Malevich at the Tate Modern: The sense of the familiar
‘Art is merely the first time
someone creates. With subsequent copies and reproductions, it ceases to be art
and becomes merely imitation’ Anonymous.
This is quite true, but there are
some bodies of work which infect and morph through so many different cultural images
that the root is altogether lost. The work of Kazimir Malevich (1879 – 1935) is
one such phenomenon. Born in modern day
Ukraine of Polish ethnicity he was one of the select group of artists at the forefront
of the Russian Constructivist Avant Garde movement based in Moscow. He
eventually achieved such notoriety that Stalin has him banned. Today his influences
are still everywhere hidden visually in the most surprising of contexts.
It is hard to write anything positive about the modern Russian state. It seems to be imploding from within and I find it sad and distressing to watch. It is important to remember that Russia and the ordinary Russians are a resourceful and strong people, and I wish them the only best through their current traumas. We must consider through that not everything is how we see it from our lenses and perhaps it is useful if we consider the Russian tendency to live in only the past and the future because so often the present is unliveable. None of the problems are new ones, ‘Rise Comrades and Free Yourself from the Tyranny of Objects’ Malevich.
Russia of the past, present and hopefully future is also one of the most powerfully creative places on earth. Their Constructivist art movement of the 20s and 30s has left a lasting legacy in architecture, s and place-making around the world, changing the lives of millions of people without them ever realising it; from housing blocks in Marseille to whole villages in India.
The Malevich exhibition this year at the Tate Modern was one of my highlights of the year. The BBC commissioned the High Priestess of architecture, Dame Zaha Hadid, to record a documentary to accompany the largest collection of his works outside of the Russian Federation. It is worth watching, she is an engaging individual with strong views and an occasional comic touch. She clearly has always worshipped his work since her student days, using constructivist influences for all manner of projects. She took her principle architectural inspiration from his Suprematist period. These are common images now and the documentary shows them moving in 3D as they slot one top of another to form the plate and floor layers of a floating structure; see the above gallery for examples. This is the mind bending stuff that apparently helped the student Zaha first understand the way her brain worked. Mere mortals like me might recognise it as the 80s TV show Rainbow Theme Music or perhaps the Chanel Four logo of the same period.
Prior to the suprematist period Malevich was largely engaged in a period of work known as Cubo-Futurism. My favourite is the powerful and perspective-challenging Morning in the village after the snowstorm (1912). It means something to Russian villagers, who frequently live life in the grip of the snow. To the child of the 80s that I am, it looks like a Pet Shop Boys stage show. This is no mere facetious comment. Neil Tennant, PBS front man has an honours degree in history and is frequently quoted on his affinity for all things Soviet, Avant Garde and Russia. In 2005 they wrote a score for Battleship Potemkin and headlined the Russian Live 8 gig on Red Square. Their video for Go West is completely in the style of the Soviet propaganda posters and Numb is a beautiful snow Russian fantasy. Throughout their back catalogue there are many samples from Russian classical music and references to Shostakovich and Tschiakovsky in their lyrics.
During this period Malevich was also working with fellow artists and musicians, Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruschenykh on their Zaum project, meaning beyond reason, calling for the dissolution of language. Their bizarre futurist opera of 1913 can be seen here, Victory Over the Sun, and is dominated by geometric colour with the performers as an ever-shifting series of dynamic sculptural forms. Just like the Pet Shop Boys Pandemonium Tour. There are also echoes of Victory over the Sun in New Order’s video for their 1987 record True Faith. Latterly, more tenuously, the Pixar animated film Despicable Me features a large bodied skinny legged anti-hero with a Russian accent hell bent of capturing the moon.
My favourite disturbia by Malevich is An Englishman in Moscow, seen above in the gallery. For this we gained the images used in A Clockwork Orange by Antony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece cinema adaptation. The novel is, off course, littered with Russian influences and language. The Clockwork Orange itself has also spawned so many Malevich inspired images, such as Danny Boyles Trainspotting artwork and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Violence with strong geometry and primary colours appears to strike a strong dystopic reference in cinema, this is Malevich’s influence.
The most famous era came next when Malevich created The Black Square (1915), itself one of the standout images of so-called modern art. It is also one of the most parodied; consider the French and Saunders sketch where two older ladies visit the Tate Modern walking past the minimalist blank canvases and simple shapes, ultimately delighted only by sight of the café. The 1923 version displayed at the Tate Modern (the original stays in Moscow being too fragile to travel) is nervously energetic, like a black hole.
It is, however, largely for his suprematism work he is remembered for as brought to life by Zaha Hadid in some ways. She saw his images and made them 3D weightless layers of abstraction and made them real in her buildings.
As I walked around the Tate Modern Malevich retrospect, I was struck over and over again by how familiar it all seemed; from books, cinema, adverts and music. So much owes its inspiration to his vision. The final link for me was my own childhood. When I was about three, I was given a small box of wooden bricks, you can see the box in the gallery above. The memory of their shape and colour stayed with me. On a recent visit to my parent’s house I asked if we still had them and they had indeed kept them safe. They were from the old Czechoslovakia; small geometric shapes in bright primary colours that the three year old me would spend hours making small structures out of. There is something about his work that captured the power of simplicity and the human capacity for image memory like no one else.
It is hard to write anything positive about the modern Russian state. It seems to be imploding from within and I find it sad and distressing to watch. It is important to remember that Russia and the ordinary Russians are a resourceful and strong people, and I wish them the only best through their current traumas. We must consider through that not everything is how we see it from our lenses and perhaps it is useful if we consider the Russian tendency to live in only the past and the future because so often the present is unliveable. None of the problems are new ones, ‘Rise Comrades and Free Yourself from the Tyranny of Objects’ Malevich.
Russia of the past, present and hopefully future is also one of the most powerfully creative places on earth. Their Constructivist art movement of the 20s and 30s has left a lasting legacy in architecture, s and place-making around the world, changing the lives of millions of people without them ever realising it; from housing blocks in Marseille to whole villages in India.
The Malevich exhibition this year at the Tate Modern was one of my highlights of the year. The BBC commissioned the High Priestess of architecture, Dame Zaha Hadid, to record a documentary to accompany the largest collection of his works outside of the Russian Federation. It is worth watching, she is an engaging individual with strong views and an occasional comic touch. She clearly has always worshipped his work since her student days, using constructivist influences for all manner of projects. She took her principle architectural inspiration from his Suprematist period. These are common images now and the documentary shows them moving in 3D as they slot one top of another to form the plate and floor layers of a floating structure; see the above gallery for examples. This is the mind bending stuff that apparently helped the student Zaha first understand the way her brain worked. Mere mortals like me might recognise it as the 80s TV show Rainbow Theme Music or perhaps the Chanel Four logo of the same period.
Prior to the suprematist period Malevich was largely engaged in a period of work known as Cubo-Futurism. My favourite is the powerful and perspective-challenging Morning in the village after the snowstorm (1912). It means something to Russian villagers, who frequently live life in the grip of the snow. To the child of the 80s that I am, it looks like a Pet Shop Boys stage show. This is no mere facetious comment. Neil Tennant, PBS front man has an honours degree in history and is frequently quoted on his affinity for all things Soviet, Avant Garde and Russia. In 2005 they wrote a score for Battleship Potemkin and headlined the Russian Live 8 gig on Red Square. Their video for Go West is completely in the style of the Soviet propaganda posters and Numb is a beautiful snow Russian fantasy. Throughout their back catalogue there are many samples from Russian classical music and references to Shostakovich and Tschiakovsky in their lyrics.
During this period Malevich was also working with fellow artists and musicians, Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruschenykh on their Zaum project, meaning beyond reason, calling for the dissolution of language. Their bizarre futurist opera of 1913 can be seen here, Victory Over the Sun, and is dominated by geometric colour with the performers as an ever-shifting series of dynamic sculptural forms. Just like the Pet Shop Boys Pandemonium Tour. There are also echoes of Victory over the Sun in New Order’s video for their 1987 record True Faith. Latterly, more tenuously, the Pixar animated film Despicable Me features a large bodied skinny legged anti-hero with a Russian accent hell bent of capturing the moon.
My favourite disturbia by Malevich is An Englishman in Moscow, seen above in the gallery. For this we gained the images used in A Clockwork Orange by Antony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece cinema adaptation. The novel is, off course, littered with Russian influences and language. The Clockwork Orange itself has also spawned so many Malevich inspired images, such as Danny Boyles Trainspotting artwork and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Violence with strong geometry and primary colours appears to strike a strong dystopic reference in cinema, this is Malevich’s influence.
The most famous era came next when Malevich created The Black Square (1915), itself one of the standout images of so-called modern art. It is also one of the most parodied; consider the French and Saunders sketch where two older ladies visit the Tate Modern walking past the minimalist blank canvases and simple shapes, ultimately delighted only by sight of the café. The 1923 version displayed at the Tate Modern (the original stays in Moscow being too fragile to travel) is nervously energetic, like a black hole.
It is, however, largely for his suprematism work he is remembered for as brought to life by Zaha Hadid in some ways. She saw his images and made them 3D weightless layers of abstraction and made them real in her buildings.
As I walked around the Tate Modern Malevich retrospect, I was struck over and over again by how familiar it all seemed; from books, cinema, adverts and music. So much owes its inspiration to his vision. The final link for me was my own childhood. When I was about three, I was given a small box of wooden bricks, you can see the box in the gallery above. The memory of their shape and colour stayed with me. On a recent visit to my parent’s house I asked if we still had them and they had indeed kept them safe. They were from the old Czechoslovakia; small geometric shapes in bright primary colours that the three year old me would spend hours making small structures out of. There is something about his work that captured the power of simplicity and the human capacity for image memory like no one else.
