I feel strongly compelled to comment on Adrienne Edwards’s reading on Malevich. I find that she didn’t so much read the painting, as much as put forth incomplete research to support an incredibly bold assertion. A discussion of Black Square appeared in her interview with November magazine, and again in a student’s colloquium presentation, which (no fault at all to the student), was even more watered down. The gist was that, during evaluation of the Black Square (Adrienne Edwards frames it as conservators “getting their hands on it”) conservators discovered a new layer of underpainting that bears a racist inscription. The line is pulled from an 1897 Alphonse Allais work for his April 1 Album on April Fool’s Day, which comprised seven monochrome rectangles alongside comic texts – and, evidently in the case of the black rectangle, reflecting the period’s normalized racism. Others included “Tomatoes being harvested by apoplectic cardinals on the shores of the Red Sea,” to accompany the red rectangle and an aphorism about anemic girls receiving first communion for the white rectangle.

In her research and curatorial practice, Adrienne Edwards rightfully pushes against the assumption that abstraction is neutral – that pure form can be relieved of political or social content, and that colors are just colors, and nothing more. For example, how is it that the black figure appears in painting, literature, culture, etc., but is never quite allowed to have a subjectivity in the way that their white counterparts are through the development of Enlightenment thinking, which, of course, emphasized autonomy and subjectivity formed through criticality? Instead, as Rizvana Bradley convincingly argues, the black figure often appears in these works to put whiteness and its social / ideological implications into relief. To further put this in the context of a colleague’s work, to focus one’s research on something like white skin in contemporary art is also, implicitly, to say something about blackness. These colors are not neutral – and this is where Rizvana through Fred Moten and Frantz Fanon begins to make interesting critiques of the phenomenological body, which are rather nuanced and I don’t need to get bogged down in here.

Still, Edwards’s discussion of Malevich rubbed the wrong way. I agree that to say that colors are just colors and that abstraction is neutral is a complete oversimplification. But for Adrienne Edwards to say that since the Black Square had this racist inscription in the underpainting, “My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one” AND “you can’t actually talk about abstraction without talking about the body” is also laden with oversimplification. Doesn’t this suggest that Malevich had inscribed figuration into his abstraction despite rigorous working of theory? And Malevich would purposefully undermine this rigor for the sake of a joke? I suppose we can toss aside questions of intention to observe what simply is. But Edwards’s critique isn’t so neutral as to simply state what is, or was – it’s also to impose a schematic, and incredibly politicized certainty on a work of art that, taken on its own, operates by offering absolutely nothing. 

Furthermore, when we do dig into the politics, history, and details of production of the painting, things get quite complicated. I am relying largely on Alexandra Shatskikh for this information who is the foremost Malevich scholar in the world and has also been vocally against the politics within Russian and Putinist-conforming institutions. In other words, someone who also sees the intertwining of abstraction and politics. Shatskikh points out that the inscription was not the only layer of underpainting. There was also a work of abstraction, in color, directly underneath Black Square, which after many years of exhibition, began to peek through the black surface. And yet, nothing about this lost work has led to any kind of re-evaluation of Black Square or its theoretical underpinnings. Furthermore, there is actually no evidence that Malevich was the person who wrote the inscription in the first place. Shatskikh describes in detail Malevich’s repulsion with Parisian cabaret and bohemian lowbrow culture, the milieu that produced the Alphonse Allais racist comic (which, in fact, he plagiarized from another artist). Furthermore, there is documentation that Malevich had written letters to the artist Mikhail Matiushin in June 1915, several months after the original 0, 10 exhibition with ideas on how he might continue to push Black Square from a theoretical standpoint. And furthermore, there is evidence that work by Malevich and Tatlin had been graffitied by visitors hostile to the work. Shatskikh’s absolute certainty that Malevich did not make the inscription himself gives me pause. But still, why should we take for granted that he did? There is even reason why Vakar would have pushed the iconoclastic headline. It is well known and documented that the historical avant-garde has been undermined by Putinist authoritarianism because it’s an aesthetic movement that provoked / provokes and inspired / inspires political instability. The museum’s exhibition to commemorate the revolution, which they called Nekto 1917 [Somebody 1917], essentially downplayed the revolution as a historical abberation. And this the critique that Shatskikh levels against the Tretyakov’s handling of their findings: that it was used to encourage a revised narrative about Malevich as unserious, racist, confused about his own theories.

Shatskikh believes that the work was vandalized at some point in its early exhibition history. To say that a racist philistine may have vandalized Black Square doesn’t lead me to suprising conclusions: in this scenario, the body and abstraction are intertwined in a way that reflects the non-neutrality of color within a larger culture + aesthetic regime. I take this idea, more or less, as a given and I think it would be very difficult to contest. It is far more radical to say that Malevich himself wrote the inscription because this suggests that a racialized body has been flowing through the very conceptualization and metabolizing of ideas within modernist abstraction since day 1. That non-representation never actually happened. This is essentially what Adrienne Edwards is telling us, and I think her argument needs more support.

I don’t think I’m splitting hairs by agreeing with her overall argument, but picking at her analysis of Malevich. I’m reminded of Latour’s essay and his distinction between “matters of concern” and “matters of fact.” I can’t look past the sloppy mobilization of facts in Edwards’s work, however. Once one part of the argument is discredited, I feel a need to very closely scrutinize every other part of the argument as well. As much the intellectual’s job is to not take arguments at face value, there also must be some basis of trust in each other’s work and integrity. I also want to point out that Edwards said incorrectly during her lecture that the curator Irina Vakar is working in Saint Petersburg, which made me cringe. When I want to get to profound matters of concern with disregard to reality, I read fiction and it serves me very well. When I read an academic text, I expect it to be well researched and grounded in facts.

Certainty is blindness. Negativity (as in, negative space) is blindness. Negativity is also akin to an uncertainty – a total lack of information. I think that is part of what attracts me so much to blindness as an impetus for reflection. It demands a humility in my engagement with the world and surroundings because it reminds me that certainty forecloses mystery and understanding. I think Edwards would do well to treat Malevich like Tatyana Tolstaya treats the Rembrandt painting, and like the blindman treats the icon in the church in Ravenna.