AIS-#1 [Architectons In Space] – “From the surface of canvas to space.”

At the turn of the 1920’s Kasimir Malevich started applying the Suprematist theories that he had previously developed in painting to architectonic forms, projecting his cosmic dreams of the Planits. The Planits are the animated equivalent of the floating cities with the names of Greek letters that Malevich called Architectons; they are sorts of space ships whose plans he set out in great detail (with no scale, like the models of the Architectons), vehicles of utopia, Anywhere out of the world. For, unlike the Constructivists, Malevich did not insist that his models should be made. He rejected utilitarianism, the temporal, and aimed at the absolute, free of context. Perhaps he foresaw the imminent end of the synchrony of art and politics witnessed in the nascent Soviet Union, the end of the Revolution as a way out of History, and the return of History and its ‘’human misfortune.’’ In other words, with the Architectons and the Planits, before he overturned his own artistic chronology and, in the end, integrated his own finitude into the Suprematist project, organising his own funeral as a celebration of the Black Square, Malevich sought radical, dogmatic escape from the fact that, as Russian philosopher Boris Groys put it: “Every political dictatorship is ultimately founded on a dictatorship over time. The impossibility of escaping our own time, of emigrating from our own present, is an ontological slavery which is the basis of all political or economic slavery. That is the unmistakeable sign of any modern totalitarian ideology: the fact that it denies the possibility of the supra temporal.”