To the Affirmer of a New Art

Idea and script: Mikhail Karasik
Animation: Taras Sgibnev
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
This film is based on Mikhail Karasik's album of lithographs
To the Affirmer of a New Art.
St Petersburg, 2010

Most of the topics in the film, like most of the pages in the album, are allusions to texts by art historians and philosophers. They are based on not just real facts, but imaginary events as well: the scenes entitled ‘Dispute. Lenin and Malevich at Gorky’ where the characters are semi-recumbent in identical poses (the original photographs were taken 10 years apart), ‘Affirmation of UNOBIS. Malevich on the podium’, and ‘Spitualist séance in the Kremlin. Stalin summons the spirit of Malevich’ are visual references to texts by the philosopher and art critic Boris Groys, who has asserted that Suprematism could and should have become totalitarian society’s principal plastic system. The triumph of the Black Square is the main plot line of this film.