In reading about Russian modernism, and particularly the suprematist movement led by Kasimir Malevich, there was a suggestion that Malevich and his associates were trying to discover the laws that govern art. In discovering laws, are they not actually creating them?
As every first-year music student knows, there are laws about part-writing. Yet, are these truly laws that were discovered? I say no. They are laws that were created and modeled after the style of J.S. Bach. It was a group of people, over time, who entered these laws into the canon, not some act of discovery.
Howard Becker writes on this theme in Art Worlds... isn't it interesting though how the search for artistic laws become quests of discovery rather than creation - as though some universality might have been discovered in Malevich's work?
Kasimir Malevich, Suprematism 1916
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