6
Becoming Revolutionary

On Russian Suprematism

Boris Groys

The central question that unavoidably dominates today’s thinking and speaking about the Russian avant-garde is the question addressing the relationship between artistic revolution and political revolution. Was the Russian avant-garde a collaborator, a co-producer of the October revolution? And if the answer is yes, can the Russian avant-garde function as inspiration and model for the contemporary art practices that try to transgress the borders of the art world, to become political, to change the dominating political and economical conditions of human existence, to put themselves in the service of the political or social revolution or, at least, of the political and social change?

Today, the political role of art is mostly seen as being twofold: (1) critique of the dominating political, economical, and art system, and (2) mobilization of the audience toward the change of this system through a Utopian promise. Now, if we look at the first, pre-revolutionary wave of the Russian avant-garde we do not find any of these aspects in its artistic practice. To criticize something one must somehow reproduce it—to present this criticized something together with the critique of it. But the Russian avant-garde wanted to be non-mimetic. One can say that Malevich’s Suprematist art was revolutionary but one would hardly be able to say that it was critical. The sound poetry of Alexei Kruchenykh was also non-mimetic and non-critical. These both most radical artistic practices of the Russian avant-garde were also non-participatory because to write sound poetry and to paint squares and triangles are obviously not the activities that would be especially attractive for the wider audiences. These activities also could not mobilize masses for the coming political revolution. In fact, such a mobilization can be reached only through the use of the modern and contemporary mass media like press, radio, cinema— or, today, through pop music and revolutionary design such as posters, slogans, twitter messages, etc. During the pre-revolutionary time the artists of the Russian avant-garde had, obviously, no access to these media—even if the scandals that their artistic activities have provoked were from time to time covered by the press.

One often speaks about the Russian revolutionary avant-garde meaning Russian avant-garde artistic practices of the 1920s. But, in fact, it is incorrect because in the 1920s Russian avantgarde was—artistically and politically—already in its post-revolutionary phase. Firstly, it developed further the artistic practices that have already emerged before the October revolution. And, secondly, it was practiced in the framework of the post-revolutionary Soviet state—as it was formed after the October revolution and the end of the Civil War—and was being supported and controlled by this state. Thus, one cannot speak of the Russian avant-garde at the Soviet time as being revolutionary in the usual sense of this word because the Russian avantgarde art was not directed against the status quo, against the dominating political and economical power structures. The Russian avant-garde of the Soviet period was not critical but affirmative in its attitude toward the post-revolutionary Soviet state, toward the post-revolutionary status quo. It was basically a conformist art. Thus, only the Russian pre-revolutionary avant-garde can be regarded today as being relevant for the contemporary situation—because the contemporary situation is obviously not the situation after the Socialist revolution. So speaking about the revolutionary character of the Russian avant-garde and relation between its pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary phases let us concentrate our attention on two main figures of Russian Surpematism—arguably, the most radical movement within Russian avant-garde. I mean here Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky.

1. Kazimir Malevish: Struggle against Nostalgia

As previously mentioned, one does not find in the art of the pre-revolutionary Russian avantgarde, including the art of Malevich, the characteristics that we tend to look for when we are speaking today about critical, politically engaged art that is able to mobilize the masses for the revolution—and help to change the world. Thus, the suspicion arises that Malevich’s famous Black Square is unrelated to any political and social revolution—that we have to do here with an artistic gesture that ultimately has its relevance only inside the artistic space. However, I would argue that if Malevich’s Black Square was not an active revolutionary gesture in a sense that it criticized the political status quo, or advertised a coming revolution, it was revolutionary in a much deeper sense. Then what is the revolution? It is not the process of building a new society— this is the goal of the post-revolutionary period—but, rather, a radical destruction of the existing society. However, to accept this revolutionary destruction is not an easy psychological operation. We tend to resist the radical forces of destruction, we tend to be compassionate and nostalgic toward our past—and maybe even more so toward our endangered present. Now the Russian avant-garde—as the early European avant-garde in general—was the strongest possible medicine against any kind of compassion and nostalgia. It accepted the total destruction of all the traditions of the European and Russian culture—traditions that were dear not only to the educated classes but also to the general population.

The Black Square of Malevich was the most radical gesture of this acceptance. It announced the death of any cultural nostalgia, of any sentimental attachment to the culture of the past. The Black Square was like an open window through which the revolutionary spirits of radical destruction could enter the space of culture and reduce it to the ashes. Indeed, a good example of Malevich’s own anti-nostalgic attitude can be found in his short but important text “On the Museum,” from 1919. At that time the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy of Soviet power by calling on the state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections because their destruction could open the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote:

Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy.

Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means:

The aim (of this pharmacy) will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art—a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).

(1)

Thus, Malevich proposes not to keep, not to save things that have to go, but to let them go without sentimentality and remorse. To let the dead bury their dead. This radical acceptance of the destructive work of time seems to be nihilistic at the first gaze. Malevich himself described his art as being based on nothingness.

But, in fact, at the core of this unsentimental attitude toward art of the past lies the faith in the indestructible character of art. The avant-garde of the first wave let the things—including things of art—go away because it believed that something always remains. And it looked for the things that remain—beyond any human attempt of conservation.

The avant-garde is often associated with the notion of progress—especially, the technological progress. But the avant-garde asked, rather, the following question: How could art continue under the conditions of the permanent destruction of cultural tradition and the familiar world that is characteristic for the modern age with its technological, political, and social revolutions. Or, to say it in different terms: how to resist the destructiveness of the progress. How to make art that would escape the permanent change – art that would be a-temporal, transhistorical. The avant-garde did not want to create art of the future – it wanted to create transtemporal art for all the times. Time and again one hears and reads that we need change, that our goal—also our goal in art—should be to change the status quo. But the change is our status quo. The permanent change is our only reality. We are living in the prison of the permanent change. To change the status quo we have to change the change—to escape from the prison of change. The true faith into the revolution paradoxically—or maybe not so paradoxically—presupposes the belief that the revolution has not the ability of total destruction, that something always survives even the most radical historical catastrophe. Only such a belief makes possible the unreserved acceptance of the revolution that was so characteristic for the Russian avant-garde.

Malevich often speaks in his writings about the materialism as the ultimate horizon of his thinking and art. Materialism means for Malevich the impossibility to stabilize any image throughout the historical change. Time and again Malevich contends that there is no isolated, secured, metaphysical, or spiritual space that could serve as a repository of the images immunized from the destructive forces operating in the material world. The fate of art cannot be different from the fate of any other things. Their common reality is disfiguration, dissolution, and disappearance in the flow of material forces and uncontrollable material processes. According to this view Malevich tells time and again the history of the new art from Cezanne, Cubism, Futurism up to his own Suprematism as a history of progressing disfiguration and destruction of the traditional image as it was born in the ancient Greece and developed through religious art and the Renaissance. Thus, the question arises: what can survive this work of permanent destruction?

Malevich’s answer to this question is immediately plausible: the image that survives the work of destruction is the image of destruction. Malevich undertakes the most radical reduction of the image (to the Black Square) that anticipates the most radical destruction of the traditional image by the material forces, by the power of time. Thus, for Malevich any destruction of art— be it past, present, or future—was welcomed because this act of destruction would necessarily produce an image of destruction. The destruction cannot destroy its own image. Of course, God can destroy the world without leaving a trace because God created the world out of nothingness. But if God is dead then an act of destruction without a visible trace, and without the image of destruction, is impossible. And through the act of radical artistic reduction this image of coming destruction can be anticipated here and now—an (anti)messianic image because it demonstrates that the end of the time will never come, that the material forces will be never stopped by any divine, transcendental, metaphysical power. Death of God means that no image can be infinitely stabilized—but it also means that no image can be totally destroyed.

But what has happened to the reductionist images of the early avant-garde after the victory of the October revolution, under the condition of the post-revolutionary state? Actually, any postrevolutionary situation is a deeply paradoxical one—because any attempt to continue the revolutionary impulse, to remain committed and faithful to the revolutionary event leads us necessarily to a danger to betray the revolution. The continuation of the revolution could be understood as its permanent radicalization, as its repetition—as the permanent revolution. But repetition of the revolution under the conditions of the post-revolutionary state could at the same time be easily understood as the counter-revolution—as an act of weakening and destabilizing the revolutionary achievements. On the other hand, the stabilization of the postrevolutionary order can be also easily interpreted as a betrayal of the revolution because the post-revolutionary stabilization unavoidably revives the tradition of the pre-revolutionary norms of stability and order. To live in this paradox becomes, as we know, a true adventure that historically only few revolutionary politicians survived.

The project of continuation of the artistic revolution is no less paradoxical. What does it mean to continue the avant-garde? To further repeat the forms of the avant-garde art? Such a strategy can be easily accused to value the letter of the revolutionary art over its spirit, to turn a revolutionary form into a pure decoration of power—or into a commodity. On the other hand, the rejection of the avant-garde artistic forms in the name of a new artistic revolution immediately leads to an artistic counter-revolution—as we saw in the example of the so-called postmodern art. Now the second wave of the Russian avant-garde tried to avoid this paradox by redefining the operation of reduction.

For the first wave of the avant-garde and, especially for Malevich, the operation of reduction served, which was made evident in the indestructability of art. Or, in other words: The demonstration of the indestructibility of the material world: every destruction is a material destruction and leaves traces. There is no fire without ashes—in other words, there is no divine fire of total annihilation. The Black Square remains non-transparent—because the material is non-transparent. The early avant-garde art—being radically materialistic—never believed in a possibility of a fully transparent, immaterial medium (like soul, or faith, or reason) that would allow us to see the “other world” when everything material that allegedly obscures this other world would be removed by the apocalyptic event. According to the avant-garde the only thing that we will be able to see in this case will be the apocalyptic event itself—that would look like a reductionist avant-garde artwork.

Thus, for Malevich the reduction of the past did not mean the promise of a Utopian future. Rather, such a promise was considered by Malevich as a new return to the past – to the old Christian promise of the Kingdom of God at the end of history. In his treatise “God is Not Cast Down” (2) Malevich draws a comparison between traditional Christianity and post-Christian secular Utopianism. This treatise was written in the same year, 1919, when the article on the Museum was written, which I have previously mentioned, but in this case the polemic was directed not against the conservative lovers of the past but against the Constructivist builders of the future. In this treatise Malevich states that the belief in the continuous perfectioning of the human condition through the industrial progress is of the same order as the Christian belief in the continuous perfectioning of the human soul. Both Christianity and Communism believe in a possibility of reaching the ultimate perfection, be it Kingdom of God or Communist Utopia. In this text Malevich begins to develop a certain line of argumentation that, as it seems to me, perfectly describes the situation of modern and contemporary art vis-à-vis the modern revolutionary project and contemporary attempts of politicization of art. In his later writings Malevich returns time and again to this line of argumentation—and I will keep these later writings also in mind by presenting here this main line of Malevich’s argumentation that I cannot describe here in full but can only summarize.

Namely, in this 1919 article, Malevich develops dialectics that can be characterized as dialectics of imperfection. As I have already said, Malevich defines both religion and modern technique (factory, as he says) as striving for perfection: perfection of the individual soul in the case of religion and perfection of the material world in the case of factory. According to Malevich both projects cannot be realized because their realization would require from an individual human being and the mankind as a whole an investment of infinite time, energy, and effort. But humans are mortal. Their time and energy are finite. And this finitude of the human existence prevents humanity from achieving any kind of perfection—be it spiritual or technical. As a mortal being man is doomed to remain forever imperfect. But why is this imperfection also a dialectical one? Because it is precisely this lack of time—the lack of time to achieve the perfection—that opens to humanity an infinite time perspective. Less than perfect means here more than perfect—because if we could have enough time to become perfect then the moment of achievement of the perfection would be the last moment of our existence; we would have no goal any more to exist further. Thus, it is our failure to achieve perfection that opens an infinite horizon of human and transhuman material existence. Priests and engineers, according to Malevich, are not capable of opening this horizon because they cannot abandon their pursuit of perfection—cannot relax, cannot accept imperfection and failure as their true fate. However, the artists can do that. They know that their bodies, their vision, and their art are not and cannot be truly perfect and healthy. Rather, they know themselves as being infected by the bacilli of change, illness, and death, as Malevich describes it in his later text on the additional element in painting and it is precisely these bacilli that at the same time are bacilli of art. (3) The artists, according to Malevich, should not immunize themselves against these bacilli but on the contrary accept them, to let them destroy the old, traditional art patterns. In a different form Malevich repeats here the metaphor of the ashes: The body of the artist dies but the bacilli of art survive the death of his body—and begin to infect the bodies of other artists. That is why Malevich actually believes in the transhistorical character of art. Art is material and materialist. And that means that art can always survive the end of all the purely idealist, metaphysical projects—be it Kingdom of God or Communism. The movement of material forces is non-teleological. As such it cannot reach its telos and come to an end.

In a certain sense these texts of Malevich remind one of the theory of violence that Walter Benjamin developed in his famous “Essay on the Violence” (1921) (4). In this essay, Benjamin distinguishes between mythical violence and divine violence. According to Benjamin the mythical violence is the violence of change—it is the violence that destroys one social order only to substitute it by a new and different social order. The divine violence is understood by Benjamin, on the contrary, as one that only destroys, undermines, brings any order to fall— beyond any possibility of the subsequent return to order. This divine violence is rather a materialist violence. Benjamin saw that himself. In his later “Notes on the Notion of History” (1940) (5) in which he tried to develop his own version of Historical Materialism, Benjamin famously evokes Klee’s image of the Angelus Novus who is carried by wind of history but has turned his back to the future and looks only toward the past. Benjamin describes Angelus Novus as seized by terror—as he sees that all the promises of the future become destroyed by the forces of history and turned to ruins. But why is Angelus Novus surprised and terrorized by this view to such an extent? Probably, because before he turned his back to the future he believed in the possibility of future realization of all the social, technical, and artistic projects.

However, Malevich is not an Angelus Novus; he is not shocked by what he sees in the rear window of his car. He does expect from the future only destruction—and so he is not surprised to see only ruins as this future comes. For Malevich there is no difference between future and past—it sees ruins in every direction. Thus, he remains relaxed and self-assured—never shocked, seized by terror, or even surprised. One can say that Malevich’s theory of art—as it was formulated in his polemics against the constructivists—is precisely an answer to the divine violence as it is described by Benjamin. The artist accepts this infinite violence and appropriates it, lets himself be infected by it. And lets this violence to infect, to destroy, to make ill his own art. Malevich presents history of art as a history of illness—of being infected by bacilli of divine violence that infiltrate and permanently destroy all human orders. In our time Malevich is often accused of allowing his art to be infected by the bacilli of figuration and even Socialist Realism during the Soviet period of his artistic practice. The writings of the same time explain the ambiguous attitude of Malevich toward the social, political, and artistic developments of his time: he has not invested any hope, any expectation of progress (that is also characteristic of his reaction to film etc.) in them but at the same time he accepted them as a necessary illness of time—and was ready to become infected, imperfect, and transitory. In fact, already his Suprematist images are imperfect, flowing, non-constructive—especially, if we compare them to, say, Mondrian’s paintings.

Thus, Malevich shows us what it means to be a revolutionary artist. It means to join the universal material flow that destroys all the temporary political and aesthetic orders. Here the goal is not the change—understood as a change from the existing, “bad” order to a new “good” order. Rather, the revolutionary art abandons all the goals, and enters the non-teleological, potentially infinite process that the artist cannot and does not want to bring to an end.

2. El Lissitzky: From Non-organized to Organizational Work

El Lissitzky occupies a unique position in the artistic avant-garde scene after the October revolution because he still understands himself and his method as Suprematist and not Constuctivist or Productivist. In other words, he still believes not merely in the autonomy but in the supremacy of art and does not let himself be involved as a simple worker in the construction of the new Soviet reality. However, it does not mean that he ignores this work of construction. Rather, he raises the claim that the work can be organized in such a way as to shape reality itself by artistic means. Lissitzky sees the Suprematism as having crossed the point zero of the old world toward a free creation of the new world—in accordance with the title of the exhibition in which Malevich has shown for the first time his Black Square and other Suprematist works. This title was “0.10” (1915) which indicated that 10 participating artists went through the point zero— through nothingness and death. Lissitzky sees himself also as one of the artists that went through the point zero—and he believes that on the other side of zero (or, one can say, other side of the mirror) one can create a new, completely artificial space and world of forms. (6) This belief is an effect of the October revolution. It seemed to many artists and theoreticians of that time that the Russian reality itself—including all its explicit and implicit contexts—was completely nullified by the revolution. The Russian reality went the same way that Suprematism did before it. There was no context for life and for art any longer. There was nothing to see through the Black Square, through the gap that was created by the break with nature and historical past. Art had to create its own context—the social and economic presuppositions for its own further functioning. In one of his texts Lissitzky compares Communism, understood by him as domination of organized, regulated labor with Suprematism understood as domination of creative, non-regulated, non-organized labor—and he expresses his conviction that in the future Communism will be left behind by Suprematism because creativity moves faster and functions more efficiently than regular work. (7) However, for Lissitzky, the non-organized labor is not a-social, purely individualistic art practice, but precisely the organizational work. The artist is not organized because he is an organizer. Specifically, the artist creates the space in which the organized, productive labor takes place.

In a certain sense, the Soviet artists had no other choice at the time other than to put forward such a total claim. The market, including the art market, was eliminated by the Communists. Artists were no longer confronted by private consumers and their aesthetic preferences, but by the state as a whole. Thus, for artists it was all or nothing. This situation is clearly reflected in the manifestos of Russian Constructivism. For example, in his programmatic text entitled “Constructivism,” Alexei Gan wrote:

Not to reflect, not to represent and not to interpret reality, but to really build and express the systematic tasks of the new class, the proletariat. Especially now, when the proletarian revolution has been victorious, and its destructive, creative movement is progressing along the iron rails into culture, which is organized according to a grand plan of social production, everyone—the master of color and line, the builder of space-volume forms and the organizer of mass productions—must all become constructors in the general work of the arming and moving of the many-millioned human masses. (8)

However, later Nikolai Tarabukin asserted in his then famous article “From the Easel to the Machine” that the Constructivist artist could not play a formative role in the process of actual social production. His role was rather that of a propagandist who defends and praises the beauty of industrial production and opens the public’s eyes to this beauty. (9) The artist, as described by Tarabukin, is someone who looks at the entirety of socialist production as a readymade—a kind of socialist Duchamp who exhibits socialist industry as a whole as something good and beautiful.

One can argue that it is precisely the strategy of Lissitzky in the late period of his artistic activity. In that period Lissitzky had concentrated his efforts more and more on the production of various kinds of exhibitions. In these exhibitions he tried to visualize the socio-political space in which the organized Soviet production took place. Or, in other words, he tried to make visible the organizational work that otherwise would remain hidden, invisible for the external spectator. To visualize the invisible is traditionally the main goal of art. Obviously, Lissitzky understood his exhibitions as spaces constructed by the curator-author—spaces in which the attention of the spectator was shifted from the exhibited objects to the organization of the exhibition space as such. In this respect, Lissitzky draws a difference between “passive” and “active” exhibitions—or, as we would say today, between traditional exhibitions and installations. (10) For Lissitzky passive exhibitions only demonstrate what was already done before. On the contrary, active exhibitions create completely new spaces in which the general idea of the exhibition is embodied—and in which the individual items function in a subsidiary role. Thus, Lissitzky argues that an exhibition of the Soviet architecture must be itself an embodiment of the Sovietness in architecture and all the elements of the exhibition, including its space, light etc., should be submitted to this goal. In other words, Lissitzky sees himself as a creator of the exhibition space that functions here as an extension and realization of his earlier PROUNS (proyekty utverzhdeniya novogo—projects for establishing of the new). Here the exhibition space becomes a heterotopian space, a term introduced by Michel Foucault. The “active exhibition” has not to merely illustrate and reproduce the development of reality and the socialist labor that creates a new society but, rather, to offer a project for designing the Soviet reality in its totality. On the one hand, here the organisational work by the Communist party is reconstructed and praised. But, on the other hand, the representation of the organized Communist work is aesthetically subjected by Lissitzky to the Suprematist interpretation of the installational space.

Thus, the road that was taken by Lissitzky was not the road of construction—but the road of organization. The Suprematist artist becomes a curator. Lissitzky does not want to produce things but wants to organize, connect, and exhibit them. Lissitzky operated inside the Soviet culture that saw the Soviet country as a huge installation space in which Communism should be installed and exhibited to the outside world. As an artist-curator Lissitzky collaborated with this Communist project but at the same time did not want to be merely a passive illustrator of this project. Rather, in his installations he tried to propose the organizational forms that could be used by the Soviet leadership in its own countrywide organizational practice. Thus, crossing the point zero the Russian Suprematism moved from the artwork to the art installation. This move is maybe the most lasting achievement of the Suprematist art.

References

1. Kazimir Malevich, “On the Museum”, in: K. Malevich, Essays on Art (trans. and ed.) Troels Andersen, vol. 1, New York, George Wittenborn, 1971, pp. 68–72.

2. Kazimir Malevich, “Bog ne skinut. Iskusstvo, Tserkov’, Fabrika” (God is not Cast Down. Art, Church, Factory) (1919), in: Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochineniy, vol. 1, Gileya, Moscow, 1995, pp. 236–265.

3. Kazimir Malevich, “Mir kak Bespredmetnost’” (World as Non-Objectivity) (1927), in: Kazimir Malevich, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 55–104.

4. Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt und Andere Aufsaetze”, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1999.

5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Pimlico, 1999, p. 245ff.

6. El Lissitzky, “Preodolenie iskusstva” (Overcoming of Art), 1921 in: El Lissitzky, Moscow, 1991, pp. 69–70.

7. El Lissitzky, “Suprematizm mirostroitel’stva” (Suprematism of the World-Building), 1920, in: El Lissitzky, op. cit., pp. 56–57.

8. Alexei Gan, “Constructivism”, in: Art and Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of the Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford, 1993, p. 320.

9. Nikolai Tarabukin, “From the Easel to the Machine”, in: Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Francis Fascina and Charles Harrison (eds), New York, 1982, pp. 135–142.

10. Sophie Lissytzky-Kueppers (ed.), El Lissitzky, Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften, Dresden, 1992, p. 366ff.