Page 34 - Studio International - June 1974

A-logical drawing c. 1915
Private collection

in addition texts by Matiouchine's wife - the knowledge beyond the subjective new teleology. Ouspenski's treatise elucidates
poetess Helina Guro - and Krouchenykh and understanding of the world, referring to the basis of this logical revolution, whose
Khlebnikov, as well as four reproductions Kant's philosophical definitions and the new meaning we attempt to understand today.
of remarkable futurist drawings by Kazimir scientific discoveries of Minkowski, who in 1908 Against the background of this feverish
Malevich and a lithograph on the cover.17c had just formulated the revolutionary concept and apocalyptic atmosphere, whose
Ouspenski's postulates on the movement of the new spatio-temporal continuum.17f The iconoclastic key is provided by Ouspenski, we
beyond the limits of traditional logic solid scientific knowledge, especially in can better understand the scenery, designed by
and those of language in particular, his mathematics, forming the basis of Ouspenski's Malevich for Victory over the Sun, scenery
prediction of a new art language and his thought, allows him to approach without where the image of the Black Square appears
insistence on the role of art - 'the only real prejudice, the concept of a 'fourth dimension for the first time. Among the designs for the
language of the future' - are only repeated in of consciousness' and human intellect. Moving scenery and the costumes for the 1913'8
his 1913 book, their first and decisive on from the famous book of Howard C. Hinton, production, there is a drawing of a square,
articulation having taken place in his masterful `The Fourth Dimension' (New York, 1904), he diagonally divided, one half white, the other
treatise of 1911, Tertium Organum. This himself wrote a book called `The Fourth black. In the margin of the sheet, Malevich
philosophical text, meriting a study far beyond Dimension' (St Petersburg 1909), where wrote 'square' (kvadrat). It is an idea for the
the limits of our introduction, can be philosophical questions, posed by the new curtain for the sixth tableau of the fifth act of
considered as an iconological mirror of the development in physics, received one of the the play, a curtain which was to be torn before
artistic revolution achieved by the Russian most remarkable philosophical commentaries. the action began. Can we be sure that the
futurists during 1913. From 1911, Inspired by a new concept of material existence, inscription 'square' is from 1913 and not later ?
Ouspenski's treatise predicted this revolution brought to light by discoveries in theoretical Should we see in it a conscious manifestation of
in thought by making explicit the fundamental physics, Ouspenski in 1911 defined the Suprematism ? It is difficult to reply always in
themes of a new vision of the world, resolutely problematic of Futurism by way of a kinetic the affirmative, for the rest of the scenery is in
opposed to objective reality, 'recognizable' vision of the world, reducing the independence Malevich's futurist style of 1913, the actors'
within the narrow limits of 'direct' perception, of time and space to a single denominator. This costumes being also made up of a multitude of
restrictions denounced by the cubists as 'retinal real conceptual revolution in the image of the geometric forms, more reminiscent of the
blindness'. Inspired by the writings of Howard world, of which Einstein's famous formula of `metallic' rigidity of his cubo-futurist paintings
C. Hinton,17d Ouspenski very discerningly relativity was to provide a definitive image only of the same period, than the 'pure' forms of
developed philosophical ideas which, while in 1916, is comparable to the scientific Suprematism as we know it from the 1915
being openly mystic, remain critical of the revolution which took place at the time of the paintings. Nonetheless, Malevich himself later
theosophical postulates of Madame Renaissance. It was to open to the human mind saw 1913, during the creation of this play, as
Blavatzky. radically new perspectives, whose logical the time of birth of the idea of a new painting;
His new conception of the world is strongly consequences Ouspenski assimilated with a it resulted from this victory over the old world,

opposed to the mechanical visions of the surprising lucidity. The old world of atomist whose symbolic conquest (psychological act of
atomists and stresses a new type of logic, refuting certainties and its logic of mechanical finality mythological transfiguration) is certainly
the illusion of 'observation' and with it that of postulating a world of material unities, reflected in the production of this cultural
`reality'. Ouspenski proclaims that there is no autonomous and suspended in a vacuum, psycho-drama, the scenic performance of
reality beyond personal consciousness, no disappeared like a child's toy, to give way to a Victory over the Sun.19
284