Flavin Judd – Red/Black

Kazimir Malevich
Galerie Gmurzynska

Red
Flavin Judd
When Kazimir Malevich painted his first Suprematist paintings around
1913 he wanted to create a revolution. After making the first works he
held off showing them to the public until he had carefully orchestrated
the context for an unveiling to maximum effect. It was not simply a new
kind of painting that he wanted to introduce but a whole new way of
looking at the world. The art itself was just an example of what the new
vision should look like. He wanted to go to the zero, the foundation, of
figurative art and then go beyond it, go to the other side. He felt that
the vanishing point of traditional perspective was a demonstration of a
closed future of limited space leading nowhere and he wanted art that
was the reverse: unlimited, open.
The first of Malevich’s works derived from Cubism and
Futurism imported from Western Europe. While designing a set for
the opera “Victory over the Sun” in 1913 he reduced his previously
cubo-futuristic work into something resembling Suprematism: bold
squares and shapes that don’t directly represent anything. This was a
major breakthrough as the black rectangle was just itself. In Peircean
semiotic terms the painting was no longer an icon (a direct representation
of something, the portrait of a person) but the painting was now an
indexical sign (one that has a direct relationship: smoke to fire). The art
was the color, the shape and not the representation of a person formed
from them.
In Malevich’s case there was a strong context for the work
with modernist Russian poets leading the way and the traveling ideas of
cubism and futurism changing the way a small group of artists looked
at the world. Malevich’s art grew out of a whole milieu that existed
prior to the Revolution and a group effort to make art in a determined
direction. For the Constructivists art was a way of changing the world,
a movement forward that encompassed everything. Malevich clearly
stated that representational art was the past and that the future was
with abstraction and his painting of the spirit.
Under the Russian Czar the artists were more or less ignored
because the abstraction allowed them to be seen as non-political,
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abstraction was seen as childish and benign. This changed after the
Revolution when even abstract squares were seen as threats to Stalin.
Malevich’s idea, that art was not just pretty pictures but was a force, an
embodiment of energy, would later be smothered under the dictates of
a central government which wanted happy peasants and subservient
workers with collectively raised fists.
Malevich’s art lived up to his hyperbolic language and the
Suprematist and later the Constructivist styles would become the vanguard
of the political revolution that followed in their radical wake.
Malevich continued his radical work as the political situation worsened
and the central government dictated more and more what both artists
and citizens could and could not do. Malevich would work in both radical
and representational styles until his death in 1935 when he painted a
social realist self portrait in the state imposed style and signed it with
a small black square.
Read one way the history of Western art since 1930 or so
has been a dark age. De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Dadaists, Constructivists
all were either exiled, killed or swept aside. Their new way of thinking
was stamped out, sometimes forgotten, often ignored and their dystopia
made manifest by politicians, capitalist exploitation and war. The post
WWII art world can be seen as the dystopic vision the Constructivists
were warning us against. We have yet to recover, yet to meet them in
their radicalness, their vision. Radicalness of thought is not only a sign
of freedom but is a freedom, an inventiveness, a way of pushing against
the constraints of a given time. Possibly the lack of radical thought and
art today is a reflection of just how constrained both are today and how
far we have to go back to go forward again.
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Black
Flavin Judd
The two squares are neither squares, nor black. Malevich’s Black Square
is slightly brushy, gray in parts, not quite black in others and not quite a
square. Judd’s Untitled is seen as black at first glance but is really cold
rolled steel and not actually flat, the folded metal giving it a shallow
depth. Neither work is black, neither is square and in that they are united.
The word minimalism is easy because it’s a way of determining
something unknown, a way of limiting damage to conventions
and in the same way the Russian Constructivists, Suprematists, and
others are lumped together as one black, slightly unsquare square and
relegated to a filing cabinet of history. The radicality of Malevich’s
work made for a rough time, for ridicule, exile, and dismissal and while
this probably had an effect on him, it did not turn him away from what
he felt was important. There is much more to the so-called reductionist,
minimalist black square. Malevich worked in all forms: designing
stage sets, perfume bottles, children’s book illustrations, and dishes.
In his “architectons,” which he began making in 1923, he moved into
architecture and real space. It would be decades before the “center of
the art world” of New York caught up with the movements in Holland,
Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and France from fifty years prior.
In the intervening years politics and the fake ideologies of competing
governments used to control people made it hard to see the past and
kept it locked away in basements.
The history of art is a shell game according to the current
fashions, a mirror held up to the past for present occupations. For Judd
the discovery of Constructivist art was slow and in small pieces. The
Cold War kept art and ideas from migrating around the world, subjecting
culture to psychotic power games and making for islands of knowledge
without connections. When my father, sister, and I finally visited Melnikov’s
house in Moscow in January 1987 it was a revelation. Here was
a house that in 1929 was as radical in its day as was Malevich’s art. That
it survived was only through the hard work of people who understood
the importance of the art as opposed to the unimportance of political regimes.
The only way political regimes are remembered is either through
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arbarity or through art, otherwise they are forgotten. Or, possibly, like
Napoleon, they might be remembered for the metric system.
The superficial similarities in the squares of Judd and Malevich
are distanced when one understands the reasons behind them.
For Malevich the abstraction of art, the forgetting of the figure, was a
way to move towards a future of mankind. For Malevich the abstraction
of form and color was towards the biggest thing imaginable: a paradise
of the infinite, power, and spirit.
For Judd’s art it is the reverse. There is no spirit, there is no
infinite, there is just what is there, an empirical radicalness of art that
wants to go back to basics, to stones on a beach, not infinite, just existing
as it is. In this exhibition, Malevich’s grand designs and verbose metaphysics
are met by Judd’s specific locations and a knock on a table. For
Judd there is no possibility of a society beyond a small family; there is
no future that is not just a repetition of the power structure of the past;
there are things and there are people, the two are not the same and the
individuals have to project their own space.
For Malevich, the language provided the engine for his
art. The prevailing culture, the history of art, despite his dismissal of
it, provides the energy for his endeavor. Malevich is inventing a new
culture that responds to the prior Czarist culture that he grew up in.
He is inventing a way to the future that is steeped in revolutionary language
(before the revolution and before Lenin) that is a way of being
for people. For Judd this is not possible as it is all conditional and fake
promises. The prevailing culture is an endless mediocrity and the task
of the individual is to fight back by making an alternative. The culture is
not something that should be made for everybody, but for individuals to
make for themselves; there is no society, only a collection of individuals.
These are two different spheres or, rather, half spheres.
The area of activity for Malevich is that of culture as humans make it,
the language, the art, the way of making soup, the way of eating bread,
the tea in the afternoon in the dacha. Malevich is trying to make a
new culture for everybody and this is half of everything. He wants new
paintings, new buildings, new plates, new pillows. Malevich’s vision of
culture tells us what is valued and what is garbage and what is worth
looking at.
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The other side of this equation is the planet we are on, the
stars, the photons that make it all possible, all that would remain if
humans were to disappear. Take away the people, their buildings, their
plates and pillows and you have what? Nature: the water lapping on
water shaped rocks. This is actuality what Judd is interested in. While
he is interested in the many cultures of humans and how they do things,
the art he is making is art that he wants to remain like the stones, and
stars and photons. He wants art like facts, stones, and culture is not
concerned with facts but only beliefs. The rocks and water exist within
culture only as narratives and myth, and the myths are just what Judd
wants to eliminate.
So the two artists are working in two entirely opposite
demi-spheres and while they intersect (within us specifically) they are
two different worlds. If you put the two demi-spheres together you get
a whole. The cultural landscape overlays the actual and the tea in the
afternoon is sipped as the water shapes the rocks on the shore and the
photons get colder and redder. If you put Malevich and Judd together
you get both the new myths (the new culture) and the facts below your
feet. It is “everything at once” as Judd once described good art.
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JUDD / MALEVICH
curated by Flavin Judd
Editor:
Flavin Judd
Inception:
Isabelle Bscher
Texts by:
Donald Judd, Kazimir Malevich, Flavin Judd, Dr. Evgenia Petrova, Krystyna Gmurzynska
and Mathias Rastorfer, Rudi Fuchs
Kazimir Malevich texts are excerpted from “A Legacy Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian
Avant-garde. Palace Editions St. Petersburg 2002.”
Kazimir Malevich letters are excerpted from “Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche. Pis’ma. Dokumenty.
Vospominaniya. Kritika [Malevich on Himself. Contemporaries on Malevich. Letters. Documents. Memoirs.
Criticism], 2 vol (Moscow: RA, 2004).”
Donald Judd texts, © 2017 Judd Foundation
Flavin Judd texts, © Flavin Judd
Dr. Evgenia Petrova essay, © Dr. Evgenia Petrova
Creative Direction & Design:
Flavin Judd / Michael Dyer
Production Editors & Project Managers:
Verena Andric / David Khalat
Judd Photography Credits
Judd Foundation Archives; © Judd Foundation:
2, 107, 109, 115
Judd Foundation Archives; Charlie Rubin
© Judd Foundation: 15, 31, 112
Dia Art Foundation, New York, Gift of Louise
and Leonard Riggio; Don Stahl: 21
Judd Foundation Archives; Flavin Judd
© Judd Foundation: 12, 22/23, 55, 64, 110, 114
Judd Foundation Archives; Lauretta Vinciarelli
© Judd Foundation: 46
Judd Foundation Archives; Elizabeth Felicella + Esto © Judd Foundation: 47, 98/99
Judd Foundation Archives; Paul Katz
© Judd Foundation: 54
© Laura Wilson: 65
Galerie Gmurzynska;
1994: 101, 102, 103, 104, 105,108
Judd Foundation Archives; David Chan
© Judd Foundation: 111, 113
Judd Foundation Archives; Rainer Judd
© Judd Foundation: 116
Judd Foundation Archives; Sol Hashemi
© Judd Foundation: 117
128

FBM Studio, 1991: 120
Page 2:
Donald Judd, Marfa, TX, c. 1970s
Donald Judd works: © Judd Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York
© Judd Foundation / 2017, ProLitteris, Zurich
Malevich Photography Credits
Collection of State Russian Museum, St Petersburg: 17, 18, 20, 23, 31, 33, 36, 37, 39, 91
© The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
Galerie Gmurzynska Archives: 2, 14, 15, 19, 24, 25, 26, 40, 41, 44, 48, 54, 58, 64, 68, 74, 82, 89, 94, 98, 100, 108
© Galerie Gmurzynska
Publisher: Galerie Gmurzynska © 2017
ISBN
3-905792-35-4
978-3-905792-35-5
Printed by Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
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