Dominik Stanisławski
KAZIMIR “PHOTOGRAVICH” MALEVICH¹

“The pleasure comes from the fact that people have an inbuilt tendency to trust their own eyes. The principle: »I will not believe it until I see it« still applies, even if we are aware of the many ways in which images can be manipulated. The need to see things combines with the affirmation of the visible. Black letters printed on a white background or colourful images flashing before our eyes continue to be reliable and win our trust.”² We have also discovered a simple yet highly suggestive way for images and black‑on‑white letters to work in synergistic cooperation. We are witnesses to continuous circulation of internet memes: a crisp caption paired with a neat image is all it takes for a message thus assembled to gain credibility and, as a result, spread across the web (preferably going viral). A term not universally associated with the concept of a gene‑like unit carrying culture, “meme,” just to recall, has been proposed by Richard Dawkins, a biologist, ethologist, and geneticist. In the course of his research on living organisms, their reproduction methods, patterns of genetic inheritance, etc., he was able to ascertain that the mechanics of natural world are also observed within culture.³ To put it simply: just as grandchildren may physically (and often mentally) resemble their grandparents, so cultural characteristics can analogously be passed down to next generations. We already intuit that specific cultural texts do not emerge in a vacuum, but are related (on many levels, for example as regards the registers of negation) to texts that came before.

Memes operate in is the countless minds of internet users (or, to be more precise, in their awareness). Viral content has a high capacity to capture quanta of attention, which leads to a growing number of people having their attention quanta captivated by it. A corresponding natural process would involve a high reproductive capacity in a gene (passing on its imago to subsequent generations), considered dominant precisely because of its efficacious replication.⁴

The above can now be transferred to the type of ​​media referred to as “social,” with particular emphasis on those with a script based on the distribution of visual content consistent with a plebiscitary system – only content capable of capturing the attention of parallel participants (players) is desirable and highly valued.

Let us now consider a work with an established reproductive position (reach), and a stable disposition to catch quanta of attention. Let us discuss a square – a black one, on a white background. Prof. Maria Poprzęcka: “It is most intriguing that Kazimir Malevich’s painting has not only found its way into the very canon of abstract art […]. Black Square has become commonplace in design and in popular culture. […] We see it […] in homeware, fashion, tattoos, in cartoons and internet memes. No other painting of the 20th‑c avant‑garde and, possibly, not a single painting made in the whole 20th century has obtained such recognition.”⁵

Particularly interesting here is Malevich’s figure of choice, the square, even though it was the circle that was considered, because of its flawless symmetry, the perfect figure within philosophical, mathematical and geometrical contexts in antiquity, by far more perfect than any quadrangle.⁶ It can be assumed that Malevich, a painter, remains true to his ‘native’ plane – the rectangle – the square, rather than going for Black circle on white background, in the form of a tondo^.7 This is a construct was generated and is still maintained by generations of painters. This is simply how painting is “done” – even revolutionary‑minded Malevich did not want to challenge this aspect of the centuries‑old order.⁸

I am not running a risk of making a serious misjudgement in proposing the following model: on first instinct, at the “pre‑decision stage,” a painter chooses the quadrangle. Such are, as we might put it, the rudiments of the grammar of painting: portraits tend to take the form of vertical rectangles, while landscapes are horizontal rectangles. To paint a horizontal portrait is, of course, doable, but it is an enterprise fraught with difficulties. When we shift our attention to the medium of cinema, which draws from photography (which draws from painting), we notice that filmmakers also face this problem – in the contemporary film frame (a rectangle stretching sideways). In order to achieve a natural effect in a traditional portrait, this kind of composition requires some exertion. The execution of a vertical portrait is far easier, even though the natural (atavistic) human vision is horizontal. A panorama, the viewing of which often forces the eyes to move from left to right, or the other way round, naturally fits into a wide horizontal rectangle; here, a vertical arrangement would constitute an additional decision needing proper consideration, while a square canvas would have a “castrating” effect on the representation of a landscape. The basic view of the modern film camera would therefore be of a “landscape” type. The original world of cinema and the world of television, which later adopted the modus operandi of the former, constructed vision in a completely different fashion. The proportions of the image – with an aspect ratio of 4:3 – would be universally (nearly) square (“squaresque,” however unfortunate this term may sound). Cinema and television in statu nascendi would thus formally be more closely related to the work of the Russian avant‑gardist than their current incarnations. A special type of rectangle, the square appears to be a less “imposing” figure, a space better suited for potential diverse (mutually inconsistent) content. In a word, the square turns out to be universal; moreover, in relation to any rectangle, the square is a step towards the perfect figure – the circle.

It is no accident that the subject of cinema and television, or the screen, discussed here, is one of interest to László Moholy‑Nagy who believes that Malevich’s Square (albeit he is referring to a white square on a white background) is “the progenitor of the cinema screen – a flickering, luminous plane.” Prof. Poprzęcka claims that Moholy‑Nagy “was right, […] Square should be an incorporeal, immaterial, luminous phenomenon, and not a common time‑worn oil on canvas.”⁹ It ought to be stressed that Malevich “sacralised” his painting by displaying it in the same way Orthodox icons are displayed. There is a special corner in a traditional Russian home, known as krasnyi ugol, for icons to be hung tilting forwards right under the ceiling.¹⁰

Black Square would therefore constitute a screen – a place for all images, a nursery ground where all representations (ontologically) belong, an archetype (H. Belting), the Uhrbild, a palimpsest, an ideal being, “buttressing” all images – those created before, those being generated currently, and potential images.

On yet another side note, if we accept Mitchell’s anthropomorphised perspective on the painting as an object¹¹ and assume that it is capable of seeing, then a painting suspended under the ceiling will have a god’s eye view. We know that kind of view very well – this is how contemporary industrial cameras, roadside radars, and street surveillance cameras see.

To return to Square with its palimpsest or montage‑like nature, let us imagine the process of stacking successive representations, allowing echoes of the images below to pass through (in photography, this is known as sandwiching). As a result, we will obtain an increasingly abstract “visual mass,” growing obscure at a fast rate and no longer evocative of anything specific but, nevertheless, still willing to accept more images, without changing the quality of the piled representations. “The emergence of Black Square is […] the purest crystallisation of the aspiration towards a complete renewal of the visual language. […] Zero held a fascination also for Malevich. Being ambiguous enough to denote both emptiness and fullness, zero took the form of the ultimate liberation of form.”¹² When Maria Poprzęcka writes about the “spiritual aura of religious Orthodoxy,” she seems to have in mind “religiosity” in its modern sense, dictated doctrinally by two millennia of Christianity.¹³ However, the meaning of the concept was broader in antiquity, and this is what I wish to refer to in this text. “Religiosity” does not necessarily have to stand for “a moral virtue that involves holding God in due reverence through internal worship (adoration, trust, love) [or] external worship (sacraments, prayer, asceticism).¹⁴ In pre‑Christian Rome, the term religio (from Latin religare – “to bind” or “to unite”) indicated not exclusively spiritual (though them as well) but also social categories, a “sense of duty” towards the community (communities) or gods. Let us consider this: if religiosity were understood like this in the present day, it would represent a moment of community, without separating or valorising the religio of football fans celebrating a football match, the religio of Catholics celebrating Sunday mass, or the religio of members of an atheist movement celebrating actions taken to support a common cause. Each case would involve a certain group of people forming a community (society) on the basis of shared views, one with which every person in the group identifies, declaratively or unconsciously, while their individual activity constitutes this community (society) and, in this way, assures its continuation^.15

A major section of Rafał Drozdowski and Marek Krajewski’s sociology book Za fotografię! W stronę radykalnego programu socjologii wizualnej (For photography! Towards a radical program of visual sociology) is devoted not so much to photographs – virtual or real visual objects – but to the act (mostly performed by amateurs, but also professionals) of taking them. “For most photographers, the act of photographing is a social ritual in which the purely instrumental dimension (the desire to take a good, satisfying photograph) is intertwined with the symbolic dimension (the aim of going through this ritual is usually to confirm, by taking a picture, specific hierarchies of order and specific hierarchies of importance).”¹⁶ Photographic images (their content) cease to have a monopoly on meaning – the socially conditioned ritual gains meaning‑wise, a comprehensible “performative act” from which, of course, the image is derived, all this at the expense of content. The authors put emphasis on the subordination of the image’s content to the act of photographing, which is in fact an exposition of the act in accordance with the rules set by society. Conspicuously present are: a tendency for content to become standardised on the one hand, and a regime of permissible /accepted /supported aesthetics to encode the standardisation of content on the other.¹⁷ Into this context I include any platform (specified by the adjective “social”) visited by a certain group of users who implement a script imposed on them, while, at the same time, constituting the actual content of this platform. Without a community of like‑minded individuals and their (virtual) activity, this social algorithm would not be grounded in reality or have a “real” effect on it. The effect would consist in exerting “social pressure,” whether felt or not by each user is of secondary importance, making them modify their individual behaviour to meet expectations “from somewhere above.” This, in my opinion, is a situation in which the use the term religio would also be justified.

Let us now look into the invention of photography.¹⁸ The search for new functionalities for it brought about the popularity of instant cameras in the 1970s – the revolutionary Polaroid is square. The picture without the frame – a natural passe‑partout – has an aspect ratio of 1:1 (some later versions were rectangular, but still close to square).¹⁹ Its makers, so it seems to me, were guided by a universalist philosophy of generating any photographic image, a potential quota on all shots and their proportions, a philosophy that could have informed Malevich’s conceptualisation of Square. Also, a purely technical aspect was taken into account, an assumption – I guess once more – that photographs would be taken by an amateur who should be offered the simplest possible decision‑making process. The dilemma of “horizontal versus vertical” is never there. Parenthetically, some early photographs were round.

A special characteristic of the new submedium was that it enabled one to generate images without the involvement of a third party (the staff at photo shops laboriously developing provided films, who got to see the prints before the person who had taken the photographs); by means of this, absolute intimacy was guaranteed, broadening the scope of possible topics (including very intimate ones) on the one hand, and making it possible to take immediate decisions – a good/bad photo – on the other. As a result, the Polaroid’s position remained unthreatened for years – until a novelty came with a vengeance. In the 1990s, a similar instrument appears, equipped with one revolutionary (evolutionary?) quality.

It is, of course, digital photography, and the new quality that comes with it is the minimised, or non‑existent, cost of producing a single image (Polaroid cartridges were never exactly cheap so they were used with care, usually in special circumstances). From this point on, we no longer talk about a single and reified photographic image – in this respect, Polaroid still belongs to the old order, and it is only now that Susan Sontag’s words, spoken in the Polaroid era of the 1970s, that we are all photographers,²⁰ begin to ring true. The development of the internet runs parallel with that of digital photography – and is soon expanded to embrace the so‑called Internet of Things; today, almost everyone in our culture carries a networked camera in their pocket (which can also make phone calls), and the social apps installed on it are ready to absorb and publicise copiously produced representations. We all begin to communicate with images (although their content, as has already been said, is made subordinate to the act of communication), and an attitude contesting this can be viewed as antisocial (or, to put it strongly: counter‑religious).

Nathan Jurgenson also discusses social photographic activity: “It is not that the invention of photography or, later, social media occurs and then, programmatically, we develop a taste for such documentation.”²¹ In his study under a title that perfectly summarises the topic – The social photo: On photography and social media, the author examines social apparatuses and photographic or filmic images that are part of these processes, objecting to the common evaluation of this complex set of phenomena based on the “mass equals low quality” key. By referring to “Zygmunt Bauman’s influencial social theory of modernity, built around the metaphor of an increasingly «liquid» world,”²² Jurgenson tries to make sense of this updated socio‑technological dimension of photography, which seems to overshadow the period known as the Gutenberg era (McLuhan). We could comment on the above by asking the following question: is it not that, in an era of social media based on photography (film), Malevich’s postulate of palimpsest‑like (montage‑like) density of images is being directly implemented, its intensification leading to the blurring of the real perceivability of each of the participating images? Further on: would we, through contact with a medium so constructed (multitudinous), somehow lose the possibility of responding to a single image for the benefit of a growing freedom in perceiving many images following one another, usually at a fast pace? A parallel can be drawn between this and the transition from a single photographic frame, presenting a specific (finished) image, to a single frame extracted from a celluloid film strip whose meaning is a product of the operation of numerous sister frames, arranged in a line (to which, of course, our abstracted single frame also synergistically gives meaning). At the same time, this would be a confirmation – we touched upon this a moment ago – of the significance of the photographic act, removing “semantic responsibility” from a single image in favour of the socially regulated act of taking, sharing and absorbing photographs. In a word – by scrolling our screens, we would actually launch a palimpsest‑film in which every single frame would have the indispensable status of a building block, without being, to crack a joke, Das Ding an sich. Jurgenson: “The modern camera eye decenters the content of the image in favor of how it will circulate. Social media asks us to see the world through the lens of how other people might see it and to identify what they might like. A [square – D.S.] Instagram eye, for instance, does not just see one’s life as a potential social photo but also sees the world through that particular network’s logic, through the eye of the friends and family and strangers who will not only see the photo but also how it fares with the app’s approval metrics. […] If the professional photographer develops an instinct for visual form, today, the social media user has learned to do the same. Through trial and error, users develop a literacy regarding the right moments to document, how they should be shared and when. We learn to intuit in real time the potential popularity of something that might be shared, to see the virality with our eyes and then inside the frame.”²³

This aspect of social media could be of interest to ethology, post‑Darwinian sciences that examine the mechanics of the natural selection of attitudes that guarantee environmental, in our case network‑related, reproductive success (likes, website visitor counters, comments, etc. prove the effectiveness in capturing quanta of attention from other network users, which of course is not to be automatically associated with a high valorisation of non‑reproductive qualities of a given phenomenon). “Tourist photos are often criticized for their predictability, the banality of each imitating each other as millions fill cameras with the same image of the Eiffel Tower, the obligatory pose with the Leaning Tower, the identically framed view from the same Grand Canyon vista.”²⁴ According to Jurgenson, we could defend these pictures against the allegation that they lack originality since they are not meant to be unique or artistically valuable. They are more like the kind of statement [or proof that] “I was there I did that.^.”25 It is precisely the need to compulsively prove the reality of one’s actions, to provide evidence, as it were, of one’s existence (with the adequate logic of the social apparatus and the axiom cited by Sontag that only that which has been photographed is real), the need to corroborate the spectacularity of one’s being in the world (we never boast about a‑spectacularity, and if we do, we get entangled in the spectacularity game anyway) that seem to be instrumental in understanding the current state of affairs.

Let us now look at the Big Other, the key figure of the psychoanalytic landscape proposed by Jacques Lacan. The Big Other (French Grand Autre) refers to a symbolic structure, a language order (tout court culture) in which an individual is immersed (without having the power to effectively challenge this mechanics) because the Big Other plays the role of an external point of reference, and constitutes the possibility of the existence of norms, rules and meanings which organise the mental and social reality. It is something bigger than and independent from the subject, something that exceeds individual (as well as collective) consciousness. Language is a good example – something that existed before us, into which we are thrown and through which we express ourselves. The Big Other is not a person or a specific entity – it is rather an empty abstract structure that functions as a site where the subject discovers their “self” in relation to others. The Big Other is therefore the “zero point” of symbolic reality, both the source and horizon of meaning (also revealing a lack of this reality or its imperfection), and Malevich’s zero point that Square is would be a good affiliation to this. According to Lacan, the subject (person) always wants something from the Big Other, seeks its recognition, approval or sense of meaning, while, at the same time, the Big Other, as has been stated above, is inextricably linked to lack – whatever the Big Other offers (language, norms, faith) never satiates human desire. Lacan’s student Slavoj Žižek comments: “This is why the big Other can be personified or reified in a single agent: the ‘God’ who watches over me from beyond, and over all real individuals, or the Cause that involves me (Freedom, Communism, Nation) and for which I am ready to give my life. While talking, I am never merely a ‘small other’ (individual) interacting with other ‘small others’: the big Other must always be there.”²⁶ It also seems that the word ‘subject’ could be substituted by the word ‘image’ in discussions on symbolic space and the Big Other. A specific image is always in relation to the Big Other’s “superior eye,” remaining an incomplete creation²⁷ with an “unsatisfied desire.”

The Big Other, as Žižek writes, is insubstantial – virtual “in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition. It exists only in so far as subjects act as if it exists. […], yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity [emphasis by D.S.], so this substance is actual only in so far as individuals believe in it and act accordingly,”²⁸ which sometimes takes a particularly blatant form.²⁹ It can be concluded that any online social network is a phenomenon comparable to divinity (physically absent but clearly perceptible symbolic order, manifested on every screen, an Idol figure, in Greek εἴδωλον, eidolon denotes ‘image, reflection’), where a group of random users create a religious structure whose activity en masse sustains this symbolic order. If looking for a name, we could suggest, for instance, “the church of screen worshippers.”

By taking analogue photographic material with a latent image to be developed, we reveal this image both to a small other (a person working in the lab) and, unconditionally, to the Big Other, emerging from the symbolic order. If we use a Polaroid (provided we keep the content only to ourselves), we leave out the small other, but we cannot ignore the Big Other. This poses an intriguing question: who takes an individual photograph? How much authorship is there in each photographic act and is it or can it be unique? Do I take a photograph in a certain way, or is it rather that I take a photograph in this particular way because one takes this type of photo in this particular way (this is how one frames it, this is how one composes it, this is how one plays with light, and at last, this is how one gets the final effect, which would in fact be neither the final effect nor the initial effect because, from this perspective, such an artifact would be – again! – merely a film frame, taken out of a (speeding) passage of millions of similar ones for a moment. Social media users play games that enable them to achieve expected results because certain strategies have been developed in the course of using these platforms that one should follow (of course, only those that work). It is as if the most important thing that we learn when using such applications was the knowledge of how to adapt to a relatively stable environment. What would matter would be the grammar (symbolic order), not random words (sentences) entered into the system by users on an ad hoc basis. “When I talk about other people’s opinions, it is never only a matter of what I, you, or other individuals think, but also of what the impersonal ‘one’ thinks. When I violate a certain rule of decency, I never simply do something that the majority of others do not do — I do what ‘one’ doesn’t do,”³⁰ writes Žižek. Moreover, we notice that the selection of content is also part of the described mechanisms, and I use the word selection deliberately, referencing the legacy of Darwinism – stronger content (regardless of how strength is defined here) will achieve reproductive success, weaker (weaker image, cultural text, genotype) will drop out of circulation in the constant race for quanta of attention. This is, in my opinion, a clear reference to Lacan’s Big Other. An active social media user always targets their message at the symbolic order, even if their perspective is declaratively limited to relations with followers, friends, potential buyers, etc.

The idea of an organised hierarchy of species that underpins nature is possibly as much “deconstructed” by Darwinism as natural teleology. “Adaptation,” a most Darwinian concept, might in fact suggest that the “adaptation” of species does not occur in a systematic way with random genetic changes being sometimes instrumental in providing better chances of survival in a changing and diversely articulating environment.³¹

There is, therefore, no fixed “hard” reality to constitute a horizon for strategic adaptation processes which would subsequently guarantee (e.g. reproductive) success for organisms (attitudes or images). It is the organisms themselves (attitudes, images, etc.) that permanently encode this reality, although they do not act teleologically. In this sense, reality would have, in line with Žižek’s arguments, a virtual character³² which we could additionally, I suppose, describe through the concept of processuality (permanent adaptation of mobile elements in a mutating environment).³³

A quotation from Impas: “We divide time with a sharp crest and put on the first page a square plane as black as mystery, the plane fixes its dark gaze on us as if there were new pages of the future hidden inside it. It will be the mark of our time, wherever it is hung [or made available – D.S.], it will never lose its countenance.”³⁴

László Moholy‑Nagy, who, to say it once more, saw in Malevich’s proposal “the progenitor of the cinema screen – a flickering, luminous surface,”³⁵ probably had no inkling of how widespread and permanent the communal (religious) experience of the flickering screen, the zero point, the square piling images… frequently stored in a special place – krasnyi ugol, would become.

Nuremberg, February 2024