Hypercubes

Dear Kazimir Malevich,

Goddamn you.

I have always wanted a tattoo. I know that in my society, this makes me bourgeois and thus beneath your contempt, but the idea of permanently yoking the arbitrariness of the body to the arbitrariness of a pictogram holds vast appeal for me. Pictograms are the bastard spawn of allegory and symbol, and thus, to paraphrase Benjamin, they are beautifully weighed down with the historic -- they last forever (in the case of butterfly tattoos, uncomfortably so) as both a testament to a specific socio-historic period and a timeless, abstract representation of a transcendent ideal. Though specifically what they mean will change with each new generation and each new reconfiguration of the social unconscious, the archetypal image base (the snake, the bird, the eye...) hasn't changed much over the centuries and probably never will. It is through this paradoxical ambivalence that these images show the endurance and continuity of the human project, as well as the transient, ephemeral nature of the individual human life. The universality and the lonely solitude of human existence. And, finally, they're all surface. Vanity, transience, death -- three great tastes that taste like cloying sweetness mixed with bitter ash together!

And yet. Every time I think about what tattoo I'd get, and I rack my brain for the most personally significant (ha -- see? bourgeois mos def!) pictogram, there is one image and one alone that slowly materializes on the glassy field of my retinas. Because once you see that image, and once you meditate on it in all its nihilistic, elitist, anti-human qualities, you can't quite ever see the world of mimetic, or even allegorical representation the same way again. It is all surface, and yet it is the ultimate denial of surface. It is adolescent braggadocio mixed with timeless insight. In short, if I could, I'd get it tattooed on my face.



Except, to reify this beautiful provocation of yours in cheap ink-on-dermis form would be to misunderstand everything that it aims for, to defuse any power of subversion contained in that image. It would be the ultimate commodification of dissent, and the timorous academic in me could never live with herself.

Aestheticism is the garbage of intuitive feeling. You all wish to see pieces of living nature on the hooks of your walls. Just as Nero admired the torn bodies of people and animals from the zoological garden. I say to all: Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant.*

Kazimir, you bastard. I love you.

*Malevich. From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, 1915.