A few weeks ago, the artist Cauleen Smith asked why art historians had not responded to a recent revelation about Malevich’s famous painting, Black Square. It would appear that a rather embarrassing inscription has been found under its top layer of black paint: “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.” This iconic painting (and I choose the term “iconic” advisedly), understood as the ground zero of modern abstraction, the absolute reduction of content, a revolutionary ushering in of a new way of seeing, suddenly proclaims itself as fully representational in a way that harbors a crudely white supremacist (and not suprematist) joke.
It’s overdetermined, overwrought. To view a black painting as representational, in fact, you only need to imagine darkness. You don’t need the “battle of negroes” at all.
Assuming this inscription’s presence is confirmed, some of us art historians might still be inclined to treat the inscription as incidental to the painting’s achievement, a bit of an embarrassment but not one we really need to talk about. And yet, in a way, this revelation wasn’t necessary to start this conversation. The inscription, if present, must have come from a source that has a prior claim to being the harbinger of total abstraction, Paul Bilhaud’s 1882 “joke” painting Combat de nègres dans un tunnel, reproduced by Alphonse Allais in 1897 as Combat de nègres dans une cave, pendant la nuit: “Battle of negroes in a cave at night.” The Bilhaud/Allais images haven’t been taken seriously as setting out the stakes of absolute abstraction. But why not? Perhaps we should have considered them together with Malevich’s painting all along.
Modern painting up until Malevich’s square, even if it was not based in naturalistic representation, maintained at least an attenuated relationship between figure and ground, and it has seemed that Malevich’s square abolished that distinction by pushing abstraction to its limit. But the distinction had already been abolished in the 19th century, and not by cool geometry but by voluptuously ridiculous scenarios that dissolve into indifferentiation through freak chromatic accidents. “Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la mer Rouge”—Harvest of tomatoes by apoplectic cardinals by the Red Sea—presents an imagined scene of red-clad, red-faced individuals harvesting red fruit by the Red Sea. If actually, literally enacted, this scene would not, of course, look anything like a uniform red rectangle. To imagine it literally, we have to imagine a rather pathetic genre scene made even more pathetic by rhyming hues that would inevitably be an imperfect match. To be abstract the painting has to be imagined not as emptied of representation but, in its every inch, full of objects of the given color.
It may seem a tedious exercise to spell all this out in detail when the idea of the painting is obviously a stupid joke. But it matters because the joke “black” painting is actually different from the others. All light has been evacuated by the staging of the content at night and in a tunnel or in a cave; on a literal level it wouldn’t actually matter what color the figures are. And this makes the dehumanizing effect of the title even more offensive. Unlike most of the other figures in the series (cardinals in red robes, pale girls in communion dresses, military recruits in blue), the African bodies of the black painting are socially undifferentiated. They don’t, apparently, wear clothes, they don’t interact with objects, they do nothing but fight with one another, in the dark, and of the dark. They simply are their bodies, unseeable and unknowable. This reduction to darkness, not just the antiquated nomenclature of “negroes,” which could pass in some other circumstance, cements the racism of the phrase.
So what does this do to abstraction? Is this its condition? Does it necessarily rely on racism? No, of course not, not always. But how do these questions bump up against the long twentieth century’s critical debate about the politics of abstraction versus representation, where abstraction has often been held up as politically superior? Does the refusal of representation require a crude mockery of representation, of bodies, of difference? The white body—the figure, so central to French painting that a figure study was known as an “académie”— was the key unit of European representation for centuries leading up to the production of these works. But other bodies were always there. Think of how when Picasso needed to break free of classical modes of representation, he turned to African and Oceanic art. Squint and look at Manet’s Olympia as a study in light and dark—just in terms of the color of the paint—and consider what that does to Olympia’s servant, conjured in order to be abolished by the searing stripe of white on black. If we take seriously Carol Duncan’s argument about De Kooning’s Woman paintings, that the artist’s mode of abstraction is a form of violence to female bodies, indeed, that abstraction can serve as an erasure of the female body, then we have to take seriously what it has done, in various moments, to bodies of color. What is the difference between an occlusion or distortion of the body that operates to abolish difference in utopian ways and one that does so in oppressive ways?
These are questions for a longer set of reflections on another day. But without buying into the notion that abstraction is always about freedom—or resistance—I don’t deny it can operate on consciousness in liberatory ways. In 1966, Ed Bullins’s play The Theme is Blackness restaged Malevich without any figures: abstract, Black, and thoroughly political, and all about going inside oneself. Maybe this should be our starting point for modernism instead.
“SPEAKER: The theme of our drama tonight will be Blackness. Within Blackness One may discover all the self-illuminating universes in creation. And now BLACKNESS—.
(Lights go out for twenty minutes. Lights up.)
SPEAKER: Will Blackness please step out and take a curtain call?
(Lights Out.)
BLACKNESS”