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48 The Nation.

August 18/25, 2003

ho is MM and why is he ready to take Everyone is suspect in the book because than one. At the end, you are almost tempt-

W over the world? The answer to that


question is provided by the rest of the
book. This includes the generic con-
vention of the surprise ending. It is a
bold but disappointing answer—provided
in a body bag that has been stitched with the
kind of ideological certainties that Bahal
everyone is on the take. It’s refreshing to
find early on that the journalist is a crook—
and the book’s charm comes from having a
narrator who is compromised in more ways
ed to forgive Bahal for finding a criminal
who, it turns out, is not at all like you and
me. The middle-class nation can go about its
business in peace again. ■

had initially seemed to be writing against. ART


Yet the book’s gift is greater than its
conclusion, or the plotting that stretches
plausibility almost to the breaking point.
Bunker 13 gives flesh and blood to the in-
Paint It Black
genuity and rapacity of India’s new entre- ARTHUR C. DANTO
preneurial class. Writers and journalists
aren’t exempt either. The novel shows that KAZIMIR MALEVICH
the desire to find and tell the truth is only
a move in a high-risk gamble. It follows f the idea of monochrome painting occurred to anyone before the twentieth

I
that there is also a sinister side to MM. At
his most chilling, he reminds you of his century, it would have been understood as a picture of a monochrome reality,
more modest cousins who have been in the and probably taken as a joke. Hegel likened the Absolute in Schelling to a dark
news—those affluent Hindus who took di-
rections on their cell phones and arrived in night in which all cows are black, so a clever student in Jena might have had
their SUVs, during the riots in Gujarat last the bright idea of painting an all-black meaning. Malevich himself said later, “It is
year, to loot the shops owned by Muslims. picture titled Absolute With Cows—witty not painting; it is something else.” And so
MM also resembles other subjects of or profound depending upon one’s meta- far as its opposition to art goes, well, you
Bahal’s reporting. In the early 1990s, when physics. In 1882 the Exposition des Arts In- don’t have to study art to be able to paint
heavy betting on cricket matches became cohérents in Paris featured a black painting a black square. Anybody could do it. So
a subcontinental trend, Bahal broke the by the poet Paul Bilhaud titled Combat de though it was almost certainly Malevich’s
story on match-fixing in India. As a result, nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit, which most important work, and inaugurated a
the intelligence authorities uncovered an was appropriated in 1887 by the French new era in the history of art, it hardly seems
illegal business that, for its most successful humorist Alphonse Allais, in an album of appropriate to call it his masterpiece, just
bookie, was generating at least $40 mil- monochrome pictures of various colors, because the factors that make for something
lion in turnover for each game. In an inter- with uniformly ornamental frames, each being a masterpiece don’t really apply to it.
view, Bahal explained that the bookies al- bearing a comical title. Allais called his all- It would be curious to think of it exhibited
ways go for the best players, “not just be- red painting Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic alongside Mona Lisa in a show called “Two
cause they can influence the match, but Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea. Masterpieces.” We marvel at its originality,
because the best players also have a higher Only in the most external and superfi- not its painterly brilliance.
risk-taking psychology.” The players, he cial respect does Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 The idea behind what Malevich called
added, were often also heavy gamblers black square painted on a white ground be- Suprematism is that you cannot carry things
themselves. “It is the way they are wound long to this history. For one thing, Black beyond Black Square. It is as far as you can
up. It gives a kick.” Square is not a picture; it does not, in other go: You have reached a point of absolute
I thought of those words while reading words, depict a black square outside the zero. Which isn’t to say that Black Square
Bunker 13. MM has an unsentimental grasp frame. One of its immense contributions to is empty—there is, after all, a difference
of money and markets. It is impossible to the concept of visual art lies in the fact that between not being a picture and being a
inhabit his world and not know that writing it liberated the concept of painting from that picture of nothing! Calling an empty rec-
in India is also now a game of high com- of picturing, and thus opened up a new era tangle a picture of nothing would be a Lewis
mercial stakes, reflecting broader changes in the history of art. “All paintings are pic- Carroll–like joke, whereas everything con-
within the national culture. The staid world tures” would have been a strong candidate nected with Black Square underscores its
of Nehruvian socialism and protected for a necessary truth until Malevich proved seriousness.
markets is gone. The Indian nation, and it false. But it was not a difference that met Consider, for example, the way Male-
indeed much of the world outside, is up the eye. Had Bilhaud’s all-black painting of vich first showed it in the 1915 show “0.10.
for grabs. 1882 been square, it might have looked ex- The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings,”
When the defense scam erupted in actly like Malevich’s Black Square. to which he contributed thirty-nine Supre-
the news in India, Bahal wrote an op-ed Black Square’s radical difference from matist works. An installation photograph
in a newsweekly saying that his team’s everything before it does not end there. shows Black Square mounted in an upper
aim wasn’t to change the system: “That Malevich’s disciple, El Lissitzky, declared corner of the gallery, diagonally connecting
wouldn’t be a fun position.” There was, he in 1922 that Black Square was “opposed two walls. This was evidently the position
said, another reason for writing his exposé. to everything that was understood by ‘pic- occupied by an icon in Russia: not hung on
Noting that he was from a small town, he tures’ or ‘paintings’ or ‘art.’ Its creator in- a wall or propped on a shelf, but in an upper
said, “I realized very early that even the tended to reduce all forms, all painting, to corner. I think the reason would be as fol-
powerful pull down their zippers to piss.” zero.” I think by its opposition to painting, lows: Icons were never considered mere
I liked the nakedness of that metaphor. El Lissitzky is saying that the fact that the pictures of saints, the Madonna or Jesus
Bunker 13 spreads the guilt more evenly. square is painted is incidental to the work’s himself, so they did not aspire to create an
August 18/25, 2003 The Nation. 49

illusion, as in Renaissance art. They were represents. I wish I knew more about the friends—the composer Matiushin, the poet
not, as Alberti said, a kind of window, moment when Malevich decided to paint a Kruchenykh and Malevich himself. It was
through which one would believe one was large black square, and realized that he had given only two performances, at Luna Park
seeing an external reality. What one be- hit upon something that changed the mean- in St. Petersburg. There were two acts. In
lieved instead was that holy beings would ing of art forever, not merely purging it of Act I, the sun is captured and locked up in
actually make themselves present in their any pictorial elements but stultifying the a concrete box. In Act II, the Strong Men of
images. Theoreticians spoke of the mys- impulse to see it as a picture of unrelieved the Future produce a new social order, no
tical presence of the saint in the icon. And blackness. Given the momentousness he as- longer dependent on the primitive source of
its placement near the ceiling was an ob- cribed to Suprematism, one can appreciate light that had been worshiped for centuries.
vious metaphorical entry point for beings that Malevich looked for intimations of it in Music, words and of course the sets and
that existed on a higher plane. A picture his earlier work, much in the way in which costumes were radical and cutting-edge:
could be a decoration, but icons were scholars pore over Pollock’s pre-1945 work The music was dissonant, the lyrics were
fraught with magic. Through icons, the in search of the drip. basic sounds in an experimental discourse
holy being was in our very presence, where Victory Over the Sun was a collabora- called Zaum. Only fragments of the music
it could be prayed to or honored. Trivially, tive effort by three avant-garde figures, all and language survive, but Malevich’s
a square is a square, not a picture of one.
Malevich created reality, rather than mere-
ly depicting it. And that in a sense is what
the figure in an icon was believed to be—
a reality rather than a picture.
After Malevich’s death, when he lay in
state, a black square hung above his head.
There was a black square on his tomb. As
a kind of icon, it carried a religious power.
In 1920, he wrote, “I had an idea that were
humanity to draw an image of the Divinity
after its own image, perhaps the black
square is the image of God as the essence
of his perfection on a new path for today’s
fresh beginning.” He clearly identified him-
self with the black square: It served him as
a kind of signature, appearing in the lower
right-hand corner of his last painting, a
self-portrait. In any case, it was not a proto-
Dadaist hoot.

he original Black Square is perhaps the

T pièce de résistance in an elegant exhibi-


tion at the Guggenheim Museum given
over entirely to Malevich’s Suprematist
phase (until September 14; Menil Col-
lection, Houston, October 3–January 11,
2004). It is the first time it has been allowed
to travel, and one can see why. It’s in ter-
rible shape, so blemished by cracks and
fissures that one would give it a pass at a
yard sale. Its ravaged condition conveys
a sense of touching vulnerability, like a
martyr’s relic. In fact, Malevich painted at
least four Black Squares, and it occurs as
a motif throughout his oeuvre, making its
first appearance in 1913, in a small pencil
study for the décor of the Futurist opera
Victory Over the Sun, two years before he
invented—or discovered—Suprematism.
There are several of these studies in the
Guggenheim show, in deference to Male-
vich’s belief that they are proto-Suprematist
works, though at the time he considered
himself a Cubo-Futurist. After Cubo-
Futurism, he went through a related style,
making what he described as “alogical” or
“transrational” works, hardly a year before
the great breakthrough that Black Square
50 The Nation. August 18/25, 2003

sketches for the costumes exist (you can see on East 54th Street in Manhattan, and one
them on the Internet), and there are, as well, really felt as if one were entering a non-
his set designs. The set that he later singled objective world when one visited it. Most of
out as Black Square’s first appearance in his the paintings consisted of shapes floating
work is, according to the Guggenheim cat- in empty space, many of them by Rudolph
alogue, for Act II, Scene 5. Indeed, it shows Bauer, the lover of the director, the Baroness
a square, divided by a diagonal into two Hilla Rebay, who used to sit at the recep-
areas, one black, the other light. tion desk, eagerly discussing the philosophy
The truth is that the drawing in question of nonobjectivity with anyone interested.
has the look of something seen through a There were a lot of Kandinskys and per-
square opening in some sort of optical in- haps some Mirós and Mondrians. I don’t
strument, like a segment of the sun against know if there was anything by Malevich,
a dark sky. It really looks like a picture. but there were some at the Museum of
Modern Art, including the famous White
ere is a better way to look at the ques- on White. It was a great place to take some-

H tion. In one of Malevich’s studies for


the opera’s décor, there is a black square
and a number of black rectangles—a
large vertical one, and then two sets of
one one felt moony about, and hold hands
on the round gray velvet settees.

ery little of Malevich’s Cubo-Futurist


three black rectangles at various angles to
one another on either side of it. But in the
same drawing there are a number of other
components—some large letters, some nu-
merals, a foot, a hand holding what looks
like a bomb, a cigarette with smoke—and
a number of mere marks—circles, waves,
V work of 1914, with which the Guggen-
heim show begins, or the alogical draw-
ings and paintings of the following year,
is especially rewarding unless you think
of Suprematism as struggling to emerge
from the early avant-garde clutter. But when
one enters the gallery of 1915 masterpieces,
hooks, indications of the edges of overlap- there is a sense of liberation that must, one
ping planes. It is an example of an “alogi- is certain, recapture Malevich’s own feeling
cal” or “transrational” drawing, a drawing when he broke free and entered what he re-
whose various components (some abstract, garded as unoccupied territory. The paint-
others representational) don’t cohere as a ings convey a feeling of utter glee. One feels
composition. The alogical drawings have as if one were witnessing the beginning a
something of the disorder of dreams, as new era, where the history of art has been
Freud attempted to characterize them when left behind forever. The Russian avant-garde
he suggested that we approach them like was obsessed with the idea of the fourth di-
rebus puzzles—concatenations of pictures mension, which its members read about in
that seem to have no rational connection the mystical writings of Pyotr Demianovich
with one another. Ouspensky. The fourth dimension was
Now imagine laying a piece of trans- not an extra parameter in some dry equa-
parent paper over Malevich’s drawing and tions but rather a living reality that one
simply tracing the black geometrical com- could hope to enter, like a new world.
ponents, disregarding all the rest. The re- Ouspensky, a Theosophist, believed that
sult will look like a Suprematist drawing artists were uniquely capable of making
of 1915, consisting of a number of free- the fourth dimension vivid for individuals
floating rectangles together with a square. who are otherwise locked in their three-
It is as though Malevich’s drawing had a dimensional perception of the world. That
Suprematist drawing inscribed within itself. is what the great Suprematist paintings
But this would have been invisible until Su- convey—the optimism and generosity that
prematism was invented two years later. defined the art of the Russian avant-garde
Suprematism consists in getting rid of all at the dawn of Modernism, when it saw
the objects other than the geometrical ones. its mission as bringing art into life, and
When that has been done, one is left with contributing, through art, to the creation
a nonobjectivist work, and Suprematism is of a new social reality, a vision initially
virtually synonymous with what came to embraced by the Russian Revolution be-
be called Non-Objective art. fore the perversions of Stalinism.
The term was first used by Rodchenko The smooth geometries and whitish
in connection with his Black on Black Paint- spaces of Suprematist painting, using bril-
ing (1918), but Malevich made the concept liant colors and jaunty compositions, were
his own, and published a book, The Non- a vocabulary of hope and idealism. They
Objective World, in 1927. It is worth men- could symbolize all the bright moderni-
tioning that the Guggenheim Museum was ties for which the art stood—syncopated
originally called the Museum of Non- rhythms; the fourth dimension as a field
Objective Painting when it was located of infinite explorations; the radical re-
August 18/25, 2003 The Nation. 51

DIALOGUE.
DEMOCRACY.
DIVERSITY.
design of contemporary clothing, housing a flight of yellow rectangles, heading for the
and cities—and above all, they could ex- upper-right corner, crossing a long, nearly
press speed and flight. “I have torn through horizontal thin red rectangle as it goes. “My
the blue lampshade of color limitations,” new painting does not belong to the earth
Malevich wrote in 1919, “and come into the exclusively,” Malevich said in 1916. “The
white. After me, comrade aviators sail into earth has been abandoned like a house eaten
the chasm—I have set up the semaphores up with worms. And in fact in man and his
of Suprematism!” consciousness there lies the aspiration to-
All the Suprematist compositions lift the ward space, the inclination to ‘reject the
spirit. Let’s just consider Airplane Flying. It earthly globe.’”
is, of course, not a picture, so don’t bother This is how the future used to look. Then
to look for the airplane. What it captures, came the Depression, Stalinism, fascism,
rather, is the feeling of flight. The flight be- the two world wars, the cold war. The poor
gins at the bottom-right corner, with a tilted mangled Black Square shows how that
black square. Along the diagonal that its once-bright future looks now. It is like the
angle defines are two black rectangles, one ashes of hope, and in its way a memorial to
larger than the other, with two thin whiz Malevich himself, as the future collapsed
lines on either side, marked by thin black around him. He died a poor man, disgraced
rectangles. At the upper edge of the largest and erased from the history of art accord-
black rectangle, direction changes—we get ing to the Soviet Union. ■

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