This image, Malevich's Black Square (1915), is for me one of the most convincing justifications for the argument that Abstract Painting was in many respects due to the invention of photograph. More to the point the fact that one of the most significant genres in photography was that of imitating representational painting, meant that painters, like Malevich, were compelled to find other means, other systems to work in, other than representational, figurative or narrative forms of painting. This, in a sense, marks the beginning of pure abstraction, if there is any such thing.
From the point of view of images generally, I have used this image as a way of testing assumptions about visual literacy and exploring the uneasy relationship between pictyres and words, merely by asking what is this image saying, what was Malevich's intention here? The answer, I would argue, is always going to be from language. That we assume the same intentional or communicatyive purpose to at the very least equivalent to language. But more to the point, the question "what is it saying?", or "what does it mean?" always falls back to the same proposition - that language is the base-line mode for representing meaning. An image such as this, one that is so deviod of representational detail, I use to emphasise the point that in spite of the saturation and apparent domination of images in the modern world, we are, as in Brathe's words, "still a civilation of writing". Writing being the dominant mode. Language being the only means by which we can decypher this image.
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