On Malevich and the Intimacy of Line Part 2

After attending David Batchelor’s talk at the Tate yesterday titled The Story of the Un-Square Square, I feel perhaps I am a little bit closer to understanding why in fact, painting Black Square was for Malevich a deeply personal endeavor. Batchelor discusses how in fact, these seemingly geometric forms are not geometric at all but instead are examples of “bad geometry”. He forwarded the claim that Malevich intentionally warped these squares to make them purposefully irregular and to reference geometry in terms of its potential for deformation. In his discussion of certain Suprematist works, he accounted for the ways in which some shapes seem to be anchored, while others float or appear to be falling, that Malevich was consciously playing with the tension between static and dynamic.

In taking a look at Malevich’s paintings anew, I have come to feel that in fact, Batchelor makes a persuasive point. Its seems to me now that Malevich was appropriating geometry only to mutate it, to present that irrational, the anti-logic of these squares. While we might understand Malevich’s Suprematist paintings as a shift away from depicting the natural world, I think in reality, what he ultimately depicted was indeed the world as it is. By departing from the laws of reason and rationality, Malevich depicts the world in a most honest and genuine way. While culturally, we have always been driven by ideologies of progress to a fixed, logical and finally better system, these efforts have only proven to be lacking in certain respects as it is not within the nature of our world to be perfect. Borrowing again from Zygmunt Bauman, it is with the emergence of Modernity that any kind of fixed societal prospect is blurred. Bauman argues that it is because of the speed of change without any definite sense of direction that Modernity can be classified as liquid. If we accept this to be true, Malevich can be read as directly confronting the world as it is – impure geometry.

In his talk, Batchelor also brought to my attention that Malevich signs his post-Suprematist figurative work with a black square, as if in some way, it is what represents him the most. It seems to me that Malevich never really abandoned painting the natural world. I am brought here to the question of metaphor, which I hope to probe at a later time. Nevertheless, it seems that Malevich’s Suprematist work is his most brave, not only because it shook the history of art and the tradition of figurative painting, but because it is always more difficult and more risky to try to depict that which is not entirely visible, but which is undoubtedly there.

Title: Suprematist Painting 

Year: 1916

Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/malevich/sup/

Title: Black Square and Red Square 

Year: 1915

Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/malevich/sup/

Title: Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions 

Year: 1915

Source: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/malevich/sup/