Kazimir Malevich’s White on White presents me with a puzzle. After tens of thousands of years of art development from cave paintings through geometric Greek pottery designs and then through highly representative statues and portraits, an artist chooses to paint a barely visible tilted square on canvas.
No, the painting isn’t itself the puzzle to which I refer, nor is the artist’s argument for creating it. So, if you are an artist or critic, don’t start sputtering irregularly that I’m one of those simple country folk without the knowledge or wherewithal to understand modern art and that as such I am one of the Great Uninformed. Rather, the puzzle for me lies in human responses to White on White, to discussion in dead seriousness about Malevich’s work, to critiques with philosophical overtones, and to its placement in a museum for observing by heads tilted like some puppy trying to understand a strange object.* In those responses I find puzzling hints about what separates us from other animals, about our claims of superiority.
Do you believe our superiority over the animal world lies in our ability to reason? A puppy tilts its head when it tries to grasp the nature of an unknown object, but a dog that sees food on the other side of a fence can reason how to get to it. Dogs and other animals seem to have the ability to plan and carry out plans. Know what I’m getting at? Apparently, in the animal world there are numerous examples of problem-solving that can be attributed to some level of reasoning.** Of course, you might argue that humans can reason about something abstract, something not associated with a need, something impractical, something like White on White. Is that what separates us from the animals? They act out of need as we do, but we also create needs.
Among the needs we create are solutions to problems more sophisticated than obtaining food on the other side of a fence. Many examples, including environmental problems of our making and flighty mathematical whimsies, demonstrate this “superior” human ability. No other species can reason about White on White, and no other species can plan how to reason about a painting. There! Isn’t that an argument for human superiority? Planning how to plan to reason? We can even make a hypothetical fence on the other side of which there is nothing but hypothesis, and people can spend their lives planning how to reach it, as string theorists do. There! That’s got to be evidence of our superiority. No dog can see the strings we envision on the other side of the quantum fence, a fence for which we have no practical plan to circumvent (no experiment to demonstrate).
That brings me to the matter of purpose. Does White on White fulfill a purpose? Malevich said he created suprematist works of art, that is, works based on and exhibiting the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling.”*** Ah! Now we have a possible solution to my puzzle. We are superior because of suprematism: A banana is a banana, and we are superior because we are superior. A bit circular, but not any more so than a critic telling me, “I understand this White on White thing and you don’t because you don’t. I can discuss this on a level of reasoning you country bumpkins can’t understand. But, I will allow you to go to the museum to tilt your head quizzically—that is, whenever you aren’t too busy trying to figure out how to get food that’s on the other side of your everyday fences. Art doesn’t have to have a purpose you understand, but in this painting the purpose is the expression of ‘pure artistic feeling.’ Bumpkin that you are, you think it’s just a white square.”
But if feeling isn’t reason, how does one hold a rational discussion about its artistic expression? Am I missing something? Is it just that I can’t see what’s on the other side of the fence? Is this then the solution to my puzzle? We can purposely invent what we don’t need, declare meaning beyond reason and proof and see the un-seeable beyond imaginary fences? Does our superiority lie in the unnecessary? Does the unnecessary give us purpose? Needlessness and purposelessness explained by imagination: Are those the qualities and process that most separate us from the other animals?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_on_White
** https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20212-elephants-know-when-they-need-a-helping-trunk/
*** Malevich, Kazimir (1927). The Non-Objective World. Munich.
No, the painting isn’t itself the puzzle to which I refer, nor is the artist’s argument for creating it. So, if you are an artist or critic, don’t start sputtering irregularly that I’m one of those simple country folk without the knowledge or wherewithal to understand modern art and that as such I am one of the Great Uninformed. Rather, the puzzle for me lies in human responses to White on White, to discussion in dead seriousness about Malevich’s work, to critiques with philosophical overtones, and to its placement in a museum for observing by heads tilted like some puppy trying to understand a strange object.* In those responses I find puzzling hints about what separates us from other animals, about our claims of superiority.
Do you believe our superiority over the animal world lies in our ability to reason? A puppy tilts its head when it tries to grasp the nature of an unknown object, but a dog that sees food on the other side of a fence can reason how to get to it. Dogs and other animals seem to have the ability to plan and carry out plans. Know what I’m getting at? Apparently, in the animal world there are numerous examples of problem-solving that can be attributed to some level of reasoning.** Of course, you might argue that humans can reason about something abstract, something not associated with a need, something impractical, something like White on White. Is that what separates us from the animals? They act out of need as we do, but we also create needs.
Among the needs we create are solutions to problems more sophisticated than obtaining food on the other side of a fence. Many examples, including environmental problems of our making and flighty mathematical whimsies, demonstrate this “superior” human ability. No other species can reason about White on White, and no other species can plan how to reason about a painting. There! Isn’t that an argument for human superiority? Planning how to plan to reason? We can even make a hypothetical fence on the other side of which there is nothing but hypothesis, and people can spend their lives planning how to reach it, as string theorists do. There! That’s got to be evidence of our superiority. No dog can see the strings we envision on the other side of the quantum fence, a fence for which we have no practical plan to circumvent (no experiment to demonstrate).
That brings me to the matter of purpose. Does White on White fulfill a purpose? Malevich said he created suprematist works of art, that is, works based on and exhibiting the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling.”*** Ah! Now we have a possible solution to my puzzle. We are superior because of suprematism: A banana is a banana, and we are superior because we are superior. A bit circular, but not any more so than a critic telling me, “I understand this White on White thing and you don’t because you don’t. I can discuss this on a level of reasoning you country bumpkins can’t understand. But, I will allow you to go to the museum to tilt your head quizzically—that is, whenever you aren’t too busy trying to figure out how to get food that’s on the other side of your everyday fences. Art doesn’t have to have a purpose you understand, but in this painting the purpose is the expression of ‘pure artistic feeling.’ Bumpkin that you are, you think it’s just a white square.”
But if feeling isn’t reason, how does one hold a rational discussion about its artistic expression? Am I missing something? Is it just that I can’t see what’s on the other side of the fence? Is this then the solution to my puzzle? We can purposely invent what we don’t need, declare meaning beyond reason and proof and see the un-seeable beyond imaginary fences? Does our superiority lie in the unnecessary? Does the unnecessary give us purpose? Needlessness and purposelessness explained by imagination: Are those the qualities and process that most separate us from the other animals?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_on_White
** https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20212-elephants-know-when-they-need-a-helping-trunk/
*** Malevich, Kazimir (1927). The Non-Objective World. Munich.
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