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Suprematism

Kasimir Malevich, 1927

Чистый Красный Цвет (Pure Red Color)

A. Rodchenko, 1921

And so the Constructivists working with the surface plane, despite themselves, confirmed the representational, of which their constructions were an element. And when the artist really wanted to get rid of representation, he achieved this only at the cost of destroying painting and only at the cost of destroying himself as a painter. I am referring to the canvas which Rodchenko offered to the attention of an astonished public at one of this season's exhibitions [5x5 = 25, 1921]. This was a smallish, almost square canvas painted entirely in a single red colour. This canvas is extremely significant for the evolution of artistic forms which art has undergone in the last ten years. It is not merely a stage which can be followed by new ones but it represents the last and final step of a long journey, the last word, after which painting must become silent, the last 'picture' made by an artist. This canvas eloquently demonstrates that painting as a figurative art - which it has always been - is outdated. If Malevich's Black Square on a White Background, despite the poverty of its artistic meaning, did contain some painterly idea which the author called 'economy', 'the fifth dimension', then Rodchenko's canvas, which is devoid of any content, is a meaningless, dumb and blind wall. However, as a link in the chain of development, viewed not as a self-contained value (which it isn't) but as a stage in evolution, it is historically significant and 'marks an epoch.’

From the Easel to the Machine

The silvicultural agenda of colonial foresters working in the Himalaya was the transformation of mixed forests of conifers and broad-leaved species into pure strands of commercially valuable conifers. this manipulation of a delicate and imperfectly understood ecosystem was further complicated by the competing demands exercised on the forest by the peasantry even if the assertion of the forest by the state redefined customer use as forest ‘crime’, it could not, within the framework of colonial administration, completely eliminate ‘illegal’ use by peasants. Like the German counterpart, colonial foresters had therefore to overcome the social obstacles to sustained yield. Faced with a set of constraints that were both ecological as well as social, British foresters arrived at two mutually reinforcing solutions and instrumental level, they carefully regulated peasant access by restricting it to areas of forest not deemed commercially profitable. While completely forbidden to enter areas under commercial working, peasants were by no means at liberty to use the rest of the forest at will. The detailed provisions of the 1878 act sharply defined (and delimited) the amount of fuel, fodder, etc. each family was allowed to take from the forest. at the same time, the punitive sanctions of the act were strong deterrence to its transgressions at a deeper epic level. The language of scientific forestry worked to justify the shift towards commercial working. The terms ‘valuable’ and ‘desirable’ and the prefix ‘inferior’, used mainly to refer to oaks, bear no relation to ecological and other functions of species thus described may perform for the surrounding countryside. By a similar act of redefinition, one that rested on the prior usurpation of ‘legal’ rights of ownership by the state, many uses the forest were designated its enemies. Thus the management profile of each forest division, the so-called ‘working plans’, while indicating possible sources of injury to the forest crop, includes men in the same category as natural hazards and wild animals.

[…] The strategies forged by forestry science and legislation manipulated agrarian practices by carefully regulating the intrusion and exclusion of ‘man’, classified in the terminology of forestry science as one of the ‘enemies’ of the forest. Not surprisingly the dislocation of agrarian practices that follow the imposition of state monopoly was to have far reaching consequences.

Maria Prymachenko (Ukrainian self-taught artist, 1909-1997)

The world, then, is the efficient cause of itself. It is resolutely dynamic, autogenerative, self-organizing, and in a real sense, alive. This one world is constituted as a sea of ch’i —psychophysical energy that disposes itself in various concentrations, configurations, and perturbations. The intelligible pattern that can be discerned and mapped from each different perspective within the world is tao —a “pathway” that can, in varying degrees, be traced out to make one’s place and one’s context coherent. Tao is, at any given time, both what the world is, and how it is. In this tradition, there is no final distinction between some independent source of order, and what it orders. There is no determinative beginning or teleological end. The world and its order at any particular time is self-causing, “so-of-itself” (tzu-jan) . It is for this reason Confucius would say that “It is the person who extends order in the world (tao) , not order that extends the person.” Truth, beauty, and goodness as standards of order are not “givens”—they are historically emergent, something done, a cultural product.

The “two-world” order of classical Greece has given our tradition a theoretical basis for objectivity —the possibility of standing outside and taking a wholly external view of things. Objectivity allows us to decontextualize things as “objects” in our world. By contrast, in the “this world” of classical China, instead of starting abstractly from some underlying, unifying, and originating principle, we begin from our own specific place within the world. Without objectivity, “objects” dissolve into the flux and flow, and existence becomes a continuous, uninterrupted process. Each of us is invariably experiencing the world as one perspective within the context of many. Since there is only this world, we cannot get outside of it. From the always unique place one occupies within the continuum of classical China, one interprets the order of the world around one as contrastive “thises” and “thats”—“this person” and “that person”—more or less proximate to oneself. Since each and every person or thing or event in the field of existence is perceived from some position or other, and hence is continuous with the position that entertains it, each thing is related to and a condition of every other. All human relationships are continuous from ruler and subject to friend and friend, relating everyone as an extended “family.” Similarly, all “things,” like all members of a family, are correlated and interdependent. Every thing is what it is at the pleasure of everything else. Whatever can be predicated of one thing or one person is a function of a network of relationships, all of which conspire to give it its role and to constitute its place and its definition. A father is “this” good father by virtue of the quality of the relationships that locate him in this role and the deference of “these” children and “that” mother, who all sustain him in it.

Because all things are unique, there is no strict notion of identity in the sense of some self-same identical characteristic that makes all members of a class or category or species the same. For example, there is no essential defining feature—no divinely endowed soul, rational capacity, or natural locus of rights—that makes all human beings equal. In the absence of such equality that would make us essentially the same, the various relationships that define one thing in relation to another tend to be hierarchical and contrastive: bigger or smaller, more noble or more base, harder or softer, stronger or weaker, more senior or more junior. Change in the quality of relationships between things always occurs on a continuum as movement between such polar oppositions. The general and most basic language for articulating such correlations among things is metaphorical: In some particular aspect at some specific point in time, one person or thing is “overshadowed” by another; that is, made yin to another’s yang . Literally, yin means “shady” and yang means “sunny,” defining in the most general terms those contrasting and hierarchical relationships that constitute indwelling order and regularity.

It is important to recognize the interdependence and correlative character of the yin/yang kind of polar opposites, and to distinguish this contrastive tension from the dualistic opposition implicit in the vocabulary of the classical Greek world we explored above, where one primary member of a set such as Creator stands independent of and is more “real” than the world He creates. The implications of this difference between dualism and polar contrast are fundamental and pervasive.