Repainting and/as Reenactment
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2002, p. 559) has insisted that Malevich was involved in the first (1920) enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace spectacle; however, it is highly unlikely that the artist had any hand in its organization.
In 1920, Malevich was hundreds of miles away from Petrograd in the Belarusian Soviet Republic. His letters from October and November 1920 all come from the Belarusian city of Vitebsk, where he was establishing an avant-garde art school despite deplorable conditions and imminent danger from the ongoing war. Malevich (1920, reprinted in Vakar and Mikhienko 2015, vol. 1, p. 132) wrote a plea to his colleague David Shterenberg in Moscow on October 5th, 1920, regarding the Polish push into Russian territories: “The troops and the sick are being evacuated, we cannot even gather everything up. In case we cannot evacuate on our own and end up being cut off, please do not forget my family.” The latter comment referred to his wife and six-month-old daughter, who had been separated from him due to the exigencies of the civil war. Shortly after this letter, the two warring sides declared a ceasefire, and he returned briefly to Moscow, near where his wife and daughter were residing, for a lecture in mid-November (Vakar and Mikhienko, 2015, vol. 1, p. 133). Nonetheless, he was neither involved in the cultural arena in Petrograd nor physically anywhere near the city during the Civil War.By 1927, Malevich was living in the city now renamed Leningrad, and it is at this later date that he most likely would have had his first full experience of the Storming of the Winter Palace reenactment. It is worth noting that the primary early documentation of this yearly reenactment can be found in Sergei Eisenstein’s film October (1927), which included clips of the 1927 Storming of the Winter Palace spectacle. The 1927 event, on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, effectively reenacted the 1920 monumental public spectacle.
In other words, 1927’s Storming was a reenactment not of the 1917 event itself but rather of the Soviet political pageant staged seven years prior under the guise of a historical reenactment of Revolutionary events.When he was creating his 1928-1929 body of work, Malevich’s understanding of reenactment as historical practice would have been heavily inflected by the Storming of the Winter Palace reenactment—not the first 1920 iteration, but Eisenstein’s documentation of the tenth anniversary event. Like most of his contemporaries in the final two years of the 1920s, Malevich would have had Eisenstein’s imagery fresh in his mind. Russian cultural historian James von Geldern (1993, p. 2) has observed that Eisenstein’s “embellishments” on the historical narrative of the Storming of the Winter Palace, “far from detracting from the event,... improved on it, focused it, and, for many contemporaries, made it seem more truthful than before.” Eisenstein’s work demonstrates an attitude toward the manipulation of history that pervaded Soviet culture during this moment.
As Malevich had been in the city at the time of the 1927 Storming staging and circulated in the same intellectual circles as Eisenstein at the time, such attitudes toward the representation of history may have inflected his own understanding of memory making in his peculiar historical moment. The two enterprises reflected a shared orientation toward the nature of history and narrative as self-consciously malleable and permeable to the intentions and needs of the present moment. Within this context, any actor with a public platform might proffer alternative narratives of history, and Malevich took full advantage of the privilege afforded by his retrospective. The Tretiakov’s institutional platform permitted him to communicate his revised personal narrative to a broad public.
A distinct difference between the Storming of the Winter Palace spectacle and Malevich’s exhibition, one might argue, was that the former was a staged performance of actions, whereas the latter was not.
Nonetheless, I argue that both events can be described as performative, in the sense of the term as defined by the original theorists of performativity studies, John Searle (1975) and J. L. Austin (1962). In their theorization of speech acts, which would be expanded upon by Judith Butler (1993) within the context of gender studies, some linguistic utterances accomplish actions solely through their being uttered.We can understand the act of painting itself as a performative speech act under Jacques Derrida’s (1988) theorization of both linguistic and non- linguistic signs, and Goldblatt (2011), Bolt (2004), and Davies (2004) have each made compelling arguments about the performative nature of works of art themselves. Indeed, the repainting of earlier works of art constituted performative acts, reiterating old works within newer contexts; as Derrida (1988, p. 12) noted, any previously iterated signifying act (whether linguistic or not) is by its nature quotable within any new context.
But beyond his extra-linguistic painterly performative acts, Malevich’s linguistic utterances also performatively effected actions: they brought historical presence into existence. His inscriptions of (false) dates constitute speech acts; to state a date is an act of speaking history into existence. The numbers he employed, ciphers that are themselves signifiers infinitely deferred from any concrete meaning, correspond in this case to the linguistic discourse regarding specific years within a commonly accepted historical chronology; by employing them within new contexts, he effectively created history anew. Malevich performatively recreated his own identity by means of these paintings and their dates. Through the action of producing his retrospective exhibition, Malevich reinvented himself. He retroactively reconstituted his identity by means of a performative utterance that seemed to give historical authorization to his artistic significance.
Lutticken (2005, p.
55) has argued that the Storming of the Winter Palace reenactment “was intended somehow to be a continuation of the revolution, activating the masses and giving history a forward impulse.” Perhaps Malevich’s motivation was also to provide his career trajectory with a similar “forward impulse.” However, if this spectacle was intended to be forward-moving, in practice it also had the effect of delimiting the appropriate spaces for revolutionary movement within the past. Media scholar Marita Sturken (1997, p. 74) has proposed that “cultural reenactment is a form of catharsis in which historical moments achieve a kind of narrative closure through their replaying.” Interpreted in this light, the Storming of the Winter Palace served the purpose of reminding participants and observers that both the tsarist era and the violent debate over what would succeed it had drawn to a close. The date of its first performance in 1920, toward the close of the civil war, reinforced this idea; its most elaborate recreation thereafter in 1927 only confirmed the sense of conclusiveness further.In the same way, whether intentionally or not, Malevich’s retrospective exhibition, with its reenactment of his past career, participated in a similar process of simultaneous repetition of and distancing from the past. It effectively reminded everyday viewers and powerful arts administrators that the era of the avant-garde had come to an end. Indeed, Fedorov-Davydov reiterated this claim in his catalogue essay. Before coming to the Tretiakov in the interim months between when Malevich secured his exhibition and mounted it, the former critic had published a scathing Marxist critique of the Tretiakov’s preceding 1929 one-man show, for Pavel Kuznetsov, in the AKhRR journal Art for the Masses under the pseudonym Efde (Fedorov- Davydov, 1929b). It is unclear if Malevich produced his own false dates before or after learning that the Marxist-leaning curator had been hired at the gallery. Regardless of Malevich’s oblique intentions, the curator’s analysis of his career firmly secured the artist’s position as an out-of-touch has-been.
The catalogue essay concluded that Malevich’s ideas were “subjectively distant from the fundamental positive trends” of new art in the Soviet era (Fedorov- Davydov, 1929a, p. 9). In other words, in Fedorov-Davydov’s interpretation, Malevich’s era had unquestionably already come to its decisive end.With respect to contemporary artistic practices of reenactment, curator Anke Bangma (2005, pp. 13-14) reminds us that “although it concerns the past, remembering is always an act of the present”; it is always “a conscious and unconscious working over, driven by changing desires and concerns.” The desires and concerns of the Soviet art world of 1929 were changing at an accelerated rate, as Soviet society reached a tipping point between the decade following the Revolution and the nascent Stalinist era. Ebullient optimism faced the harsh economic consequences of the previous decade and a firmly entrenched resistance to Bolshevik ideology. If art was to serve any purpose in this new, difficult era, the proponents of AKhRR’s Socialist Realist agenda claimed, it would be to propel forward an optimism toward the collective national future.