I was fascinated by that notion of nothing.
What I’ve just done is attempt to paint a blind black square.
I’m excluding vision, and yet it makes the vision even more intense in my head.
It all revolves around that idea of trying to reactivate Malevich’s Black Square into
relevance at the beginning of the 21st Century.
What do you think?
Love it.
The Black Square by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich is a really big deal in art history,
and I wanted to find out why.
The history of soviet painting, the history of contemporary abstraction, all of these
things are bursting out of this tiny canvas.
It’s a mesmerising proposition, and it’s haunted the history of 20th-century art.
When Malevich’s original Black Square painting was revealed in 1915, it caused outrage.
It was the most radically abstract art people had seen, the first painting that didn’t
represent anything, but itself.
Western artists were moving to a very abstract way of painting, but they were still copying
reality: painting a female figure, making a forest.
To paint just a black square, to find the ultimate expression of what you believe in,
we don’t realise what a courageous thing that was, it was scandalous.
Could this work only have come out of Russia at that time?
Yes, when you have no freedom and freedom is given to you, you go to extremes.
And then new things can start, and happen.
It’s been labelled the ‘dawn of modernism’, the ‘zero-point’ of art, and gone on to
influence generations of artists - from abstract painters, to more broadly, like major Australian
performance artist Mike Parr.
I went outside one morning and I suddenly found myself looking at the road.
And I thought, bitumen is everywhere now, we’re paving over the whole world with bitumen,
this is really the end of the Black Square.
Malevich’s Black Square was the inspiration behind Mike Parr’s famous work at this year’s
Dark Mofo Festival, where he buried himself beneath a Hobart road for three days.
I thought, all people will have to look at is the bitumen, there was nothing.
I said “this represents nothing” - straight away it started representing stuff.
So what I realised doing that performance was because there was nothing, there was everything
for the audience.
But like any great work, the Black Square provokes all sorts of interpretations.
References to the Black Square also appear in the work of major contemporary artist,
William Kentridge, who has a different take on its significance.
For me the great thing about the Malevich is its impurity.
One thinks of it as this moment that comes out of nowhere in contemporary art, and what
I’ve understood was that it came out of the bastard activity of making costume design.
And that’s another piece in the Black Square puzzle, this icon of modern art originally
began as a stage curtain in the futurist opera ‘Victory Over the Sun’, which Malevich
did the designs for.
So it’s not from a brilliance of purity of thought, that comes afterwards.
All of the spirituality and all of the mumbo jumbo, I’m convinced is an afterthought,
a justification after the event.
And I think it is important, but I’m interested in the side footnotes that come into it.
People should understand the background of it, and then when you look at it, you get
a little bit of history, you understand what freedom is, you understand what it is when
freedom is taken away from you.
Malevich’s period of artistic purity was in the end pretty short lived.
Stalinism took hold, abstraction was prohibited, and by 1933 his painting looked like this…
But still he signed it, with a tiny black square.
When he died he was in his coffin, other fellow artists painted the Black Square on it, the
Black Square was hanging like an icon above his coffin.
It was his statement, his one and only big statement he made.
Well you can say it’s just a black square, but then it has no reason to be.
It only has a reason to be if you ask questions, it only has a reason to be if it provokes
you.
That gesture on his part changed the course of 20th-century art and culture.
It’s an incredibly revolutionary moment.