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Thursday 18 July 2002 |
Malevich (Mal-yea-vitch) is necessarily one of my favorite Suprematist painters, since he was the only one around. The display of “Black Square” “number 2” pictured in the article does not fit the intended display he had in mind when he painted the piece. Every household in pre-industrial Russia had a painted icon of the family’s patron saint, revered and treasured over many generations, each possessor often adding adornments to it, some often having the icon stand as godparent to their children. These icons were always placed in a shelf in an upper corner of the house to watch over it.
Kasimir in his Suprematism essays wanted to place this big black square, one of the first abstract paintings, in that sacred space, so viewers would look up to where the traditional icons were and see this symbol of his new age, an age of Communism supreme. The Communists, though, wanted art of a more instructive bent, bourgeois sloganeering and happy workers smiling in a proletariat triumph.
And it really is not simply a black square; there are subtleties of paint layering and position against the white square of a canvas that differentiate it from someone stamping a black square on a sheet of paper and calling it “art.” He created several of these “Black Square”s, and created a number of abstract Suprematist paintings depicting geometric figures in flight. He may have done a Communist graphic novel about a red square against bourgeois figures, I don’t recall. I remember a piece that looks almost representational, with three peasant figures stooping for mowed grain.
From a Crate of Potatoes, a Noteworthy Gift Emerges. A version of Kasimir Malevich's "Black Square" was unveiled at St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum last month, bringing to a close a long saga in the history of the Russian avant-garde. By Sophia Kishkovsky. [from New York Times: Arts]
4:40:25 PM 
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TiVo Central has a Goldmember selection in support of the new movie. In it, Mike Myers looks really uncomfortable doing the TiVo advertisement that’s currently showing along with the long trailer and the Beyonce music video. He apppears to be using a teleprompter right below his line of vision, and the camera seems a bit too close for his comfort.
However, he does use a neologism I like: “TiVotée” (pronounced like “devotée”).
That’s a perfect term! I love it. I am a TiVotee!
2:06:06 AM
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Got lost in central Philadelphia trying to figure out how to get home. At least it wasn’t Girard Ave, but what a maze. Two hours to get home, forty-five of them wandering the tiny backstreet blocks in the tiny two-lane one-way streets trying not to collide with cars as the girls pass by! Worse was that getting lost was so stressful, and getting onto 95 was such a relief, that I felt in danger of sleeping at the wheel the whole way back, possibly a response to the comedown in epinephrine. I made it back though.
1:55:19 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Richard Allan Baruz.
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This is a personal weblog; that is, it is in no way affiliated nor connected with the company for which I work, nor the clients to whom I am contracted.
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