Suprematism, Art, and Feeling (Part 1)

One of my favorite artists is Kasimir Malevich. He started a movement in 1913 that he dubbed Suprematism. It was an effort, on his part, to recapture what he considered to be the key purpose of art. The key purpose of art, according to Malevich, is to evoke a feeling using visual medium.

In Malevich's mind, however, the art of painting and art itself had been too over-crowded by "things." Artists, in his mind, should "cast aside (ideas, concepts, and objective structures) in order to heed pure feeling." The way that Malevich proposed to accomplish this was by removing objectivity, the conscious mind, and recognizable structures from his paintings.

One of the reasons that Malevich became so obsessed with this artistic campaign to recapture "pure feeling" was because he felt that for too many people the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling. For example, he wrote - "Is a milk bottle, then, the symbol of milk? Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things."

So why does all this stuff even matter? It matters because Malevich sensed that there had been a loss of this 'feeling' in art. The goal of many artists had become to paint an approximation of something. It was not concerned with evoking a feeling in the observer but in recording a moment in time or a "thing" through the medium of paint. A good example of how this perspective of art has continued to this day can be found in every new movie that comes out. The goal of every digital effects artist is to create a seamless digital effect. They don't want you to notice that it is there. They want to create such a perfect representation of "things" that we can't notice the difference between the real and the digital.

Malevich realized that art in its purest form was to be creative. Mankind had a desire and a "bubbling up" within him to create something. G.K. Chesterton, in his book, "The Everlasting Man" talks about this first desire and how we have records of it in cave paintings. Chesterton observed that every cave painting we have ever seen is not an "objective" representation of a horse or of the animals we so often find on ancient cave walls. Instead it is an artistic expression of those animals.

Many scholars speculate that this is because they were primitive men uncapable of approximating a real horse on a cave wall using handmade paints. Chesterton argued that in fact all we can derive from these cave paintings, in terms of meaning and significance, is that these so called "primitive" men were motivated from something within to be creative. He posited that these cavemen were in fact artists and painted the animals in the manner they did because they were being creative. Malevich would say that they were trying to capture and evoke that feeling of awe and wonder they experienced when they observed these amazing animals.

(to be continued in Part 2)