KAZIMIR MALEVICH: A NEW GOSPEL IN ART

By Gleb Sidorkin HAA 176m, Spring 2011

Introduction

The subtitle of this essay has two possible meanings, and the difference between them corresponds to a dividing line within the critical appraisal of Kazimir Malevich and his legacy. The phrase "novoe Evangelie v iskussvte" appears in a personal letter from Malevich to Mikhail Matyushin, dated June 23, 1916, in which the Suprematist painter tries to convince his friend of the need to emulate Jesus Christ by creating a book that would "lock up" (zakliuchit') the story of their art and become the "key" (kliuch) by which the path to the heavens could be opened for others .1 Translating this phrase as "a
1

Kazimir Malevich, "Letters to M.V. Matyushin," in E. Kovtun, ed. Annual of the manuscript department of the Pushkin House for 1974 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976) 195.

new Gospel in art" maintains a syntactical ambiguity present within the Russian "v isskusstve." One could dispense with the literal translation and erase this ambiguity by translating it in one of two ways: "a new Gospel in the field of art," or, "a new Gospel in the form of art." A translator who views Malevich either mostly as a formalist or mostly as a mystic might select one of these disambiguations, the first to prove that Suprematism was a statement about art as such, or the latter to show that it was a transcendent vision of a messianic order. Malevich himself, however, was always careful to maintain his ambiguity, and preferred to write in Russian. And if one sticks to the ambiguous original version of the phrase, the Russian tradition provides a productive note of resonance: the words are borrowed from an Orthodox Christian discourse about the relationship between the divine word and the holy image. Orthodox theologians have described icons as "Gospels in images" at least since the defence against Iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuriesa time in which the equivalence between word and image came to mean much more than simply illustration. In Iconophile thought, the phrase became imbued with meanings related to the Christological doctrine of the "Logos made flesh," and the incarnation became the basis for aesthetic theory. Thus, the formal and philosophical system of the Byzantine icon responds to both meanings of the phrase "evangelie v iskusstve." That is, an icon of Jesus Christ contains not only a representation, but also a theory of representation. Byzantine iconography is both theology in images and a theology of images. The analogy between the Christian and Suprematist "Gospels" points to a basic similarity between Byzantine and Modernist art: both are highly politicized aesthetic systems in which questions of form are bound up with moral and philosophical

considerations. Given that Byzantine writers were much more straightforward in articulating the specific nature of the relationship between theory and practice than Malevich was, pushing this analogy further could be illuminating. The following essay attempts to account for Malevich's development as an artist and thinker by thrusting him into the conceptual framework of Byzantine icon theory, trying to make sense of what it might mean to create a Gospel in art while still preserving the ambiguity of the phrase.

Methodology This reading of Malevich is part of a larger project in which I am interested in finding connections between Byzantine art and Suprematism on three different levels: the formal, the historical, and the theoretical. On the formal level, the art-historical importance of Russian artists' encounters with icon painting in the development of abstract art has already been established, but quality research and compelling comparative analyses are just beginning to emerge. A daring historical analysis was suggested by Annette Michelson on the pages of October magazine in 1990, wherein Leninist art was presented as a continuation of the Orthodox "textual system."2 Her "prolegomena" remains unfinished, but she has opened the door for Nikolai Berdyaev's account of Communism as a "Christian heresy3" to inform the study of Modernism. These historical trajectories combine to make Russian artists like Malevich compelling subjects for the third, theoretical level of analysis, on which this paper will concentrate. In developing an account of Malevich by using the terminology of Byzantine

Annette Michelson, "The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System" October, Vol. 52 (Spring, 1990) 16-39. 3 See Nikolai Berdyaev, "Communism and Christianity" in The Origins of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960) 158-189.

icon theory I follow in the footsteps of Marie-Jose Mondzain, whose ground-breaking work on the philosophical texts of the Iconoclast period has led her to the following conclusion and new path of inquiry:
"There is no alternative system of thought concerning the image capable of competing with the theoretical and political power of the one that the church developed during its first ten centuries We have always been, and are still today, heirs to a Christian iconocracy What, then, can I add to all this? First, I will pause at the point on which the [Iconoclasts and Iconophiles] agree their mutual condemnation of idols and idolatryin order to investigate what Patristic thought can bring to the study of a few examples of modern works in the fields of painting, photography, and cinema. What exactly are our icons today, our iconoclast signs, our idols?"4

In making all of these connections between Malevich and iconography, I am not interested in erecting my own personal idol of Malevich the crypto-Christian and asserting that the Orthodox tradition is the one true path to understanding Suprematist theory. As Aleksandra Shatskikh repeatedly warns in commentaries on her edited volumes of his texts, Malevich's thought has a paradoxical property of being almost impossible to grasp as a totality, while also making it easy for critics to totalize it within some other system of thought, and to use it to further their own agenda. Competing attempts have been made to associate Malevich with projects ranging from the analytical to the mystical: from the philosophies of Shopenhauer, Kant, and Bergson to the poetics of the transrational zaum movement to non-euclidean geometry and the theosophical variations on the idea of four-dimensional perception.5 Shatskikh rejects all such reductive accounts of Malevich as a partisan of specific philosophical movements, citing

Marie- Jos Mondzain Image, Icon, Economy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005) 173174. 5 See Christina Lodder, "Introduction" in Rethinking Malevich, ix-xxii

his aversion to all bookish culture, and finding no evidence to support a popular theory according to which he read philosophy "in secret" so as to appear original.6 While I take to heart Shatskikh's warning about the futility and danger of equating Malevich's work with any other aesthetic system, her strong use of the terms samobytnyi and samorodok, meaning Selbststndigkeit or "self-originating",7 strikes me as too categorical. After all, later in the essay Shatskikh isolates some important currents within the cosmopolitan intellectual milieu that shaped Malevich's thought.8 She also writes that among the few texts Malevich did read, the Gospels stand out as by far the most cited. In fact, Shatskikh concludes that the New Testament was the one book that remained on his desk throughout his life, and was his "primary reference and metatext."9 Given that a number of book-length studies have been devoted to claiming the influence of books Malevich didn't read, a comprehensive volume on "Malevich and Christianity" is long overdue. Direct Christian references in his writing are numerous, ranging from a comparison between Lenin and Christ10 to an account of the faktura of an Orthodox temple11 to the theological tour de force God is Not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory. Some of the language in his "biographical sketch," which concludes with a monologue in the voice of Jesus, would almost suggest that one could view Malevich as a radical

Aleksandra Shatskikh, "Aspects of Malevich's Literary Legacy: A Summary" in Charlotte Douglas and Lodder, C., eds., Rethinking Malevich (London: Pindar, 2007) 317-328; 323 7 Shatskikh, "Teoreticheskoe Nasledie Kazimira Malevicha" in D. Sarab'iankov and Shatskikh, A., eds., Kazimir Malevich: Zhivopis', Teoriia (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1993), 179-190, 183, 185 8 ibid. 184.; Shatskikh's essay includes an interesting account of the influence of the Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev on the intellectual scene of the time, detailing his potential link to Malevich via the mutual friendship of Mikhail Gershenzon. However, she sees Malevich's incorporation of Berdyaev simply in terms of a general messianism. 9 Shatskikh, "Kazimir Malevich: Volia k Slovesnosti" in Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. A. S. Shatskikh, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gileia, 1995-2004), v.5, 11-30, 25 10 Malevich, "Lenin" (1924) in ibid., v. 2 (1998), 25-29, 27 11 Malevich, Letter to Gershenzon, "21 Dec. 1919" in ibid., v.3, 334

Protestant who saw his own work as the true fulfillment of the Gospels. At the very least, these texts indicate that he saw the twentieth century as still firmly attached to the Christian era, and looked at the rise of Communism primarily in religious terms.12 But looking at these more obvious moments only scratch the surface of Christianity's imprint on Malevich's worldview, in the same way that formal comparisons with icons and cursory mentions of the "icon corner" placement of the Black Square in the 0,10 exhibition have so far glossed over the deeper connections between Suprematism and Byzantine art. A more theological engagement with the Orthodox tradition has the potential to open a rich dialog with Malevich's seemingly idiosyncratic philosophy. Ultimately, Shatskikh does not claim that strong readings of Malevich in relation to other philosophical or political projects have no value; she just condemns those that pretend to offer a conclusive synthesis. In fact, she celebrates the ability of Malevich's work to spawn a profusion of productive misreadings. The aim of this essay, then, is simply to generate a productive misreading, in the hope that a fresh vocabulary might help to bridge the impasse between mystical and formal interpretations of Suprematism. In the following pages, I will apply this vocabulary by comparing three stages in the development of Christian art with three moments from Suprematist theory, and show how by being both a Greenbergian formalist and a New Age mystagogue, Malevich ended up becoming an Iconophile in the strict Byzantine sense of the word.

1. This Reasonable and Bloodless Worship

12

Malevich, "Biograficheskii Ocherk" in ibid., v. 5, 338-377

"The Christians, having defeated the pagans, turned their temples into Christian ones, replaced their Gods with their own Gods, and erected their understanding of the objectless world Modernity seeks to establish the new light, that is, new 13 knowledge, in the study of nothingness."

The spread of Christianity in the first centuries of our era was not just a religious movement, but an aesthetic revolution that overturned the representational order of the Mediterranean civilization it eventually came to dominate. The characteristically evocative flourish of Malevichian historiography quoted above is an account of this Christian revolution, which Malevich considered a forerunner to the current, Suprematist one. Interestingly, he begins his narrative after the moment of victory, when the pagan images are already discredited, and the task at hand for the Christians is figuring out how to create a new, legitimate image of the divine. Written in the mid 1920s when Malevich was head of the State Institute of Arts Culture in Leningrad, this reflection on postrevolutionary art is typical of the rhetoric of late Suprematist theory. The pathos of earlier Suprematist texts, written before Malevich's move to Vitebsk and his transition into a new life as a theorist and pedagogue, was quite different. In the pamphlet From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting, published in Moscow in 1915, he wrote:
"We have cast aside Futurism, and we, the ones with the most courage, have spit on the altar of its art. But will the timid ones be able to spit on their idols?Like we did yesterday !!! I tell you that you will not see the new beauties or the new truth 14 until you work up the courage to spit."

Clearly, the historical moment in which these words were written is not analogous to that of the victorious Christians he identifies with in the later text, who have cast off the chains of idolatry and seized the power to redecorate the temples of the old regime. For
13 14

Malevich, "Khristiani, pobediv iazychnikov" in ibid., v.5, 271-272, 271 Malevich, "Ot Kubizma i Futurizma k Suprematizmu" in ibid., v.1, 35-56, 43

Malevich in 1915, it seems, the idols still had a power to be reckoned with, since spitting on them took so much courage. In this way, the early period of Suprematism corresponds to the early centuries of the Christian movement, when Christian art was a set of secret symbols, and Christians who got up the courage to spit on Roman idols were likely to be executed. Within the framework of the development of the Byzantine icon, then, early Suprematist theory represents the period of struggle against idolatry, and early Suprematist canvases function as Iconoclast signs. Since the Byzantine icon is a conceptual as well as a material construct, the history of its development cannot be said to start with the emergence of images of Jesus and Mary on the catacomb walls. The icon's roots reach back to early antiquity, to critiques of the idol that were first articulated in the Jewish scriptures and later elaborated by Pagan philosophers. These critiques, which were adapted and radicalized by the Christian movement, attacked the idolaters from all possible angles. The following list of charges against idolatry compiled by second century writer Justin Martyr sounds like it could just as easily have been written as a manifesto by Malevich ca. 1916:
It is folly to give to the gods the form of men, for this is not fitting to the divine. These images are soulless, and deadlike corpses. The images of the gods are made of the same material as the most dishonourable objects. It is a chance whether a workman turns out a god or a common utensil. 4. These sacred images are the work of base and depraved handicraftsmen. 5. The richness of the statues serves to tempt theives, and then guards are sent to protect Gods! 15 6. The idols have the names of demons and bear their form.
1. 2. 3.

The mixture of moral invective and complicated theoretical reasoning is what makes Justin's arguments especially reminiscent of early Suprematist texts. Whole sections of From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, are devoted to calling the academy bad
15

Arguments from Justin Martyr's Apology, cited in the essay "Idolatry and the Early Church" in Norman Baynes, Byzantine Studies and Other Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1955) 118-119.

names like "torture chamber" and "rag peddler," comparing it to the Inquisition and expressing a wish to see its artworks devoured by wild animals. The manifesto is an explosion of vicious attacks on the old ways of making art, but at the same time manages to develop a sophisticated critique of academic art. The critique that is most fundamental to From Cubism and Futurism, and which ultimately allows Malevich to discredit all prior forms of art, is the assertion that Suprematism is the first time artists have tapped art's true potential as pure creativity:
"Nature is a living image, and it is proper to take pleasure in its beauty. We are the living heart of nature. We are the key mechanism within this giant living image. We are its living brain, which expands its life force The artist is given a gift so that he may contribute to life his share of creativity and increase the yield of life's elasticity. Only in absolute creativity will he find his justification."16

The passage quoted here is important not only because it articulates the basic principle of Malevich's anti-idolatrous critique, setting up the moral opposition between those who "steal" from nature and those who "give back" to nature. These sentences also contain the kernel of Malevich's complicated conception of the sacred, which he articulates more fully in his writings of the Vitebsk period, and which is necessary to understand if one is to relate him to a theory of sacred images. At its most basic level, the worldview expressed in the corpus of Suprematist texts represents a sacralization of the idea of an infinite material world. The two terms invoked most often to embody this materialist spirit of the universe are "vozbuzhdenie" (stimulus) and "nichto" (nothingness). Both of these terms describe an undifferentiated totality in which the human being can participate, but which becomes distorted and blocked by a utilitarian world of thought-objects. Thought, for Malevich, is almost like an original sin

16

Malevich, "Ot Kubizma i Futurizma k Suprematizmu" in Sobranie, v.1, 35-56

that allowed for the building of the human world, but was responsible for casting man out of the Garden of pure stimulus. Salvation, then, resides in rekindling this lost one-ness with pure being, and the path to this recovery of divine essence lies in the doctrine of "absolute creativity." This Suprematist economy of salvation closely resembles the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, which rewards prayerparticipation in the divine energies with a rejuvination of the divine nature of man, cleansing the body and senses of the stain of fallenness and death. Whether it be through prayer or creativity, both the Orthodox and Suprematist pathways to the infinite require a special kind of participatory contact with the divine a logike laetria. This phrase from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is rendered in English as "reasonable and bloodless worship," is used in Greek theology to distinguish Christian practice from idolatry. "Logike" here refers not only to "reason," but also to the Christ as "incarnate Logos," who took on the form of a human person so that humanity could interact with God on a new level that was both personal and spiritual. Whereas pagans worshipped material things and placed sacrifices of flesh at the altars of corporeal Gods, the worshippers of Christ sought communion with a divine Logos. Christian prayer, like the pure creative act of Suprematism, is a give-and-take process of expressing one's love for the divine through an activity of pure logos, which is then rewarded by participation in the divine energies. In her brilliant essay entitled "Kazimir Malevich: The Will to Language" Aleksandra Shatskikh picks up on a word that, for her, perfectly encapsulates Malevich's view of his writing: liturgy. Shatskikh brings in this term, which Malevich used to describe his ideal of poetry, in talking about the aftermath of Malevich's famously ecstatic moment of painting the Black Square. According to her, this experience

transcended mere painterly creation, and stirred in the artist a desire to impart the teachings of Suprematist metaphysics. For Shatskikh, the texts he was inspired to write over the ensuing years were liturgiesverbal hypostases of his discovery of the infinite through absolute creativity.17 I would expand on Shatskikhs use of this term, however, by taking the theological meaning of the Greek term laeturgia, which literally means "the work of the people." This meaning of the word resonates with the Suprematist ideal of the artist as a worker who actively participates in the creative process of the universe. In this sense, liturgy can be used to describe both the paintings and the texts produced by Malevich, since both participate in that great call-and-response interaction between the resonant instrument of the human skull and the eternal vibration of stimulus, which Malevich called God. Reading the texts of early Suprematism, what strikes me most is not the conceptual elegance of the liberation of painting into the realm of pure form, but rather the emotional intensity of the drive to topple the images of the past. The fine critical edge with which Malevich cuts through art history is contrasted by the blunt force of his rhetoric, which expresses a demand to burn all art of the past in a crematorium in rather menacing tones. 18 What does it matter to him, one wonders, if other people continue to make bad art? Clearly, art had higher stakes for Malevich than just as an intellectual or proffessional endeavor. He thought about art in a Christian way, believing that if the wrong kind of art were to triumph, it would drag humanity ever further into the slavery of imitation. The comparison with Christian anti-idolatry is productive here in contextualizing the relationship between absolute formal rigor and absolute moral purity, doing so while

17 18

Shatskikh," Kazimir Malevich: Volia k Slovesnosti" in ibid., v.5, 11-30, 12 Malevich, "O muzei" in ibid., v.1, 132-136, 133

avoiding the muddled notion of "political art" and its attendant categories of "critical" and "affirmative" art. In Christian art, as well as in Soviet art, the line between critical and affirmative quickly loses its footing. On one hand, most of the attacks directed by the Christians against Idolatry are straightforwardly critical, and Malevich adopts much of the same rhetoric in his attempt to utterly discredit the academy. However, as I have tried to show, the core principle that differentiates Suprematism and makes it truly revolutionary pure creativity is at once affirmative and critical. Malevich doesn't simply inveigh against worshipping in front of a shameless Venus or a hollow Christhe invites all to join him in a new logike laetria of creative, communal participation in the sacred liturgy of stimulus and form. Both Christian and Suprematist iconoclasms went beyond the level of critical art in the simple sense of questioning or undermining a certain set of images. Their revolution was on the level of worship, not just on the level of representation. They aimed to completely change the way we relate to images, access the divine, and construct the social imaginary. How does one get to an external position from which to pass judgment on such revolutionary projects, if our experience of ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves depends on being inscribed in one or another such regime of representation?

2. The Ascetic Image

The second stage in the history of the Icon is characterized by a proliferation of diverse popular image practices, which the Church constantly struggled to keep in check. As Hans Belting writes, "Whenever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power Rather than

introducing images, theologians were all too ready to ban them."19 However, theologians were often the weaker party in this constant back-and-forth with everyday worshippers, as many popular image cults were grudgingly adopted by the authorities. Even as icons became a standardized practice within the Byzantine church, they remained controversial. The deep-seated Christian suspicion of images which structured the Iconophile project from the beginning never died down completely, and boiled over to the point of civil war during the Iconoclast crises of the eighth and ninth centuries. The final products of this evolution which hang in churches today are the formal legacy of an elaborate balancing act between the demand for popular images to serve the needs of the congregation and the strict theological limits imposed by Christian anti-idolatry. This power struggle between the spontaneous, often irrational reality of artistic practice and the necessity of maintaining purity and coherence on the theoretical level played out within Suprematism as well. As with Iconophile thought, Malevich's theoretical project was forced to play catch-up to account for developments in his own artistic practice which departed from early Modernist doctrines. The strange feature about Malevich's image theory, however, is that the same images play a double rolefirst as the origination of Suprematist theology, and later as its visual manifestation. In an inversion of the path taken by most aesthetic theorists, who study philosophy in general and then apply their ideas to the field of art, Malevich came to his general ideas about philosophy through working them out in his artistic practice. The privileged role of painting in Malevich's metaphysics of objectlessness, as both the origin of revelation and a visual representation of it, crystallized around the
19

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 1.

image of the Black Square. The stripping down of painting to its most basic, the final zeroing away of both content and form, becomes equated with a prophetic vision of the pure nothingness that underlies all sensible forms. The evolution of this insight about the conventionality of human perception, arrived at on the surface of the canvas, actually begins with insights gained from basic landscape painting. Looking back on the history of his discoveries, Malevich praises landscape painting as an ironizing cognitive tool which allows one to see the constructedness of the human view of reality. Painting teaches us that the objects we see around us are just as much a human construction as objects in a painting:
"The artist constructs a landscape which contains trees, houses, riversbut these have no authentic basis in the painting. The movement of objects from one place to another is also a pure construction, the authentic reality of which is that not a single object in the broader sense of the word can be moved. The painter proves this in his experience of the flatness of the picture surface, where nothing can change location. It's possible then that the constructedness of the painterly surface reflects the authentic reality of the world in its lack of movement or in its relocation of objects. Things themselves don't exist as locations if something moves from one place to another, it is only in perception, not reality.20 The painter's constructed canvas perfectly illustrates that the world has no foundation."21

After all the abuse directed at landscape painting in Malevich's earlier writings, the act of rearranging objects from reality on a static picture plane is recovered a useful exercise in coming to an understanding of the illusory relationship between human vision and reality. For Malevich, all phenomena that appear as objects for human cognitionnot just things themselves, but also movement and location in timeare the result of the structuring, selecting process of predmetnost'. In the vocabulary of later Suprematist writing, predmetnost' becomes not just a property of things, but also an activity, or a method. The

20

Malevich, "Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost', ili Velikii Pokoi" in Sobranie Sochinenii, v. 3, 205 21 ibid., 223.

illusion of individual objects emerges in place of wholeness as a result of this "cutting" action of the objectifying human mind. Malevich sees nature as existing in an undifferentiated, "sinless"22 state, which becomes artificially broken apart by human cognition. The terms he uses for cognition or reason (which, as we have seen, are associated with the fallen nature of humanity) are razum and rassukok, both of which contain the prefix meaning "apart". Hyphenating the words to emphasize cognition as "taking apart," he writes that if reason (raz-um) was a property inherent to nature, this would imply an absence of perfection. If nature is infinite, it cannot be a "whole", and if there is no whole, there is nothing for the mind to take apart (raz-umit'). "Therefore, raz-um is an invention of man, which he uses to assault the fortifications of the universewhich have neither a beginning nor an end, neither a roof nor a foundation, and no single whole."23 This view of the perfection of the universe and man's fall from grace by the utilitarian application of destructive, contingent reason was the result of Malevich's encounter with the picture plane. Looking at a landscape painting, one can choose to see trees and animals on a canvas, or one can "squint one's eyes" and see an undifferentiated field of color and shapeproving that objects exist only in so far as we use raz-um to divide up an inherently objectless world. The journey of Suprematist painting begins with this encounter with traditional painting, and the world, as a unitary field of form and color, and culminates with painting the Black Square and understanding that even form and color are the product of raz-um acting upon total nothingness. This was the Good

22 23

ibid., 198 ibid., 240.

News revealed to Malevich through his artistic practice, and which he sought to spread with his New Gospel in Art. Malevich always insisted that painting the Black Square was a major turning point in his career, but scholars have struggled to understand the exact nature of the shift in his artistic practice. Fully accepting that the Black Square will forever remain an enigma, I would characterize this moment in the following way. Having come to a profound understanding of human consciousness through the conceptual mechanism of abstract painting, Malevich was faced with the task representing it to others. Looking at the black squarewhich functions a both as conceptual work and a pure visual experience he realized that the paintings he was making not only showed the process of coming to objectless awareness, but were also representations of an objectless, God's-eye view of the universe. The result of this realignment was a new negotiation between theology and artistic practice which was analogous to the one Christian theologians were forced to engage in when confronted with an emergence of images of the divine. One of the challenges of this Iconophile stage in Malevich's development, in which he would have to justify representing the infinite in finite form, was the very term "objectless painting." In the strictly formalist system of his earlier work the term bezpredmetnaia zivopis' mostly had a fairly straightforward usage as the exploration of purely formal elements, the result of which had no reference to objects in the world. In this sense, the Black Square is not a representation of a black square, but rather is a black square. This concept of the identity of the image to itself and not to a referent was what related it to the world a theory about the self-identity and referentlessness of human vision. But at a certain point, when Malevich discovered that the image also contained

another kind of content, which he called a "feeling of objectlessness," the meaning of bespredmetnost' began to shift from a way of painting to a way of looking. The second meaning of the bespredmetnost' was made possible by a strange development within the Russian scientific vocabulary, which created a distinction between predmet and objekt. Both of these words mean "object", and the former is a Slavic calque on the latter Latin form which combines "in front of" and "to throw." In the language of Russian experimental science, however, object refers to the thing under observation (say, "forest"), while predmet refers to the aspect of one has chosen to study, and the approach taken (e.g. "effect of rainfall on frog population" or "economic analysis of timber stock"). In Russian schools, predmet refers to the "subject" of a given class, such as mathematics. This usage allows Malevich to reconcile bespredmetnost' as a method of painting with bespredmetnost' as the name for a vision of authentic reality. In his later work, it is used to describe a special type of vision that allows the human being to transcend his own objectifying tendencies. For example, in World as Objectlessness, he makes reference to "bespredmetnoe issledovanie," a mystical type of "research" that would examine a given objekt without applying any predmet to it at all. Malevich imagines that if one could observe the world without applying any method or set of criteria, without partitioning it into objects of study, without viewing it from any specific angle, one would strip away the fallenness of human vision and see the world as it "really" is. This type of vision is implied, I would argue, in Malevich's labeling of abstract images with titles like "Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions" (1915). In my view, Malevich painted an imagined experience of doing a painterly study in which the objekt

of a peasant woman was approached a bespredmetnii way. If one was successful in completing such a paradoxical study, one would see the woman's true, material essence. My reading of Malevich's "painterly realism" corresponds to an important principle of Byzantine iconography which one might call "Christian Realism." This formal feature of Byzantine art was developed as a defensive measure against the main critique of Iconoclasm, which accused iconographers of falling into the idolatrous trap of "worshipping the creature instead of the creator." Since the human world in general was finite and fallen, aspects of it were stripped out of the divine image as much as possible in order to avoid the idolatrous pitfall. For this reason, bodies and faces in icons are rendered as minimally and uniformally as possible, depicting the shared spiritual essence of the figures rather than the individuality of their earthly bodies. Bodies in icons are usually draped in cloth, and the face, hands, and feet are thin and delicate, effacing the "fleshiness" associated with the carnal world of sin and death. The zen-like composure of Christ's body on the cross as it appears in Byzantine art is a perfect example of Christian Realism: there is little sign of blood, and the only trace of torture is a minimal depiction of the wound in his side, which is allowed for narrative purposes. Additionally, Christ's posture on the cross is not slumped down, as on many Western crucifixes, but poised and erect, foreshadowing his victory over death and his resurrection. The narrative concept of foreshadowing is not actually an appropriate term to use in the context of Orthodox art, which transcends linear human time and always depicts events from the point of view of the completed resurrection and the Second Coming, which has, in Christian Realist terms, already happened. Thus, all Byzantine icons represent "reality in its Christian development." Whereas Socialist Realism presents the world from the point of view of the Materialist Dialectic, both

Christian Realism and Painterly Realism present an ascetic image of the world from the point of view of God.

3. Cosmic Order

Having established an ascetic formal system that would adequately meet the theological challenges of rendering the divine in finite form, both Malevich and the Byzantine churchmen began to perfect ways of displaying these images to serve the various needs of their congregations. One of these needs was pedagogical, conveying to the congregation the story of how their salvation and emancipation from the mortal realm came to pass. Malevich's late Suprematist exhibitions did this very effectively by restaging the progression from representational painting to objectlessness, thus allowing the viewer to experience the relativizing effect of Malevich's formal deconstruction of painting. Of course, there are numerous equally valid interpretations of Malevich's late exhibition practice and his ambiguous return to figuration, no single one of which can claim to represent the artist's true intent. It seems possible, however, that Malevich continued to build and refine an idealized narrative of the evolution of Suprematism, from the Renaissance portrait to the Black Square, as part of his pedagogical practice. At least some of his strange back-dating practices could be explained by the need to fill in pages of the visual textbook which he skipped over in his own career. The narrative staging of images for pedagogical purposes became central to the fully developed practice of iconography, which incorporated icons into the multi-sensory Gesamtkunstwerk of the Byzantine rite. However, the early church lacked access to the types of exhibition spaces that allowed Malevich to stage his narratives so effectively.

The development of the Byzantine cathedral as a controlled architectural setting for holy images is accounted for by Hans Belting in the following way:
"The church was confronted with existing images that were credited with miraculous power. In order to control their effect and to distract attention from magical expectations, images had to be explained rationally, emphasizing the immaterial presence of the archetype and devaluing the material presence of the image as object. Such theological efforts, however, were far from being understood by the common people and no powerful weapon against idolatry. The church therefore resorted to the practical solution of taking the images under firm control and using church decoration as what we might call an applied theory of images. There always had been churches with images, but now images were presented in the framework of a well-devised program that allowed for a carefully guided, strictly limited kind of worship They had a predetermined location in the churches and were given a specified function in church ritual. The church directed attention first and foremost to the official liturgy, which contributed to the control of the image and was the primary means of ecclesiastical self-presentation."

Belting's narrative seems to attribute the development of the liturgy almost completely to the need for controlling and containing the use of Christian imagery, with perhaps the goal of creating a systematic and reasonable theological and iconographic practice as a secondary reason. However, I would argue that the installation and choreography of icons in the temple is one of a number of techniques used by the church to create a powerful feeling of a unified world that involves the individual in a communal sensory experience. The Orthodox liturgy combines imagery with architecture, and engages all of the senses in order to create the feeling of entering into an ordered, eternal, otherworldy sphere of relations, wherein the lowly worshipper is as much a part of the unified cosmic representation of God's creation and as the looming figure of Christ Pantokrator, crowning creation and looking down upon it from the dome of the church. Upon entering an Orthodox church one immediately gets a sense of a vast, harmonious heirarchy of angels, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and saints, topped with the aforementioned Christ image in the dome, and extending outward and down from central images of the Jesus and the Theotokos. Elaborately concieved arrangements of icons represent the theology

of the church through image and space. The different spaces of a church also become representations, and are set off in relation to each other in order to represent other aspects of theology:
"The signification of each part of the Orthodox church is derived from its architectural location and its function in the course of the liturgy. The interplay between the immaterial and the sensory worlds is denoted by the sanctuary and the nave. At the same time, both these parts constitute an indivisible whole in which the immaterial serves as an example to the sensory, reminding man of his original transgression. For Saint Simeon of Thessalonika, the narthex corresponded to earth, the church to heaven, and the holy sanctuary to what is above heaven. Consequently, all the paintings in the church, especially those constituting the iconostasis, are arranged according to this symbolism."24

While the theological aspects of Orthodox church decoration and liturgical practice are emphasized, and have often been written about in the West, most scholars overlook the purely visual, affective power of the icons in their staging within the liturgical cycle. The icons and the liturgy are not just there for controlling the veneration of images, or merely as analytic representations of abstract theology. They are powerful works of media that successfully achieve the task of incorporating the viewer into a sense of his place in a unified cosmic order. The economy of gazes between icons and viewers, as well as among the icons themselves, creates energetically charged pathways that act on the participant as he moves with the liturgy. This elegant ballet of gazes that is staged in a temple is one of the key visual effects of late iconographic art, and has an almost physiological effect of creating a sense of intimate contact with the ever-present, familiar faces of Jesus, Mary, and the Saints. Judging from photographs, the dense visual field encountered by visitors to Malevich's room at 0,10 must have achieved a similar effect of incorporation into a

24

Michelson, p.27.

cosmic totality. The desire to engage audiences with an experience of unity with cosmic forces is clearly articulated in Malevich's writing:
"I imagine the Cosmos, or Being, as a multiplicity of forces, rotational centers or stimuli. All of the rings that emerge do not constitute individual systems, but exist in mutual interpenetration Developed human life, which also emerges from the central dynamism, is a miniature version of this single connectivity of various dynamic forces The primacy of stimulus and the expression of an authentic connectedness with Being should be a primary goal and in the absence of forms to express this, I offer Suprematist bespredmetnost' as the first glimpse of the new interrelatedness."25

Malevich here suggests that the task of incorporation into a cosmic connectivity is the primary goal of Suprematism. And in his body of work this decidedly "affirmative" function of his art is consistently present, from the designs for the cosmic opera Victory over the Sun, to the installation in 0,10, to his architectons and his design of room for the viewing of his own corpse, over which was hung the Black Square. Lissitzky's Pressa exhibition design stands out as the masterpiece of this strain within Suprematism. As the experience of the Orthodox Church has demonstrated, such an effect of incorporation into cosmic totality is best achieved in a controlled, closed environment wherein the entire visual space can be arranged according to a single system. This type of "total art" is ultimately is what Boris Groys is referring to when he compares the utopian projects of Suprematism and Socialist Realism in his text Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin.26 Both projects would function at their best if they somehow came to be the only game in town. The creation of an aesthetic system that is truly successful in allowing the viewer to feel included in something greater than herself is one of the great achievements of Orthodox art. But looked at from another point of view, such a project can be seen as crushing individuality in a heinous act of totalitarian manipulationwhich has indeed

25 26

Malevich, "Suprematizm. Mir kak bespredmetnost', ili Velikii Pokoi" in ibid., v. 3, 229 Boris Groys, Total Art of Stalinism (New York: Verso, 2011).

become the legacy of Stalinist art. A fact that is often lost amid many horrible memories of the Soviet era is that the Communist party, despite some of the miserably weak aesthetic properties of Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, managed to achieve the effect of cosmic incorporation for large swaths of the society, while maintaining a relatively ascetic style of imagery. Many of the people who remember attending one of the the spectacularly staged May Day parades during the height of Soviet power recall a sensation of pure joy, of truly feeling at one with an organic unity and a cosmic mission. One can only imagine the overwhelming power a parade like this could have had if the floats, costumes, and the entire urban landscape had been designed not by a committee of Stalinist apparatchiks but by an artistic genius like Malevich. Whether or not Malevich would have taken up the offer to design the visual space of the entire USSR is among interesting topics of speculation that have resulted from Groys's book. While Malevich's writings suggest that he was committed to aesthetic pluralism in society, he was also a proud and ambitious artist. What self-respecting designer could pass up the chance to work with on such a monumental canvas? Christianity, too, has had to reconcile its staging of the cosmic order with the dangers of extending the power of its imagery by wielding political power. In the Russian Orthodox church, the warning voice of Dostoevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor speaks loudly enough to suppress radical voices who would like to tear down the billboards and TV stations and replace them with icons and liturgies. Perhaps this restraint is now the key to a true asceticism of the image. Or, maybe, we will welcome the rise of a new, truly engaging total aesthetic system that will allow the suffering, alienated subjects of Late Capitalism to feel part of something greater than themselves.