Dr. Zeynep Münteha Kot
Let us imagine standing before Picasso’s Guernica, Dürer’s The Great Piece of Turf, Monet’s Sunrise, or Munch’s The Scream. Or perhaps we are trying to envision Ramses II, the Battle of Kadesh, and the Hittite army at the Abu Simbel temple in Egypt. We might also be viewing the Venus of Willendorf at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, accompanied by feminist art that transforms her into a double-sided image. Did the artist depict what they saw, or what they knew? Does the work tell us a sacred tale, or does it invite us into deep contemplation—does it provoke, or does it soothe? What is the subject of the piece, and by what techniques has it been brought onto the canvas? We are able to answer all these questions.
When our path leads us to the Tate Gallery in London and we encounter Kandinsky’s The Cossacks, we may not be able to ask the same questions with the same confidence. The painting merely suggests a figurative content. It is said to include a dome, spears, and horses; yet identifying them is difficult. Even if we notice the brilliance of the colors, to grasp their meanings we would need to consult Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In short, if we were visiting the museum without a guide and happened to miss the painting’s title, it would be hard to associate this dynamic composition, bold colors, and strong contrasts with the warrior spirit and vast exuberance of the Cossacks. The painter likely did not expect us to do so either. For subject matter was essential to Western painting prior to modernity. Kandinsky, on the other hand, did not seek to narrate a subject, but to create a musical composition—and through it, to evoke a spiritual vibration. If the intended inner resonance was awakened, the work was deemed to have fulfilled its purpose.
Once liberated from references to the external world and reconnected to a new network of meaning within the inner world, the artwork leads us to this realization: art need not be representative or descriptive. Forms expand and contract without rules, as in our dreams; colors drift in a zero-dimensional sphere, occupying all dimensions. Yellow warms as it erupts onto the surface. Blue paralyzes as it beckons toward infinity. White is fertile power, purple is melancholy, green is balance, gray is indecision. The soul resembles a piano with its numerous strings; the eye is its hammer mechanism.
By freeing itself from references to the external world, a work of art may perhaps penetrate the soul without mediation. Yet this immateriality carries a particular risk: no matter how meticulously planned or prepared with preliminary sketches and designs, the work may easily dissolve into a necktie or carpet pattern. This would mean the artwork loses its communication with the viewer—and consequently, its artistic quality. It is for this reason that Picasso, ruling on the impossibility of abstract art, might have likened The Cossacks to “a story that had forgotten itself first.” For the artist must always begin from a visual or conceptual reality—provided it is not entirely forsaken. Did Kandinsky manage to do this? In other words, are the Cossacks in this painting truly present, or are they merely forms that tremble like the memory of something once known?
Kandinsky abandoned his judgment on the representational function of art after attending an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow in 1895. The subjects—already difficult to access—perhaps were not as crucial in the work as one might assume. The true impact of art could not have resided there. The very next day after encountering one of his own canvases and failing to recognize it, he gave up the Art Nouveau style he had been following—where he portrayed people and landscapes with bold contours and vivid colors. The painting was of extraordinary beauty, glowing as if lit from within. Yet the figures appeared unfamiliar—if only for a moment. It revealed that the potential of color and form extended beyond representation. But still, why abandon it?
Art historians seem eager to attribute the painter’s erasure of figures from his canvas to the rapid urbanization of Europe following the Industrial Revolution, the abrupt dissolution of traditional forms, humanity’s growing alienation from nature and from itself, and even the chaotic atmosphere of the February and October Revolutions. The color of such a world, in Kandinsky’s palette, would be gray. Gray is endless hesitation, silence, despair; it bears no life, and thus can give none—it is always neutral. That is why any color passing beside it silences it. If the world Kandinsky lived in was truly gray, he could have painted it in black, white, and their intermediate tones, instead of removing the figures altogether—just as Picasso did in Guernica or Kollwitz in her War and Death series. In doing so, he would still have questioned the essence of representation, simplified expression, and yet delivered a political or social message. So again we must ask: why the abandonment? Or rather, what is this silent speech?
When Adorno declared that poetry was barbaric after Auschwitz, poetry did not fall silent—it changed its strategy. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka tells the story of a man transformed into an insect, but he offers no explanation, because the reasons are, at their core, unknowable. Gregor thinks as a human being, yet the link between language and thought has been severed (or perhaps never existed at all), and so he emits the sounds of an insect. This grotesque condition expresses the psychological and existential fragmentation of the human being—something as tragic as wars in which blood is shed.
Beckett attempts to represent the failure of representation in a play: everyone waits, Godot does not come, and reality fragments. We never learn who Godot is or why we are waiting for him; the subject dissolves. When Beckett’s characters speak, their sentences echo into the void; a chasm opens in language. Time disintegrates: the past merges with the present, and the present closes off the future.
—What shall we do?
—Let’s wait.
—Yes, let’s wait. But what are we waiting for?
Neither historical nor cultural references, nor philosophical theories or theological narratives can save us from this hell of waiting. The play ends, and Godot still has not arrived. Because meaning either does not exist—or is forever deferred.
The same crisis of representation can also be traced in avant-garde art. When the world descended into darkness—twice—artists of the era first refused to depict this world, then went on to depict that very refusal. They lost their images, only to discover new ones: emptiness, silence, disconnection, collapse, destruction, nothingness, contradiction. Adorno would affirm these new images: “Art can express reality only by breaking it.” Picasso does exactly this in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: he first fractures the body, estranging it from itself; then, one by one, the aesthetic ideals that had been revered for centuries—beauty, proportion, symmetry, harmony—are dismantled. Dali, in his famous painting The Persistence of Memory, distorts time with melting clocks, distorts space with a background where earth and sky merge, and distorts identity through an amorphous creature that is half-human, half-animal. Likewise, in his composition 4’33”, John Cage represents nothing at all; there is no artwork in the work. For 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the audience waits for the musical performance to begin, but the pianist does not play a single note. The only sounds are coughs, creaking chairs, and whispers. Because whatever meaning was once expected to be staged collapsed—alongside the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires.
Kafka—whom we may consider proto-avant-garde—and the avant-garde artists I have referenced throughout this essay, developed a language of escape. Escape was necessary. For the world shaped by two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and intellectual oppression—a world in which millions perished, class inequality prevailed, and mass starvation reigned—was terrifying. Kafka’s Metamorphosis gradually retreats from the three foundational pillars of Western thought: a meaningful universe, a knowable subject, and the reliability of representation. Yet it arrives nowhere. Vladimir and Estragon, who wait for Godot, do not know whom they are waiting for—nor do we know who they are. Beckett’s play is a sabotage of the classical foundations of existence: action, purpose, continuity, and resolve. No one survives. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by collapsing perspective, fragmenting space, and flattening the picture plane, deeply unsettles its viewer. Truth becomes problematic, observation is problematic, the body is problematic, concepts are problematic. Yet the work merely diagnoses—it offers no remedy. Disquiet remains disquiet. Dali wishes to melt chronological time, yet does not replace it with another (such as Heidegger’s conception of kairos). Objects thrust into the unconscious do not return. All ontological assurances disintegrate. In short, there is no awakening from this dream. John Cage, for his part, refuses to represent the world. And yet—he could have, like Dvořák, brought a New World into the symphonic form. But when Cage invites the world itself onto the stage, instead of melody, tonality, and rhythm—those elements we consider the essence of music—art itself collapses.
Kandinsky’s world is as terrifying as the world of artists on the line of escape. And yet, The Cossacks does not reside on that line. The composition defies classical perspective; there is no depth. It is fragmented and scattered. There is no center. Time is not linear, but circular. The figures have been erased, replaced by rhythmic patches and fields of color—representation has been rejected. Still, The Cossacks does not belong to that trajectory.
Dawn is about to break. As the painter returns home with his paint box in hand, he suddenly sees a painting of indescribable beauty. A moment that ruptures sensory experience—a blow. And then the spell is broken. The painting belongs to the painter himself. Though Kandinsky attempts the next day to recapture “that moment” through the same painting, it proves impossible—the objects no longer disappear. A decision is made: the object harms the painting. If this is the decision, then The Cossacks can be re-read from this point onward:
Recognizable elements still remain in the painting: the spear-wielding cavalry we know as Cossacks, other figures seemingly mounted on horseback, and a dome reminiscent of those found in Central Asia… As Picasso envisioned, the artist may or may not have begun from a visual or conceptual reality. It is precisely this ambiguity—our inability to know where we began, or whether we began at all—and the figures’ failure to become “something” that invites us into another work nested within the work itself.
As the story moves away from its beginning, as colors detach from objects, as forms disperse and lines begin to ripple, we pass into a war beyond war. The Cossack rider is no longer a historical figure, but a seeker of truth, wandering not through Siberia or the Far East, but through the desolate recesses of the self. Spears poised for throwing, or the heavy cavalry maces used in close combat, are no longer symbols of allegiance to Europe’s last absolute monarchy, but emblems of the struggle against the thick darkness within us. We run from one front to another on our small but agile horses. In truth, curved lines and circular strokes scatter across the entire composition. There is almost no space to rest between colors and lines. Figurative elements give way to abstract colors and forms; the known blends into the unknown, victory merges with defeat. And yet we run. The run is erratic, and so the composition is unbalanced.
The twentieth century of the world is terrifying—not only for avant-garde artists or for Kandinsky, but for us as well, those who know them through books and works. When Malevich drew a black square on a white background, he abandoned perspective, depth, light and shadow, figurative elements, all colors except black and white, and even symmetry (despite having drawn a square). In doing so, he abandoned the world. Two years after Black Square, Duchamp sent an inverted porcelain urinal to an exhibition in New York, thereby rejecting the conventional definition of art, the aesthetic criteria upheld until then, and all forms of authority. What he truly rejected was art’s classical method of rendering the world visible. Since the world had changed, the form had to change as well. Malevich and Duchamp rejected the representation of this world, either through irony or in its actual form. When they abstracted, it was a “geometric abstraction”—an abstraction rooted in the world, deriving its nature from it, while simultaneously claiming to express its very essence… In abandoning Black Square, Fountain, The Metamorphosis, 4’33”, or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, they did not set out on a new path; disquiet remained disquiet. The world remained at zero point.
“The night that tramples on souls, the hand that points the way, the hand that destroys the way, the fear that inspires this hand, the insecurity of not knowing, the path that does not exist, the guide who has lost his way…”
The twentieth century of the world is terrifying—but it is not real. And not just the twentieth; all centuries are like this… Terrifying, but not real. There are no Cossacks, no Bolsheviks, no Kyrgyz. The Japanese did not fight the Russians, nor did Central Asia rise up. If we believe they did, it is because Maya has concealed Brahman, or because we do not know we are dreaming. When Khalid Abu Ziya bid farewell to his grandson Rim, calling him “the soul of my soul,” what he saw in the world may have been nothing more than a faint reflection in a mirror. Kandinsky would probably have called Abu Ziya’s composure ecstasy (vecd). Because with loss came discovery. And perhaps, to find while losing, one must squint—like Abu Ziya or Kandinsky. When one does, the details transform into symbolic accessories that lead us to the essence beyond appearances. Like the tiny earring clinging to Abu Ziya’s lapel… a symbol from the world that has been left behind. The object no longer harms the painting—it clears the way. The Cossacks emerges from this narrowed gaze, unraveling and dispersing the world as it searches for its essence. It is a kind of seeing—a seeing within seeing. A moment that interrupts sensory experience—a blow. It shows the way, trusts the way, knows the way.