From White-on-White to Green-on-Green: Suprematist landscape architecture and garden design

With the creditable exception of Burle Marx, and perhaps James Corner, landscape architects have been slow in responding to Suprematicism. Kasimir Malevich used this term as an alternative to Non-objective Art, which is itself an alternative to the more common Abstract Art. Malevich was thinking of its supremacy over previous art movements. Part of Malevich’s inspiration, like Corner’s, was from aerial photography: he abstracted patterns from landscapes. His suprematist ‘grammar’ was based on the elemental geometric forms, particularly the square and the circle. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition the holy family were believed to have a presence in icons. Comparably, a square is a square: it is not a picture of a square. This gives non-objective art a supremacy over representational (objective) art. Landscape architecture shares this type of supremacy over landscape painting: it is about making real places, not pictures of places. But landscape architects should also be fine artists in the sense of expressing truths about the nature of the world. Green-on-Green abstracts a truth about humanity’s relationship with the natural world: the works of man are always part of nature and always distinguishable from nature. We can guess that the term Abstract Art did not appeal to Malevich because of its use to mean ‘abstracted from the external world’. Malevich believed that art is spiritual. One can however, imagine that Malevich would have been happy to describe the ‘other’ type as Concrete Art, using concrete in the logician’s sense as an opposite to abstract.

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Tags: Landscape, Whiteonwhite Greenongreen   Posted in Gardening Consultant