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Unframe Malevich!: ineffability and sublimity in Suprematism
Art Journal, Fall, 2004 by Branislav Jakovljevic
So, what do we learn from the disciples? First, that the Suprematist forms do not tolerate the constraints of textual structural features, such as linearity, syntax, or semantics. Second, that while Suprematism is inseparable from spatiality, its proper space is not the illusionist space of the painting, but the concrete space that surrounds it. Finally, that it is precisely because of his insistence on "art as such" that Malevich had to renegotiate and redefine the relation between the painting and the environment that surrounds it. The region of this intense negotiation is the painting's border. Close scrutiny of the extant photographic documentation of Malevich's works from the period 1915-35 reveals an intriguing and largely neglected fact: Suprematist canvases are left unframed. This absence of frames from Suprematist paintings is hardly accidental. It can be traced from Malevich's first public display of Suprematist works in the 1915 show 0.10 Last Futurist Exhibition, to his solo exhibitions in Berlin (1927) and Moscow (1929), to the paintings around his deathbed in his Leningrad apartment (1935). In the first of these exhibitions, Black Square, famously positioned in the corner of the gallery room, seems to lack even the thin molding that borders the same composition hung above the dead painter's head twenty years later. Molding, customarily used to distribute pressure on the canvas equally and prevent it from tearing, is the only frame that can be found on Suprematist works during Malevich'slifetime. Interestingly, while his backdated "post-Impressionist" works feature often elaborate frames, the Suprematist paintings, presumably from the same period, remain bare and frameless. The question of the frame is certainly not extra-aesthetic or extraphilosophical when it comes to Malevich's Suprematism. (32)
Meyer Schapiro suggests in his essay "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art" that the frame that completely surrounds an image ("a homogenous enclosure like a city wall") appears relatively recently in the history of art, and with the emergence of perspective painting in the Renaissance it changes from an external border to a windowlike "framing and focusing device placed between the observer and the image." (33) The frame has the effect of quotation marks: it hints that the image does not fully belong to the place it occupies. The skilled hand of an artist and the mathematically precise laws of perspective have transported the image from elsewhere, and it is to that nonexistent elsewhere that the image properly belongs. The picture is floated by the frame. This home-lessness is the price the picture has to pay for its own coherence. As long as the image represents an illusory but coherent elsewhere, the painting's actual surroundings remain irrelevant. However, the frame does more than equip the painting with a "framing and focusing device." It furnishes the picture with a permanent and ambulatory milieu. As the painting's environment in its own right, the frame always threatens to declare independence and secede from the painting it is supposed to guard. The result is not an empty frame, but the baroque frame full of itself: an elaborate, wide, ornamental frame, exaggerated to such an extent that its former host becomes no more than one of its details, albeit positioned in the privileged, central position. Or, conversely, the painting is deprived of the convenience of its traveling companion and is exposed to milieux of all sorts. Schapiro rightly points to the "frameless modern picture" as the prime example of this juxtaposition of painting with its environment: "If the painting once receded within the framed space, the canvas now stands out from the wall as an object in its own right, with a tangibly painted surface, whether of abstract themes or with a representation that is predominantly flat and shows the activity of the artist in the pronounced lines and strokes or the high arbitrariness of the selected forms and colors." (34)
