By Grace Schwindt
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Victory over the Sun, 1913, production still from a performance at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, during Art Basel, 2015.
In a new series, frieze invites artists to present a series of images that are important to them
Victory over the Sun, 1913
Even though Kazimir Malévich’s paintings have been crucial to the development of my practice, the second image for my Portfolio is a still from a recent reenactment of Victory over the Sun, a Russian Futurist opera that premiered in 1913 in Saint Petersburg.
Victory over the Sun was the result of a collaboration between poets Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, composer Mikhail Matyushin, and Malévich, who designed the set. Together, they invented a new world in a new language (‘zaum’), within which text, music and the art of painting merge through a process of deconstruction and reinvention.
The opera introduced the first of Malévich’s ‘Black Square’ paintings, a pivotal series and one that has provoked endless questions about the art of representation. Looking at these works, I am drawn to think about whether a blank square can be an image, whether a movement can be more than a gesture, and so on and so forth. For me, this is the key to much of Malévich’s work: the manner in which he thinks through what representation is and what it can be, and the way that he considers what abstraction means in relation to reality. In each painting, he insists on looking at the world with care, and as a result you are constantly pushed to imagine a new order that is not determined by cruelty or exclusion, but by honesty.
The third part of Grace Schwindt’s ‘Portfolio’ will be available tomorrow.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
