Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality

Chapter 5 Kazimir Malevich, Unovis, and the Poetics of Materiality

Maria Kokkori, Alexander Bouras and Irina Karasik

In 1921, Kazimir Malevich formulated a radically new understanding of materiality and the nature of creativity. He stated, ‘The new war on materials has been declared. Materials will be defeated by the production processes, and in the course of this war they will be transformed’.1 From 1920 to 1922 at the Vitebsk People’s Art School (Vitebskoe narodnoe khudozhestvennoe uchilishche) and later at the State Institute for Artistic Culture in Petrograd (Gosudarstvennyi institut khudozhestvennoi kul’tury – Ginkhuk), Malevich and the Unovis group investigated art through laboratory research, focusing on the ‘science of painting’ [zhivopisnaia nauka], as Malevich described it, and examining the painterly processes involved in the ‘new systems of art’.2 Cen- tral to their explorations was the study of faktura, in both its material and immaterial aspects, fusing the two and thus challenging preconceptions about its meaning, practice, purpose, essence, and use.3 When Malevich set up Unovis (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art) in early 1920 in Vitebsk, he deliberately set out to create a

1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Unovis’, Iskusstvo, 1 (Vitebsk, 1921): 9-10. 2 K. Malevich, O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve. Statika i skorost’. Ustanovlenie A [On New Systems in Art. Stasis and Speed. Resolution A] (Vitebsk: Unovis, 1919); reprinted in Kazimir Malevich, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, ed. Aleksandra Shatskikh (Moscow: Gileia, 1995), I: 153-183; English translation in K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1968), 1: 83-119. 3 For further discussions of faktura, see Vladimir Markov, Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh. Faktura (St. Petersburg: Izdanie obshchestva khudozhnikov ‘Soiuz Molodezhi’, 1914); A. Hanse-Löve, ‘Faktura, Fakturnost’, Russian Literature, XVII: 1 (1985): 29-38; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October, 30 (Fall 1984): 82-119; Maria Gough, ‘Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36 (Fall 1999): 32-59; Maria Kokkori and Alexander Bouras, ‘Charting Modernism: Malevich’s Re- search Tables’, in Achim Borchardt-Hume, ed., Kazimir Malevich (London: Tate Publishing, 2014), 164-195; A. Bouras, ‘Faktura utopii’, in ‘Khudozhestvennaia tekhnika i materialy v teorii i praktike russkogo avangarda’ (PhD Thesis, Moscow Architecture Institute, 2016); and Maria Kokkori and Alexander Bouras, ‘Metallic Factures: László Moholy-Nagy and Kazimir Male- vich’, Leonardo, L, 3 (June 2017): 287-291.

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004384989_007 106 Kokkori,BourasandKarasik new kind of artistic education with the broad aim of applying the principles of Suprematism to the work of designing a new world. Malevich and the Un- ovis collective, comprising El Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, Nina Kogan, Lazar Khidekel, Nikolai Suetin, Ilia Chashnik, Lev Iudin, as well as associates Gus- tav Klutsis (Gustavs Klucis) and Aleksei Kruchenykh, envisaged Suprematist experiments not as concrete manifestations, but as tentative steps towards a future that they imagined to be inescapable: as radical gestures, the presence of which would encourage a leap forward. These explorations were theoretical activities that shortly came to assume a ground-breaking strength and influ- ence over the creative energy of subsequent Avant-Gardes. The goal was the fulfillment of an unattainable promise, the advent of an all-encompassing art of form, space, faktura, and colour that would result in an ideal fusion between art, technology, and society. This was manifested in the artists’ collective projects and publications. These included the typewritten almanac, Uno- vis No. 1, which was produced in 1920 by Malevich and Lissitzky, along with a number of their students and colleagues. This publication presented the Uno- vis programme of cultural reforms in a series of essays and declarations on art, art teaching, the theatre, music, and poetry. The present essay discusses the Unovis group’s engagement with material through a reading of the artists’ reflections on the subject, as well as an anal- ysis of the origins and development of Suprematist ‘materials’ and a consid- eration of the strong links between these material explorations and Aleksei Kruchenykh’s poetry. These materials were not incorporated into the Supre- matist palette but were discussed as abstract ideas. Ultimately, the authors aim to illuminate how the members of the Unovis collective promoted themselves as belonging to a laboratory, where both staff and students worked experimen- tally and speculatively to materialise modernity.

The Material Spectrum: a New Taxonomy

Lev Iudin’s project at the Vitebsk People’s Art School on the spectrum of materials and their transformations is a striking example of the fusion of Suprema- tism and substance, technological advances and utopianism, abstraction and poetry. Lev Iudin (1904-41) was a student and colleague of Malevich. He grad- uated in 1922 and followed Malevich to Petrograd, where he worked alongside him at Ginkhuk (Fig. 5.1). Iudin’s diaries of 1921-22 record his work on Suprema- tism and often resemble exercise books. Iudin was very young, only 17 at the time, suggesting that all the concepts that he explored were actually formulated by Malevich. The diaries include brief summaries of several of Malevich’s lectures, outlines of specific experiments, details of the school’s curricula, and