63

E c o n o m y a n d E x c E s s

Malevich and the Survival of Painting

Simon Baier

65

1 the term “Suprematism” is first mentioned in a letter from Malevich to Michail Matjuschin, dated Septem-ber 24, 1915. in irina vakar and tatiana Mikhienko, eds., Malevich o sebe, sovremenniki o Maleviche (Male-vich about himself, contemporaries about Malevich), vol. 1 (Moscow, 2004), p. 69. See for an example aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square : Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (new haven and london, 2012), pp. 54ff.

2 his work contains exceptionally few exceptions that confirm this rule. the painting Mystic Suprematism from 1920, today in the collection of the Stedelijk Mu-seum in amsterdam, would be one such categoriza-tion-evading piece, with which Malevich again con-solidates the tableau of painting. nonetheless the abolition of painting remained the norm until his re-turn to russia from Berlin.

3 Malevich arrived in Petrograd in august 1922. a year later, in august 1923, he was appointed director at the Museum of artistic culture, and immediately began setting up “research laboratories,” including his own department of form and theory. the name change from Museum of artistic culture to institute occurred in September of the following year. for a detailed analysis of Malevich’s tactics at the beginning of Sta-lin’s rule (concealement under the cover of positivist science was certainly one), see Pamela Kachurin, “Malevich as Soviet Bureaucrat : ginkhuk and the Sur-vival of the avant-garde, 1924 – 1926,” in charlotte douglas and christina lodder, eds., Rethinking Ma-levich : Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 125th Anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Birth (london, 2007), pp. 121 – 138.

4 Quoted the new translation by antonina W. Bouis in this volume, p. 147.

5 ibid. 6 ibid. 7 Malevich writes at the beginning of his “introduction

to the theory of the additional element in Painting,” that art, and especially painting, can be the subject of science not because it shows something but only be-cause it “belongs to the general order of phenomena.” ibid.

8 See the introduction to Bouis’s translation in this vol-ume, p. 140.

I.

B y 1927 Malevich’s oeuvre appeared bifurcated, having neglected his

own painting for years. his first major retrospective in late 1919 in

Moscow, just four years after staking out his personal claim to abstract

painting under the banner of “Suprematism,” 1 at the same time marked

the apparent end of his painterly production, which he substituted with diagrams,

graphs, architectural models, and in particular countless manuscripts.2 While

teaching in vitebsk, and from 1923 in Petrograd as director of the institute of

artistic culture (ginKhuK) and head of the department of form and theory

(fto), Malevich undertook an investigation of modernist painting, whose aim

was to establish a systematic science :3 “i called all this work of examining artistic

activity in general and in painting in particular the science of artistic culture.” 4

Beyond Malevich’s own brushstrokes, the cultural fact of painted surfaces re-

mained in order to become subject of a wide ranging analysis : “painting in par-

ticular,” meaning more precisely its progression from Paul cézanne to what Male-

vich explicitly identified as its outer limit, a point at which it, as a sensual

appearance reliant on sunlight is able to show something to its beholders, could

separate itself from its own medium. the dissolution of form in the white flicker of

brushstrokes marks the last stage within a narrative, in which Suprematism is sup-

posed to demonstrate the disappearance of the visible itself (fig. 1).

 • “i chose painting, that is, my specialty.” 5 Malevich’s choice of subject is not,

however, solely grounded in biography. rather, painting is understood here as a

“document,” seeking to make the subject, which produces it and, moreover soci-

ety as a whole, legible 6 — the world in which its tableau manifests itself, rather

than to merely represent something different.7 thus painting is neither substituted

by another art form nor in fact abolished, but instead subjected to an external

perspective that seeks to clarify what it had once been. the attempt to publish the

results of this project in russia in 1926 had failed.8 as a result of the closure of his

department and subsequently the entire institute of artistic culture that same year,

Malevich found himself confronted not only with the existential precariousness of

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9 Malevich was dismissed as director on november 15, 1926. the institute merged on december 4, 1926, with the State institute for the history of the arts (giii), to continue its work for at least another three years as the committee for experimental Studies on artistic culture. Kachurin 2007 (see note 3), pp. 135 – 137.

1 0 a first english translation from russian, which also in- cluded the other planned chapters of the book, was published in 1976 ; see troels andersen, ed., K. S. Male- vich : The World as Non-Objectivity�Unpublished Writings 1922 – 25, vol. 3 (copenhagen, 1976).

1 1 the only exhibition in which Malevich achieved this was a retrospective of his paintings in a hotel in War-saw in 1927, a few weeks before his visit to Berlin.

1 2 in 1970 the Stedelijk Museum published a catalogue raisonné of the Berlin exhibition of 1927. that publica-tion is the first time to include the charts, complete with texts translated from german and russian into english. troels andersen, Malevich : Catalogue Raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition 1927, Including the Collection in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Stedelijk Mu-seum amsterdam (amsterdam, 1970), pp. 117 – 120.

1 3 Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 148. 1 4 ibid. 1 5 ibid., p. 147. 1 6 Matthew george looper, “the Pathology of Painting :

tuberculosis as a Metaphor in the art theory of Kazi-mir Malevich,” in Configurations 3, no.1 (1995).

his own material situation.9 the prospect of any museum archiving his work, or

even just public presentation, must also have appeared increasingly uncertain.

the hasty publication of a fraction of his theoretical work from the preceding years

in german translation with the help of lászló Moholy-nagy in the Bauhausbücher

series in 1927, which he was able to arrange during a visit to Berlin, was to remain

its only publication for a long time to come.10 But Malevich’s interest in exhibiting

the corpus of his painting as an essential part of that investigation, and supple-

menting the retrospective he was able to stage in Berlin that same year as part of

the Great Berlin Art Exhibition with charts and diagrams, turned out to be impos-

sible.11 in Berlin, however, he therefore deposited not only paintings — fearing for

their safety in russia — but also a collection of manuscripts, tables, and graphs

addressing the subject of the persisting remains of painting.12

 • out of a much larger planned book that set out to cover his entire theoretical

work from the preceding years, but remained unpublished amidst the flux of cul-

tural politics, Malevich extracted a substantial section, which he titled “an intro-

duction to the theory of the additional element in Painting.” it begins with what

seems at first glance a surprising characterization of his project. the true pur-

pose of his proposed science of painting, he writes, is to determine its relation-

ship to the context in which it arises : “ . . . until now, critics viewed the painterly

art only from the emotional side, independent of examining the circumstances in

which it was found.” 13 to hear such a statement from Malevich must come as a

surprise, and not only in relation to the subsequent argumentation of the text,

which appears directly to contradict this premise. it is also bothersome if one

seeks to place it in relation to what he himself formulated in the preceding years

as the absolute objective of an art that seeks to free itself from any derivation and

utility. the “force of circumstances and the environment on which the form of

the painterly culture-manifestations depended,” is now supposed to explain art,

which in return as an effect that is able to testify this world.14 Yet, the proposed

positivist sociological critique of art immediately tumbles into a register of or-

ganic metaphor. for the context of such a body of painting — Malevich writes ex-

plicitly : “Painting for me has become the body . . .” 15 — placed in analogy to the

body of the painter, is not only social but simultaneously biological. 15 the history

of painting, which thus proclaims itself as a correlate of society and art, mutates

directly into an etiology of viral and bacterial decomposition. as if the first pages

still wanted to follow the tune of historical materialism, the revealed perspectives

break off immediately to transpose the argumentation into a dark biology of art.

and indeed the term “additional element,” whose theory the text sets out to de-

velop, does appear for the first time in this association — in the comparison of a

change in painting style with an infectious disease of painting itself, which under-

mines, dissolves, and ultimately destroys the existing aesthetic norms as law of

representation.16 nonetheless, the introduction of this term from the field of life

Fig. 1Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 1918, oil on canvas, 97 × 70 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

6968

25 See Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 149. 26 Malevich even reformulates the struggle for existence”

as a “struggle against an image.” See Bouis’s transla-tion in this volume, p. 159. the german term “Weltan-schauung” (world view) appears frequently in Mal-evich’s writings. See for example Kazimir Malevich, “the Philosophy of the Kaleidoscope.” in andersen 1976 (see note 10), p. 25.

27 Please see Bouis’s translation in this catalogue, p. 150. 28 ibid., p. 149. 29 ibid. p. 160. Paradoxically, Malevich argues that pre-

cisely because art appears as a constant process of deformation, and thus contains the flow of time, it is conversely able to situate itself as narrative outside of history, and maybe even time itself.

30 in his fundamental essay, “the Semiology of cubism,” Yve-alain Bois appears to misunderstand this aspect of Malevich’s theory, where he characterizes the ad-ditional element as “dispensable.” i would assert that Malevich meant precisely the opposite : “. . . in art, it is impossible to insulate from additional elements — that kind of isolation would mean isolation from being.” Quoted from Bouis’s new translation in this volume, p. 166. So the additional element is precisely what de-termines the essence without which we cannot speak of painting (as opposed to other images). Yve-alain Bois, “the Semiology of cubism.” in lynn Zelevansky, ed., Picasso and Braque : A Symposium (new York, 1992), pp. 169 – 195, here pp. 185ff.

3 1 Malevich describes this in relation to the state as a form of “image management by correspondence” and more concretely as “psychotechnology,” through which politics, and in microrelation the bourgeois nu-clear family under the authority of the father, seeks to shape the thoughts and thus the world view of its sub-jects. See Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 153.

32 Malevich’s polemics against erotically charged paint-ing based on identification and repetition go back a long way. the “fat ass of venus,” of which Malevich speaks in relation to the painting of the past is under-stood as an effect of the representation itself. the demand to banish it from the surface of painting speaks for Malevich’s sometimes misogynous but above all anti-sexual stance toward art. See Kazimir Malevich, “from cubism to Suprematism in art, to the new realism of Painting, to absolute creation,” in charlotte douglas, Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia. Studies in the fine arts: the avant- garde (Michigan, 1976), pp. 107–110, see esp., 107.

1 7 See the introduction to Bouis’s new translation in this volume, pp. 143 – 144.

1 8 Malevich writes : “Standing on the economic Supre-matist surface of the square as the absolute expres-sion of modernity” Kazimir Malevich, “on new Sys-tems in art,” in K. S. Malevich : Essays on Art, 1928 – 33, troels andersen, ed., vol. 1 (copenhagen, 1968), p. 83.

1 9 ibid., p. 84. 20 “So that all forms of this action are composed not

of aesthetic, but of economic necessity. the latest movements in art — Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism — are based on this action.” ibid., p. 84.

2 1 viktor Shklovsky, “iskusstwo kak priem / die Kunst als verfahren” (1917). in Jurij Striedter, Texte der russi-schen Formalisten, edited and with an introduction by Wolf-dieter Stempel, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), pp. 2 – 35 ; herbert Spencer, “the Philosophy of Style,” (1852), in Essays : Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 2 (london, 1901), pp. 333 – 369. viktor Shklovsky’s the-ory of defamiliarization of which Malevich was cer-tainly familiar, and is very close to his own history of the deformation of representation outlined here, criti-cizes the attempt to apply the concept of economy to aesthetics. Malevich appears to connect both posi-tions in a paradoxical maneuver where, as i attempt to demonstrate, he ultimately interprets economy as excess rather than subsuming it the under efficiency.

22 Quoted from andersen 1968 (see note 18), p. 85. 23 later in the text Malevich describes the possible fusion

of the energy of nature with the economic strivings of mankind through windmills, waterwheels, and sub-marines. ibid., p. 107.

24 georges Bataille’s theory of an “économie générale” and in particular of expenditure, which he laid out in 1933, appears to me to be unusually close to Male-vich’s thought. noteworthy are also their very similar assessments of Stalinist communism and capitalism as symptoms of a single trend that reduces life to ma-terial survival and channels all surplus value into new investment and thus, as Bataille argues, dangerously represses and excludes all necessary expenditure. georges Bataille, La part maudite : Précédé de la notion de dépense (1933) (Paris, 2003) ; and espe-cially idem., “Kommunismus und Stalinismus” (1953). in idem., Die Aufhebung der Ökonomie, edited by gerd Bergfleth, 3d expanded ed. (Munich, 2001), pp. 237 – 288. i am grateful to Sebastian egenhofer for this important insight.

additional element” in the concept of the political itself, which he defines as the

outburst of irreducible social conflict.25 So at the endpoint of a meandering

exposition, we are left with aesthetics, economics, and politics as the defining

stratifications of society.

 • as dispositives they produce relations between subject and world that — each

separately and in its own right — conjure nothing other than images or, in Male-

vich’s terminology, “ Weltanschauungen.” 26 it is for precisely this reason that Male-

vich can place the canvas of the painting in direct relation to society, painting is

not therefore, as might appear at first glance, solely and exclusively an effect of

social relations, but placed within an immanence that defines it as social produc-

tion sui generis.27 as such production it creates relations through which the world

is made imaginable, and indeed comprehensible. But the history of such produc-

tion is revealed simultaneously — and this point leads to the heart of Malevich’s

science — as a process of deformation : “all norms of established systems are the

order of previous interrelational influences of additional elements on one another,

forming a new additional affecting element, the norm of which can violate an-

other norm. Signs of violation will have various forms and colorations and will

develop in stages of deformation and reconstruction, thereby achieving a system

. . . .” 28 Breaking the norm through deformation of form and color is therefore the

event that impels the history of painting, and not some system of representation,

to which it simultaneously and reciprocally strives. Painting may repeatedly con-

solidate into orders, movements, styles, and schools. But whereas any order to

remain relative, as it changes over time and are therefore readable as historically

formed, the destruction of this order initiated by painting is in itself a singular

event. as events they are irreducible. But they can at the same time be connect-

ed to one another as equals situating themselves as absolute and unbound ex-

cess beyond any historical narrative, whose very meaning they ruin. as an end of

form they locate themselves at the margins of history itself, over which they

reach out as symptoms of an unattainable outside. Malevich goes so far as to

situate them outside of the temporal scheme itself : “a work of art cannot be

valued, because it is outside time.” 29

 • the additional element of painting is not therefore something superfluous that

could be extracted from it.30 Just as for Malevich the political reveals itself solely

in the outbreak of conflicts — conflicts that the state and the police as agents of

form always attempt to pacify or eradicate 31 — and just as economy is defined sole-

ly through the production of surplus value that corresponds to no use or benefit and

which can’t be leveled by any investment, the aesthetic appears to be set in motion

by something that fundamentally challenges any order of representation, but also

of beauty, desire, and lust.32 Yet this supplement, as the very essence of painting,

is not to be found in any particular materiality, in the application of color or its rela-

tion to surface, even if these are precisely the categories Malevich draws upon to

sciences assimilates political economy. the russian “pribavochnyi element” is

too close to the russian translation of Karl Marx’s concept of surplus value

(“pribavochnaya stoimost”) for this to be ignored.17

 • the adoption of the perspective of economy is nothing new in Malevich’s theory

of Suprematism. in the brochure On New Systems in Art, published in 1919 in

vitebsk, Malevich had already defined the surface of Suprematist painting itself

as “economic,” 18 in order then to identify it as a genuine symbol of modernism.

Beauty as a whole should no longer be regarded in and of itself, but as “the simple

economic expression of the action of energy.” 19 What the painting of cubism,

futurism, and Suprematism are founded on, he writes, is nothing other than “eco-

nomic necessity.” 20 But what could such an economy of painting actually mean ?

is what we are dealing with here not simply word play, or worse short-sighted

opportunism on Malevich’s part, seeking an exaggerated mimesis of the new jar-

gon of post-revolutionary cultural politics ? at the same time, this interpretation of

the term economy appears at first glance rather conventional, clinging as it does

to a discourse that by the nineteenth century had found an unlikely entrance into

the discipline of aesthetics. if also in distinction, viktor Shklovsky’s influential es-

say “art as technique” (1917) refers to precisely this tradition, which begins, by

way of richard avenarius, in particular with herbert Spencer’s influential essay

“the Philosophy of Style,” in order to make effectiveness, bound to energy

quanta, into a verifiable criterion of aesthetic production.21 Malevich’s concept of

economy does indeed appear at this point to acknowledge that tradition, whose

rationalization is inherent to modernism as a whole, in order to produce the prim-

itive and the natural as the outside of a rigorous law of efficiency. Malevich’s

analogization of the painter, who “regulates the flowing forces of color and paint-

erly energy,” 22 with the figure of the engineer who taps the power of nature in

designing windmills, water wheels, and submarines appears to point precisely in

this direction in which artistic production as a whole is subordinated to a perspec-

tive that seeks to judge the use of its means under the aspect of maximizing re-

turns.23

• the concept of the additional element, as introduced by Malevich at the end

of the nineteen-twenties, appears on the other hand to significantly complicate

such an interpretation of economy. not only because the idea of surplus value

resonating in its overtones contradicts a simple cycle of means and end. the

double articulation of economy in the fields of life and social sciences under the

aspects of pathology, conflict, and disintegration simultaneously exposes it to

an externality that transcends the limits of calculable effectiveness. Just as life

is mutated by disease, and economy in its production of surplus value subsumes

accumulation and expenditure, Malevich understands painting as a production

that is determined by nothing other than the ceaseless dissolution of its forms ; 24

a process of destruction that is finally reflected in Malevich’s “theory of the

7170

35 ibid., p. 180. 36 ibid., p. 183. 37 ibid., p. 185.

33 Malevich often uses both terms — element and sign — synonymously : “in researching cézannism, cubism, futurism, and Suprematism, i managed to determine three types of additional elements — special signs by which a system, norm, or painterly culture are under-stood.” Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this vol-ume, p. 167. nonetheless, his painting is certainly not pursuing semiology or semantics.

34 See Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 166.

II.

the text addresses this possibility at various points. at the same time it poses the

diagnosis only conditionally as one first opened up by Suprematism. Whereas

earlier statements, beginning with the programmatic text “from cubism to Su-

prematism in art to new realism in Painting, to absolute creation” (1915), argue

a stringent progression in the sequence of “isms” in painting that only reaches

its zenith with the extinguishing of the phenomenal world in Suprematism, which

seeks to shift painting outside of the painted surface, by the end of the nineteen-

twenties Malevich is dating the end of painting, before abstraction. in fact the

text sees the possibility of the end, or even its necessity, already being reached

with cubism, which Malevich identifies with the ascendancy of industrialization

and a particular form of socialism : “i would say that the beginning of worker art is

in cubism, that is, in the moment when art begins to vanish.” 35 “Painters fear the

metallic city, there is no painting there. . . .” 36 “in the conditions of industrialism,

painting retreats. . . .” 37 So the present reveals itself as a historical moment in

which painting has been obsolete for decades. Malevich’s own suspension of ar-

tistic practice is thus not only belated ; the entire project of Suprematism, which

only unfolds after cubism, is suddenly exposed as an anachronism : with its se-

mantic overtones of a world of flight, of wireless communication, and of the dis-

persion of all that is fixed and permanent, it occurred above all as science fiction

in the wrong medium — painting, which in no way matches the technical condi-

tions of its day.

 • the prohibition of depicting a world of contemporary production in Malevich’s

abstract painting, which ultimately rejects factories, industrialized agriculture,

and instrumentalized nature to speak solely of an unknown future, tears the paint-

ing of Suprematism from the societal moment of its production, which it cannot

acknowledge. however, they are also paintings that in turn, and necessarily, speak

of a preindustrial epoch, reflected in the coarse handiwork of their painted sur-

faces. the fusion of facture, material, and color that flashes momentarily in

Malevich’s production, as pure negation beyond representation reducing the

investigate painting as an object. Beyond its materiality and its concretization as a

colored object revealed to the eye of a viewer, painting is, on its surface, the work

of painted “signs” set in a motion in order to undermine its consistency and above

all its own power of figuration.33 as a metamorphotic force that cuts all ties to any

ontological core, it reveals itself not only to be capable of banishing the figure it-

self from its sphere — as the “what” of painting — as Malevich claims it for the in-

vention of Suprematism.34 its force of negation, as an immaterial structure out-

side of any specific materiality, cannot be halted by the bounds of painting as a

historical activity, but rather has to confront it with its own dissolution as an art.

7372

38 to burn the tradition of painting itself to ashes in order to subject it to a new anti-visual reception and, prag-matically, to create space in the museums is a per-haps polemical but for that no less significant pro-posal of Malevich’s from 1919, against which his work on painting in the nineteen-twenties should be read. Kazimir Malevich : “o muzeye,” in Iskusstvo kommuny 12 (1919), p. 2 ; see also the german translation in Boris groys and aage a. hansen-löve, eds., Am Null-punkt : Positionen der russischen Avantgarde (frank-furt am Main, 2005), pp. 203 – 207.

39 Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 185. 40 Malevich’s involvement with anarchism is known, and

permeates the metaphors of many of his texts. church and factory appear above all in the “traktat Bog ne skinut : iskusstvo, verkov’, fabrika” from 1920 as an-tipodes to art. See the german translation in aage a. hansen-löve, ed., Kazimir Malevic: Gott ist nicht gestürzt ! Schriften zu Kunst, Kirche, Fabrik (Munich and vienna, 2004), pp. 64 – 106.

4 1 ibid., p. 152. 42 formulations of this kind are found above all in one

chapter that was not published in the Bauhaus book. Quoted from andersen 1976 (see note 10), pp. 102ff.

forms of painting to an instant of pure sensation, appears to collapse retrospec-

tively into its individual elements. like the painting of the past, the abstract com-

positions of Suprematism systematize anew into subject, material, and technique,

which have lost sight of their own present between the future of their signified and

the past of their signifier. this perspective also poses the question why, if the

technique of painting really belongs to the world of the past, as Malevich repeat-

edly argues — and we should not forget that even at the beginning of his career he

characterized himself as the sharpest critic of tradition and its archiving — it still

remains the almost exclusive object with which his chosen science concerns itself

at the end of the nineteen-twenties.38

 • it would appear to me decisive to note that Malevich’s diagnosis of its neces-

sary dissolution is tied above all to social, technical, and economic conditions : “in

the conditions of industrialism, painting retreats. . . .” 39 at the same time Male-

vich’s own history of painting, as we have seen, unrolls in contrast as an autotelic

process that sets in motion its own deformation, not simply as an effect of other

circumstances, and conversely shows itself capable of exposing society itself as a

place of repression : the state, the factory, and the church, as consolidated forms

of power, are the institutions that Malevich utilized to counterpose a critique of

painting that over again crushes the illusion of its own legibility and ultimately its

own legitimacy.40 the anachronism of painting, which is over and done with, yet

simultaneously persists as a subject of theory and within the practice of his stu-

dents is thus contingent upon a dual temporality. it exists in two mutually contra-

dictory narratives. While it is tied to what the world regards as technological

progress, and Malevich’s characterization of his project at the beginning of the

text reminds us of this, he also ultimately attributes it an autonomy whose haphaz-

ard power of negation thwarts history as a “blind, dark norm.” 41

 • Malevich’s study draws upon the development of his own students to explicate

a general law of painting and its development within modernity. the manner of

this investigation as well as its metaphors are, i would argue, simultaneously leg-

ible as symptoms of a condition of painting itself, concealed behind the mask of a

positivistic formalism whose efficiency is revealed in diagrams, analyses, and

graphs. Malevich’s insistence on the power of the graph sometimes appears man-

ic : “the graphs will show . . . ” is an ever-recurring trope. “But it seems to me that,

when constructing the graph, one will be able to see what it is necessary to mani-

fest and what is unnecessary, what is relevant today, and what is irrelevant.” 42 Yet,

what was taught at his institute and suggested to his students as a particular style

was not simply Suprematism as the latest and last stage of a system of representa-

tion. instead, the result manifested in graphs and charts presents a plurality

of artistic systems — impressionism, cézannism, cubism, futurism, and Suprem-

atism — that are presented only to a certain extent as a progressive sequence and

rather as structural possibilities for the present that Malevich himself characterizes

Fig. 2El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, eds., Die Kunstismen (Erlenbach-Zürich et al., 1925), cover and first page

7574

48 ibid. p. 168. 4 9 ibid. p. 169. 50 Malevich writes : “the line of painterly limit.” ibid. 5 1 ibid., p. 171. 52 ibid.

43 Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 166. elsewhere Malevich describes this condition as “an aesthetic tangle of mixed-up connections of all sys-tems and teachings.” ibid., p. 168.

44 cited in and translated from el lissitzky and hans arp, eds., Die Kunstismen (Zurich, 1925), p. viii. ger-man Quote : “die gegenwart ist die Zeit der analysen, das resultat aller Systeme, die jemals entstanden sind. Zu unserer demarkationslinie haben die Jahr-hunderte die Zeichen gebracht, in ihnen werden wir unvollkommenheit erkennen, die zu getrenntheit und zur gegensätzlichkeit führten. vielleicht werden wir davon nur das gegensätzliche aufnehmen, um das System der einheit aufzubauen.”

45 Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 163. 46 aleksandra Shatskikh provides an impressive example

of this tendency in the Witebsk unoviS group led by Malevich. She quotes from records of discussions during an evening drawing course held on March 27 in Witebsk, where Malevich’s student nina Kogan not only proclaims the homogenization of all styles to a universal unity in Suprematism, but also the homog-enization of the subject itself, in this case the flower : “the content of a painting is unity. the unity inherent in the diversity of constituent elements of the painting. and not only paintings : the content of everything is unity. through all the diversity we are striving toward the same goal : universal unity. a flower is the unity of the mass of elements of which it is composed.” Quot-ed from aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk : The Life of Art (new haven and london, 2007), p. 115.

47 “. . . the main sign of any work is the establishment of the interrelationship of contracts between line and curve.” Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this vol-ume, p. 162.

structure, as explicated through cubism, but is forced, like the orbit that makes

the planets circle the sun, to return to the world of phenomenal appearances in

solar light, however far it might leave it behind : “. . . whereas painting must defi-

nitely complete its path in its artistic orbit.” 48 “the first stage of cubism could

represent the alpha of the cubist constellation where the motion of painting stops,

it is its aphelion, after which it must move back to its perihelion.” 49 overcoming

cubism cannot therefore be a question of the practice of painting itself. cubism,

not Suprematism, is already its outer limit.50 for this reason Malevich no longer

characterizes his own Suprematist art as pure painting, but as a paradoxical vi-

sual form, as a hybrid whose structure consists of using the means of painting to

speak at the same time of something else in another form. his students, on the

other hand, who are the primary concern of the text, are therefore in an extremely

difficult and ultimately precarious situation, as they all are painters. not only is

the question of which styles of modern painting they espouse as simply a matter

of personal disposition, a problem of the subject that Malevich binds to the idea of

an unconscious that is only partially willing to obey the laws of historical rational-

ity. the states he apparently provokes in his students, a “continual oscillation,”

being “irritable, preoccupied,” stages of “paralysis,” 51 and generally “crisis,” 52

are always revealed in the text as allegories of a state of art in its entirety, whose

function and position represent the most urgent problem for Malevich.

as eclectic : “in our time, there are numerous painterly movements. . . .”43 el lis-

sitzky and hans arp’s book Die Kunstismen (the “isms” of art), published in ger-

many two years earlier, in 1925, as an ironic parade challenging the avant-gardists’

claim to be the force of the future, introduces this problem with a quote from

Malevich at the beginning of the book : “the present time is the epoch of analyses,

the result of all systems that ever were established. centuries brought the signs

to our line of demarcation, in them we shall recognize the imperfections that led

to division and contradiction. Perhaps we thereof only shall take the contradic-

tory to construct the system of unity.” 44 removed from its original context, name-

ly, the text “on new Systems in art” published at the end of 1919, and placed at

the beginning of a list of different styles, Malevich’s opaque dialectic condenses

to a gloomy vignette equating construction, separation, and opposition. in the

book itself the present as the “epoch of analyses,” as distinct from the age of in-

novation, is — reversing the conventional chronology — posed as a beginning

leading to a past. in Die Kunstismen time runs backwards from a thoroughly un-

certain present (fig. 2). Malevich’s attempt at clarification in the midst of the plu-

ralistic field cast by his theory of the “additional element,” can certainly be read in

this context as a project to overcome the diagrammatic stasis within which all the

styles of the twentieth century suddenly appear presentist. in return, his metaphor

of painting as disease — “a painterly examination is like a bacteriological analysis

to determine the causes of an illness” 45 — replaces the historical diachrony of

styles with a synchronous perspective that describes every style not only as pos-

sible, but as fundamentally repeatable.

 • So painting is not only an illness because it disintegrates any order. it is also so

because, as a phenomenon within industrialized society, it can only be described

as deficient, problematic, and residual. Malevich’s treatment of his students who

had identified themselves as proponents of particular styles on the basis of per-

sonal dispositions with various additional elements extracted from the modernist

styles — the sickle of cubism, the fiber of cézanne, and the rod-shaped tuberculo-

sis bacterium that forms the simple straight line of Suprematism — turns out to be

hardly suited to guide them onto the path to the style of the future, which Suprem-

atism once was. the work of deformation places the individual, who in Malevich’s

educational experiments in vitebsk around 1920 was still conceptualized as a

bourgeois remnant to be dissolved into the universal style of Suprematism, in an

existential tension to linear development, which the student is very often only par-

tially equipped and sometimes not at all able to comprehend.46 the various case

studies — developments, confusions, and pathologies — often find a generally

problematic and certainly always have an ambivalent outcome. the starting point

and model for this is cubism, whose reduction of the outline drawing to a differ-

ential contrast of curve and straight line is set as the exemplary structure for any

painting.47 in fact, Malevich argues, the practice of painting cannot escape this

7776

districts and provinces.” 53 the endangerment of the provincial, as the irreduc-

ible distant in contrast to the expanding metropolis, is expressed in the paralytic

tension of contemporary painting, which is no longer sure of its own place : “a war

could break out between such painters if the issue were power and construction.

the former would say the peasant and his rye culture should be metallized ; the

cézannists, on the contrary, would say the reverse : peasantize the city, stop its

dynamics and turn it into a park, into quiet, friable masses. . . .” 54 Malevich’s

own proposals on construction and power, undertaken between 1922 and 1928 in

the form of plaster painted white and wood models referred to as planits and ar-

chitektons by contrast appear to situate themselves within this conflict as build-

ings neither of a urban nor rural situation, but to set off on a flight into the unin-

habitable, as cubic agglomerations possessing neither doors nor windows to

admit any life at all.

 • Yet, the war of which Malevich nonetheless speaks here, is immanent, and may-

be even all the more palpable as he regards his situation from afar for the short

moment of his time in Berlin. the “metallization of the rye culture” demands its first

victims that very winter of 1927. in his autobiography, written in the nineteen-

thirties, Malevich transposes the conflict as fable into a scene from his childhood :

“one day i was so exasperated at the factory boys that i declared war on them. i

hired an army from among the peasant lads and paid them one piece of refined

sugar each.” 55 in this unusual passage, put to paper only a few years later, the death

struggle between city and country, which by now is tearing through Malevich’s world

with a vengeance, is pushed away to the distance of memory. at the same time, his

identification with the figure of the peasant is unmistakable. the future painter Male-

vich helps it to victory in a yet harmless battle between children, by firing an arrow

into the eye of the leader of the factory workers in order to, if only briefly, eliminate

his perspective and bring about the triumph of blind objectlessness.56 in the Soviet

countryside this war began for real after the harvest of 1927, with its unexpectedly

small state grain procurements. Stalin announced the idea of large-scale collectiv-

ization the following January in a speech on the grain crisis. the centralized political

control of production, the expropriations, and the industrialization of field work was

aimed in the long term at the abolition of manual harvesting in order to catapult the

notoriously backward country into the age of mechanization.57 the first large-scale

measures were implemented the next winter.

 • the identification of the painted surface with the field of agriculture goes back

a long way in Malevich’s writings. and it also appears to be the field of agricul-

tural production and its metaphors that allow Malevich to adopt a new perspective

in relation to the problem of economy. in On New Systems in Art (1919) he writes

not only with all the futurist furor at his disposal of the necessity for the “green

world” to become “extinct,” in order to transmute painting into the physiological

immediacy of electrical light signals.58at the same time, Malevich characterizes

III.

Malevich’s text does indeed return toward the end to its original question, which

was to define the relationship of painting to its external circumstances. taking the

example of cubist painters, he describes how their work divested from their apt

environment — the industrialized city — starts to regress, before it, finally, goes

back through the history of art stage by stage and decomposes completely : “the

dynamic plane of the surface of their works will become rough, because it falls

apart into brushstrokes, forming a crusty mass with every kind of shades of tones

and elicits the inevitable friability of the painting canvas, approaching the cézanne

surface, farther to the impressionist. . . .” 51 “the steely surface . . . starts to soften

. . . dissolving and forming a doughy mass with the different consistency of slimy

multicolored hues.” 52 like a film reel played backwards, the effect of the addi-

tional element of painting is discovered here in its inversion : what it reveals is a

form of painting, which is incapable to preserve itself, and which is moving not

into the future but is chronically thrown back into its past. its surface becomes

brittle and softens. the reversal of history is narrated as a threatening and effec-

tive destruction of form, which retreats from its hard, achromatic state into a

formless, multicolored mass of paint. the same law that impels painting is re-

vealed in obverse in works, which return nolens volens to pre-existing styles.

here, the sheer existence of painting is tied to the project of modernity whose

complete realization is proclaimed but still awaited. the endpoint of the over-

coming of nature and thus of the difference between country and city is the aboli-

tion of the economy of agriculture itself, which must be replaced by the absolute

presence of industrialization in all spheres of life. at the threshold of that moment,

individuals persist who prefer a way of life shaped by agriculture to an urban one,

driven by their recalcitrant subconscious — which is itself essentially responsible

for the production of painting, where it counteracts its dissolution into rational

theory. Pure painting associated with the name of cézanne is, in contrast to cub-

ism and futurism, as Malevich writes, a painting of “the suburbs and cities of

53 ibid., p. 179. 54 ibid., pp. 179ff. 55 Kazimir Malevich, “autobiography,” in evgeniia Petro-

va, ed., A Legacy Regained : Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde (amsterdam, 2002), p. 158.

56 “it ended with my arrow catching the factory leader in the eye, while his whizzed past me.” ibid., pp. 158ff.

57 See, as one example in this connection : Sheila fitzpat-rick, Stalin’s Peasants : Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (new York 1996).

58 “each day nature emerges further and further from the old green world . . . approaching that moment when the green world will be as extinct as the primeval land-scape . . .” Quoted from andersen 1968 (see note 18), p. 86.

5 1 ibid., p. 175. 52 ibid.

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painting in the same context as an irreducible part of this green world : “Painting

grows as a forest, mountain or rock.” 59 its tableaus are “beds of the plane on

which the essential painting grew.” 60 While the economy of painting may com-

pare itself with the disappearing world of feudal agriculture, it does not however

fit seamlessly into it, but instead contradicts its organic circulation : “and when the

artist paints and sows painting, with an object serving as a bed, he ought to do it

in such a way that the object becomes lost.” 61 nothing other than the effective

consumption of energy is at stake, essentially introducing a dystopia of waste that

resists the fiction of a harmonious exchange between nature and mankind. the

field of painting is and is not agricultural. Painting itself stands on the threshold of

its own disappearance, without being able to leave itself behind, its surface, its

own genesis and materiality. irretrievable expenditure, the loss of the object as

“contradiction” constituted on the canvas, is the true harvest in prospect.62

 • “therefore whatever takes shape, it must take shape within the unity of the gen-

eral culture of the universal modern movement.” 63 the revocation of that one

sentence written in 1919 appears to me to be what Malevich’s science of painting

is driving at in the late nineteen-twenties : “Peasantize the city, stop its dynamics

and turn it into a park, into quiet, friable masses.” 64 Perhaps this is not only a

wrong turn, defying the progress of history, but also a profound premonition of

Malevich’s coming resumption of painting, by which he finally releases himself

from the self-imposed verdict. not a peasantized city perhaps, and still less a

park : quiet, friable masses. nothing appears to better characterize the strange

empty landscapes and fields that appear only a year later in Malevich’s paintings,

figures, if present at all, now inactive, mostly faceless, often empty handed (fig. 3).

the abstract structure of curved and straight line that he had in 1919 already de-

fined as the essence of cubism, finally condenses at the end of the nineteen-

twenties to the figure of the sickle (fig. 4), which fills his tables, texts, and graphs

both as metaphor and as a recognizable symbol. it will return to his painting as a

tool of harvest, a painting, which not only permits itself to end its own suspension,

but which also allows the object itself to return to its field. in peculiar exercises he

begins to repaint motifs discovered before his leap into abstraction (figs. 5, 6).

the motif of the reaper frees itself from the hard and firm modulation of the nine-

teen-tens to soften into a coarse and frayed facture.65 the identification with a

world in the process of extinction transforms its economy into a spectral after-

image of modernity, figuring as its unfulfilled remainder, opposing it in repetition

and regress.

59 ibid., p. 100. 60 ibid., p. 109. 6 1 ibid. 62 to overcome progress is already Malevich’s explicit

objective here : “all creation, whether of nature or of the artist, or of creative man in general, is a question of constructing a device to overcome our endless progress.” therefore the goal of the painter must be to create not aesthetic harmony but contradiction : “he also creates forms, and separate elements of their symbols, and achieves a contradiction on the surface of his picture.” ibid., p. 85.

63 Malevich’s text production articulates this contradic-tion in extremis. in one text he explains that the idea of progress must be overcome, only to write immedi-ately thereafter : “therefore whatever takes shape, it must take shape within the unity of the general culture of the universal modern movement.” ibid., p. 180.

64 Quoted from Bouis’s translation in this volume, p. 180. 65 his repetitions of motifs from the nineteen-tens, which

began in 1928, are, even if Malevich himself back-dates them to that time, by no means, as often as-sumed, simply copies. at the same time the motifs of harvest and work in the fields are not exhausted with these repetitions, but ultimately become, in new com-positions, the central topics of his late work.

Fig. 3Kazimir Malevich, Peasant, 1931 – 32, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Fig. 4Nowaja Generazija, Nova generacija 2 (1928).

Fig. 5Kazimir Malevich, Reaper, 1912, oil on canvas, 71 × 69.4 cm, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Fig. 6Kazimir Malevich, Reaper, 1928 – 29, oil on plywood, 72.4 × 72 cm, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg