Kazimir Malevich

A slide projected in a darkened studio room, a name mentioned in passing, a stray reference in a crit that she does not let go of.

Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian avant-garde of the years surrounding the 1917 revolution.

Suprematism, constructivism, a moment when a small group of artists convinced themselves with the total conviction of people who believe history has just handed them a blank page, that painting could dispense with representation entirely, that a canvas could hold pure feeling in the form of pure geometry.

A red square floating against white, a black square against white, forms in tension, forms in flight, forms that refuse to sit still and obey gravity the way objects are supposed to.

She's transfixed.

It is difficult later for biographers and critics to fully reconstruct what that first encounter did to her, because so much of what follows in her career reads in retrospect as the slow unfolding of a single insight received in those London years, that architecture did not have to be a static gravity bound art of the vertical and horizontal.

That a building could behave the way Malevich's floating planes behaved, could exist in a state of dynamic suspension, could imply motion even while standing still, could refuse the right angle's tyranny without becoming chaos.

The Suprematists had painted worlds unmoored from Earth's pull.

Conceptually, tension can be created when putting subjects at odd with each other, whether in space, in time, or in relation to others.

The Black Square by Malevich is a small painting that is literally just a black square.

The interesting part of this artwork is the concept of it, the way it was exhibited high up in the corner of the gallery, representing where the icon would usually hang, and then also the sociopolitical environment of Russia at the time in which Malevich created The Black Square.

This is a podcast about comics and not cool early 20th century Russian art, so I can't go on my usual very long rant about The Black Square.

But yes, tension can be created conceptually as well.

We've got Noguchi opposite Nishapur from Iran.

Kazimir Malevich, one of his great teapots opposite Kate Malone, who's a great beloved English potter.

Donald Locke, interesting.

So here's someone who's very interesting.

How did you become interested in language as art? When I was growing up, my first sense of what art could be emerged through encounters with the written word.

What is the single artwork you feel has done that? Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, the painting opens up everything.

It's about as reductive as one can get.

It is literally a black square and I like the sheer of that sense of possibility.

And I mean, there are specific works that he makes.

There's one which is called Constructivist, which looks a bit like a kind of cross between a Malevich and a swastika.

And I think he's sort of thinking through...

Just this way in which abstraction is used as a way of forgetting the past.

And so for him to bring in the swastika while also bringing in Malevich is really powerful.

Later on, I'd say mainly after 1982, once he's done extensive travels, particularly to Australia, but also to places like Afghanistan and Sao Paulo.

And once, crucially, I think he's used photography a lot and film and thought through the kind of chemical development of those materials.

I think the early 20th century is a great template.

Picasso and Malevich and all these people, and Marionetti and so forth, and the shock of the new.

Air flight suddenly, automobiles suddenly, the advances in physics suddenly, and Einstein and all that.

They put that into their work, and that's why I find modernism to be still so stimulating.

You know, they have these ways of doing these things that you kind of stare at them, and I guess to some degree what Zaha did as well, I guess with the parametric where you imagine the computer helped you do that, but there has to be this vision that's so personal to you that maybe doesn't have wind analysis and sun analysis attached to it.

It's just this sort of like, you know, she also has this sort of Malevich, the Russian artist, that was her inspiration with these obscure paintings.

So that's where I got the confidence from.

They do their way, you just do your way and see how it goes.