The wrong Malevich: Art, revolution and the public sphere

This article argues that there is a radical division between Malevich’s pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary thought and work. Underlying this division is a distinction between modernism as practices of negation within art and the avantgarde as the negation of the practice of art. Whilst Black Square and White on White have an established place in both art-history and contemporary theory, as the epitome of a certain type and moment of modernist art, what Malevich did after the revolution is poorly represented and poorly understood. After the revolution Malevich stopped painting, started teaching, wrote theory and started working collectively; this was an attempt at the radical transformation of art in conjunction with the radical transformation of society. Thus there is an exemplary distinction to be made between Malevich’s pre-revolutionary modernism and his post-revolutionary avant-gardism.