A Persistent Opacity:The Black Square
The Significance of a Russian Suprematist Painting of a Black Square
done at the time of the Revolution

'supermatist'efforts
   
Malevich's  
Black Square as the Transmission of Modernity, Post and otherwise:
Frame 
Time 
Completely Exposed:  
    
Unique Repetition, 
The Trace,
Noise, 
The Icon Unveiled as the Space of Intuition,
Or   
The Blank Face of Divine Ignorance and Absolute Coherence.

 
.Full Stop.

We usually start by announcing our horizons, the enclosures, possibilities, 
and seemings on an "I" and its particular knowledge.
"I" wishing to begin, 
Simply:
 
Film frozen in the Shutter.

Impenetrability and paradoxically a historical osmotic shock; an early 
20th Century Russian painter paints a painting.  He paints it all black.  
A great Abuse and mutation, and a rendering sensible of itself as itself.  
A prevision of the space between the conclusion 
of frames 
of reference. 
Period. 
Of Period. 
Revolution and the messianic moment of exploding clocks, expounding hope of the 'not yet'. 
BLANKFUTURE   
Basis of an advertisement for constant change.  Film frozen in the open shutter.
Film continually exposed, film a blank blasted with history. 
  
Malevich's Black Square is the final Icon.  A work meant to inaugurate a new 
social-cultural order, the Revolutionary order; as the Icon of Christianity 
was sanctified by its placement in the upper corner of rooms, the Black Square 
was also to be placed in the corner of the room - to usurp the position of the 
great image (the Image of Christ), the narration of our Debt to His 
Conclusive Singularity, His Most Certain Sacrifice.  

This replacement is a repetition. An animation of an Anarchist Avatar. 

"The image is the final path, the image is something that bares the exit, 
by means of the image the further path is interrupted, everything which 
has paths converges toward the image, all paths lead to the image particularly 
if it is holy, hence I see the justification and true significance of 
the Orthodox corner in which the image stands, the holy image as opposed 
to all other images and representations of sinners... 

The corner symbolizes that there is no other path to perfection 
except for the path into the corner."
- Malevich- 

Malevich proclaimed his work as the "zero" of painting, that there was 
no-thing other that painting presented, no positioning, no certain 
conventional imaging.  A meta painting, -  more -  a painting that has 
no opposite in say representational painting, no painting to its anti-painting.  
For representational painting must deal with particulars of sorts, whereas 
'not-painting' is a general relation englobing the rest of the universe.  

Malevich saw the square as being that work that would necessarily 
maintain a spiraling triad into the fourth dimension by being a 
painting, by negating painting, by bringing painting into a new context, 
painting beyond painting.  ...The synthesis then bears the insignia of 
its origins - its memory in fact...It was a structural change in levels. 

The Black Square was to be everywhere, made by all, to be drawn on 
the palm of one's hands, pasted on walls, worn on clothes, painted in 
individual studios - the centre was to be everywhere and there was to 
be no more circumference.

Malevich hung a black square in the place where 'normally' 
stood an icon...he hung an incomprehensible 'object-less' 
object in the place where before hung those objectifications which had 
given all objects their reason to be, and the raison d'etat...
the order of the universe ...that narration.....by the re-placing of 
the icon by the appropriation of the holy space, the sanctioned corner 
where the Face, the Family, the Ordeal hung, Malevich appropriated 
the significatory value, the syntax of the originating code of 
Russian cultural ideology.

Malevich hung a black square in the centre of the world of meaning and 
the word was irrational, 
 
Noise and in Pure Contradiction 
Pure Significance

Sign. The Fullness there of.                                                                                               
 
The plenitude of a sign 
is the sign as sign - not as meaning.  

This is the history of resurrection, both the revolution and evolution.  
Abolishing through the pure negation the lamination of signs, the merry-go-round 
of language, the noose of the dead of naming.  

Through the effacement of the Icon a parable about the Icon.

"And even today the notion of a structure lacking any centre represents 
the unthinkable itself." Derrida

History:
1913, Malevich joins the 'Budelyabin' group (man of the future group)...
the expressed aim of this group - the creation of a new language- 
a language universal and trans-rational.  Malevich, who had previously 
espoused cubo-futurism and before that Primitivism, now concentrated on works of 
'alogism' and 'Zaum'. By early 1914 it appears that Malevich had come to 
the conclusion that cubism was only willing to go just so far in its 
renunciation of the values of the object in favour of the development of 
pure painting and that in order to completely overthrow the rule of the object 
in painting more extreme measures were necessary.

(Writing in prewar Russia, and influential upon Malevich) Uspensky  
in "Tertium Organum"  claimed that logic solely dealt with visible phenomenon 
and that logic could only deal with ideas expressed in words.   Yet, Uspensky went on, 
what was behind phenomenon could not be expressed in words and was outside logic.  

What lay behind phenomenon was noumenal, a world of many dimensions where 
'each thing is a certain archetype of the all.'  
This is the land of truth, a direction that can only be hinted at.  
That 'truth can only be expressed in a paradox, or even in the form of a lie. 
To speak of truth without lies we must know some other language.  
Our language is not suitable.'  Thus Malevich's experiments in 'Zaum' and 'alogism'.

After the failure of the 1905 uprising and intensified  
because of his exile, Lenin, by 1908 did not hold absolute control 
of the Bolsheviks in the Duma.  The challenge to his authority centered 
on philosophical differences.  A.V. Lunacharsky, A.A. Bogdanov, and Maksim Gorky 
were the principal members of this group who formed a political and philosophical 
position that came to be known as bogostroitel'stov - "God Building"

"Lunarcharsky and Bogdanov had been strongly influenced by philosophical 
currents  of the turn of the century, especially the writing of Nietzche and 
the empirico-criticism of E. Mach and R. Avenarius.  From Nietzsche they took the 
idea of the ubermensch, the ideal of the future transcendence of 
the existing concept of man through the active creation of new cultural 
and social values which would replace the category of God.  
However, the individualism of Nietzsche was tempered by their reading 
of Mach and Avenarius.  Mach held that reality was something created 
by individuals reacting to and organizing their sensory experiences.  
Thus, there were no absolute truths; concepts of space, time, and causality, 
were exactly that, socially agreed upon conventions created by humanity 

...If sensory experience was preminent, then the proper task of the 
revolutionary was to revolutionize the experience of sensation, 
to reorganize the social construct of reality.  Bogdanov and Lunarcharsky 
began to view religion as such a necessary social construct.  Malevich 
influenced by these ideas, conceived The Black Square as an Icon of common 
relation and destiny.  A way of envisioning the creative certainty and intensity 
of the constant Revolutionary State.  

A Fable That Will Foretell A Parable
"The Spas Nerukotvornyi" (The Savior Not Made By Human Hands)
is a Novgorodian Icon of the 12th century which was originally kept in the Cathedral 
of the Assumption, but is now in the Tretyakov Gallery.  It is one of the earliest 
Russian icons and certainly one of the most revered, since tradition held that this 
type of icon initiated the use of representation in Christian art.  
The legend, memorialized by the Church Festival of August 16 which marked that 
transfer of the original image from Edessa to Constantinople in 944, ran as follows. 

Adgar IV the Black,  King of Edessa, heard of the miracles of Jesus and , 
having Leprosy sent a scribe named Hannan with a letter to Jesus, asking him 
to  come to Edessa to heal the King and preach the Faith.  In a return letter 
Jesus praised Adgar for his faith, but said that he could not come but that 
he would send an apostle later .  While there Hannan, who was a painter, 
attempted to paint a portrait of Jesus, but could not because of the 
radiant and ever changing nature of his face.  Seeing Hannan's frustration, 
Jesus bathed his face with water and pressed it to the linen, leaving 
the imprint of his image.  Hannan returned the 
letter and icon to Edessa, where Adgar was healed by the painting...
The legend had deep roots in the Russian psyche; just how deep is demonstrated by 
the interest that Malevich  had in it.  

The expression of Malevich's interest is found in a typewritten manuscript 
of 1924 that was an appendix to the unpublished book The World as Nonobjectivity.

The essay was provoked by the death of Lenin and in it Malevich commented 
about the connections that he found between Christ's death and Lenin's deaths 
and subsequent attempts to give artistic form to  their images.   
He felt that both Christ and Lenin teachings were non-objective. 
(The Black Square was the first non-objective/object)  
However, their followers were unable to comprehend the indivisibility 
of the world that this implied, sought to preserve their spirit after 
the material deaths in the form of a realistic cult image.  

Religion, art, and politics attempted, 'To transfer the image, 
the spirit, and the soul into existence, to make a real existence out of myth, 
to incarnate it in the body and the visage.'  

Malevich understood that the confines of representation only 
furthered the divisibility of the world.  Representation is the lie of the world, 
its pervasive languish in the gestures and grimaces of definition.  

The Black Square is an attempt at Revolutionizing discourse and informational transfer...
it is a definitive hack at the deadening pervasiveness of the centre of power, - the meaning 
of word, the throne of blah-blah commerce. 

The primary subversion '...The function of centre was not only to orient, 
balance, and organize the structure - one cannot in fact conceive of an 
unorganized structure- but above all to make sure that the organizing principle 
of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure.  
By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure 
permists the play of its elements inside the total form.   And even today the notion 
of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the ceanter also closes off the play which it opens up and 
makes possible.  As centre, it is the point at which the subsitution of contents, 
elements, or terms is no longer possible.  At the centre , the permutation or 
the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed with 
in a structure) is forbidden.  At least this permutation has always remained 
interdicted and I am using his word deliberately .  Thus it has always been 
thought that the centre which is by definition unique, constituted that very 
thing whithin a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality.  
This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, 
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it.  The centre is at the centre of 
the totality, and yet, since the centre does  belong to the totality it is not part 
of the totality, the totality has its centre elsewhere.  The centre is not the centre. 
The concept of centered structure although it represents coherence itself, 
the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science is contridictorily coherent.  
And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.  
The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on 
a fundament ground, a play constituted on  the basis of a fundamental 
immobility and a reassuring certitude , which itself is beyond 
the reach of play.  And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can
be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode 
of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, 
of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. 
And again on the basis of what we call the centre (and which, because 
it can be neither inside or outside, can also indifferently be called 
the origin or end, arch or telos)  , repetitions, substitutions, 
transformation, and permutations are always taken from a history 
of meaning (sens).  That is, in a word, a history- whose origin may 
always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence.  
This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archaeology, or like 
that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality 
of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a 
full presence which is beyond play.

If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure , 
before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as 
a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain 
of determinations of the centre.  Successively, and in a regulated fashion, 
the centre receives different forms or names.  The history of metaphysics, 
like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.  
Its matrix... is the determination of Being and Presence in all senses of the word.  
It could be shown that all the names related to fundamemtals, to principles, 
or to the centre have always designated and invariable prescence-eidos, 
arche, telos, enrgeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) 
aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so forth....

The event I called a rupture, the disruption presumably would have 
come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, 
that is to say repeated, and that is why I said that this disruption 
was repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth. it became necessary to 
think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a centre in the 
constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders 
the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence- but 
a central presence which has never been itself, has always been exiled 
from itself into its own substitute.  The substitute does not substitute itself 
for anything which has somehow existed before it.  Henceforth, it was necessary 
to begin thinking that there was no centre, that the centre could not be thought 
in the form of a present-being, that the centre had no natural site, that it was 
not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number 
of sign-substitutions came into play...everything became discourse...a system 
in which the central signified, the original or transcendental, is never 
absolutely present outside a system of differences.  The abscence of the 
transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely."
 -Derrida.

Malevich's Black Square Is A Tool
  
Aesthetics intersecting a philosophy 
of information and semiotics that effaces information and semiotics.  
Alien to the confines of our mortality, alien to the taste of difference. 
A relief without contours.  

The grounding paradox of a 
timely disjunction in time. A herald of modernity in all its confusions, 
glories, hyperbole, necessary violence, meaning and non-meaning.    

The beginning of the recognition of the value of noise and chaos, 
that function of dislocation that refuses the tag of meaning by being it and not-it.

Certain, and certainly beyond the usual propaganda of freedom of purchase, of gender 
'freedom' politics, of yes/no binaries. 

The majestic violence of light, of death.  A wagging nihilism as vitality.  

As Wilden has so succintly pointed out: 

"Evolution and Revolution are the result of the creative integration 
of noise into the system as a memory trace." 

So to sum: the most radical (root) aspects of the record of 
the Black Square is its singularity in contradiction, its repeatability.  

The illumination that this work offers is its persistent opacity.  
The foundational work of the informational epiphany, 
the mark of the horror and joyous today.  

It Transforms Me Into A Bottomless Waste
Malevich on the Black Square. 




Notes:
W. Sherwin Simmons, "Kasimir Malevich's Black Square" 
- Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts, Garland Publishing 1981, P. 212.

Jacques Derrida, "Writing and Difference" , 
Trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, 1978, P. 278

Anthony Wilden, "System and Structure", Tavistock Publications, Second Ed.
1980, P. 403

Gorky gave cultural expression to the theories in the 1908 novel ISPOVED 
(The Confession) which chronicled the adventures and search of God of 
an orphan named Matvei.  After a futile tour of monasteries and sectarian 
groups the youth meets a man named Yegudiil.  Yegudiil tells him that God 
would only appear when all men gave up their separation from one another 
and formed a collective whole.  Matvei goes on to learn about those forces, 
economic and political that held this new God apart.  

Later after a revelatory experience Matvei prays: "to the Almighty, immortal people! 
Thou art my God and the creator of all gods, which thou hast fashioned from the toil 
and struggle for the search!
And there shall be no other gods in the world but thee, for thou art the one God 
that creates miracles!  Thus do I believe and confess! And I shall return 
there where men are freeing the souls of those close to them from the 
imprisonment of darkness ...Lighting before the People its secret face...
revealing to the People the unified and true path to common flowing 
together for a mighty work  - the world wide building of God!"

---