A simple black square on a white background.Д«oth images and paintings, and sculptures, became swept up into this new dynamic of a transformative force that was going to transform not only art but society itself. ItвЂ™s pure geometry, it is simply four corners, and itвЂ™s a shocking image still to this day. And so, the famous Black Square, which dominated over this one room of the exhibition, has all of those components within it. The idea of the human body as a machine.ДЄll of that rectangular aesthetic around factory architecture and industrial architecture found its way into the canvas. And so, these two impulses come together in Constructivism and Suprematism, and also, I think relate to the fear about Industrialisation вЂ“ seeing what was happening to the landscape, the dreadful filth, the terrible conditions in which workers found themselves. And to what separates us, perhaps, as a species, the idea of being reflective and a sense of transcendence. So, while one drive was about shaping the future, the other was about something which seemed timeless, eternal, to relate back to the fundamental nature of human existence. Suprematism has a slightly different ethos in that it was trying to marry that new functionalism with a sense of transcendence, with a sense of spirituality. And these new kinds of shapes and forms and materials вЂ“ steel, concrete, the use of glass вЂ“ was impacting on the consciousness of young artists. Huge industrial buildings that were driven not by Athens and the legacy of Classicism but by machinery, by engineering, by function. Constructivism takes its starting point from, in a way, architecture. These are the two names that then reverberated beyond Petrograd, across Western Europe and finally around the world. It was part of a movement which was called Constructivism, although Malevich himself founded another movement called Suprematism. It wasnвЂ™t something that was restricted to the elites.ДЄnd this was the beginning of abstraction in art. It made art become immersive, participatory, it created a universal language which could be read by any culture. It released art from the pressure to be mimetic, to be a mirror of the world. It released art from what was increasingly a slavish relationship to structures of power. It is about pure colour, and I think we should regard black as a colour, it is about planes and lines and shapes. Secondly, it didnвЂ™t try and represent the world in other ways, there was no shading, thereвЂ™s no contour, thereвЂ™s no sense of a perspective, of trying to render three dimensions in a two-dimensional space. Well, first of all, there is a sense of a beginning, of a void, the complete absence of representation вЂ“ there is no picture in this black square. So, MalevichвЂ™s Black Square is the paradigm shift which changed the whole direction of contemporary art. And what was striking about it was that there was not a single image, not one picture, in a display of about fifty paintings. One of the rooms of this exhibition has gone into art-historical legend, and it was the room created by Malevich himself. The zero signified the beginning, a tabula rasa, a springboard from which a new tomorrow could be born, the ten was the number of artists who took part. The energy that that levered amongst these young people manifested itself in a world-changing exhibition, and it was called The Last Futurist Exhibition: 0.10. And it was very clear that Tsarist Russia was in its final days. Then the catastrophe of the First World War. And Futurism encapsulated everything that excited these young people at the beginning of a new century. TheyвЂ™d also celebrated a firebrand from Italy called Marinetti, whoвЂ™d brought news of a new avant-garde called Futurism. TheyвЂ™d heard about this young man called Picasso, and Braque, in Paris, whoвЂ™d invented a radical new form of art called Cubism. However, there was a group of young artists in Moscow who were beginning to hear of rumblings in other parts of Europe. It was still under the rule of the Romanovs who believed in autocracy, nationalism and the power of the Orthodox Church. It was making a tectonic shift between a largely rural, agricultural economy and culture to registering the shockwaves of industrialisation. In the early 1900s, Russia was a huge territory stretching all the way from Finland to Indochina and Japan. This small, rather humble and even rather irregular square was to change the direction of modern and contemporary art. So, MalevichвЂ™s Black Square and the whole Constructivist movement is a revolution. And so, for two thousand years and beyond, certainly Western Art has been dominated by representations of bodies and faces. We humans have an anthropomorphic need to see ourselves, we look to art as being a kind of mirror.

The black revolution speech