It’s hip to be square

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Abstract art is now a century old and produced around the world. Rosalind McKever reports on an international survey show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery

A hundred years ago Kazimir Malevich exhibited a painting of a black square with a white border at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0.10’ in Petrograd, now St Petersburg. A century later the Whitechapel Gallery traces the journey that symbol of abstraction has taken across the world and through the century. Over 100 works, 100 artists, 100 years since ‘0.10’; the facts about this exhibition look like binary code, an appropriate analogy for a survey of abstraction, which stresses its utopian, architectonic, quotidian and communicative powers.

These four themes are needed to bring some order to an overwhelming body of work, with walls, floors, ceilings and display cases packed with paintings, sculptures, film, and photography. The exhibition starts with painting, namely Malevich’s diminutive Black Quadrilateral (undated) and its utopian attempt to transcend oil and canvas. Half a century later the egalitarian possibilities of the material of art took a different tack in the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Her bichos (creatures) are hinged aluminium sculptures which can be arranged by the viewer.  Another 50 years on and the material of art adopts a dystopian flavour in Kara Lidén’s whitewashed posters.

Utopian ideals are still present in contemporary works. Keith Coventry’s Sceaux Gardens Estate (1995) could be mistaken for a Malevich or a Mondrian; it is in fact a map of a south London council estate. Architectural photography is abundant in the exhibition: the images of radio towers in Moscow and Berlin taken by Aleksandr Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy and others are a particular treat. Tatlin’s  Monument to the Third International, a design for a building that was never built, is present via Dan Flavin’s neon-light homage ‘Monument’ for V. Tatlin (1966–9). The legacy of utopian architectural styles, namely their appropriation by the corporate world, is particularly evident in Hannah Starkey’s photography.

The ‘everydayness’ of the architectural is made readily apparent by Carl Andre’s 10 x 10 Alstadt Lead Square (1967), which sneaks in underfoot, almost unnoticed. This notion of the quotidian also features in works by artists exploiting the possibilities of supposedly ‘feminine’ techniques and materials. Anni Albers’ tapestry, designed in 1926, which creates geometric forms using modulations in the weaving, and Běla Kolářová’s subtle abstract forms made up of cosmetic samples and snap fasteners from the 1960s are examples. Rosemarie Trockel’s Cogito, ergo sum (1999) plays with these presuppositions: her knitted black square is machine made.

Commonplace abstraction is also present through a number of artists’ engagement with geometrical logos. The communicative power of the abstract can be surprising, but Constructivism’s association with posters means it is ever present. Daniel Buren’s Seven Ballets in Manhattan, a performance of dancers carrying placards of Buren’s striped paintings, takes abstraction to the streets. Originally staged in New York in 1975, the performance will be repeated in London during the exhibition. Abstraction also has an uncommunicative side. In Jenny Holzer’s TOP SECRET 32 (2010) the redactions of government documents form black rectangles against the white page.

A more light-hearted defacement of text occurs in David Batchelor’s October Colouring-in Book,Spring 1976 (2012–13). Batchelor playfully adds colourful forms to the pages of the US art journal October. The piece emphasizes the text-heavy monochrome nature of this academic bastion of art and theory. Elsewhere, modernist magazines are included in the exhibition to demonstrate how the geometric aesthetic was disseminated through their graphic design as well as the manifestos and images within. European examples such as Blast  and Abstraction Création are accompanied by Arturo from Brazil and Souffles from Morocco.

The chronological layout of the exhibition and the focus on the artists’ training highlights the importance of art schools in the continuing legacy of abstraction. The relocation of Bauhaus  staff, such as Josef Albers, from Germany to America’s Black Mountain College  is an important moment in the history of geometrical abstraction. In the 1970s at London’s own Byam Shaw art school, Tam Giles taught Hassan Sharif, an artist from the United Arab Emirates who went on to translate and publish manifestos by Mondrian and Malevich in Dubai’s leading newspaper. The idea of geometrical abstraction being passed down by generations of artists makes the exhibition feel a little like an extended form of the geometrical abstraction dynasty like the diagram of modern art’s ‘descent’ once drawn up by Alfred H. Barr, the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The emphasis on the political importance of abstraction, found in the catalogue and in some labels, balances out the more immediately obvious formal connections. In this beautifully illustrated catalogue the curators introduce the four aforementioned themes in general terms while art historians offer more focused detail. Briony Fer considers abstraction’s internal paradoxes, Tom McDonough its nihilism. Tanya Barson describes the Latin American context, and Jiang Jiehong the Chinese.  There is also a short anthology of texts addressing Middle Eastern modernisms.

The curators have taken care to include artists from across the globe, although they do not claim to have compiled an exhaustive list. Trying to make clear the diverse socio-political contexts and relevance of a century of international art is a tough challenge. The sheer quantity of works seems to make the point forcefully, but a more edited selection would have been equally effective; at times connections to the black square seem tenuous and overly reliant on the idea that Malevich’s painting is ‘influential’. In the wake of the recent Malevich retrospective at Tate Modern and Radical Geometry,  an exhibition of South American abstraction at the Royal Academy, London audiences may be particularly well equipped to handle this avalanche of abstract forms, but the Whitechapel exhibition requires in-depth attention to appreciate that its message is not all surface.