Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/82

74 ed to be the destruction of everything which had been understood as "art" since civilization had begun. If Malevich's vision of the future had been realized, it would have been a kind of "return", on a higher plane, to the pre—literate conception of a people such as the Balinese, who told an anthropologist:
 * We have no art. We do everything as well as we can.

El Lissitzky, writing of Malevich's "square on square“ painting, described the implied "death" and "rebirth" of art in the "mathematical" terms quoted earlier:
 * Here a form was displayed which was opposed to everything that was understood by 'pictures' or 'painting' or 'art'. Its creator wanted to reduce all forms, all painting to zero. For us, however, this zero was the turning point. When we have a series of numbers coming from infinity...6,5,4,3,Z,1,0... it comes right down to the 0, then begins the ascending line O,1,2,3,4,5,6...

It was hoped that from Malevich's pure geometrical shapes would emerge an art, an architecture and forms of self-government and work emanating directly from the springs of human creativity and owing nothing to the forms of the out—lived world. The "abolition of art" expressed only one side of the modernists' programme. The other was the artistic recreation of life. Wrote El Lissitzky:

In the new order of society...where work is being done by everyone for everyone, in such a society work is given free scope and everything which is produced is art. Thus the conception of art as something with its own separate existence is abolished.