[Nettime-nl] Maximalism meets Minimalism Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam immersion into a black Malevich square by Queen Maxima

[Tjebbe van Tijen via Chello <t.tijen@chello.nl>]

Maximalism meets Minimalism Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam immersion into a black Malevich square by Queen Maxima & the 1915 Manifesto by Kazimir Malevich

This is the link to my picture on which this text is based
http://flic.kr/p/gSKibF

'Chiffon' hat meets 'craquelé' painting or the recuperation (appropriation) of a revolutionary concept, when royals open exhibitions of the work of revolutionary artists and all intend is commodified into just an aesthetic experience. Or would Queen Maxima have had a real knowledge of the 'the intend' of Kazimir Malevich when he made his Suprematist paintings. 

Does she know his 1915 manifesto in which he writes: "The square is a living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art"? Does that explain the way Maxima had a close look during her round of all the works on display in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam?

Was she ready to take the risk, by getting so close at this revolution in painting, as Malevich explains: "Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a grin jut out. A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life, and this allusion is only a reminder of the living."

Maxima did survive this opening celebration, but what went on in her mind, may be haunting her for the rest of her days. She must have heard the voice of Malevich sipping through the craquelé of his paintings and his radical statement from a time that was full of revolutionary turmoil at the end of the royal reign over Russia: "I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit."

Hereby a selection from the famous 1915 Malevich Manifesto "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting"

-----
"Only with the disappearance of a habit of mind which sees in pictures little corners of nature, Madonnas and shameless Venuses, shall we witness a work of pure, living art."
[p.1]

"Things have disappeared like smoke; to gain the new artistic culture, art approaches creation as an end in itself and domination over the forms of nature."
[p.1]

"Thus they are unable to see the new beauty of our modern life. For they live be the beauty of past ages."
[p.2]

"And I say: That no torture-chamber of the Academies can withstand the passage of time. Forms move and are born, and we make newer and newer discoveries. And what I reveal to you, do not conceal. And it is absurd to force our age into the old forms of time past"
[p.2]

"But can cowards spit on their idols. Like we did yesterday!!! I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit. [. . .]"
[p.3]

"Now it is necessary to give the body shape and lend it a living form in real life. And this will be when forms emerge from the mass of the painting; that is, they will arise in the same way that utilitarian forms arose. Such forms will not be copies of living things in life, but will themselves be a living thing. A painted surface is a real, living form."
[p.6]

"If for thousands of years past the artist has tried to approach the depiction of an object as closely as possible, to present its essence and meaning, then in our era of Cubism the artist has destroyed objects together with their meaning, essence and purpose. The new picture has sprung from their fragments. Objects have vanished like smoke, for the sake of the new culture of art."
[p.8]

"The square is not a subconscious form. It is the creation of intuitive reason. It is the face of the new art. The square is a living, royal infant. It is the first step of pure creation in art. Before it, there were naive deformities and copies of nature. Our world of art has become new, non-objective, pure. Everything has vanished, there remains a mass of material, from which the new forms will he built."
[p.8]

"Any painting surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a grin jut out. A face painted in a picture gives a pitiful parody of life, and this allusion is only a reminder of the living. But a surface lives, it has been born. The grave reminds us of a dead person, a picture of a living one."
[p.8]

"I have arrived at the surface and can take the dimension of a living body. But I shall use the dimension from which I shall create the new. I have released all the birds from the eternal cage, and opened the gates to the animals in zoological gardens. May they tear to pieces and devour the remains of your art. And may the freed bear bathe his body in the ice of the frozen north and not languish in the aquarium of boiled water in the academic garden. You may delight in the composition of a painting, but surely composition is the sentence of death to a figure condemned by the artist to an eternal pose. Your delight is the confirmation of this sentence."
[p.9]

"I say to all: reject love, reject aestheticism, reject the trunks of wisdom, for in the new culture your wisdom is laughable and insignificant. I have united the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of color! Remove from yourselves quickly the hardened skin of centuries, so that you may catch us up the more easily. I have overcome the impossible and formed gulfs with my breathing. You are in the nets of the horizon, like fish! We, Suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognize us."
[p.10]

Kazimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting (1915): <a href="http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/ConstrBau/Readings/MlevchSupr.pdf"; rel="nofollow">www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/ConstrBau/Readings/MlevchSupr.pdf</a>

The link is a scan from the standard work on Art Theory:
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood. 2003. Art in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.; p173-183)
For availability in a local library see worldcat.org
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/49260988
===========

- inspirational news picture has this caption: "Netherlands' Queen Maxima looks at a painting of Russian avant-garde painter Malevich during the official opening of the exhibition at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Friday Oct. 18, 2013. A string of diplomatic incidents is putting a severe strain on the relationship between the Netherlands and Russia, one of its major trading partners. The Dutch royal couple is scheduled to visit Russia on Nov. 9, 2013. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)"
http://www.gosanangelo.com/photos/galleries/2013/oct/18/top-photos-oct-18-2013/30005/

If you like the picture with the black polygons and yellow dot, you can have it reproduced by hand for just over $400,- in China (it comes without the original craquelé though) via this web site that offers: "Hand painted oil painting reproduction on canvas of Suprematism 1915 8 by artist Kazimir Malevich as gift or decoration by customer order." How would Malevich have reacted to this Chinese mimicry and what about Walther Benjamin and his discourse "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", published in 1936? I hope that the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has procured a few of these copies as a necessary documentation of reappearance of the manual art in the age of digital reproduction (or is this Chinese firm faking it and does the painting not come of one of the manual reproduction centres of art in China, but from a printing machine with 3D capacity?)
http://www.chinaoilpaintinggallery.com/k-kazimir-malevich-c-58_77_1437/suprematism-1915-8-p-35224


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