Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square was the starting block from which the idea of my Dokodemo Door sprung. This geometric abstract painting is the forerunner of the 1960s Minimalist movement and takes art to degree zero.
Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square , painted in 1913, carried abstraction to its ultimate geometric simplification. The painting was regarded as a "dead square" or "void" by critics at the time, but to Malevich it symbolized a “full void”. It showed how painting could succeed unaided by reference to anything specific in the outside world.
For Malevich, the square represented "the supremacy of pure feeling".
He banished subject matter, moving from representation towards the purity of mathematical geometry.
The Black Square ’s context is that of pre-revolutionary Russia . The events of October 1917 brought about the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Russia ’s traditional monarchy was replaced with the world’s first Communist state. The old order was destroyed in the same way that Malevich swept away the material, physical world in his painting. It is a bold leap into complete abstraction at a time when Russian art was stuck in naturalism and epic narrative painting. It envisions a new reality on a higher plane.
Why is the ‘Dokodemo Door’ black? Black traditionally symbolizes negation or emptiness, however, it also reveals ultimate possibility and relates to the moment prio r to the act of God, and prior to human creative activity. Therefore, black can be used to represent infinite potential. Influences: Mark Rothko At the age of eighteen I wrote a dissertation entitled ‘Surrender to the Void’, focusing upon the work of Mark Rothko. Rothko sought to escape the familiar in order to find transcendence. The “Pilgrimage to the unknown” was for Rothko the first step in the artist’s experience. His paintings are gateways to such an internal pilgrimage for each viewer. Rothko’s work is spiritually intense, inviting us to experience ourselves in our ‘original’ and ‘essential’ form, to reach a sense of pure ‘being’ before or beyond concepts. His work encourages us to seek the greater reality which exists between words, the subtle whispering which indicates that we know ourselves and the world only in fragments, not as a whole, as if we were looking “through a glass darkly” as St. Paul the Apostle put it. |
‘Black on Maroon’, Mark Rothko. 1959The canvas as a mirror
The Void of a blank canvas forms a screen onto which one can project ones own imaginings and representations. This is a two-way process. One sees oneself in the canvas. It is a mirror that begins with nothing.
When I first encountered Rothko’s ‘Seagram Murals’ as a child at the original Tate Gallery in Pimlico, London , I felt that they created a very strong spiritual atmosphere. Something about these vast maroon canvases affected me in what I can only describe as a religious way – a feeling entirely free of dogma, yet still potent with meaning - a meaning beyond words.
Being raised in a Methodist environment, my early exposure to spirituality took place in chapels which were almost devoid of decoration. There were no mosaics, sculptures or stained glass windows. No gilded paraphernalia and certainly no incense. The walls were whitewashed and naked. I believe that this morally rigorous, puritanical environment ‘patterned’ and encoded my consciousness. Although I later rebelled against the idea of organized religion, I have retained a sense that aesthetic austerity is very powerful.
The Rothko Chapel, Houston , Texas . 1964-7The Blank Canvas
A blank canvas - its space, its emptiness, strikes us far more powerfully than does a complex composition. It has a feeling of infinite possibility rather than fossilized fact. Such a space invites us to interact with it. In Rothko’s abstract paintings, it is the viewer who creates the subject.
Our bodies physiologically react differently to infinite fields of pure colour; the blue dome of the sky; the infinity of black night… our feelings are developed out of our relationship with them. In The Rothko Chapel in Huston , Texas , the artist’s canvases are black and blank, but they are not bare. They are the ‘pregnant’ Void.
The Void has no form, substance or presence, and yet it is everywhere. It is everywhere and yet nowhere.
Mark Rothko. Retrospektive – Kunsthalle HamburgMark Rothko (1903-1970)
Untitled, 1969
Acryl auf Leinwand, 233,7 x 200,3 cm
Collection Christopher Rothko
© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008
The Void
The Void is a concept that is terrifying, as is the idea of infinity. It can not be defined by any terms of this reality. The Void has no sound, no sight, no taste, yet we are fully aware of it.
To sense the Void is to have awareness devoid of experience.
"When we encounter the Void, we feel that it is primordial emptiness of cosmic proportions and relevance. We become pure consciousness aware of this absolute nothingness; however at the same time we have a paradoxical sense of its essential fullness. This cosmic vacuum is also a plenum (full assembly) since nothing seems to be missing in it. While it does not contain anything in a concrete manifest form, it seems to comprise all of existence in a potential form. In this paradoxical way we can transcend the usual dichotomy (division into two) between emptiness and form, or existence and non-existence. However, the possibility of such a resolution cannot be adequately conveyed in words; it has to be experienced to be understood”. Stanislav Grof, ‘ The Cosmic Game’. |
Lucio Fontana, ‘Concetto Spazile’, 1959Why is there a hole in the centre of the ‘Dokodemo Door’?
The artist, Lucio Fontana, in his last interview said that "The evolution of art is something internal, something philosophical and is not a visual phenomenon”. Speaking of the ‘buchi’ (the holes and slashes he made in his canvases), Fontana said, "...the discovery of the cosmos is a new dimension, it is the infinite, so I make a hole in this canvas, which was the basis of all the arts, and I have created an infinite dimension. It is a new dimension corresponding with the cosmos. The hole was precisely to create that void there at the back”.
Fontana said of his ‘buchi’ (holes) that "as a painter, while working on one of my perforated canvases, I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension for art, and tie in with the cosmos as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture" in which "the images appear to abandon the plane and continue into space".
Fontana 's objective for his art was the breaking of dimensional limitations; both physical and metaphysical. The holes allow the viewer to enter a contemplative place that is no longer earthbound… into a space which lies beyond…
Gateways to the Infinite
For the Dokodemo Door, I chose as my launch pad Malevich’s Black Square . I used this image as the module from which the rest of the piece was proportioned and from which everything else developed. I also acknowledge inspiration, visually and conceptually, from two of my artistic heroes, Rothko and Fontana - yet I take my work a step further:
I have formalized the misty doorways and slashes of Rothko’s and Fontana ’s canvases, and made them geometric and thoroughly three-dimensional. I have also drawn greater attention to the space beyondby illuminating the opening in the centre of the work so that it is brighter than the ambient light of the room in which the work hangs. This is my way of indicating that what lies beyond may be an even greater and richer reality than that to which our minds have become accustomed.
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