The Black Square

Malevich as Prophet

Kazimir Malevich, 1915, Black Suprematic Square

I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic Art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
—Kazimir Malevich

The truth of the modern world lies not in what is revealed to us but by what is hidden. The pre-modern world still exists: even in the midst of declining civilisation (past the zenith of culture, there is only the metropolis and its tyranny of greys, concrete, grids). There is still a tree outside the window (one looks past the plastic bags that attach to its branches).

The tree is subversive if one understands that the purpose of the degenerated Apollonian principle is to eliminate Nature, that is to say all that resists symmetry. All that exists cyclically—that comes into being, lives and dies—has, from the standpoint of dull order altogether too much vital force in it. The order of nature must be destroyed by the order of zero—an unnatural, alien force. We live in the order of zero, and have done for quite some time. Those who dwell in the violence and viscera of Nature are the obvious enemies of the ones for whom the Grey Square, lacking the pure feeling of the black, who detest countryfolk, farmers, animals, and the wilderness (who would like, instead, to build grey blocks and call them “The Wilderness”).

Representation—that is to say, the copying of God—was an adoration when it was not direct rivalry. The Church, opting in favour of icons against the iconoclastic tendencies of the East, loses control of the cascade of images which flow like a waterfall from the living body of Christ. These portals, however, escape their upward direction and can no longer be harnessed. Every thing becomes icon, sign. The thing itself becomes exhausted. There is no longer a way we see what is created and lives, and what has been made and never lives.

The more states pretend to control words, the more they silently admit that images have long escaped their grasp. It is an admission that what they would like to control, namely the image, has been beaten by the Black Square. From out of the Black Square, and displayed on Black Squares everywhere is the defeat of the imagination: whatever you can imagine already exists and can be seen. The power of the Black Square consists in you not seeing it but in its being seen through. The frame is the portal. We are only ever looking at the Black Square even, or especially, when we think we are seeing movement, “real” life.

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life") - Malevich

The black square or rectangle, a version of the same, is the true victor of the twentieth and twenty-first century, which are the same century. The square is, as Malevich says is “a living, regal infant”. The squares proliferate, giving birth not from the void (or the nothing) but from replication. The circle is defeated. The line of the horizon is defeated. The triangle lives on in esoteric rituals and the suspicion of schemes of which one is always the loser. The square-child is the new icon, the bounded, empty creator.

The black megalith of Kubrik, zen alien technology, becomes a pocket scrying machine. The face is no longer that which transmits the light of the creator, but a crime. The eyes, in particular, no longer windows but subject to the domination of the black square. Sight itself is post-representation. Seeing is on the side of history, and finished.

In 2020, the Black Square replicated a million times over, in a little joke of its own—Black (Square) Lives Matter—to remind us that it is the Ur-icon of modernity itself. The Black Square commanded a brief appearance, and the people complied. (In one of those ironies of history, five years earlier, a joke of Malevich’s was discovered scribbled under the top layer of one of his Black Squares (“Battle of negroes in a dark cave”)).

The Black Square does not announce itself as enemy, because it doesn’t need to, and because it is not exactly an enemy. It is the frame through which all things come to be, and to be seen, the moment we could not rest with an order which does not deal in squares. The Black Square nevertheless presents itself as a challenge: ⬛️ ⬛️ ⬛️

p.s. editing to add this, which came from Ted Gioia’s note. No doubt the DOJ’s software was directed to Black Square all female faces, but what an image.