Cabbage Moths Lay Their Eggs On My Kale: On Malevich and the Intimacy of Line

Tuesday, 30 September 2014

On Malevich and the Intimacy of Line

The new Kazimir Malevich show at the Tate Modern is curated in such a way that it tracks the various ideological and stylistic changes within his painting practice more or less chronologically. What particularly struck me were his two iconic self-portraits, one at the start of his career and one at the very end. Although I had seen these two paintings before, I was more familiar with his Suprematist work and of course Black Square. While I would never wish to discredit the social and political drives of Malevich’s turn to geometric abstraction and his wish to represent that which does not participate in the natural, I can’t help but wonder if this is also in a sense, personal.

From my own experience with drawing, I know that there are times where I am eager to draw myself, others, and the world around me. In other moments, I limit my observation of the world to straight angles, drawing each line with a ruler, refusing the flexibility of a freer hand. I have come to feel that when I draw with a ruler, it is because I am feeling a lack of confidence, that a line without a ruler would be too personal and would reveal too much about me.

If Malevich’s intent was to distance himself from painting the natural, he was also establishing a distance between his art and himself. I am not in a position to know Malevich’s biography so intimately that I could discern what he may have been personally enduring at these times, nor do I think this would be a helpful endeavor. Perhaps in the end, all that can be speculated is that artists not only respond to the political and social realities around them, nor are restricted by reactions to the history of art. Instead, it is fruitful to consider that so much goes on emotionally within a human being, that we can never fully comprehend his or her motives, nor should we assume that an artist is aware of these themselves. Looking at Malevich’s two self-portraits then, separated in time by Black Square, all we can do is hypothesize that perhaps there is something here we do not fully understand. More simply, these works considered together are proof of the fluctuation and temperamental nature of how we experience ourselves from one moment to the next. And yet, perhaps I am completely mistaken, that in fact, there is something deeply intimate and revealing about painting the picture of a black square.