undated, multiple media
In 1915 the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich proclaimed the purity of the artistic creation by means of avoiding any form of representation and utilitarianism in painting. He called his approach suprematism. Abstract art, once called anti- utilitarian, now is a best-seller at art’s auction and small, tiny, colorful variations on the black square, here deliberately (mis)understood as pixels, now permeate any form of digital representation. The QR code (Quick Response) being the stylistically closer example of this.
QR codes have the characteristic of being born out of the digital but functioning only outside virtual space. These representations of malleable cyber-space appear visually almost as simple as suprematist artworks, yet they do not have that unity of matter and form that Malevich hoped to reach with his work. The cyber-space to which a QR code refers can be endlessly changed.
variations on a theme by kazimir malevich confronts the idea of the internet as a perpetual archive able to store everything. On the long run, I see only two possible fates for archives: to be dispersed or to become so vast that meaning is found not in its content but in the way it is organized. The situation in which we will find ourselves then is not so different from the one described by Jorge Luis Borges in The Library of Babel, an infinite archive able to store any possible combination of letters (in our case data) in which people roam endlessly in a useless effort to find and recombine truth.
variations on a theme by kazimir malevich is not a single work. it is an infinite process that can take multiple incarnations. it has no date, no beginning, no ending, no author. anything that is turned into a QR code is a variation on a theme by kazimir malevich. QR codes aspire to the condition of being ultimate signs, able to represent anything in their stark digital minimalism, yet unreadable by the non-machine-augmented human. they are visual poems, dance notations, graphic scores and films, movement-poems, minimal dances, graphic novels and video-games, impossible music and implausible signs, the action-theatre of the everyday. they are the epitome of the medial collapse of our age, always present yet unreachable.
within my work variations on a theme by kazimir malevich have appeared two times, as a performative-installation-score-for-audio-video-and-visual-poem in february 2020 in an exhibition at soundsabout, and as (elsewhere)film as one of the sections of my permutational film cosm(o)etica.
martin moolhuijsen 