Of Kasmir Malevich’s legendary painting Black Square, Peter Schjeldahl wrote: “Malevich is monumental not for what he put into pictorial space but for what he took out: bodily experience, the fundamental theme of Western art since the Renaissance.” Schjeldahl also noted that the artist offered “a peculiarly Russian mystical tradition... evoking the compact spell of the icon, as a conduit of the divine.”

 

Drawing inspiration from both these concepts and from the actual cross-and-circle shape that Malevich used in many other works, in various iterations, I conceived this piece with the idea of bringing the figurative element back into the equation, as a way of exploring the relationship between the physical self and abstract thought, between the bounds of the material world and the realm of purely conceptual ideas, between form and the “zero of form” which so profoundly influenced Malevich himself.

 

Note: Aside from the obvious connotations, the title of this piece, Field / Figure, is a reference to the noted contemporary ballet Field Figures, choreographed for England’s Royal Ballet by Glen Tetley with music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, premiered in 1970. This ballet is constructed around a central pas de deux, originally performed by Rudolf Nureyev and Deanne Bergsma, which is repeatedly disrupted by five other dancers. In my piece, is is up to the viewer to decide if the “pas de deux” is between the figure and the geometric shape, or if they are disrupting each other. (Or both, simultaneously.)

 

ANNELIESE VARALDIEV is a photographer and videographer whose work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Cinémathèque Française, and the Musée d'Art Moderne (Paris), as well as a number of private collections and institutions. Her camera work for broadcast media includes a long association with French television—for documentaries (or, more precisely, "film essays") on such figures as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Orson Welles, Roy Lichtenstein, and William Forsythe. Varaldiev’s images have been shown in a number of museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including the Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany), Galerie Michèle Chomette (Paris), and the Stephen Cohen Gallery (Los Angeles). Notable exhibits include  Glasstress, a collateral event of the 55th Venice Biennale, and Kameramusik, a solo installation of photographic portraits of composers at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, which was part of the inaugural New York Phil Biennial in 2014.