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MA Philosophy 

An investigation into Global Justice.

Matt Solomon

Cosmopolitanism has become an increasingly popular view in the last couple of decades. Are there any remaining compelling reasons ‘not’ to take a cosmopolitan view of the world?

My argument is against the current form of cosmopolitanism, which is multiple in character and attempts in a futile way to take on corporate globalisation without addressing the immanent shifts happening within the actual political bodies of world politics and economics. This naïve cosmopolitanism fails to see or engage with the full implications and changes that need to happen within the existent political and economic systems that are both national and international although predominantly and legislatively national. A cosmopolitanism that attempts to transcend the nation state as opposed to tackling it head on as part of the same global system that is causing the problems it is trying to resolve. The problem of Global Justice needs to be fully contextualised and I am arguing that there can be no actual distinction between how the nation states of the world operate and how global players such as multinational companies, world banks and supranational military organisations are complicit in perpetuating global injustice. Or to put it another way, the hegemony that is the current global ideological system cannot be separated from the emancipation proposed and to some extent implemented by what is only a manipulated and currently watered-down form of cosmopolitanism, which has been forced outside both national and international structures of power. I do realise this argument is quite nuanced so will start by trying to paint a picture of what I mean.

All nation-states are part of the current hegemony of globally organised capital. We are encouraged to give to charity via non-government organizations (NGOs) and engage with the world as a global space outside both the national and international systems of governance, systems which are increasingly interconnected. Many of us have been hit economically with austerity as a result of a failing capitalist system, then we are being persuaded to feel guilty about being way better off than people hit by famine, war, collapsing economies and natural disasters. Importantly, I would argue, that these catastrophes are often a result of immoral or amoral or at best partially moral political systems. Systems that we have been steered away from fully understanding. 

I’m not going to build up a case against this kind of cosmopolitanism in a dialectical way and then argue against it as I feel that dialecticism is an overrated analytical tool in dealing with such a complex and transitory subject and the position I’m taking is too nuanced to not counter argue while I am discussing this subject as I go along. 

The World Social Forum for example which has attempted to be an umbrella group for global resistance. Political organisations and pressure groups initially met in Brazil in January every year to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. The WSF “[…] offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalisation.” (World Social Forum, Wikipedia)

Or in their own words:

“The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among humankind and between it and the Earth.” (World Social Forum, Wikipedia).

To be honest I had never heard of this organisation before researching for this essay. But after reading an article of how good intentions gave way to petty squabbles and people and pressure groups feeling left out and NGOs apparently taking over. I suddenly felt an overpowering pessimism, if change was necessary, a meeting by like-minded activists once a year in Brazil wasn’t going to help in any way. When the forum got in trouble with the authorities in Brazil after some of its participants apparently traveled 300km to destroy some fields of Monsanto GM licenced crops, I felt slightly more encouraged but to my mind I really think anti globalist protesters travelling the globe would do better to stay at home and protest and be active in their localities, maybe join the greens or the communist party and fight the system from within. What we have here is a globally motivated anti-globalisation movement representing the poor and war-torn via NGOs, indirectly confronting the World Economic Forum, which I doubt were even listening. To be one of the 1000 member companies invited to Davos in Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum meet every January, you need to have an annual turnover of over $5bn dollars. Its ironic then that I actually feel the chances of real change towards a fairer world may more likely lie with the Davos elite than the 1500 delegates from around the world participating in the World Social Forum. With the WSF there are no arms to twist, just issues and people to agree with. Davos have the money (our money) and should be as clued up as any to the problems facing capitalism due to climate change and new technological challenges. 

But change needs information, it needs knowledge and its been true of many pressure groups and minor political groups, parties and organisations, that even though they haven’t a hope in hell of gaining any legitimate seat of power, they have raised the consciousness of the general public and those currently making decisions in positions of power. A very good example I have just noticed is on the World Economic Forums’ web page. The first article has the headline “5 ways you can personally fight the climate crisis” this initially looked encouraging until you realise, front of house, of the WEC, the richest group of capitalists on the planet, we are being told what ‘we can do’ as individuals to fight climate change! Reading the article they are making the case for getting involved and how the Paris Agreement and this type of “[…] public commitment encouraged non-state actors to step up their ambitions and make similar pledges” (Nack, J. World economic Forum, webpage) They are presumably talking about curbing emissions of CO2. If there is an arena that is threatening the world’s poorest nations its climate change. Is this corporate capitalism waking up to the issue? This poverty that’s hitting poor countries now and will increasingly is ironically as a result of the very policies these huge conglomerates are perpetuating. Is the WEC another toothless agency? Or is this actual change happening on every level due to its urgency? We can only hope it’s the later.  

When it comes to the individual, action on global justice can seem futile, and there is a strand of thought, especially in more isolationist and/or nationalist quarters that the plight of the poor is a result of a kind of natural law. This is the notion that capitalism can be aligned (and has been encouraged to be aligned) to Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, via Milton Friedman’s concept of ‘free market capitalism’. These ‘free forces’ of the market have been fused within the public’s imagination to mirror Darwin’s overemphasised maxim. Here morality has been weakened to the point where it is supplanted by a nihilism that binds capital and survivalism. Darwinism, as a fixed value, is used to override morality which is temporal. The State then via various means ‘protects’ the individual from understanding what’s happening internationally or how the state is complicit in the globalisation via ‘too big to fail’ corporations and financers. This backs up what Guy Debord wrote in his book: The Society of the Spectacle, that; “Fascism is a ‘technologically equipped primitivism’. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion.” (109 Debord, G. 1967. p, 61). 

But let’s drill down a bit into this Darwinist standpoint. The Coyote was nearly exterminated, not because it wasn’t suited or fit for its environment, it was nearly exterminated because of the brutality of man. Dinosaurs actually died out, not because they were unfit to live on earth, but because a random asteroid hit the planet. For the coyote man was the asteroid. Capital ‘fitness’ is not going to help where climate change is concerned. Climate change then is the asteroid that has hit capitalism. What it represents is a profound test of humanities ability to develop a political strategy that changes a system that has its roots in the Neolithic era, when man first settled after being nomadic, and developed the concept of private property. Therefore, it’s the nation-state that upholds and sustains this ideological standpoint that first needs to be changed before things can change globally.

The vacuum being created by this disengagement from national policy on global justice is being filled by a nationalism that has in recent years been fuelled by a new popularism and an isolationist agenda promoted by right wing interests, big business and multinational-corporations. The same internationally aligned interests have also proposed, as an ideological stalwart, that any form of international government would lead to a totalitarianism where we would all be imprisoned in some kind of Orwellian nightmare. Furthermore, the same ideological stand point argues for a decrease in the state (smaller government and less taxation) effectively breaking the power of the state to intervene in their corporate operations. It seems to be that the global players have manipulated the system in their favour by weakening the national states and preventing any political control effecting their operations at a global level. 

The warning promoted concerning global governance as a totalitarian nightmare may in fact be quite the opposite, a regulated and transparent global government could never be despotic, as it would have to be based on national and regional agreements. Assurances may need to be made about such things as policy transparency, agreed budget distribution and overall policy development. Whereas despotism (both national and by extension global) uses borders as convenient parameters, where it effectively hides behind the national systems as a corrupt arbiter whose global allegiances have capital profit as its ideological basis.

In a response to Thomas Pogge, who makes the claim that we are complicit in global injustice by just actually participating in our national societies, Steinhoff makes the assertion that even though we are active participants within the societies we live “[…], Pogge is too quick in moving from the responsibility of governments to that of its citizens.” (Steinhoff, U. P,122) I would take that a step further, but in the other direction, Pogge is too quick to assign the responsibility to a specific state government in the first place and Steinhoff is complicit in Pogge’s naivety. It’s easy to see that if a state steps out of line it is duly punished not by a faltering internal system but in the way the global system (as it stands in 2019) treats them. 

China has been accused of colonialization in Africa where it has helped developing countries build ports and infrastructure, although due to China being such an economic heavy weight, tariffs or sanctions would have little to no effect. But take Venezuela for example, they have the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and voted in a left-wing government. It wasn’t long before they were improving the plight of the poorest in their country and it wasn’t long also before Saudi Arabia reduced the price of oil from 130 dollars a barrel to 30 dollars a barrel, effectively crippling the Venezuelan economy due to the estimations the government in Caracas had when taking out loans that they assumed they could repay depending as it was on the higher oil price. Added to that America placed a trade embargo on them. Since then the system in Venezuela has taken a turn for the worse, its collapse has been presented in the media as another example of the failure of socialism. Pogge would make the individual responsible for not fulfilling his or her negative duty by letting the state perpetuate the suffering of the global poor, but ultimately, the state is not complicit here, the state is under the yoke of global capital, it is under coercion from the global corporate players and financers. Its true to say any collaboration within this system including sending money to charities, as Steinhoff rightly points out, is actually propping up this global regime. But if the state can not change how it operates in relation to this hegemony how can we blame the individual?

This is the double bind that forces us to fight against and support the same system, which is the nation state and the global shadow of corporate capitalism behind it. What Steinhoff seems to be doing is admonishing the individual of responsibility, or at least in his criticism of Pogge pointing to the individual’s complicity in facilitating the state, thereby burdening the individual citizen with an unresolvable guilt. The left is well aware of the mental gymnastics required in navigating a system they don’t agree with while functioning within it. Personal and practical politics is bound together with an overarching idealism. The key would be finding a way of making this ideal a practical one. Cosmopolitanism has these two aspects divided, ‘ideally’ we would overthrow the system via its mechanism of oppression which is the state, and on the other hand, in practice, we can help the poor in a more immediate way by donating money or working as a volunteer for an NGO. In the first instance we reach a cosmopolitanism through a political struggle and setting up a Rawlsian agreement via the political system of the nation states involved and then by maintaining agreements between states on a global level to meet the needs of the global poor and correcting the massive scale of global inequality. In the second instance we might feel the urgency of a war-torn zone like the Yemen needs immediate aid and we should circumnavigate the state and hand aid agencies and NGOs our money or help with campaigning assistance. The first way is too idealistic and unlikely to happen under current conditions? and the second wholly inadequate? like putting a plaster on a wound or treating the symptoms and not the disease.

Peter Singer’s Book: The Life You Can Save, makes a clear argument that seems at first to be quite straight forward, that to ignore a drowning child is the same as not committing your money and time to saving lives via giving aid to creditable charities and NGOs. Although it seems easy to dismiss this as slightly melodramatic and operationally inadequate for many as the current austerity policies being imposed within nation-states mean many people are struggling just to pay their rent let alone send money abroad. Stronger arguments might convince people that all the overseas development, in an ever-improving world, could be taken care of by the state. Prospective political parties may add a commitment to overseas development to their respective manifestos, this might satisfy voters’ concerns and alleviate them of their guilt. If a political manifesto promised to send 2% of GDP as overseas aid, a citizen voter can clear their conscience with a single cross on a piece of paper. Within the nationalist framework then, that has a built-in commitment to spend much more money than can be raised by all the marathons and charity events and collections put together, the citizen is admonished of Singer’s and Pogge’s disputed individual responsibility. But is this a trap? Well somehow the National state (that is only really a front to a global order) which continues to perpetuate the inequality in the world, manages to free the vast majority of its citizens of any responsibility. Citizens are not condemned to be free in the way that Jean-Paul Sartre once suggested but ‘allowed’ to be free of any particular responsibility. They are free as a subject, they are free under the law, or via a kind of social contract as described by Hobbes. But has the individual citizen given up some of his rights in exchange for:  A. his shielding of the blame and B. his being granted a type of agreed ignorance of what happens in the world?  And therefore, consciously or not given over his right to political engagement to the global system (via this proxy of nationalism) to perpetuate all the necessary or un-necessary injustices in the world. Nagel, T. (2005, page 1-2) makes a good point, that theories about the structure and make up of a sovereign state are numerous purely because these states have been in existence for a while. He argues following Hobbes and Rawls that for justice between people to exist (equality under the law, agreements not to steal etc) the sovereign state is a prerequisite.

                                                            Conclusion

The psychological make up of a nation state, or its base psychology is a product of its historical development. I’m thinking here of Hobbes idea of the body politics where the make-up of a sovereign nation is likened to an ‘artificial man’ or Leviathan. But the rationale that forged nation-states into what they are today is very different to what the rationale of a global or world-state might need to be. Currently a cosmopolitanism that rightly has a priority to combat the vast inequalities in the world is only really, as I mentioned earlier, able to treat the symptoms and not the disease. Although it looks like the issues arising due to climate change have even the capitalists wondering what happens next. Ultimately then it remains to be seen if organisation at the global level by cosmopolitans can shift the power away from the nation state and critically the global systems of finance and political coercion that currently run the global system like a protection racket.

Bibliography and background reading.

World Social Forum: https://fsm2016.org/en/

World Social Forum, Wikipedia Page.

World Economic Forum, Wikipedia Page.

World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org, (5 Ways You Can Personally Fight The Climate Crisis, Jaime Nack, 27th May 2019)

Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. 

Pogge, T. (2014). ‘Ending Poverty’. Video.

Pogge, T. (2001). Eradicating Systematic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend. Journal of Human Development, 2, 59–77.

Steinhoff, U. (2012). Why “We” are not Harming the Global Poor: a Critique of Pogge’s Leap from State to Individual Responsibility. Public Reason, 4, 119–38.

Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1, 229–43.

Rawls, J. (1993). The Law of Peoples. Critical Inquiry, 20, 36–68.

Nagel, T. (2005). The Problem of Global Justice. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 33, 113–47.

Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster capitalism.

Buckminster Fuller, R. (1969) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

Debord, G. (1967) The Society of the Spectacle.

Thomas Hobbes: Social Contract. Oregon State Education.

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Woodcut Printmaking 1880 - 1923

Woodcut Printing by European Artists From 1880–1923. 1. Introduction. Historically Woodcut Printing as a relief technique would be first used in China around 800AD for printing textiles from wooden blocks. In 828AD the first ever printed book would be produced called the Diamond Sutra. The technique didn’t arrive in Europe until midway through the 13th Century. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press used woodcut or wood engravings that were printed with text in the first ever books to be published in 1450. In 1482 Erhard Ratdolf produced colour prints using woodcut techniques. Artists such as Albert Durer and Holbein used woodcut in the 16th Century. Then Hogarth’s ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ in 1751 used wood engraving. From then on Woodcut seems to become neglected as ‘high art’ until the late 19th Century when it was used by the painter Paul Gauguin when he depicted scenes of primitives living in Tahiti.

The technique is very simple: A wooden block with a flat surface (often pear or boxwood) is cut into in relief so that when ink is applied to the surface and printed it doesn’t print where the wood has been cut away, thus producing the image. The idea that cultures and/or individuals didn’t use similar techniques outside of historical records is somewhat incredulous. Even in prehistory, it is probable that ‘man’ in some way and at some time used a technique like woodcut, either on cave walls or early types of paper. This isn’t the subject of this essay though, we are looking at the period between 1880 and 1923, a time of change and a time art flourished and is well documented.

So much happened in terms of historical change between 1880 and the 1920s that to properly define a particular type of art and its circumstances within this period would be nigh on impossible. So I will give a more general overview and close in on some artists who should, I feel, be considered, the main protagonists.

2. The industrial revolutions that swept Europe in the 19th Century asked innumerable questions of art and culture. England in 1880 was considered the workshop of the world, imperialism and colonialism combined to secure vast amounts of raw materials to be used in manufacturing. The British, Dutch and French empires had trading routes that circumnavigated the totality of the known world. America in 1880 was a rising industrial power, although it was in Europe where the most advances were being made in science and technology. The 40 years that are in question in this essay would see in all the major industrial and technological advancements that heralded in the modern historical paradigm. What was the world like before the telephone and the radio, what political circumstances were created by the mere realisation of what was to come, when scientists split the atom and inventors became involved in machines that could project moving photographic images. It was time of profound change, a time of cataclysmic disasters and social/political upheaval on a grand scale. What soul searching faced an individual artist, how could a creative individual living at this time come to terms with the events going on around him/her and how should they make art that could speak of their time? It is in this vein that the artist lives and works would be defined. Woodcut in relation to this time will to an extent depict a kind of artistic introspection.

Paul Gauguin, born in Paris (1848–1903) was a stockbroker until he was 35, and then he took up painting and notably printmaking. Printmaking from the early 19th Century, progressively gained a much greater status as a genre, and artists like Paul Gauguin asserted its prominence within their own work and gave licence, so to speak, to future artists to use it more centrally as a genre. L'estampe Originale (original print) only came into existence in the 1880s and 1890s. So Paul Gauguin is our first protagonist and his working style may be considered a vital reason why printmaking became so evident as an avant-garde genre. Gauguin experimented with woodcut as a means of expression, with Gauguin woodcut wasn’t just a means of reproduction, he was a pioneer with a particular style, exploiting the wood grain and lowering the block in part so it would transfer less ink, even the marks created by gouging out the wood were left to create an effect.

Gauguin attempted to depict primitive surroundings using a ‘primitive’ technique and a similarly primitive style. The earthiness of the finished result rivalled his paintings for their visceral potency. His Tahitian Journal (Noa Noa) has a number of these evocative woodcuts. They reached their audience in Paris 1896 published in La Revue Blanche. His use of flat colour, bold shapes and well-defined outlines suited woodcut. He rejected the troubled world with its clamour for industrialisation and resulting social fragmentation with evocative and wholly contained images of a primordial paradise. All the painting of his later work suited printmaking and he may well of, influenced artists towards print purely because of his flattened vibrant colours. He was also interested in ancient history, specifically Egypt and the Middle East. Some of his work was likened to Cloisonné enamel work mainly because of his formal presentation of flat delineated colour.

He was working at a time when various new ideas in art and literature were emerging. Jean Moreas published his literary manifesto in 1886 (A French symbolist poet), Moreas talks of the ‘primordial idea’. Today Gauguin is labelled a Post-modernist but at the time his work was linked on many occasions to symbolism specifically French symbolist poetry. His work refers to inner meanings, Maurice Denis wrote: “they did subjectively deform nature in order to make clear that their representations were not about things or events in and of themselves but about the philosophical or emotional meanings that lay behind them”. In the subject matter of Gauguin’s work he struggles with philosophical and inner meanings; questions he feels we need to ask ourselves. His journey to the south seas was a bit like a journey away from the world towards the self and in Gauguin’s spiritual quest he shows us his inner self, full of symbolism and emotional intensity. Maybe a reaction to the calamitous world around him and preempting the later psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung. Paul Gauguin exhibited his work in an exhibition called ‘Group Impressionist et Synthetiste’ during the Universal Exposition in Paris 1891. Edvard Munch is said to of seen this show and was greatly impressed. So with this simplification and iconographic flattening comes the paradox that this primitive evocative roughly hewn work, has a powerful resonance and is actually highly sophisticated. Like Munch’s works they are a synthesis of the psychological and the aesthetic.

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) was brought up in Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway. During his life he travels and exhibits his work mainly in Europe. From early on in his career he mixed with Oslo’s artistic and literary bohemia. He exhibits his first woodcuts and coloured lithographs in 1896 at the Salon des Independants in Paris. During his lifetime he was as much known for his prints as he was for his paintings.

The Japanese adopted side grain woodcut printing in 1889 and this in turn influenced European trends. Munch further reinforced the earthiness of the medium by incorporating the grain of the wood into the image, so we have a combination of colour, grain, composition and symbolic reference, which was immediate, intense and evocative.

Munch then developed a method that made the process less time consuming, by sawing up the woodblock up into pieces that outlined his composition. He would then ink up each cutout block, reassembling them like a jigsaw before printing. This process mirrors the working style, achieving an integrity of means that would be unprecedented for its time.

Prints exhibited in Paris in 1896 were titled ‘Anxiety’ and have and aesthetic and disturbing intensity, the subject matter is redolent of this almost macabre visceral obsession. Coloured lithographs and woodcuts using black figures and red skies and all the prints have mysterious and disturbing titles, they reflect the depth of reflection and emotional intensity that must of been prevalent at the close of the 19th Century.

Symbolist art could be considered a kind of tracing that reveals the seeds of social change that European society may of been somewhat unaware of. The impetus of creative reaction proceeds and follows social and cultural change and it is sometimes difficult to separate the initiator and the initiated. It wasn’t long before artists across Europe were finding new and highly expressive means of communication.

The Futurists in Italy would express the coming of the machine age, the Fauves under Braque and Picasso were being more pragmatic with their diametric to the Futurists, which would encourage a more direct comprehension of our shared humanity.

At the beginning of the 20th Century coupled with the Italian Futurists was a reaction away from the industrial urban environment towards the primitive and the spiritual. You can say it was an impetus in art starting with Gauguin with his veneration of the noble savage or Picasso’s so-called Fauves (Beasts) but it can be argued that is less to do with progressions on art and more to do with and more a reaction, maybe even a compulsion, to reinvigorate what lies dormant in a degenerating urban environment or culture. With the rise of fascism in Italy and the political manoeuvring brought about by Marxist theories and the looming threats of revolution in Russia and Germany, states of fragmentation and dictatorial restraint multi-polarised the whole of society, not just a few art groups or movements. The collective consciousness of the whole of European civilisation was being and was to be totally restructured. War would be a way for the ruling classes to sublimate and suppress cultural and political change. The establishment was anti this new art and this new art was anti-establishment. A lot later German Expressionist art would be condemned as ‘degenerate’ and destroyed by the nazis when Hitler took power and attempted to re-assert ideals in art that were Romanesque, Teutonic and placed German pre-Christian paganism centre stage in an obtuse classical millennial historicism.

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, foresaw the turbulence of the Russian revolution and the outbreak of the 1st world war. Kandinsky and Marc searched for new modes of expression that could encipher the stasis of the modern world, new in its essence and outside the post-renaissance tradition. Kandinsky’s painting is thought to be the first wholly abstract work. New types of populist art like magazines and picture postcards made art transferable, and to an extent, art was losing its kudos as historical documentation. Film revolutionised popular culture in the first part of the 20th Century and photography was giving the portrait artist unchallengeable competition. But social pressures and new ideas are ideal catalysts for progressions in art and this would be true with the work of a group of artists from Dresden in Germany known as the Die Brucke Group (The Bridge) (1905–1913) later known as The German Expressionists.

With the Die Brucke the imprint of the earlier movements of post-impressionism, symbolism and Picasso’s slightly earlier ‘primitive’ Fauvist period is clearly evident. The painter Otto Mullers work, for example, puts the human form in natural environments without clothes, using vibrant colours and brushwork remarkably similar to Picasso’s. A rawness and direct impact are the main ingredients. The Die Brucke Group were, Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Karl Schmidt Rottluff, (1884–1976) Emile Nolde (1867–1956), Max Pechstein (1881–1955), and Otto Muller (1874–1930).

Die Brucke was founded incidentally the same year that the first Fauve exhibition happened at The Salon D'Autonme in Paris with paintings by Henry Mattise (1869–1954), Andre Derain (1880–1954), and Maurice De Vlaminck (1876–1958). Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D'Avignon was painted two years later in 1907, a painting that paved the way towards Cubism. It was with the Die Brucke that woodcut was revived as a creative medium and most of the group used woodcut extensively.

In 1905 Dresden galleries showed 50 paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, and 132 other works by French and Belgian Impressionists, artists like George Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin and Felix Vallotton as well as 20 paintings by Edvard Munch in 1906. This exposure to high European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism may explain to some extent the Die Brucke’s tendency towards naturalistic atonement. From the beginning the Die Brucke sort to break with convention, the means of expression and the message combined in some of the finest graphic artwork produced in the 20th Century. Kirchner wrote:

“The mechanical process of printing lends unity to the separate stages of the work, the task of giving the work its form can be prolonged as much as one likes, without the least risk.”

All the members of Die Brucke were in their early to mid-20s in 1905 and it was a time of youthful exuberance, Kirchner was the central figure in the group. Hypersensitive with a compulsive attitude to his work, he used woodcut for the group’s posters and catalogues. From the start right up to their split in 1913, he was the main organiser. He produced illustrations and woodcuts for a book of expressionist poetry called ‘Umbra Vitae’ by George Heym. His style has sometimes been described as like hieroglyphs as he simplified and deconstructed the image. Although his paintings and woodcuts have a distinctive expressionist style. 

Erich Heckel, Kirchner and Rottluff were all architecture students who lost interest in the formalisation of building, and decided to create art instead. Rottluff travelled to Norway to paint landscapes, but they were predominantly an urban art group. They depicted urban life with a new iconic ‘Art Group’ style. They were in effect a prototype of many future art groups and movements, such as the different strands of the Modernist movement in the early 20th Century as well as influencing Design schools like the Bauhaus and more radical groups like Dada and The Factory in New York.

They talk of the ’new humanity’ and they saw themselves as urban primitives with open house attitude, and at one point opening their studios to the public, so people could be a member of Die Brucke for a small fee, in return members would have the access to the studios and receive regular in-house publications. Like a modern day illustration agency, they would take on commissions from publishers, creating artwork for book covers, illustrations for poetry and posters for political parties. They would also exhibit their painting and write and print their own manifestos. Max Pechstein even produced an illustrated lords prayer using black and white woodcuts where the tensions in this urban environment are juxtaposed with a yearning for spiritual and philosophical liberation. But as ‘war’ closed in all around them the pressure began to take its toll. In 1916 Kirchner wrote:

“The heaviest burden of all is the pressure of war and the increasing superficiality, it gives me incessantly the impression of a bloody carnival”

With titles like ‘Conflict’ and ‘The Murderer’ the group’s later work echoes the angst (and the titles) of Edvard Munch. And borrows from him his cathartic edge and premonitory zeal, although it expresses itself in a much more explicit and graphical way. George Grosz, not part of Die Brucke but influenced by them, would later produce satirical drawings of Germany’s economic collapse and capitalist greed that resonate highly even of today’s unbalanced unequal society. In 1905 Erich Heckel said this to his drawing teacher:

“The only important thing as far as he was concerned was the seizure of the total expression”

Now for this group of artists, it was a question of what and how to express the social disintegration going on around them. Officially the Die Brucke split with a final show in 1912 at the Soderberg, but they all carried on working as The German Expressionists through all the upheavals of the 1st world war and the revolution in 1918 where some of the group produced work for the then German republic, including government contracts for posters encouraging people to vote in the 1919 election, the results were controversial.

In 1923 rampant inflation in Germany signalled the end of German Expressionism and with it the end of this era of woodcut printmaking, although the Die Brucke ended with the unprinted Chronik KG Brucke in 1913 (now in the Berlin Staatliche Museum) many manifestos were written by leading members of all the art groups in Europe. Art and culture were finding new dimensions and new possibilities, artists were glimpsing a liberated future free from the constraints of an overbearing establishment in both art and society. Franz Marc wrote: “We say no to the great centuries, we know that with this simple denial we cannot stop the serious methodical development of the sciences and triumphant ‘progress’ also to the scornful amazement of our contemporaries we take a side road, one that hardly seems to be a road, and we say: this is the main road of mankind’s development. (Blaue Reiter Almanac, 1914).

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Buckminster Fuller quote:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” R. Buckminster Fuller

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RON PILLER

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Kazimir Malevich, Reciter, pencil on paper, 1913

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Postmodernism and how the art object lost it's primacy within a technological culture.

Introduction.

Sometime in the early part of the 20th Century the art object, that unique, oblique and at times strange manifestation of a creative society lost a battle with the birth or beginnings of a new technological age. The primacy of the art object began its slow dissolution into the spectacle of modern society. The art object can be many things, a painting, a sculpture, a drawing, a garment, an african tribal mask or even a bicycle wheel attached to a stool, but it has a prerequisite set of iconic emblematic and culturally significant values that embody human social stasis and mans relational connection to all phenomena including the spiritual. I would like also to include within my definition of the art object a particular type of creative architectural space, which I believe is bound up and part of the creative object, like maybe the negative space in which we find the object. I am not just including the gallery space but any social space be it public or commercial. Primacy is in some respects quite a ambiguous value, the meaning used for primacy in this essay is that the object had or has (or was perceived to have) a central primary function in society, for example the Totem Pole in Red Indian culture or the historical painting in Western societies, both are unique and serve a higher function in respect that they both embody a particular type of social authority. Other art objects include, portrait painting, african tribal sculpture, municipal sculpture, art objects from previous civilizations in museums including actual archaeological sites. Its not that these art objects actually lost any of they're particular significance or power but more like they began to be perceived to have been superseded by or sublimated to the cultural spectacle as modern western society developed various new media. The Postmodernism we are talking about here is the socio-political spectacle of late capitalist societies such as in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia, although not many countries in the world have been immune to these developments. The spectacle we are talking about in relation to postmodernism is the expanded definition given by the french philosopher and film maker Guy Debord in his 1967 book “Society of the Spectacle” which many believe to have sparked the student protests in Paris only a year later. Here are two of the numerous short definitions written in the book:

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” (Guy Debord, Society of the spectacle, chapter 1, 1)

or:

“The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image”(Guy Debord, Society of the spectacle, chapter 1, 34)

1.

Without getting too heavily into definitions, the first use of the word Postmodernism was in a book by Jean-Francois Lyotard called “The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge” published in 1979. Lyotard in this book seems to be concerned that the communications revolution in computing, only beginning to happen around then, would undermine the existing Knowledge frameworks that regulated the world of academia or the Occident linkage of the language of science and the language of political ethics. Postmodernism is now seen to cover a much larger field and the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism starting as far back as early 20th Century neo-classicism and the return to representation in the paintings of for example De Chirico. The implications for the art object within this shift from modernity to postmodernity are complicated but can be seen as this: Modernism –The subjugation of context through the production of unique art objects or forms. Postmodernism – The subjugation of unique form through the projection of context as spectacle.

Picasso is important here, as he started painting early on with inspiration and influence taken from a very good example of the unique art object, that being the African tribal mask. As Picasso's fame became more and more apparent, the shift from modernism to postmodernism was highly transformative in respect that Picasso was only too aware of it's implications. He used the spectacle that Guy Debord talks about later in his book “The Society of the Spectacle” so well that our conception of what a successful artist should (or should not) be like can be gauged against his image still reaching us through this spectacle. This separates the artists image including his work from the actuality of his unique works as art object, therefore even though Picasso was very interested in the unique art object, it was his unique image through the spectacle, that is his enduring legacy. Artists from this point onward are subjugated to the spectacle in as much as the spectacle has no exit, only outsider art could be said to be fully autonomous as it was, except until recently, undiscovered. There is even more to this relationship of artist and social spectacle, the implications of it are also an opportunity to project new ideas, and the curiosity regarding this emerging technological age must of taken the place, to some extent, of creative inspiration. Where once artists were locked up in the academies, suddenly your beach photos adorn the cover of Time Magazine and the enigmatic artist is shown holding and drawing a dove in his studio. This fame may of enthused them as much as say getting images of their work published or seeing their work in black and white on a television screen, it would with out a doubt effected the work. Art can not only imitate nature or reality (including abstract modes) as an illusion but through the illusion of the spectacle become electronic, sharing the pulse of an almost living entity and living through the viewers own experience. The moving image of a static work of art empowers the original work with another more profound energy, it becomes a stylistic synthesis working with the optical spectacle. So there is this inevitable trade off, the artist exchanges the art object's unique presence in the world for transcendence and a certain transitory iconoclasm. Abstraction has also another discernible function on this basis, it is representation transfigured, processed, reproduced and regurgitated. It is no longer a painting but the transmission of blue or a shape a rhythm or a code. Despite this Picasso retained his modernist credentials although he should be considered a modernist artist within the postmodern spectacle of advanced capitalism.

2.

In an essay authored by both Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called “The Culture Industry: Entertainment and Mass Deception” written during world war 2, they describe the cybernetic forces at play within so called popular culture and the then contemporary monopoly capitalism in the US and western societies in general. They describe the art object very well here in relationship to contemporary culture or the then developing postmodern spectacle society. According to them art (high art) involved “purposiveness without purpose” originally, but under monopoly capitalism this was reversed to “purposelessness for purposes”. Guy Debord would of described these purposes as late capitalism's attempt to marry the “autonomous economy” (the self regulating free market) with the social unconscious, through the subjugation of motifs and historicism. Debord suggests that eventually “The autonomous economy permanently breaks away from fundamental need to the extent that it emerges from the social unconscious which unknowingly depended on it” (Debord, G, chapter 2, 51). Debord proposes that this begins a process of subversion against the spectacle in the form of class struggle as the economy can be seen to rely on society and not the other way round. This is very much a Marxist interpretation of social dynamics where eventually capitalism fails to provide for the needs of a society and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In this situation the spectacle is used to suppress, pacify and divide the population for as long as it can maintain a functioning economy. Some of what society begins to miss within this polarisation is the creative space and the art object, which has been supplanted by the spectacle putting the created object second to the celebrity of the artist. Commercial enterprise also starts buying up public space for the purposes of commodity production or distribution. Benjamin Buchloh in an essay titled, “Figures of Authority: Ciphers of Regression” explains how the spectacle effects the production of art, or how art comes to be perceived:

“Style then becomes the ideological equivalent of the commodity: it's universalising exchangibality, it's free-floating availability indicating a historical moment of closure and stasis. When the only option left to aesthetic discourse is the maintenance of its own distribution system and the circulation of its commodity terms, it is not surprising that all “audacities have become convention” and that painting starts looking like shop windows decorated with fragments and quotations from history”

Conclusion.

The cybernetic regulative nature of human civilization needs to have the social and political construct within reach, as it needs at times to make particular changes, necessary for its survival or perpetuation. If we have no control over our social organization the world would quickly descend into anarchy completely, I say completely here as I feel we have a kind of organized anarchy already. The word organized and the word anarchy seem at odds with each other, but the worlds societal status has never been homogenous, some parts of the world are in a state of complete anarchy and some parts could almost be seen as utopian, but it is ultimately the same system. Viewing what has been written here and on this subject in general through my reading and research it seems that the vacuous culture that now constitutes the spectacle that Debord refers to in his book has generated and attached a higher value to the unique work of art, and for that matter the unique space or architecture. There is then on that basis a battle between the sustainability of the spectacle and the re-emergence of the art object, going on both outside of the social spectacle and within it. Art begins to look more autonomous and manipulated in equal measure, and at the same time the actual spectacle as Guy Debord conceived it is under attack. Not only are the boundaries between original art and the spectacle being eroded, by for example interactive media, but each person has direct input to the spectacle via social media. Also when original art is viewed in high definition via these new mediums they loose much less of their aura than they did when the spectacle mainly consisted of celluloid, newsprint and black and white television.

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.” (Debord, G, chapter 1, 19)

Bibliography.

Bois Y, & Krauss, R, Formless: A User's Guide, Zone Books.

F Buchloh, B, Figures of Authority: Ciphers of Regression, notes on the return of representation in European painting, Youtube Video.

Debord, G, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red 2010, Buchet-Chastel, 1967.

Jameson F, Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, 1991.

Lyotard, J, The Postmodern Condition, 1979, First five chapters, online abridgement.

Williams, R, Art Theory: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell, 2004. With quotes from Horkheimer M & Adorno T, Dialectics of Enlightenment, 1947.

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Imaginary Landscape 

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Wide Angle - 35mm film

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Le Corbusier

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Malevich and the Russian Avant-garde

In History - In Theory - and In Analysis.

i) Introduction.

In Russia towards the end of the 19th Century, Literature, or the written word, was generally considered to be a barometer of social and political change. Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were very famous, and treated as celebrities, Turgeneve for example was greeted by crowds of people on the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg when he returned from Paris in1879. Novels held an importance in developing collective consciousness in the vast expanse of what would become in the next century the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic's. Earlier in the mid 19th century writers like Turgeneve, Pushkin, Dostyevsky and Tolstoy set a public agenda for debate, not just amongst the bourgeois but the peasant, and proletariat classes. The publication of a novel was a national event causing the development of a grass roots political movement that became a force in public affairs, and many would argue effected what happened at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Within this context, Poets, Theorists, Artists and Architects began a particularly Russian Avant-garde experiment, setting in motion theories and developments in Art that had, and still have, a lasting influence. The insular nature of the Russian state was beginning to find many influences coming from Western Europe and especially France and Germany. Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto proclaims in it's opening line a somewhat distilled political analysis of the times: “ A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.” (Marx and Engel's, 1848, p.1). Russia a Feudal state with a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie centred mainly in Moscow and St Petersburg was beginning to be effected by social and political changes that were happening right across Europe and beyond, and with improvements in transport by rail Russia was able to keep much better lines of communication with cities like Paris, London and Berlin, and also abreast of subsequent developments in Art and Culture. In 1904 Russia lost a war with the Japanese in Manchuria, the first European state ever to loose a war outside Europe, and in 1905 after agrarian unrest and terrorist acts there was a reformist Revolution.

In this essay I shall be looking at the expanded contexts and theory of the Russian Avant-garde and specifically the work and influences of Kasimir Malevich, within the political and cultural dynamics of early part of the 20th Century. I have attempted to set the scene in the last two paragraphs and realise that I am dealing with a very important era, not just in art and culture, but sociology, philosophy and theoretical studies. Taking all this into consideration has been the basis of my research, and I will attempt to keep a strong overview of the whole dynamic, of firstly viewing something in history within the complexities and context of the situations involved and secondly keeping an overview of the relationships between the social situations and the art that was created during this turbulent time in European history.

1. Futurism and the Manifesto.

Marx and Engel's revolutionary manifesto and the manifesto as a genre will become, at the beginning of the 20th Century a very important part of the creative work produced by the avant-garde, not just in Russia but in all the main European nations. Martin Puchner explains the importance of the manifesto in his book : Poetry of the Revolution “...Marx and Engels created with this text (The Communist Manifesto) nothing less than a new genre. This new genre brought into a novel and startling juncture philosophy and politics, analysis and action, historiography and invention.”(Puchner, 2006, p.11). He also links the manifesto to another tradition, that of religious revelation : “ When the manifesto turns against the state and its authority, it appeals precisely to ... (an) alternate authority of religious revelation.” (Puchner, 2006, p.13) and he goes on to talk about how social revolt from the Reformation in Germany and the Puritan Revolution in England to various Peasant riots in the 16th Century used open letters, pamphlets and declarations, as a means to disseminate and proclaim new ideas and radicalise populations. This suggests to me a regulative, pragmatic dimension to social politics and a historical counter cultural linage. The Manifesto has therefore become a fixed point (if ever there could be one) in cultural affairs. To me Puchner over plays the importance of the Manifesto as a way of making a point, maybe a point that needs to be made: that the written word within the frameworks of dissemination in a modern context is social changes most active force. I would argue that the manifesto does initiate somethingnew to those who would otherwise not know, and it is a formulaic oracle and potentially a type of self fulfilling prophesy but the something is other than the manifesto – it is embedded there within the manifesto's perfunctory facility only as an initiation or a declaration or both. It is not the Manifesto itself that holds the dynamic of change but it is the dynamic of change that holds the Manifesto. What starts to emerge in Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century is a necessity for change, from an outmoded feudal system of surfs and masters under a Tzar, that was becoming more and more economically suppressed by an developing European and American Capitalist hegemony. Cultural, social and scientific advances that where happening in Western Europe did not go unnoticed in Russia as many links between the cities of Europe were being forged. It is at this point the Manifesto comes in to play as an instrument of the Avant-garde. In Literature the Manifesto can be seen to arrive in France with Jean Moreas and his Symbolist Manifesto as early as 1886. The opening line foretells much of the cultural turbulence to come :

“ Like all the arts, literature evolves: in a cycle with its returns strictly

determined, complicated by various shifts over time and in the changing

climates. It is clear how each new phase in artistic evolution corresponds

precisely with the senile decrepitude, the ineluctable end of the school

just before it....”(Caws, 2001, p.50) from “Le Manifeste Symboliste”1886.

As has been suggested at the at the beginning of this text, literature was the most predominant medium as regards of how a society perceived itself, and ideas in literature proceeded in advance of other mediums. In a sense literature has been perceived as the Avant-garde of human creativity, but only if we take the idea (or label) of the avant-garde in its most literal sense. It would be quite natural then for the new art groups emerging in a new scientific age to grab hold of the written word as a way of bringing attention to their ideas. The first Art Manifesto was written by F. T. Marinetti in 1909, “The Futurist Manifesto” starts with an enthusiastic call to arms:

“We stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging

mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes

starred like our spirits, shinning like them with the prisoned

radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our

atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last

confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper

with our frenzied scribbling. (Apollonio, 1970, p.19).

This is the opening paragraph, and after explanations of the joys of electric light and motor cars it begins a numerical protogenic declaration to Futurist action, as follows:

FUTURIST MANIFESTO

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep.

We intend to exalt aggressive action, feverish insomnia, the racer's stride,

the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

We affirm that the worlds magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty:

the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes,

like serpents of explosive breath – a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot

is more beautiful than the Victory of samothrace.

We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across

the earth, along the circle of its orbit.

The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity, to the

enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive

character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack

on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!...Why should we look back,

when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible?

Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we

have created eternal, omnipotent speed.

We will glorify war – the worlds only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the

destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and

scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, we will fight

moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will

sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals;

we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with

violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents;

factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride

the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; advent-

turous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels

paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the

sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem

to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (Published in Le Figaro, Paris, 20 Feb, 1909)

(Apollonio, 1973, p. 19) F.T. Marinetti.

The parallels between the paintings of the Italian Futurists and the Russian are highly noticeable although all can be said to be influenced by Cubism, the Italian work is more provocative in relation to the machine age, as in this manifesto there is a glorification of cars, planes and any other kind of modern dynamism, they seem to of opted out of any kind of romantic idea of peasant life like the Russians felt suited the cubic idiom. Even the purely abstract works have titles like “Long Live Italy” (fig. 7) or “Dynamism of the Automobile” and even the more parochial subject matter of a lady walking a dog has the name “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash” (fig. 8). This last painting is a good example of the use of the painterly methods of cubism to evoke the illusion of time passing, something we see in paintings by Goncharova and Malevich (fig, 11). Its obvious that the paintings of Braque and Picasso in their Cubist phase radicalised many artists in the early 20th Century including the Russian Avant-garde. A Russian sculptor called Vladimir Izdebsky, part of the “New Artists Federation” in Munich and friends with Kandinsky, put on a show in Russia of 800 paintings depicting the new tendencies in European Art. In this ground breaking exhibition there were paintings by artists such as Van Dongen, Braque, Vlaminck, Balla, Signac, Rousseau, Metzinger and Kandinsky. Kandinsky (a Russian) is often credited to be the first abstract artist and also wrote an interesting book called “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” and along with Franz Marc founded one of the most important and thought provoking art groups of the 20th Century called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. We witness in Kandinsky's book the relevant soul searching that many artists were beginning to see as their obligation, as the world around them changed very fast.

2.The Autonomy of Art.

There is an idea in art and in society in general, that mankind is on a journey from a more natural state of being towards a more unnatural state. Capitalism has a particularly good example of this in its division of labour, where the worker doesn't own the means of production and therefore his working life is separated from his natural dependency as a human being. And added to this is the fact that a worker in a modern industrial situation is even further removed from nature by the very nature of the environment of the work place. Peter Burger in his book Theory of the Avant-garde quotes B. Hinz, “During this phase of historical separation of the producer from his means of production, the artist remained as the only one whom the division of labour had passed by, though most assuredly not without leaving a trace...” (Burger, 1974, p. 36). This idea that it is the inverse correlation born of the separation of the maker from his means of production in general, that gives the artist and art its social autonomy, is subject to its proto-cultural decent from the privileged classes of previous (courtly) society. It therefore follows that socio-political and psycho-physical vestiges of this previous era are carried with it, and contrary to this we see in Malevich's Suprematism the idea that the specific nature of art is universal and timeless, therefore outside any political or historical situation. From the present do we not look back at what Burger describes as the Courtly World as a strange age, any art, artist or indeed conception of art that proceeds from any era carries, reasoning, conceptions and baggage from that era, that it may latter hark back to, or rebel against. In the work of Malevich we see a deliberate intention to transcend a historical narrative and replace it with a timeless universal or a paradigmatic shift, through which man can reinterpret perceptions and develop new states of consciousness. Paradoxically art given the mantle of responsibility of retaining the vestiges of production and therefore historicised and handed the guardianship of a bygone era sought to radicalise the bourgeoisie hegemony from within, especially the Avant-garde. The result is a polemic rift that can never be entirely reconciled, and the Russian avant -garde is a good example were eventually only revolution could break the idealogical deadlock. The elucidation of the state and depth-complexity of physical reality through science and developments in science, did not go unnoticed by the creative and artistic and in the case of the Italian Futurists, as we have seen in Marinetti's Manifesto there was a sudden and enthusiastic realisation of the implications and potentials of the coming technological age. Peter burger argues “ The European Avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in a bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men.”(Burger, 1974, p. 49). Contrary to this Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova, in their Rayonist and Futurist Manifesto, say this:

“We, rayonists and futurists, do not wish to speak

about new or old art, and less about western art. We

leave the old art to die and leave the “new” art to

battle with it..” (Bowlt, 1976, p. 87)

Its not a battle for the Russians they are purposely trying to find a non-conflict zone where they can focus on the centrality of new work and new theory. Although they recognise what Burger describes as a confrontation between old art and new art. Artists tend to disassociate themselves and their art from any idea or conception of the praxis of life, primarily because of the strength of its negation to an Avant-garde development, and we find in its place a reversal whereby if their work is one day subsumed into contemporary society then it would serve that society better by the mere fact that it wasn't forced upon it. For the Russian Avant-garde it is revolution that brings about the downfall of the establishment, not art, and for a time the state was sympathetic to the Russian project, until the Stalinist era and the introduction of Social Realism as state sponsored intervention in art. The Avant-garde artist contrary to what Peter Burger suggests still produces objects separated from the mundane world (whether a world in a bad or good order) and calls them art – even a dada happening is defined as such and is therefore a separate act outside the praxis of life. Avant-garde art to my mind seeks to address the changing role of the artist in a future society. Avant-Garde art also address's the complexity of the artists role in redefining the relationship between artist, the artists work, and the more general way in which a society is constructed.

Avant-garde, even Neo-avant-garde work attempts to raise our consciousness and become absorbed somehow into the praxis of life, although I would stress that I think it impossible for art and the praxis to be as one, for precisely the reason that Burger points out: “When art and the praxis of life are one, when praxis is aesthetic and art is practical, art's purpose can no longer be discovered, because the existence of two distinct spheres (art and the praxis of life) that is constitutive of the concept of purpose or intended use has come to an end.” (Burger, 1974, p.51). Art can only be autonomous through separation – through firstly conception and idea and then definition through separation. This autonomous art is a monitor to the sublimation of art within the general praxis of life that has subsumed art in its own ways via engagement.

3. Swans of Other Worlds.

The role of the artist, and the writer for that matter, in society was going to change whether the political establishments and art establishments liked it or not, the technological revolution that has happened since the early 20th Century forced mankind to radically reinterpret the systems and processes by which society was structured and the new art groups where at the vanguard of these new developments. In a way they sensed the implications of developments such as, Radio and the Telephone, Cinema and the Aeroplane, and could find ways to represent aspects, elements and theories in there work relevant for this social restructuring. Cubism for example could be seen as a metaphor of this slow fragmentation happening or going to happen within culture or families or political systems. The work could also be seen to represent the fracturing of the art world as a result of earlier avant-garde invention, adding a humorist dimension to radical and pragmatic painting as interpretation. It could also be seen as purely an autonomous investigation into the progressive

pictorial disintegration of forms. In her book: Swans of Other Worlds, Charlotte Douglas puts forward an argument that there were... “two philosophical interests that dominated new Russian art at the beginning of 1912” and they were... “the search for essence and the effective use in art of the human psyche”. (Douglas, 1976, p.18). She goes on further to suggest that it could be seen as a search for a metaphysical or essential reality, and some kind of qualitative change in human consciousness. Essence in a fast changing world becomes very important to mankind in general and especially the artist. All human organisation depends on an appropriate and balanced relationship with essence. Essence is the fixed element in human affairs and is directly relative to all physical or non-physical phenomena (the laws of physics or pure maths). Shifts in human relationships to physical phenomena (e,g, the development and use of iron or, more profoundly electricity) determinechanges in social structure and effect in a general way the relativity of mankind to all phenomena, and it is this that drives changes in socio-political structures. Theoretical advancement (which can be argued to be subject to essence) can also change our relationship to physical phenomena but it tends to ride on the back material or physical changes. Douglas calls it “The intangible essence” that artists sought to express in there work that relied less on purely depicting the world but tried to reveal something intuitive or within the realms of the subconscious. 

This investigation of natural phenomena, reminds me of Eastern Philosophy (Buddhism or Taoism), where the eternal Tao is described as, the basis of the universe or the absolute.Here it is explained by Lao-tzu in the “Book of Changes”: There is something in a state of fusion, it is born prior to heaven and earth. How still! How lovely! It stands by itself unchanging, It moves about everywhere unfailingly. (Susuki, 1959 p.16). This is the Essence the Russian Avant-garde attempted to instil into their work and especially Malevich's Suprematist period, and the work of artists like Goncharova, Matiushin, Kandinsky, Lissitzky and Rosanova, who looked to the future while attempting to return to the fundamental stasis of human existence within the universe. With an unknown future they rejected the continuum handed down to them from previous more Romantic Art, including Symbolism and Impressionism, and were forced, you could say by the paradoxical and energized situation, to begin a new chapter in the history of art. The kantian aesthetic theory consideration that beauty is a subjective response, and is generally to be considered a property of nature and that it should be seen as the basis of a non-empirical understanding, was rejected by the Futurists as being old fashioned and institutionalised. Not only that, but too fixed on representation of the visible world – what interested the Russian futurists was the invisible world. The paintings attributed to the Russian movement called Cubo-Futurism were, as the name suggests influenced by Italian Futurism and the paintings of the French school Cubismunder Picasso and Braque. You can see a greater influence from Cubism than futurism in paintings by Malevich which are often of peasant scenes and a kind of rural idol. But we find still, a strong break from Post-Impressionism and a deformation of forms that strongly represents an inner world not just of the painter but of the viewer. Natalia Goncharova for example breaks from an earlier Post-Impressionist style and starts to break up the image in a distinctive Cubist way, this forces the viewer to question the way they see the world and therefore the work carries a kind of philosophical disposition. This new way of working encourages a pragmatic response from the viewer and is itself a pragmatic view of the world through existential experience. This pragmatic and speculative approach by the avant-garde looks for truths in the work of art, but truth in its more dissonant form as potential.

4. A Russian Avant-garde Experiment.

The main focus of this Research project is to look at the implications and intersections of ideas and theoretical development in the work of Kasimir Malevich and the paintings he did that are credited to his Suprematist period, from his first Suprematist painting in 1913 until his last Architectonic sculptures in 1928. The Russian avant-garde isn't just Suprematism, it is also, Neo-Primitivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Rayonism, Constructivism, and Ego-Futurism, not to mention Kandinsky's key Russian influence on The New Artists Association and The Blue Rider groups in Munich. As I have mentioned earlier many influences effected the Russian Avant-garde from symbolism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, and Italian Futurism as art movements and socio-political, scientific and theoretical shifts were also beginning to be important factors in the radical departures being made in Russian Avant-garde art. It is also fair to mention that it is not just painting that constitutes the beginnings of Modernism in Europe, we have also, Literature, Poetry, Sculpture, Theatre and Dance.

Kazimir Malevich, 1878-1935, was born in Kiev in the Ukraine and his first painted works, were in the style of Impressionism and then Neo-Primativism and he became part of the Russian contingent of the Futurists and Cubo-Futurists after moving to Moscow, and eventually started his own school called Suprematism in 1913. Although the first Suprematist paintings are thought to of dated from 1913 no paintings were exhibited until the 0-10 exhibition in December 1915. In the Petrograd exhibition the so called Last FuturistExhibition showed 39 of Malevich's Non-Object paintings. Malevich said this in 1927 about his “Black Square” painting,

“When in my desperate effort in 1913 to liberate art from the ballast

of objectivity I fled to the shape of the square, and exhibited a picture

consisting of nothing but a black quadrilateral on a white field, critics

sighed, as did society: “Everything we loved is lost. We are in a wilder-

-ness (....) We are confronted with a black square on a white ground!”

The square appeared incomprehensible and dangerous to critics and

society (....) and nothing else could have been expected.”

Before he began painting in his most radical and controversial Suprematist style Malevich painted pictures like “Knife Grinder” 1913 (fig, 11) which look like a more colourful version of a Braque portrait, and have something of the feel of Leger, in the way he gradates, with tone, truncated forms. I like to link Malevich's work more directly with his Russian contemporaries such as Natalia Goncharova and Olga Rosanova who share much of Malevich's developments in painting. For example as noted earlier with the Italians Goncharova's painting of “The Cyclist” 1913 (fig,6), has a similar moving image quality as “Knife Grinder”, were time itself is fragmented by echoing forms and the foreground and the background intersect with a flattening of coloured forms and shapes directly onto the picture plane. One work that I find very intriguing is a drawing called “A Figure” (fig,5) painted in 1912 by Natalia Goncharova, it shows a very strong Russian heritage to religious Icon painting and also Primitive Art and also reminds me of the work of Modigliani, who developed drawings like this into sculptures. It is at this point in Malevich's career and after a collaboration with a Futurist poet called Alexei Kruchenykh that he embarks on his Suprematist experiment.

Alexei Kruchenykh poet and Russian Futurist invented his own poetic language called Zaum, - the prifix “Za” meaning beyond and the suffix “um” meaning mind therefore “Beyond the Mind”. Kruchenykh also wrote and collaborated on writing some Manifesto's for the futurist movement in Russia, a few years after Marinettis were published in Le Figaro (a French national news paper) although he contested some of the dates and claimed he was writing Zaum poetry before 1909.

This is an early Russian Futurist Manifesto:

A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. (Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov). 1915.

To the readers of our first unexpected.

We alone are the face of our Time. Through us the horn of time blows in the art of the word.

The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the ship of Modernity.

He who does not forget his first love will not recognise his last.

Who, trustingly, would turn his last love toward Balmont's perfumed lichery? Is this the reflection of today's virile soul?

Who, faint-heartedly, would fear tearing from warrior Bryusov's black tuxedo the paper armorplate? Or does the dawn of unknown beauties shine from it?

Wash your hands which have touched the filthy slime of the books written by those countless Leonid Andreyevs.

All those Maxim Gorkys, Kuprins, Bloks, Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys, Kuzmins, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.

From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their insignificance!...

We order the poets' rights be revered:

To enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (word-novelty).

To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.

To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches.

To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.

And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of your “Common sense” and “good taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centred) Word. (First published in Moscow in 1912 by the Hylaea group, later known as Cubo-Futurism)..(Lawton, Eagle, 2004, p. 51) accredited to: Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and Khlebnikov.

It does have a striking resemblance to Marinetti's, but it is a narrower attack – sorting out the future from the past, and a past full of names, and in this way engaging with the collective consciousness of the Russian people, everyone could understand its clear message of whole heartily rejecting the past for the promise of a supercharged future with skyscrapers and summer lightening. In the light of the fact that only two years later Russia has its most famous moment in history “The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917” this Artist Manifesto seems a bit incendiary. Even though the Marinetti manifesto glorifies war as “Humanities onlyhygiene” it seems far more enthusiastic for modernity and less bitter in its attack on the past. We see at this point that the Russians take a slightly different view to, Balla, Severini, Marinetti and the other Italians as regards what the future maybe could, and maybe should, be all about. The most important distinction can be seen in a play written by Kruchenykh, with sets and costumes designed by Malevich (fig,12) called “Victory Over the Sun”. The Sun in this play is captured in the first act, and subdued inside a concrete house. The second scene is set in a future where the sun's power has been overthrown, and set in place called the Tenth Country. The characters are aspects or qualities of moral standpoints. The main idea of the play concerns the proposition that the sun represents an illusory reality thatneeds to be overcome before mankind can fully understand true reality which will set manfree from his dependence on nature. The whole play is unconventional to say the least and the actors encouraged to slowly pronounce each syllable in the spirit of Kruchenykh's Zaumlanguage poetry. The experimental play shows precautionary characteristics and in an unearthly future men have no memories and no dreams. Charlotte Douglas explains that: “Kruchenykh conceived of his “beyond mind” Zaum language as a language which is produced as an automatic reflex and directly communicates internal states; it is communicative by virtue of originating out of a shared humanity.” (Douglas, 1976, p.42). The characters in the play jump from absurd speech to the purely phonic Zaum, (beyond mind) when they are overtaken with fear. Malevich's sets and costumes use geometry and movement to evoke the otherworldliness of “The Tenth Country”as well as inventive lighting effects. The backdrop of the set was a large black square on a white background, which according to Malevich was the inspiration for his first Suprematist painting “Black Square” painted in the same year of the production in 1913.

5. Suprematism.

What shows itself very clearly in the work of the Russian Avant-garde is an intention to re-frame the intentions and purposes of art at a fundamental level and shock out of its complacency the bourgeois traditionalist status-quo. What they needed was a radical new style and a radical new theory, something important for Russia and more importantly important to art. Malevich's early Suprematist paintings are almost emblematic of this intention to re-frame and transcend whatever held them back up until then. Malevich writes in his book, entitled “The Non-Objective World” (which should really be translated as “The Objectless World”) about this new role in art:

“The art of the past which stood, at least ostensibly, in the

service of religion and the state, will take on a new life in

the pure (unapplied) art of Suprematism, which will build

up a new world – the world of feeling....” (Malevich, 1927,

p.68).

In a scientific way, Malevich defines his work with the idea of feeling as the central purpose or concept. Malevich's work is objective in the sense that he objectively attempts to paint feelings, which means therefore that we should only call Malevich's work non-objective when it comes to objectively painting objects that exist in the world or are a representation of the world in its physical presence as manifestation. It reminds me of Descartes methods of scientific enquiry in the way he rejects empirical knowledge for the purpose's of an assertive, methodical, re-interpretation of phenomena. Another tenant of Malevich's written theory is the idea of the artist as creator.

“An artist who creates rather than imitates expresses himself;

his works are not reflections of nature but, instead, new realities,

which are no less significant than the realities of nature itself.”

(Malevich, 1927, p.30)

The basis of his argument rests on the premise that artists of the past hadn't ever fully broken away from imitating the world around them, and the lead taken by Cezanne and then the Cubists eventually lead to Suprematism, where all the vestiges of physical reality are left behind. Art then becomes creation, becomes nature, and is no longer an artificial imitation. This new way of working as pure abstraction comes in the heat of all the other radical departures in art and at a time when revolution in Russia was beginning to be a distinct possibility. After painting the “Black Square” Malevich said that he didn't eat or sleep properly for a week, such was the importance he saw in his work. After viewing some paintings by Malevich for myself I realised that not only can you see into a new world in his work but this otherworldliness escapes into ours, and almost one hundred years old these paintings look remarkably contemporary. The five Malevich paintings, in the exhibition called “From Russia”, shown recently at the Royal Academy were as follows:

1. Suprematism, 1915. (fig, 2) 2. Peasant woman in two dimensions, 1915.

3. Black square, 1923. (fig, 29) 4. Black cross, 1923.(fig, 31) 5. Black circle 1923.(fig, 30)

The three paintings, Black square, Black cross and Black circle are painted on canvases just over a metre square, and are larger than what you expect or the impression you get from seeing them in a book. They have a powerful contrast not just because they are black and white, but also to the gallery space in which they are viewed, and are enigmatic regardless of their historical importance. All five of these paintings are usually housed in The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and were part of the “from Russia” exhibition that showcased French and Russian art from 1870 to 1925. The “Peasant woman in two dimensions” is much smaller and consists of an orange square on a white background and looks more like a preliminary piece in comparison to the others. “Suprematism”(fig, 2) as the name suggests embodies a fuller conception of the work designated Suprematist by Malevich. If you stand close to this painting it looks roughly painted, with a white background where pencil lines have been drawn and then coloured in using primary and sub-primary colours. If you stand back the strength of the composition “zing's” into play, and the dynamic of the sharp edged forms and resonant colours plays games with the light, creating a space exterior to the gallery and interior to the painting. The rectangular shapes have a relationship to the main picture size and progressively smaller shapes, mostly rectangles, make dimensional shifts that don't quite let you find representation in what you see. The nearest I got to seeing something representational were maybe things like Steel Girders, Farm Machinery, Tapestries or Wooden Boxes. The effect this dynamic painting has, could be explained as being, the closest place that pure abstract painting can get to representation without representing anything at all. Malevich called his coloured Suprematist work “Dynamic Suprematism” and it is an extension of his, (“Zero-Point”, as he calls them) earlier, black and white work. Here he further states his case:

“All pre-suprematist painting hitherto

and today, Sculpture, Word and Music

have been slaves to natural forms; they

await liberation in order to be able to

speak there own language” Malevich, 1915.

Malevich's early black and white “zero-point” work has to me the air of a sacrifice, maybe the sacrifice of something from another world. It resets cultural relationships and has a socio-political relativity to the role and purposes of art. It is also an assertion towards the power of art to transfigure and investigate its own problematic situations. Maybe as a mirror to our own world of appearances or “cheap appearances” as they are referred to in Victory over the Sun, they attempt to sacrifice the past and a shallow compulsion to interpret this world from only an empirical conciousness that rejects anything it cannot attribute to visibility.

6. Futurism, War, Revolution.

As history proved, the social engineers and political powers, didn't want this new invisibility of phenomena, that science was rapidly discovering, to be an instrument of art - with all its utopian idealism and creative liberation. They preferred war and global domination and would borrow from “art” anything that would help them overturn or forestall the thing that they feared most, which was Revolution. In a maybe rather obvious way this points the finger at Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto where the glorification of war is one of his many clarion calls. And it is true to say that Italian Futurism has been accused of supporting Fascism, where art is only about empowerment and the kind of liberation that is often to the detriment of mankind in general. Although I'm sure that it isn't as simple as that, you could put a compelling case in arguing that we live in a world where the underlying narrative has been, and still is Marinetti's. Walter Benjamin in his book Illuminations talks of Marinetti's rebellion against the branding of war as anti aesthetic: “Marinetti.... expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology..... (Mankind's) self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”(Benjamin, 1930s, p. 242). Marinetti is saying things like: “War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.”

(Benjamin, 1930s, p, 241) This is not before the horrors of the first world that he advocates such nihilism, but the Ethiopian colonial war of 1935, where Italy was involved in the scramble for control of North Africa, like many other European Nations. Compare this with what Malevich says about his art in 1919 in the catalogue of the Tenth State Exhibition, in Moscow: “At present man's path lies across space – across suprematism, the semaphore of colour in its fathomless depths. The blue sky has been conquered by the suprematist system, has been breached, and has passed into the white beyond as the true, real conception of eternity, and has therefore been liberated from the sky's coloured background.”(Bowlt, 1976, p. 144). When in 1914 Marinetti travelled to St Petersburg to meet his Russian Futurist counterparts he didn't receive a particularly friendly welcome although Malevich, Kulbin and Matiushin all Futurists showed professional respect to Marinetti as the first so called Futurist. But according to Charlotte Douglas: “Khlebnikov tried to distribute bitterly worded leaflets at one of Marietti's St Petersburg lectures, and Larionov recommended throwing rotten eggs.”(Douglas, 1976, p. 50). Charlotte Douglas also makes a distinction between the underlying theories of Kruchenykh and Marinetti: “The strong emotion responsible for the destruction of syntax was associated for the Italians with “wars and shipwrecks” for the Russians it was induced by their first glimpse of the living universe. Zaum, as it was expounded by Kruchenykh, was not based on disordered urban “madness,” but was rather a constructive principle by which one might achieve insights into ontological, if fearsome, reality.” (Douglas, 1976, p. 50).

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, changed the relationship between the artists and the Russian avant-garde to the new soviet governance, which was a new type of social system under Lenin. As the artists of the Russian avant-garde were part of this new social system, it changed their relationship to the rest of the world, with state backing, artists could imagine grand utopia's that could, to a certain extent, be sanctioned by the state as feasible goals and objectives.

7. Constructivism.

Suprematism was the invention of Kasimir Malevich and it is Malevich's theories that fix the philosophy and purposes of suprematism. In 1917 Malevich was named chairman to the Russian Nation Commission for Art which worked to reform the state academies of art after the revolution. Later on he was appointed as a teacher at the Vitebsk Art School which at that time was headed by Chagall, and here in Vitebsk he developed revolutionary techniques and ideas in teaching methods. One of his most notable students was El Lissitzky who was very interested in Malevich's theoretical philosophy of Suprematism. Lissitzky's work resembled the purely abstract work of suprematism, using primary colours and geometric shapes lissitzky came up with an enduring style, which would later be known as Constructivism. As the name suggests, Constuctivism has the added element of forms constructed and floating in space. Still using rectilinear shapes and strong straight lines he began experimenting with the idea that the Suprematist genre could extend into a 3rd dimension without loosing any of the transcendent qualities of the work of Malevich. Where for example Malevich talks of an added element in art and a “new visual environment”(Malevich, 1927, p.12) and the idea that the paintings depict feelings as opposed to depicting something physical or as “object”. Lissitszky slightly reformulated Kazimirs objectless world and introduced an unscaled formalisation of spacial elements. A rectilinear shape is therefore transformed into a cube, and we then have new forms and new interrelations between forms in a purely conceptual space. With the help of Malevich's portal into a liberated world of pure abstract shape and colour, we begin to see the crystallisation of form, in a limitless and transcendent universe. So what is this space? Is it theory that interpenetrates into the formal disciplines of painting, or is it painting that interpenetrates into the theoretical thinking of a scientific age? What I think we see in Lissitzky's work, especially his prouns (fig, 17, 18, 19, 21) is a symbolic representation of a de-materialised world, where forms have no mass, and are ethereal and transient. Later on with the work of both Malevich and lissitzky we find an architectural element or strata begin to emerge where the stylistic approach of suprematism and constructivism are adapted into architectural potential, notably Malevich's Architectonicmodels(fig, 23) and Lissitzky's models and drawings for exhibition pavilions and interiors,(fig, 20) of which some of the later were actually constructed.

Constructivism, and Malevich's architectonics supplied the new revolutionary government with ideas for Sculptures, architectural projects and social schemes. All the protagonist declarations of the avant-garde manifesto's could for once be more than just a call to action, they could be tested and legitimised. Books could be published, with constructivist graphic design, new ideas in art theory could be taught in art colleges new buildings designed and the infrastructure to a brave new world and a brave new society could begin to be envisioned and built. There is a problem, however when a style in painting is adapted into a style in Architecture especially a style that is transcendent and evokes a timeless universality. A transcendent universality in Architecture would have to take as its primary regulative factors the beingness of human interaction, interaction between humans, and humans with there environment, which is a diametric conceptual standpoint. Painting in its primary function only needs to take into consideration a viewer, and since the viewer can also be the painter, the process of adaptation is easily applied. As well as this you can change a painting half way through, even start again if it goes wrong, and each painting can reveal developments in an idea as its actual subject matter. Buildings have a defining purpose, and this is ultimately the only common denominating factor in architecture and it is this that runs counter to the immaterial or the object-less world. If there is such a thing as a transcendent universal in Architecture it belongs to the cultural and socio-political dimension of human habitation. To say that the work of Malevich and Lissitzky isn't relevant to Architecture is an obvious misconception, especially considering new techniques in construction that were developing at the beginning of the 20th Century. These building techniques were counter to the conservative establishments ideology, that, for all intents and purposes subscribed to either a classical ideal of the monumental, or an ethnocentric continuum. A certain number of the Russian Avant-garde developed there work in relation to architecture, this includes Rodchenko, Tatlin and Melnikov and apart from contributing to the International style developed a particularly Russian take on incorporating new technology, such as reinforced concrete and steel frames. Malevich talks about a Zero Point in painting which breaks with the historical continuum of painting, and likewise they look for this Zero point in Architecture. Malevich's earlier work and some of his later work did however depict scenes of peasant life, and has some of the kudos of icon painting within a modern era. It is maybe this work that would be better suited to architectural interpretation, although something of his philosophical theories of Suprematism had attached themselves to the brave new world of the Revolution, and were further developed by Lissitzky and others. Lissitzky said this about the encounter with the “old aesthetic” after the revolution:

“In this glorification of mechanical technology,

this revelation of the possibilities of well known

materials, there is more of value than just a powerful

reaction against the old aesthetics. The reaction

purely provides the impetus, the action must be

based on deeper foundations. The aim was to make

effective in architecture the entire energy which was

crystallized in the new painting...”(Lissitzky, 1967, p.370)

He further suggests: “a demand for new materials, but not a material fetishism”(Lissitzky, 1967, p.370). I would argue that what proceeds in architecture, in the broader context of the Modern

Movement is the fetishism of a particular type of form and space, which was the rectilinear and the subjugation of form (and space) to utilitarian construction techniques. It fitted new styles in painting, as did it fit new ideas in social theory, particularly ideas relating to bringing Socialism to the masses but it lacked a developed understanding of the depth and complexity of human habitation. To be fair to Lissitzky even though he was caught up in all the radical changes happening in architecture he was critical about new building as being “designed to meet the need of the moment” (Lissitzky, 1967, p. 371) and that “ modern architects in various countries have been fighting for some decades to establish a new techtonics.”(Lissitzky, 1967, p. 371). This suggests that Lissitzky believed that the same depth of thinking applied to painting should be applied to architecture, but what he doesn't do is realise that this depth of thinking in architecture would have to result in a break from his (and suprematisms) stylistic genre, as it would have to become, in theory, an independent field of enquiry.

ii) Conclusion.

What I think I have uncovered while researching and writing this essay is a persistent search by the Russian Avant-garde for something timeless in art, and outside any narrow definition. From a country that still had the vestiges of feudalism, and long traditions in Religious art, comes one of the most radical departures in painting, and theory, that the history of art had ever seen. More ironic still is the fact that it would be history that dealt them, and all the other new art groups in Europe a major blow in the form of a tragic set of circumstances that culminated in two world wars, revolution, the rise of fascism and the beginnings of the cold war. Some artists embraced war as we have seen with Marinetti's famous and some may argue cryptic manifesto, but most were bitterly against it, and many lost their lives or were badly injured. When in 1913 Malevich exhibited his famous Black Square painting the public and the critics were outraged, they called it Dead Square as it belonged to a theoretical framework that was not their own, and it pointed to a future that could never be judged by their conventions.

“I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished

myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art. I have destroyed

the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects, the horizon

ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature.”

Kasimir Malevich, (Bowlt, 1957, p. 118).

It was something of a paradox and also somehow entirely fitting that after a revolution, in a modern industrial nation such as Russia, a style of art such as Suprematism would be given the endorsement of the Soviet state. Fitting because the revolution was seen at the time, by many, as the beginning of a new age, and Suprematism the beginning of a new art. The problem is the paradox that it wasn't developed enough to trancend its grounding in theory as a philosophical standpoint in art, into all the material substance of the political equivalent of dialectic materialism.

Kazimir Malevich unlike many artists carried on living and working in the Soviet Union until the end of his life in 1935. His later painting re-discovered some of his earlier figurative subject matter of peasant life, and he wrote extensively on art and Suprematism.

iii) Bibliography:

Apollonio, Umbro, Ed. Futurist Manifestos. Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1930s.

Bowlt, John, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. Thames and Hudson, 1976.

Burger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-garde, Manchester University Press 1984.

Camilla, Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922. Thames and Hudson, 1962.

Caws, Mary, Manifesto. Bison Books, 2001.

Compton, Susan, The World Backwards, (Russian Futurist Books 1912-16) British Library, 1978.

Douglas, Charlotte, Swans of Other Worlds, (Kasimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in Russia) UMI Research Press, 1976.

Eagle, Herbert, and Lawton, Anna, Words in Revolution (Russian Futurist Manifestos 1912-1928)

New Academia Publishing, Washington, 1988.

Faerna, Jose Maria, Malevich, Cameo/Abrams, 1995.

Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover, 1914.

Kruchenykh, Alexei, Suicide Circus, (Selected Poems), Green Integer, 2001.

Lissitzky-Kuppers, Sophie, El Lissitzky, Thames and Hudson, 1967.

Malevich, Kasimir, The Non-Objective World. Paul Theobald, 1927.

Martin, Sylvia, Futurism. Taschen, 2005.

Milner, John, Malevich and the Art of Geometry, Yale University Press, 1996.

Osborn, Peter, Philosophy in Cultural Theory. Routledge, 2000.

Zhadova, Larissa, Malevich, (Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art 1910-1930)

Thames and Hudson, 1978.

Other sources:

Aiello, Thomas, Head-first Through the Hole in the Zero: Malevich's Suprematism, Khlebnikov's Futurism, and the Development of a Deconstructive Aesthetic, (1908-1919). (PDF) www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/E-Maj/issue_01/E-Maj_1_2005.htm-39k.

Charlotte Douglas at, The Malevich Society, Park Avenue, New York, malevichsociety@hotmail.com

Marx, Karl – Engels, Fredericks, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html 06/03/2008.

http://www.russianavantgard.com/Artists/goncharova/....08/04/2008.

http://www.gerrit-thomas-rietvelt.de/e/index/shtml .......25/03/2008.

El Lisstzky- Video, Leo Larez, M2T and VPTO Videofilm, Ruskin University Library, Cambridge.

759.088 LIS.

[surrealist34]

Russian Ceramicist 

[surrealist34]

Ideas on Abstract Art and Aesthetics

Ideas on Abstract Art and Aesthetics

Contextual Studies Essay

MA Printmaking

Matt Solomon

Introduction

In one of my sketch books is a paragraph written by me a few years ago, where I suggest that beautyor an aesthetic is the same as meaning, only a meaning that is unintelligible. My idea is that meaning is intrinsically linked to beauty or aesthetics (and in this case to the intangible) as meaning is still meaning whether we can or can not intellectualise it, or even understand it. Ask someone why they like a particular colour and they don't know why. Granted this meaning becomes highly subjective, but I also believe there is a false line between the objective and the subjective as one day something is subjective the next day it is objective or at least can be objectively studied. Human sense is a mysterious thing, for example, emotional responses are not scientifically discoverable, but it would be wrong to suggest it has no purpose or for that matter no meaning.

The Abstract and Figurative Spectrum

This realisation has consequences when considering abstract art, as there is no division between the subjective and the objective, one borrows from the other, and vice-versa. There are layers of meaning and therefore layers of aesthetics. A rough distinction can be made though using a polemic: Abstract art fixes the presence of itself to the actual physical manifestation of the work, whereas Figurative art fixes the presence of the image to the illusion it attempts to create, at least these are the two ends of the spectrum. But this distinction only shows the two extremes of what a work of art can not actually be, as all work to be properly comprehended as a work of art has to sit within this spectrum and never beyond it. The centre of a work of art sits between these two nodes, pure illusion and concrete physical presence. For example a Rembrandt portrait and a Carl Andre stack of bricks. The Rembrandt though could never be pure illusion as it would then be indistinguishable from reality itself, and the Carl Andre can never be a completely physical manifestation as ontologically it is subject to a particular persons perception and therefore is an experience of a manifestation and not an actual manifestation. The Rembrandt also has something of an abstract

physical dimension as does the Andre have an illusory dimension. You could also speak of surface qualities when looking at an old master, it has beauty, not as part of the illusion but on an abstract level, even the way the paint starts to deteriorate and crack is aesthetic. Similarly abstract art can sometimes evoke an illusion, for example Kandinsky's early abstracts look like a prediction of the coming first world war, were canons and armaments can be vaguely seen within them. A work of art may be heavily attached to either end of this spectrum, or combines points on it, but it is infused with the whole dynamic, it will always be layered with aesthetic meaning, have it's own unique aesthetic DNA.

End of the 20th Century

Can a movement in art be categorised or discovered by the way in which it layers it's aesthetics, or the way or mode by which it's aesthetics are assembled, performed or enacted? If we look at, for example the paintings of Picasso and Braque during their Cubist period there is a definite set of layers 1. The texture of the paint 2. The colours used 3. The landscape depicted 4. The shapes used 5. The context of the era. All these add up to a very particular aesthetic. Conceptual Art also has a very clear aesthetic, rigorously striped of ornamentation, words used in a way of explanation instead of paint, modern and natural sub aesthetic materials or poor materials, and a dislocation from the gallery space. For example if we look at a work of art by Joseph Beuys called End of the 20th Century we find what is to my mind a very beautiful work of art, but what is it that makes it so aesthetic, what are the layers of meaning, how can a pile of stones be so attractive, although I except it may be something personal to me, as it displays none of the more traditional notions of beauty.

The artist points towards the totality of the relationship between the physical incarnation of humanity and its total spirituality. He breaks through the barrier of the distorted perception of the world as relationships of specific matter, relationships such as those formed by the so-called exact, natural sciences. Joseph Beuys (Nairne, 1985, page, 96)

Taking the viewer into a space where he or she is confronted by mans total human spirituality is surely not an easy task. But I think Beuys here explains very well what we are dealing with, without saying that all art has this as its purpose, we can say that some art achieves this. The combination of sensory meaning combines as a vehicle that taps into our spirituality. With a work like End of the

20th Century we are dealing with 21 large basalt stones very roughly hewn into similar shapes, lying on the floor. It engages us with its sheer physicality and when I saw it at the Tate a few years ago dramatically conveys a kind of social unity. The only way I can explain this is that there seems to be a kind of physical allegory being played out, and this allegory is not just confined to the physical presence of the work itself but escapes solidly into the building holding it, as well as the social context in which the work is placed. I was reading about aesthetics and I found that a branch exists called Evolutionary Aesthetics, and I am wondering if there is something of that here as well, does this pile of stones bring to the surface something of our social history, stone has been used as a building material for millennia, evolutionary aesthetics suggests that we have a built in response to certain sensory inputs. Based on this theory, things like colour preference, preferred mate body ratios, shapes, emotional ties with objects, and many other aspects of the aesthetic experience can be tied with how we evolved.(Wikipedia search Aesthetics). We can see how this may effect our notions of beauty or aesthetics, for example if we see a painting of a landscape our reference is our actual instinct to survive, or a room full of basalt stones may evoke a social system that is more closely linked to our natural state as a human species or at least it may break through the barriers of distorted perception as in Beuys's proclamation above.

Beuys was interested in history and the origins of man and had a sense of a lost unity, the need for reconciliation between north and south, man and his past, and man and nature... he shared with the Zero group, and particularly Klein, the idea of art as a field of energy, and the objects of art as symbols of that energy. The existence and release of energy hidden in individuals was a basic principle for him, and helps to account for the significance of teaching and polemics in his life; releasing energy for social change was an ideal, and led to him adopting the -at first hearing- rather strange designation 'social sculpture' for his deeply subjective work. (Causey, 1998, page, 139 and 141.)

An artist as accomplished as Beuys may claim to of achieved this kind of energy release in his work but as we can see it is a very subjective and personal reaction he is working with. How his audience perceived it is even more difficult to measure, but I think his work and influence, was and is, very important to the development in the world of art, and the social systems which it has addressed.

Abstract minimalism

How does this concept on aesthetics stand up to scrutiny in the light of more minimal works of art, work by artists such as Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly. You can't deny that a painting by Ellsworth Kelly is aesthetic but what then is the meaning behind this aesthetic? Ellsworth uses large areas of flat colour, and in shapes with a very careful line, sometimes using custom shaped canvases. He rarely use more than two colours and often just one, simplification seems to be a strong element in his creative process. At first glance his paintings seem very simple but in reality they are pretty complicated especially when more than one is seen in a gallery environment. For a start, that much colour has a mesmeric effect and combined with his almost carved shapes, the paintings seem to float in a directionless void.

In a book on the writings and thoughts of Pablo Picasso I found this short expression about subject matter, it is from a telephone conversation with Pignon “The subject never scared me, I get an order I execute it. You can make fifty thousand abstract paintings, or others in that vein, or tachistes, even if the painting is green, well then! The subject is green. There is always a subject; it's a joke to suppress the subject, it's impossible. It's as if you said: 'do as if I weren't there.' Try it.” (Ashton, 1972, page 36)

Picasso sees ahead to the work of Ellsworth Kelly by pointing out, that a single colour alone can constitute the subject of a painting, and as he points out it is the actual subject-matter and therefore it's meaning. The meaning here, like an Ellsworth Kelly painting, is difficult to discover and can be probably better explained as a feeling. Although it is unintelligible, maybe it can be seen as a contrast to the world around it, aesthetic balance in contrast to a world in socio-political imbalance. It would certainly have value in that respect, anything would be of value that has this kind of cultural resonance.

I think time is necessary with my paintings, you have to live with them because they're about perception. A lot of people maybe feel, “Where's the content? But the content is the form, is the colour. That's not enough for people. They want Marilyn Monroe! But for me, I can never get to the end of this, visually. (Ellsworth Kelly, Art World Magazine, July 2009, page, 31.)

Conclusion

I found writing this essay very difficult, as it is dealing with something that can be seen to be very intangible. My theory that aesthetics is the same as meaning, or that it is intrinsically linked seems to stand up under closer analysis, and I will do some further research into it. I realise that trying to objectify something so subjective and transitory using theory alone would only continue to be more and more difficult, but it is something that can be investigated through sculpture, printmaking, painting, drawing and installation.

Bibliography

Ashton, Dore, (Picasso quote) Picasso on Art, A Selection of Views, Da Capo press, 1972.

Causey, Andrew, Sculpture Since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Nairne, Sandy, State of the Art, Ideas & Images in the 1980s, Chatto & Windus, 1987.

Other sourses

Art World Magazine, Ellsworth Kelly article, June/July, 2009.

Wikipedia, page, Aesthetics.

Photo, The End of the 20th Century, (by Joseph Beuys), Nairne, Sandy, State of the Art, Ideas & Images in the 80s, page, 99, Chatto & Windus, 1987.