‘I imagine a world of inexhaustible, unseen forms’
- Malevich, 1915¹

On a cold January morning in 1919, four years after Kasimir Malevich revealed his Black Square to the world, a red rectangle was raised above 60,000 human heads as they jostled to find space on Glasgow’s George Square.

This particular shape of human struggle, otherwise known as the Forty-Hour Strike or Bloody Friday ended in failure due, in most part, to an over zealous reaction by Whitehall to the perceived threat of Bolshivism unfurling successfully from Russia and Germany since the turn of the century. Soon, it was squeezing like the Red blob from factory and shipyard gates across most British port towns. Industrial conflicts, community-based protests and political developments established Glasgow’s reputation as the centre of working class struggle in Britain, at a time when the leading members of the British government were of the firm belief that Glasgow was in the grip of ‘revolutionary ferment’. The events of that Friday morning in January, earned the Bloody status when the police launched a baton charge against what was, up to a point a peaceful demonstration. The mood in the square changed almost immediately, waves of workers met the police batons with fists and bottles, forcing the police to retreat from the square².

For a brief time, while the police and army were receiving dictates from London, the square belonged to its people. As the pigeons perched contently shitting atop the bronzed heads of the country’s finest commanders and dignitaries, who knows what shape the mass formed below in those brief vertiginous moments of anticipation.

Soon, the City Sheriff appeared and attempted to read the Riot Act, which given the previous moments of unifying euphoria, proved futile as the crowd tore the Act from his hands as he was in the process of reading it. Carnage was soon to ensue as the mass poured out of George Square, into the surrounding streets and eventually to Glasgow Green. Nearby army barracks in Maryhill and surrounding areas refused to fight against their fellow Scots and it was probably around then that the colour fully drained from Robert Munro’s face (the then Secretary of State for Scotland). Over the next day 10,000 English troops were quickly despatched to Glasgow tooled up to the teeth with tanks, machine guns and howitzers with direct orders to ‘extinguish the revolution’. This, Scotland’s first mass picket ended under two weeks later, with the city’s civic spaces under siege the strike was called off with an agreement that guaranteed the workers a 47 hour working week – 10 hours less than they were working prior to the strike, and 7 hours more than what they fought for.

The aura of this event has seared its shape onto the delicate surface of the Scottish national psyche. Today, George Square has been covered with red tarmac many times over, essentially to provide space and adequate surfacing for commercial reasons. However it’s distinct colour, for most time-served Glasweigans, ruefully teases that latent bitter-sweet memory from ninety years ago. Indeed, it is a well traversed supposition that public spaces can be powerful repositories for the collective memory, however for most denizens, public squares have increasingly been the source for much ambivalence.

As civic spaces, public squares typify the heart of the Modern city where the rational of the grid paved the way for more efficient capitalist consumption and easier movement, particularly if and when required for authoritarian presence. It is widely known that the grid plan commonly attributed to Baron Haussmann’s modernisation of Paris in the late Nineteenth century was as much a reaction to public order as it was to sanitary or aesthetic motivations. Though the desire to control urban space and impose order in the early part of the twentieth century was not only a preoccupation of the modern urban planner, but increasingly of artists, poets and writers, who experienced the new geometry of urban-life as an inward space comprised of fragmented forms.

Malevich’s Black Square and the development of the Suprematist group marked a significant departure from the tyranny of representation within art. Now, this tyranny has neither volition nor function within the discourses of contemporary art practice, it has however, manifested within the canon of art history, presenting the self-aware contemporary artist with a tangle of theoretical and historical ideologies to navigate through. Such a discourse is articulated in the long-standing and prolific practice of the German artist Mischa Kuball. Approaching Kubball’s impressive back-catalogue, recurring motifs and themes point to an intellectually rigorous critique of public spaces and their political structures. Whatever image this conjures in the mind of a newcomer to Kuball’s practice will find that the formal manifestation of such rigour is surprisingly spiritual due in part to his tacit handling of collective ambivalence.

In Public Square³, a project-performance in Hamburg (2007), Kuball stages a personification of Malevich’s Black Square by dressing 500 participants in black and forming them into a square. This human painting then parades through the streets of the city holding banners with the phrase: “public sphere – every gesture in the city is politics”. A conflation of Malevich’s Square and the spectacle of mass uniformity seen in public protests, Public Square serves to illuminate the inherent vagaries of human movement. Viewed as a video-work, Kuball’s Public Square takes no time in undulating in and out of its standard geometric coordinates, shape-shifting one minute from a gloopy rectangle to a jaggy trapezium the next. A series of amorphous shapes yet unknown to science emerge and without trying we begin sense that it is these shapes, unlike the rigidity of the square, which are most redolent of human progress. This skilful balance of homage and critique for the Suprematist agenda is underpinned by Kuball’s intention to ‘show the amorphousness of a tolerant society’⁴.

The tension of this balance is played out in the evident bathos of human endeavour set precariously against the unyielding shape of Modernism. When Malevich asserted that ‘the square is a vivid and majestic newborn: the first step of pure creation in art’, he was alluding not only to the promise of potentialities the square form evokes, but also to the innate entropy a newborn entity presents (note the use of the word sphere Kuball uses for the banners). While he is evidently doffing his cap to both Malevich’s transcendental suprematism and his artistic ownership of the square form, Kuball is reasserting Black Square and grounding it within the ‘now’ through a context understood to be public and therefore vulnerable to all things irrational. The video documentation of Kuball’s Public Square, confounds expectation of the weighty rhetoric normally symptomatic of performance art documentation, whether through stills or descriptions of the event. Rather, the bathos is revealed by the time-based element of Public Square. After the camera retreats from an establishing aerial perspective, (when the ghost of Malevich is adequately indulged) point of view is then taken down and ‘inside’ to the human space of this public square. Against the sound of the participants repetitive primitive and undecipherable chant, there is also the quiet pulsing of convivial chat – who knew that squares would sound so ‘nice’?. There are flashes of legs and arms, a cat languishing over someone’s shoulder, a man wearing a vivid red t-shirt turns backwards into the onward march to chat to someone behind him, fragments of sunglasses, teeth, sandals, a moment of natural and unified quiet. Kuball pulls the camera back and once again we see Public Square as plan, the cat, sunglasses and the red T-shirt are lost, instead Kuball makes visible the rational functions of Hamburg’s streets, traffic flow, and signs. This telescopic device is jarring, and reminiscent of a low-level, somewhat paranoid experience of anxiety, one which Kuball weaves around the square motif highlighting it not only as a dominating political and cultural symbol, but also as source for a deeper almost primal mistrust of order.

A wilful misreading of dominant forms, is according to literary critic Harold Bloom’s central thesis in ‘The Anxiety of Influence: a theory of poetry’ ⁵, a necessity for the creative process. Bloom explores the ambiguous relationship artists have with their dominant precursors, suggesting that all ‘strong’ art is the result of a misreading, suggesting that artists are hindered in the creative process when under the weight of influence. Conversely, when this sense of anxiety is absent from living artists, then the creative outcome will tend to be ‘weak and derivative’ Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of ‘strong’ artists manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. The protection that this misinterpretation allows for the strong artist, he argues is that it allows for a clearing of ‘imaginative’ space free from the pressure of history. Of course, this summary of Blooms hypothesis is reductive to say the least, however it serves to highlight that the relationship between the artist and the source for her/his influence can be fundamental to the genesis of creative ideas. From this perspective, Malevich’s Black Square is understandably a source of anxiety for many artists. Iconic of the birth of Modernism, this small square signalled a seismic departure from representation and has become the universal symbol for everything that is avant-garde. Having experimented equally with the circle, the cruciform, and the rectangle, it is Malevich’s square that has seared its unnatural form into the improbable enclaves of the human psyche where, it now looms large in cultural imagination. Perhaps, it is the strength of Black Square and the dominance it exerts over the historical narrative of contemporary Western art that provokes such irresistible ambivalence from Kuball. His relentless reconfiguring of the Suprematist and Modernist agenda and it’s repression of subjectivity that is, for Kuball intensively combative, constantly experienced and actively felt. The anxiety and subsequent appropriation of Malevich’s iconic square within a public space is manifested in this instance surprisingly without solipsism. Maybe in the hands of a less experienced artist, such hijacking of this iconic symbol for Modernity would have been indulgent, arrogant even. However, Kuball, manages to rescue Malevich’s square from the institutional systems that sought so virulently to define and subsequently neuter it. By reframing Black Square into a uniquely human shape – one which is characterised by anomalies and anxieties, Public Square personifies the vulnerabilities we all inherently share when faced with a dominant form, whether that may be a political ideology, an urban rationale, or a dead Suprematist who will forever exert influence.

When confronted with the burden of an overbearing influence, a primal human instinct is to form into a mass. Safety in numbers usually guarantees a degree of protection and anonymity, however it also feels good. Regardless of the motivation, the desire to form a physical mass is primal and redolent of human progress, especially within a historical tradition. We are taught from an early age that being part of a mass is an edifying and necessary benchmark to measure socio-political development by, a presumption supported by the undeniable corporal energy experienced when in a large group. However, increasingly within a contemporary western context, public protest is a politically impotent method of expression. That’s not to say though, that its function is completely redundant as another form of expression. Instead, operating en masse performs the role of public spectacle (the public demonstrations against the war in Iraq put paid to that). Whether we mourn the passing of this method of radical collectively as an instigator of change or like Kuball we rescue it, confront and contort it to find a fresh volition which is simply in-and-of-itself. If the efficacy of protest is no longer contingent on the circumstances or situations likely to produce change, then art may well be the last voice of protest. This in itself presents the artist with tremendous responsibilities and with that comes new anxieties. If Kuball is right, then shape of progress is no longer square – it’s ouroboros.

Notes

¹ Malevich, K.S. Artist, Infinity, Suprematism Unpublished writings 1913-33. Vol. IV. Trsltd by Xenia Hoffmann, Ed Troels Andersen. Borgen Copenhagen 1978. p 9

² Online collection Glasgow Digital Library,maintained by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde [http://sites.scran.ac.uk/redclyde/rcevents.html. Accessed 4 April 2008]

³ To view the video of this performance, see www.mischakuball.com

⁴ Preece. R. The powerful emotion of light:Interview with Mischa Kuball.

⁵ Bloom, H. The Anxiety of Influence; The theory of poetry. 2nd Ed. 1997, Oxford University Press.

Selected Bibliography

…in progress, Mischa Kuball. Projects 1980-2007, Ed Florian Matzner. Published by Hatje Cantz, Germany

A map of misreading, Harold Bloom, NewYork Oxford University Press 1975

Red Square, Black Square; Organon for Revolutionary Imagination, Vladislv Todrov, State University of New York, 1995.

Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square’ and the Genesis of Suprematism 1907-1915, . Sherwin Simmons, Garland Publishing 1981.

Camillo Sitte: The birth of Modern City Planning: with a translation of the 1889.

Austrian Edition of his City Planning According to Artistic Principles, by Christiane Crasemann Collins, George R. Collins, and Camillo Sitte, Dover Books, 2006.

Notes

<p>1.) Malevich, K.S. Artist, Infinity, Suprematism Unpublished writings 1913-33. Vol. IV. Trsltd by Xenia Hoffmann, Ed Troels Andersen. Borgen Copenhagen 1978. p 9</p> <p>(2.) Online collection Glasgow Digital Library,maintained by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde [http://sites.scran.ac.uk/redclyde/rcevents.html. Accessed 4 April 2008]</p> <p>(3.) To view the video of this performance, see www.mischakuball.com</p> <p>(4.) Preece. R. The powerful emotion of light:Interview with Mischa Kuball.</p> <p>(5.) Bloom, H. The Anxiety of Influence; The theory of poetry. 2nd Ed. 1997, Oxford University Press.</p> <p>Selected Bibliography</p> <p>…in progress, Mischa Kuball. Projects 1980-2007, Ed Florian Matzner. Published by Hatje Cantz, Germany</p> <p>A map of misreading, Harold Bloom, NewYork Oxford University Press 1975</p> <p>Red Square, Black Square; Organon for Revolutionary Imagination, Vladislv Todrov, State University of New York, 1995.</p> <p>Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square’ and the Genesis of Suprematism 1907-1915, . Sherwin Simmons, Garland Publishing 1981.</p> <p>Camillo Sitte: The birth of Modern City Planning: with a translation of the 1889.</p> <p>Austrian Edition of his City Planning According to Artistic Principles, by Christiane Crasemann Collins, George R. Collins, and Camillo Sitte, Dover Books, 2006.</p>