Participants in the performance drew a “Black Square” with their bodies on the seashore

“MK” organized an action on the occasion of the birthday of Kazimir Malevich

145 years ago, on February 23, 1879, Kazimir Malevich was born. The same one who wrote the famous “Black Square” (and not even one, but four, and all different). But most importantly, he revolutionized art as a concept. A modern work is not just a beautiful picture, but a thought form, and what is important is not so much the execution as the meaning intended by the author. Even if this meaning is ornate, metaphorical and associative. This is exactly the dedication “Moskovsky Komsomolets” came up with on the occasion of Kazimir Severinovich’s birthday.

Five in the morning. Outside the window the sky is black, like a Malevich square. There’s still half an hour until dawn. Events will soon begin as part of the Yuri Bashmet Arts Festival, on the occasion of which the author of these lines found himself in Sochi. But despite this, photographer Sergei Karmeev and I decided on a “black square” action.

Bring with you a tripod, camera and smoke bomb. Before the athletes, of whom there are many in Sochi, started running and the fishermen came out to collect their catch, we decided to occupy a deserted piece of the beach and stage a performance in honor of the great artist-reformer. An action where the co-author is nature itself, and it was with nature that the legendary Suprematist conducted a dialogue. What is it like to be inside a black square, how to draw it with your own body – in motion? Let’s try it for ourselves.

So, a rocky beach is used as a canvas. The uniform is black. For good luck – a badge with a “Black Square” on a sweatshirt. Having marked the square with the help of stones, I “open” the smoke “brush”. There are no sparks from it – only figurative white smoke. I go around the square clockwise, because time is inexorable – it always flies forward, no matter what a person does. It was this idea that Malevich pondered in his programmatic work “The World as Non-Objectivity”, after he wrote his first square.

The artist came to the discovery of this simplest form, which, as it turns out later, is the smallest particle of any “window to the big world,” that is, an electronic screen (a pixel is the same as a square). In 1913, he worked on the scenery for the opera “Victory over the Sun” and painted the alien sun, which the local Byudelians want to defeat, in the shape of a black square. Man has been trying to conquer nature for a long time, but it is impossible. Nature needs to be realized.

According to Malevich, Nature is man’s teacher, it is “authenticity, performing the meaningless work of its manifestations without purpose and reason.” Why do flowers bloom? To die one day? To become something more? No, they just bloom, because that’s how nature works, life is a process. A movement that is the perfection to which art of all times has strived.

My wanderings around the “Black Square”, marked with pebbles, is also a process. I simulate all life situations – thoughts, torment, joy, sadness. The running turns into a soft step, then into a dance, then into a spin. This is pure meaningless, yet deliberate movement. According to Malevich. “The whirlwind of movement of thought illuminates the darkness of the future with lightning speed in order to see the practical conclusions hidden in it as the keys to the answers,” he wrote.

A minute and a half – and the smoke dried up. In the finale, I wrote in the air – Malevich. However, this is unlikely to be clear in the video. The treatment turns the white smoke into black and my black figure into a white, almost abstract one. Black color comes to life here, flows, flows, breathes, “works” in space. “Thought created the practical objective world,” wrote Malevich, and this dedication was also created by the power of thought. At the same time, “thought must also come to a pointless conclusion, defeating its empty run of compositions,” Malevich wrote next, and this is what our action came to. “By New Art we must understand pure, unidealized, non-objective action,” Malevich also wrote. Following his ideas, gleaned from his work “The World as Non-Objectivity,” we have a living black square. Where movement plays a leading role.