READING MalEvich
O. CAMY

“Throughout his life, Malevich
never stopped writing. Manifestos, articles followed one another. From 1920 to
1928, he even stopped painting to retire, he said, "in the new domain, for
me, of thought". For what purpose? It is that "with the brush, it is
not possible to obtain what one can obtain with the pen". Malevich then
writes his great treatise: Suprematism. The world as Objectlessness, Or
eternal Rest. Thus, Malevich is not only a painter but he is also a writer,
a thinker; it is therefore
essential to read him if one wants to gain an understanding of the
"objectless world", which appeared
to him during the production of his famous painting Black Square (1915).
Certainly,
his writings are often considered dense, obscure, even incoherent. This essay
aims to show that they reveal a unity of meaning and a logical order of
thought, constituting a doctrine, Suprematism. We will first propose an introduction
to this doctrine with great caution because of the power and originality of the
writings themselves.
The
interest of such an introduction is naturally of an aesthetic order: it
provides keys to interpret Malevich's painting (Suprematist and
"Post-Suprematist"). But there is an even more compelling reason that
justifies this doctrinal clarification: Malevich offers us a critique of the
modern world which has succumbed to the seduction of the object, in particular
the practical object; an object that tends to become needy, empty, and only
satisfies our “desire for satisfaction” (the “animal principle”). Abstraction,
in the sense of Malevich, therefore, stems from an artistic but also spiritual
experience which precisely frees us from the object, makes us enter a "new
reality", the "white world". Which is the condition for
"recovering the fund of man, freed from the beast". Thus, the
Suprematist doctrine appears as a doctrine for today”.
Contents
Foreword p. 5
I Prior
questions
A Why reading Malevich? p. 7
1. Malevich writer p. 9
2. Malevich thinker p. 13
3. Malevich art theorist p. 17
B. How to read Malevich? p. 19
Note on the writings of Malevich and their interpretation p. 24
II Elements of
philosophy
A. Object / World of Objects p. 28
B. Towards the Objectless World p. 43
1. From objective science to “pure science”
p. 46
2. Malevich Platonist? p. 51
Annex. Hesychasm and Malevich p. 63
C. A crossing of appearances? p. 68
1. The negative path p. 69
2. The esoteric way p.71
3. The Eastern Way p.73
Annex. The dimension of radical absence of the phenomenon in its
appearance p. 78
D. A phenomenology
of sensation p. 79
III Aesthetic
elements
A. Is Malevich an iconoclast or an
iconophile? p. 89
B. Is there a
post-suprematism? p. 99
1. The
temporality p. 106
2. The
combination of pictorial cultures p. 111
Appendix: A Policy of the Objectlessness? p. 129
Bibliography p.
136
Contents p. 142