In Part Whole: The Aesthetics of the Discrete

摘要

Let us start with a story. It was 1915 when Kazimir Severinovich Malevich attempted to paint an impossible painting and inadvertently ended up changing art forever. We will never really know what got into Malevich that day, when he got up in the morning, ventured into his studio and decided to start painting the Black Square. Art historians are perhaps better positioned to answer this, but for the sake of our story, we are for once not really going to listen to their ideas and theories. Let us just, as an experiment or maybe a joke, reconstruct what happened. During breakfast-typical Russian pancakes with tvorog, a local cottage cheese - he had already made a quick sketch of the square, in pencil, filling in the outlines with a rough hatch pattern. After having marked up the outlines of the square with a pencil and a ruler, standing in front of the canvas, an unexpected moment of hesitation came over him. 'Should I first mark the edges?', Malevich murmured, 'and then just infill the rest, maybe using parallel strokes? Or perhaps better to start in the middle and then spiral outwards?' In a slight panic, he sat down on a stool. 'I just want this square to be black,' he thought, 'no meaning, just black, zero, nothing'.