even as icons

became a standardized practice within the Byzantine church, they remained controversial.

The deep-seated Christian suspicion of images which structured the Iconophile project

from the beginning never died down completely, and boiled over to the point of civil war

during the Iconoclast crises of the eighth and ninth centuries. The final products of this

evolution which hang in churches today are the formal legacy of an elaborate balancing

act between the demand for popular images to serve the needs of the congregation and

the strict theological limits imposed by Christian anti-idolatry.

This power struggle between the spontaneous, often irrational reality of artistic

practice and the necessity of maintaining purity and coherence on the theoretical level

played out within Suprematism as well. As with Iconophile thought, Malevich's

theoretical project was forced to play catch-up to account for developments in his own

artistic practice which departed from early Modernist doctrines. The strange feature about

Malevich's image theory, however, is that the same images play a double role—first as

the origination of Suprematist theology, and later as its visual manifestation. In an

inversion of the path taken by most aesthetic theorists, who study philosophy in general

and then apply their ideas to the field of art, Malevich came to his general ideas about

philosophy through working them out in his artistic practice.

The privileged role of painting in Malevich's metaphysics of objectlessness, as

both the origin of revelation and a visual representation of it, crystallized around the

image of the Black Square. The stripping down of painting to its most basic, the final

zeroing away of both content and form, becomes equated with a prophetic vision of the

pure nothingness that underlies all sensible forms. The evolution of this insight about the

conventionality of human perception, arrived at on the surface of the canvas, actually

begins with insights gained from basic landscape painting. Looking back on the history of

his discoveries, Malevich praises landscape painting as an ironizing cognitive tool which

allows one to see the constructedness of the human view of reality. Painting teaches us

that the objects we see around us are just as much a human construction as objects in a

painting:

"The artist constructs a landscape which contains trees, houses, rivers—but these have no authentic basis in the painting. The movement of objects from one place to another is also a pure construction, the authentic reality of which is that not a single object in the broader sense of the word can be moved. The painter proves this in his experience of the flatness of the picture surface, where nothing can change location. It's possible then that the constructedness of the painterly surface reflects the authentic reality of the world in its lack of movement or in its relocation of objects. Things themselves don't exist as locations… if something moves from one place to another, it is only in perception, not reality.20… The painter's constructed canvas perfectly illustrates that the world has no foundation."21

After all the abuse directed at landscape painting in Malevich's earlier writings, the act of

rearranging objects from reality on a static picture plane is recovered a useful exercise in

coming to an understanding of the illusory relationship between human vision and reality.

For Malevich, all phenomena that appear as objects for human cognition—not just things

themselves, but also movement and location in time—are the result of the structuring,

selecting process of predmetnost'. In the vocabulary of later Suprematist writing,

predmetnost' becomes not just a property of things, but also an activity, or a method. The

illusion of individual objects emerges in place of wholeness as a result of this "cutting"

action of the objectifying human mind.

20 Malevich, "Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost', ili Velikii Pokoi" in Sobranie Sochinenii, v. 3, 20521 ibid., 223.

Malevich sees nature as existing in an undifferentiated, "sinless"22 state, which

becomes artificially broken apart by human cognition. The terms he uses for cognition or

reason (which, as we have seen, are associated with the fallen nature of humanity) are

razum and rassukok, both of which contain the prefix meaning "apart". Hyphenating the

words to emphasize cognition as "taking apart," he writes that if reason (raz-um) was a

property inherent to nature, this would imply an absence of perfection. If nature is

infinite, it cannot be a "whole", and if there is no whole, there is nothing for the mind to

take apart (raz-umit'). "Therefore, raz-um is an invention of man, which he uses to assault

the fortifications of the universe—which have neither a beginning nor an end, neither a

roof nor a foundation, and no single whole."23

This view of the perfection of the universe and man's fall from grace by the

utilitarian application of destructive, contingent reason was the result of Malevich's

encounter with the picture plane. Looking at a landscape painting, one can choose to see

trees and animals on a canvas, or one can "squint one's eyes" and see an undifferentiated

field of color and shape—proving that objects exist only in so far as we use raz-um to

divide up an inherently objectless world. The journey of Suprematist painting begins with

this encounter with traditional painting, and the world, as a unitary field of form and

color, and culminates with painting the Black Square and understanding that even form

and color are the product of raz-um acting upon total nothingness. This was the Good

News revealed to Malevich through his artistic practice, and which he sought to spread

with his New Gospel in Art.

22 ibid., 19823 ibid., 240.

Malevich always insisted that painting the Black Square was a major turning point

in his career, but scholars have struggled to understand the exact nature of the shift in his

artistic practice. Fully accepting that the Black Square will forever remain an enigma, I

would characterize this moment in the following way. Having come to a profound

understanding of human consciousness through the conceptual mechanism of abstract

painting, Malevich was faced with the task representing it to others. Looking at the black

square—which functions a both as conceptual work and a pure visual experience— he

realized that the paintings he was making not only showed the process of coming to

objectless awareness, but were also representations of an objectless, God's-eye view of

the universe. The result of this realignment was a new negotiation between theology and

artistic practice which was analogous to the one Christian theologians were forced to

engage in when confronted with an emergence of images of the divine.

One of the challenges of this Iconophile stage in Malevich's development, in

which he would have to justify representing the infinite in finite form, was the very term

"objectless painting." In the strictly formalist system of his earlier work the term

bezpredmetnaia zivopis' mostly had a fairly straightforward usage as the exploration of

purely formal elements, the result of which had no reference to objects in the world. In

this sense, the Black Square is not a representation of a black square, but rather is a black

square. This concept of the identity of the image to itself and not to a referent was what

related it to the world — a theory about the self-identity and referentlessness of human

vision. But at a certain point, when Malevich discovered that the image also contained

another kind of content, which he called a "feeling of objectlessness," the meaning of

bespredmetnost' began to shift from a way of painting to a way of looking.

The second meaning of the bespredmetnost' was made possible by a strange

development within the Russian scientific vocabulary, which created a distinction

between predmet and objekt. Both of these words mean "object", and the former is a

Slavic calque on the latter Latin form which combines "in front of" and "to throw." In the

language of Russian experimental science, however, object refers to the thing under

observation (say, "forest"), while predmet refers to the aspect of one has chosen to study,

and the approach taken (e.g. "effect of rainfall on frog population" or "economic analysis

of timber stock"). In Russian schools, predmet refers to the "subject" of a given class,

such as mathematics.

This usage allows Malevich to reconcile bespredmetnost' as a method of painting

with bespredmetnost' as the name for a vision of authentic reality. In his later work, it is

used to describe a special type of vision that allows the human being to transcend his own

objectifying tendencies. For example, in World as Objectlessness, he makes reference to

"bespredmetnoe issledovanie," a mystical type of "research" that would examine a given

objekt without applying any predmet to it at all. Malevich imagines that if one could

observe the world without applying any method or set of criteria, without partitioning it

into objects of study, without viewing it from any specific angle, one would strip away

the fallenness of human vision and see the world as it "really" is. This type of vision is

implied, I would argue, in Malevich's labeling of abstract images with titles like "Red

Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions" (1915). In my view,

Malevich painted an imagined experience of doing a painterly study in which the objekt

of a peasant woman was approached a bespredmetnii way. If one was successful in

completing such a paradoxical study, one would see the woman's true, material essence.

My reading of Malevich's "painterly realism" corresponds to an important

principle of Byzantine iconography which one might call "Christian Realism." This

formal feature of Byzantine art was developed as a defensive measure against the main

critique of Iconoclasm, which accused iconographers of falling into the idolatrous trap of

"worshipping the creature instead of the creator." Since the human world in general was

finite and fallen, aspects of it were stripped out of the divine image as much as possible in

order to avoid the idolatrous pitfall. For this reason, bodies and faces in icons are

rendered as minimally and uniformally as possible, depicting the shared spiritual essence

of the figures rather than the individuality of their earthly bodies. Bodies in icons are

usually draped in cloth, and the face, hands, and feet are thin and delicate, effacing the

"fleshiness" associated with the carnal world of sin and death.

The zen-like composure of Christ's body on the cross as it appears in Byzantine

art is a perfect example of Christian Realism: there is little sign of blood, and the only

trace of torture is a minimal depiction of the wound in his side, which is allowed for

narrative purposes. Additionally, Christ's posture on the cross is not slumped down, as on

many Western crucifixes, but poised and erect, foreshadowing his victory over death and

his resurrection. The narrative concept of foreshadowing is not actually an appropriate

term to use in the context of Orthodox art, which transcends linear human time and

always depicts events from the point of view of the completed resurrection and the

Second Coming, which has, in Christian Realist terms, already happened. Thus, all

Byzantine icons represent "reality in its Christian development." Whereas Socialist

Realism presents the world from the point of view of the Materialist Dialectic, both

Christian Realism and Painterly Realism present an ascetic image of the world from the

point of view of God.

3. Cosmic Order

Having established an ascetic formal system that would adequately meet the

theological challenges of rendering the divine in finite form, both Malevich and the

Byzantine churchmen began to perfect ways of displaying these images to serve the

various needs of their congregations. One of these needs was pedagogical, conveying to

the congregation the story of how their salvation and emancipation from the mortal realm

came to pass. Malevich's late Suprematist exhibitions did this very effectively by re-

staging the progression from representational painting to objectlessness, thus allowing the

viewer to experience the relativizing effect of Malevich's formal deconstruction of

painting. Of course, there are numerous equally valid interpretations of Malevich's late

exhibition practice and his ambiguous return to figuration, no single one of which can

claim to represent the artist's true intent. It seems possible, however, that Malevich

continued to build and refine an idealized narrative of the evolution of Suprematism,

from the Renaissance portrait to the Black Square, as part of his pedagogical practice. At

least some of his strange back-dating practices could be explained by the need to fill in

pages of the visual textbook which he skipped over in his own career.

The narrative staging of images for pedagogical purposes became central to the

fully developed practice of iconography, which incorporated icons into the multi-sensory

Gesamtkunstwerk of the Byzantine rite. However, the early church lacked access to the

types of exhibition spaces that allowed Malevich to stage his narratives so effectively.

The development of the Byzantine cathedral as a controlled architectural setting for holy

images is accounted for by Hans Belting in the following way:

"The church was confronted with existing images that were credited with miraculous power. In order to control their effect and to distract attention from magical expectations, images had to be explained rationally, emphasizing the immaterial presence of the archetype and devaluing the material presence of the image as object. Such theological efforts, however, were far from being understood by the common people and no powerful weapon against idolatry. The church therefore resorted to the practical solution of taking the images under firm control and using church decoration as what we might call an applied theory of images. There always had been churches with images, but now images were presented in the framework of a well-devised program that allowed for a carefully guided, strictly limited kind of worship… They had a predetermined location in the churches and were given a specified function in church ritual. The church directed attention first and foremost to the official liturgy, which contributed to the control of the image and was the primary means of ecclesiastical self-presentation."

Belting's narrative seems to attribute the development of the liturgy almost completely to

the need for controlling and containing the use of Christian imagery, with perhaps the

goal of creating a systematic and reasonable theological and iconographic practice as a

secondary reason. However, I would argue that the installation and choreography of icons

in the temple is one of a number of techniques used by the church to create a powerful

feeling of a unified world that involves the individual in a communal sensory experience.

The Orthodox liturgy combines imagery with architecture, and engages all of the

senses in order to create the feeling of entering into an ordered, eternal, otherworldy

sphere of relations, wherein the lowly worshipper is as much a part of the unified cosmic

representation of God's creation and as the looming figure of Christ Pantokrator,

crowning creation and looking down upon it from the dome of the church. Upon entering

an Orthodox church one immediately gets a sense of a vast, harmonious heirarchy of

angels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints, topped with the aforementioned Christ

image in the dome, and extending outward and down from central images of the Jesus

and the Theotokos. Elaborately concieved arrangements of icons represent the theology

of the church through image and space. The different spaces of a church also become

representations, and are set off in relation to each other in order to represent other aspects

of theology:

"The signification of each part of the Orthodox church is derived from its architectural location and its function in the course of the liturgy. The interplay between the immaterial and the sensory worlds is denoted by the sanctuary and the nave. At the same time, both these parts constitute an indivisible whole in which the immaterial serves as an example to the sensory, reminding man of his original transgression. For Saint Simeon of Thessalonika, the narthex corresponded to earth, the church to heaven, and the holy sanctuary to what is above heaven. Consequently, all the paintings in the church, especially those constituting the iconostasis, are arranged according to this symbolism."24

While the theological aspects of Orthodox church decoration and liturgical practice are

emphasized, and have often been written about in the West, most scholars overlook the

purely visual, affective power of the icons in their staging within the liturgical cycle. The

icons and the liturgy are not just there for controlling the veneration of images, or merely

as analytic representations of abstract theology. They are powerful works of media that

successfully achieve the task of incorporating the viewer into a sense of his place in a

unified cosmic order. The economy of gazes between icons and viewers, as well as

among the icons themselves, creates energetically charged pathways that act on the

participant as he moves with the liturgy. This elegant ballet of gazes that is staged in a

temple is one of the key visual effects of late iconographic art, and has an almost

physiological effect of creating a sense of intimate contact with the ever-present, familiar

faces of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints.

Judging from photographs, the dense visual field encountered by visitors to

Malevich's room at 0,10 must have achieved a similar effect of incorporation into a

cosmic totality. The desire to engage audiences with an experience of unity with cosmic

forces is clearly articulated in Malevich's writing:

24 Michelson, p.27.

"I imagine the Cosmos, or Being, as a multiplicity of forces, rotational centers or stimuli. All of the rings that emerge do not constitute individual systems, but exist in mutual interpenetration… Developed human life, which also emerges from the central dynamism, is a miniature version of this single connectivity of various dynamic forces… The primacy of stimulus and the expression of an authentic connectedness with Being should be a primary goal… and in the absence of forms to express this, I offer Suprematist bespredmetnost' as the first glimpse of the new interrelatedness."25

Malevich here suggests that the task of incorporation into a cosmic connectivity is the

primary goal of Suprematism. And in his body of work this decidedly "affirmative"

function of his art is consistently present, from the designs for the cosmic opera Victory

over the Sun, to the installation in 0,10, to his architectons and his design of room for the

viewing of his own corpse, over which was hung the Black Square. Lissitzky's Pressa

exhibition design stands out as the masterpiece of this strain within Suprematism.

As the experience of the Orthodox Church has demonstrated, such an effect of

incorporation into cosmic totality is best achieved in a controlled, closed environment

wherein the entire visual space can be arranged according to a single system. This type of

"total art" is ultimately is what Boris Groys is referring to when he compares the utopian

projects of Suprematism and Socialist Realism in his text Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin.26 Both

projects would function at their best if they somehow came to be the only game in town.

The creation of an aesthetic system that is truly successful in allowing the viewer

to feel included in something greater than herself is one of the great achievements of

Orthodox art. But looked at from another point of view, such a project can be seen as

crushing individuality in a heinous act of totalitarian manipulation—which has indeed

become the legacy of Stalinist art. A fact that is often lost amid many horrible memories

of the Soviet era is that the Communist party, despite some of the miserably weak

aesthetic properties of Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, managed to achieve the effect of cosmic

25 Malevich, "Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost', ili Velikii Pokoi" in ibid., v. 3, 22926 Boris Groys, Total Art of Stalinism (New York: Verso, 2011).

incorporation for large swaths of the society, while maintaining a relatively ascetic style

of imagery. Many of the people who remember attending one of the the spectacularly

staged May Day parades during the height of Soviet power recall a sensation of pure joy,

of truly feeling at one with an organic unity and a cosmic mission. One can only imagine

the overwhelming power a parade like this could have had if the floats, costumes, and the

entire urban landscape had been designed not by a committee of Stalinist apparatchiks

but by an artistic genius like Malevich.

Whether or not Malevich would have taken up the offer to design the visual space

of the entire USSR is among interesting topics of speculation that have resulted from

Groys's book. While Malevich's writings suggest that he was committed to aesthetic

pluralism in society, he was also a proud and ambitious artist. What self-respecting

designer could pass up the chance to work with on such a monumental canvas?

Christianity, too, has had to reconcile its staging of the cosmic order with the dangers of

extending the power of its imagery by wielding political power. In the Russian Orthodox

church, the warning voice of Dostoevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor speaks loudly

enough to suppress radical voices who would like to tear down the billboards and TV

stations and replace them with icons and liturgies. Perhaps this restraint is now the key to

a true asceticism of the image. Or, maybe, we will welcome the rise of a new, truly

engaging total aesthetic system that will allow the suffering, alienated subjects of Late

Capitalism to feel part of something greater than themselves.