THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE AS AN UNCONTROLLABLE BEAST
Dedicated to Barbara
I visited Kiev recently.
And there I ran into the Black Malevich Square!
Kiev is a totally gutted and pillaged city.
Like all the other cities in the world, in fact.
But Kiev looks like it has been bombed.
The government cliques and oligarchs have robbed the people blind.
The populace are like wraiths, rummaging about in the ruins.
The streets have been captured by corpulent automobiles, which maneuver like tanks.
They drive up onto pavements and prevent pedestrians from passing.
They barge along the highways, polluting the air and honking their horns.
They carry bandits, bankers and beauty queens.
And ordinary people move aside and shrink away, squealing.
They drink in nauseating cafés in order to forget their own negligibility.
It is as if the city has been occupied by a hostile army.
Nonetheless, I did meet one living, rebellious creature there.
And it was Black Malevich Square!
That was what I called the black cat with little white socks on its four paws.
Black Malevich Square is the cat’s first name, patronymic and surname.
This cat hid under the cars.
It was leading some kind of secret life there.
Possibly it was damaging these cars, putting them out of action.
Or perhaps it was sniffing the petrol to trigger its hallucinations.
It was using the petrol to stimulate its imagination!
In any case, it was clearly not knuckling under to the occupying authorities.
The occupying authorities wish to eradicate imagination.
The occupying authorities wish to control people’s thought and visions.
And neither does the Russian avant-garde knuckle under to history or museums.
The Russian avant-garde is a cat that defies any attempt to train it.
I think the avant-garde wanted to leave the human race and become a beast.
According to Nikolai Aseev, Kruchenykh turned into a jackal.
A jackal is an animal that cleanses the world of carrion.
And Igor Terentiev could leap like a cat, from standing, straight up onto the table.
Without the slightest effort!
Tatlin created the Letatlin flying machine in order to fly like an owl or a magpie.
Tatlin built the Letatlin in order to fly away from people.
And he was right!
Gilles Deleuze thought about that – about becoming a beast.
Mankind! It isn’t descended from a monkey, but from an ant.
That’s what Malevich said.
Mankind, according to the suprematist, had got mired down in labor and objectness.
“Objects are the concupiscence of the human kind,” Malevich noted down.
The goal of mankind is to transform forests into furniture.
Malevich despised labor.
He loved nature.
The Black Square is nature, it’s a beast!
Malevich wrote the treatise “Idleness as the real truth of mankind.”
Giorgio Agamben is very fond of this treatise.
It states that idleness is the highest condition of man.
It attacks both capitalism and socialism, which constrain man to labor.
Malevich says in this treatise that even machines should be as indolent as donkeys.
One day Malevich saw a book by Schopenhauer in a bookshop window.
The book was called The World as Will and Representation.
Malevich burst out laughing.
“Where there is will and representation, there is no world,” he said.
Malevich did not like the human will.
Will is directed towards the control of objects, he believed.
Will creates objectness.
But cats and buffaloes live in a state of objectlessness.
And Malevich had no respect for any kind of representation either.
To representations he counterposed cosmic objectlessness.
To representations he counterposed nothingness.
Malevich regarded all the “isms” of art as limited representations.
Malevich regarded “isms” as illnesses.
He wanted to organize the academy of art like a medical school.
Where all the “isms” would be studied as ailments.
In 1928 Malevich went to Kiev.
Where he wanted to teach the “isms” as sicknesses.
But he wasn’t allowed to do it.
Malevich also said that there is no conscious mind in suprematism.
Suprematism is free from reason. Like an animal!
In suprematism there is no constant pursuit of perfection.
Suprematism not only lies beyond the bounds of objectness, but beyond the bounds of invention.
Suprematism is based on excitement and excitation, like nature!
On excitation and sensation.
The world is objectless and only man wishes to objectify it.
That was what Kazimir Malevich thought.
And he also hated the state.
Moles and sparrows loathe it too.
And giraffes, and butterflies …
The mole, by the way, was Marx’s favorite animal.
And Malevich liked to keep away from human settlements, like a hedgehog or a moose.
He liked to sit under a solitary oak tree and gaze at the horizon.
Birds would come and perch in the tree.
Malevich said that people would eventually be the end of this “little ball.”
The “little ball,” of course, is the globe of the Earth.
Velimir Khlebnikov called himself Chairman of the Globe.
One day Khlebnikov retreated from mankind into the steppe, like a saiga antelope.
Or did he withdraw into the wilderness, like Jesus?
Like Khlebnikov, Jesus loved flowers and animals.
But mankind is bogged down in the mire of internecine war and slaughter.
Mankind has built prisons and put living creatures in them.
Khlebnikov hated zoos, where animals are incarcerated.
He wrote a poem about this – “The Menagerie.”
All the futurists wanted to become fish and swim away into the ocean.
Terentiev once composed a fish-poem.
There were no words in it, only bubbles.
As well as the stirring of gills.
And Khlebnikov wrote a poem consisting of nothing but punctuation marks.
The Russian futurists were not enthusiastic admirers of machines, like Marinetti.
Khlebnikov attacked Marinetti when the Italian came to Russia.
He though Marinetti was a swaggerer.
Khlebnikov was interest in water nymphs, not automobiles.
Water nymphs are girls who are turning into fish.
Khlebnikov himself wanted to turn into a constellation.
Walter Benjamin considered constellations to be the source of inspiration.
The Russian transrational poets used zaum, they didn’t want to speak in human language.
The Russian human language was wallowing in banality and bygonality.
That was what Kruchenykh thought.
Zaum is nonhuman Russian language: jaunty and objectless.
In zaum the words don’t descend on your head like axes.
Zaum has no need of oaths and vows.
Zaum is words flying like gnats.
Sometimes they bite, and sometimes they simply drone.
Zaum is words flying like fireflies, leaping like grasshoppers.
Zaum is words devoid of meaning, because meaning has become botchery.
The zaum poets didn’t want to write and publish literary compositions.
They constructed decompositions.
Ilya Zdanievich believed that all literature had been transformed into botchery.
All art is botchery.
Botchery is words intended for sugary goo-gooing and agitation.
Botchery is the whole of modern literature that caters to the needs of society.
Society, by the way, is also botchery. That is what the Tikkun thinks.
Instead of literature, we need droning, said Kruchenykh.
The droning must irritate men of letters and show them that they are fools.
Kruchenykh called himself a dronejurer.
He was not only a jackal, but also a mosquito.
And Mikhail Larionov invented the movement of rayonism in painting.
“Rayonism is almost the same as a mirage,” said Larionov.
A mirage appears in the scorching hot air of the desert.
Rayonism is what a camel sees in the desert.
It is not the objects that are important, but the rays of the sun as they are refracted.
And by the way, Pavel Florensky also pondered over mirages in Iconostasis.
Serge Sharshun considered octopuses to be more interesting than people.
Sharshun’s painting is the painting of an axolotl.
And Pavel Filonov cultivated his paintings like crystals
In the way that a leaf grows out of the bud.
Filonov also wanted to be a proletarian.
A proletarian is a new being growing out of the old mankind.
A proletarian is not a worker, but a thinker.
That is what Marx thought.
The Russian avant-gardists wanted to think!
In short, the avant-gardists were sick of mankind and all its works.
Jacques Camatte, by the way, also believed that mankind had lost its way.
That is why the avant-gardists loved geometry and wild animals.
The geometry of the Russian avant-garde is the right pathway to wild animals.
Long live the world, but not objects.
Long live the black cat with the little white socks!
Long live the cosmos!
To sense the cosmos – that is what the avant-gardists wanted to do.
To sense the cosmos means to be in a poetic state on Earth.
Long live idleness!
Idleness – the kind that cats have, or three-toed sloths, hanging from the trees?
Or is Malevich’s idleness something different?
Is it clear to you what idleness is?
If not, then read Malevich’s treatise.
Go to the primary sources.