The lecture will analyze ideas developed by the man of the modernist era.
It is fair to say that the emergence of the modernist man is closely associated with the crisis of classical rationalism and Arthur Schopenhauer's prophecy about a genius comprehending the world via art. Based on this notion, Nietzsche would later propose the conception of a superman who controls his own will. But by the time modernist aesthetics did arrive, it had attained an unprecendented level of radicalism. Malevich was rejecting chaos and arbitrariness, seeing man as someone much more impudent than the Nietzschean “Übermensch”, someone who would build his own new world instead of imitating God in the process of creation.
“Only God, or someone with all his features, can be 'master of the world', but if man takes on all God's features will he not also take all his prejudices and will he not build a kingdom of heaven on earth on those same prejudices? Obviously a man casting God down has to build his world and his heaven on completely new principles, 'real, obvious grounds', and not on God's groundless prejudices.”
(Kazimir Malevich. God is not Cast Down. Art, Church, and Factory. 1922)