Malevich and Soviet Memory
Malevich’s retrospective served as a performative historical argument not only about his personal identity but about the nature of Soviet identity overall. In 1929, Malevich still served Soviet interests as an internationally renowned artist.
He had received an unusual privilege to journey abroad to Warsaw and Berlin in 1927, where he had presented well-received exhibitions. His contributions to the development of the Soviet state in its earliest years as well as his foreign media acclaim placed him in a position whereby his career still mattered to Soviet national identity. In 1929, his personal history as a prominent pre-Revolutionary artist bolstered Soviet claims to cultural superiority.The reenactment of Malevich’s career thus served to remake his nation’s history, in addition to his own. His artworks served as tangible, purportedly archival connections to the pre-Soviet era and as documentation of the present era’s problematic continuity with the remaining vestiges of the past. Bangma reminds us that “memory is not simply something we have, as a transparent record of past experience, but rather something we do, in an act that does not merely reflect past reality ‘as it was’ but acts upon reality by organizing it and attaching specific meanings to it” (2005, p. 14). Malevich used his paintings and their false, or perhaps merely eccentric, dates to act upon the documentary evidence of a past, to organize his present reality by means of attaching revised meanings to his own past. He reconfigured his pre-Revolutionary past for the needs of his Stalinist-era audience in order to argue for his continued relevance within the evolving present.
Cultural theorist Mikhail Epstein (1995) has proposed that living in the Soviet era often elicited a sense of bifurcated temporality. Glimpses of an imagined utopian future jarred against uncomfortably familiar sensations of deja-vu.
Already by the late 1920s, the classless society of the future promised by the Revolution had all too frequently reverted to reconfigured versions of the tsarist past. Party officials received preferential access to state-controlled employment, residences, and luxury goods unavailable to everyone else (Gutkin, 1999). If the bright, shining future had already arrived by 1929, as Malevich’s colleagues such as Constantin Yuon and Alexander Gerasimov would paint in their proto-Socialist Realist images of ruddy-cheeked kolkhoznitsi (female collective farm workers), that future had somehow cruelly slipped out of the grip of the present.By inscribing his works with dates that long preceded their actual creation, Malevich participated in such temporal ambivalence, essentially creating works that were born “old.” These paintings’ time had purportedly long passed before they had ever existed. If, in his avant-garde, abstract Suprematist works from the years before and immediately after the October Revolution, Malevich had sought to step ahead of the march of culture and bring the future into the present, his antedated works from his 1929 exhibition represented an attempt to drag the present (works he had just recently made) back into his past. With his 1928-1929 paintings, he deliberately stepped behind the cultural trajectory, enacting the work of an arriere-garde, falling into a constructed aesthetic backwardness. Although he maintained links to original works from his past, Malevich’s counterfeit simulation of what might have happened in his career short-circuited reality, conforming to his personal interpretation of what could have been real—a curriculum vitae in the subjunctive mood. He retroactively placed his present-day creations into a fictionalized past, looking backward not to change the story of the present but to change the story of the past with more recently created objects.
Within this context, the tool of reenactment was briefly liberating.
Curator Robert Blackson (2007, p. 29) has contended that reenactment can provide participants with “emancipatory agency.” Indeed, Malevich’s retrospective provided the artist with a venue to express his understanding of his past within an art world context that was increasingly closed off to him. I believe that the performative utterance of his own history allowed him renewed control over his identity and the interpretation of his art after its vilification at the hands of AKhRR propagandists. He was able to retrieve his own agency, albeit for only a short moment—when his exhibition traveled to Kiev in 1930, it was quickly shut down and his art was confiscated by authorities—and propose narratives that opened spaces for alternatives to the increasingly dominant pejorative accounts.However, while Malevich’s reenactment of his career held liberating potential, its curatorial reception in the exhibition’s catalogue by the AKhRR critic Fedorov-Davydov manipulated the artist’s own false dates to quite different ends. While these dates might have provided Malevich with some agency to reestablish his identity on his own terms, the manipulation of those dates by the newly hired curator at the Tretiakov effectively removed that agency by cementing Malevich’s reenactment performance solidly in the distant past within a Marxist narrative that left no room for the emancipation of the avant-garde.