Suburban Utopia, An Infertile Place (SU4IP)
Lyndon Watkinson
Lyndon Watkinson (1999) is an artist, designer, writer, and musician based in Sheffield, UK. Democratising art and art context through artworks, publications, graphic design, articles, and sound. Creative director and founder of the online arts organisation SU4IP. His work is characterised by a desire for precision, often depicting aesthetics that celebrate and criticise the absurdity of corporatized identity, calling into question the necessity of creating false exteriors when what is not seen is often just as important.
In late 2020, a blog post entitled Suburban Utopia, An Infertile Place formed part of the wider inquiry and development of his practice for his bachelor's degree in fine art. As his work matured, he applied this term as a formalisation of his creative endeavours, later abbreviating it to SU4IP, now used as a digital alias and publishing entity.
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Digital Collage, 2022
01:31 is a visual metaphor for the effect of borders and
ideologies on human experiences. Characterised through the censorship of
Russian avantgarde movements in the early 20th century within the
Soviet Union, modern art was seen as harbouring counterrevolutionary ideas, or
misrepresenting state values.
Closely observing the life and legacy of Kazimir Malevich,
the founder of the Suprematist movement, this work seeks to re-energise the
sentiments of his experiences in a turbulent geopolitical environment, and
capture the longstanding ideas, concepts, and techniques he left behind.
︎ The grid is a system which doesn’t prescribe thought. It is a system of movement and visual organisation. It doesn’t encourage ideology or bias. Broadly accepted as an apolitical entity implemented by anyone. This results in an apparatus ripe for:
1. Over-assimilation into an ideological belief, where the grid is politicised to an extent it loses its inherent neutrality, too heavily associated with a particular outlook
2. Marginalisation. The grid neutralised into irrelevance, too indifferent to be applied in a hierarchy where everything must have some form of alignment
Censorship of Kazimir Malevich is an example of the marginalization of radical art theory, where the assimilation of the grid into his supremacist concepts would be suppressed out of paranoia of modern art being underpinned by counterrevolutionary ideals.
Malevich’s Sensation of an Imprisoned Man is a product of his experiences of imprisonment and interrogation by the KGB in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1930.[1][2]
The primary subject of the painting is a faceless individual, characteristic of most of Malevich’s later works, clothed in a tunic-like red and white garment, with dark navy creased trousers.
The other subject of the image, a windowed structure akin to Stalinist architecture, alongside a striped spire, reminiscent of those found on the Kremlin, or St Basils Cathedral. These features are enclosed within a true-to-colour orange wall.
Blocks of red, blue, and yellow, typical of Russian avantgarde artists, at times fused in gradient with white.
In this work, political geography is defined by the colour of the terrain. Barefoot, the primary subject is standing on the cusp of red landscape, the Soviet Union, contrasting against the blue, western nations outside of the eastern bloc. This illudes to Malevich’s captivity, situated bordering increasingly westernised nations such as Finland or Estonia.
The fortified buildings in the background suggests a settlement, city, or town. As it sits on blue terrain, this infers that it is outside of the Soviet Union. However, it is debatable as to whether what we are seeing is St. Petersburg, or somewhere like Tallinn or Helsinki. Irrespective of this, the individual in this artwork is outside their perception of a civilised society.
Towards the end of his career, Malevich would turn towards depictions of people and nature, elements of Suprematism enduring. Our experiences are what respond to the world around us. Malevich uses his art theory as a vehicle to depict this.
The original premise of this timestamp, the grid does not prescribe thought or ideology, but is often used as a tool to define such. Malevich’s Suprematism embodies the grid being used to characterise human tendencies, and overturn traditional ideas of art. In a highly regulated police state that sought to maintain realism as one of its goals, Malevich was put at the centre of and ideological battleground.
The creation of 01:31 began by visually following Malevich’s Sensation of an Imprisoned Man. I wanted to cannibalise some elements, and rework them in a way that was pixel perfect in proportion with the size of the canvas. Mostly out of my satisfaction to do so, but also to reinforce the framework of a grid-like structure to align its.
I made the figure the focal point of the image, scaled to divide the image into two opposing factions of the red equilateral grid, and the blue disproportionate grid, lending colours directly from the flag of NATO, and the flag of the Soviet Union. In Malevich’s Sensation of an Imprisoned Man, the character is depicted on the cusp of these two vastly different political landscapes, their size and position has been altered to separate these two sides. This illustrates how life was vastly different subject to the coinflip which side of the border you were born on. As 01:31 developed it became a testament to the idea of borders, and how they affect people.
Overlaying the image, is adhesive residue, left over from an old plaque now removed. Malevich’s memorial, constructed by Nikolai Suetin after the artists death, was destroyed in combat during World War II. This work strips back the richness of what lies beneath censorship and moral injustices. Despite existing in a time of significant turbulence, sustaining heavy erosion, the life and work of Malevich endures.
01:31 is a testament to the circumstances artists occupied during this time, still prevalent in the way people live today, profoundly affecting the work of myself and others.
Sources:
[1] Artsery. Malevich: Beyond the Black Square. Visited: Aug. 2022. URL: http://www.artsery.com/2014/10/malevich-beyond-black-square.html
[1] Wikipedia. Kazimir Malevich. Visited: Aug. 2022. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich#cite_note-:2-28