Hei Fangkuang

Black Square is presented as one of the works that inaugurate the modernist break in visual art. Its significance lies not only in its stark form but in the formal difference it marks: a gap that can be read against representation and even against the apparent nothingness of a narrative with almost no action.

A Modernist Gesture

Black Square is paired with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made display of a bicycle as one of two extreme gestures that mark the beginning of modernism in the visual arts. The works are unlike one another, yet the book relates them through the speculative identity of opposites associated with Hegel: each helps define the other as part of a shared break with established artistic representation.

Gerhard Richter’s paintings are then understood as pursuing the passage between these poles. His shifts between photographic realism and abstract stains make visible the transition from recognizable representation to a purely formal minimal distinction. In this account, Black Square is not simply an isolated endpoint of abstraction; it helps name one limit of a passage that Richter’s work explores.

Minimal Difference and the Gaze

The book returns to Black Square when discussing Juan José Saer’s Nobody Nothing Never. That novel’s action is minimal: during a summer in Argentina, Cat Garay and Elisa try to protect their horse from a killer, amid political anxiety and social disintegration. Its events are repeatedly narrated first by an apparently objective voice and then by Cat, often in the same words.

Against the near-absence of narrated action, the comparison to Black Square clarifies the force of a minimal formal gap. The point is not a substantial difference between two separate contents, but a difference that divides an object from itself and marks where the subject’s gaze enters what is perceived. Black Square thus functions in the argument as a way to think about how a seemingly spare form can make a relation—between perspectives, representation, and the viewer—perceptible.