Rhythm 69

David Mabb
(William Morris Block Printed Pattern Book, with Hans Richter Storyboard,
developed from Richters Rhythmus 25 and Kazimir Malevichs film script Artistic
and Scientific Film Painting and Architectural Concerns Approaching the New
Plastic Architectural System)
Rhythm 69 appropriates (and by this I mean it confiscates, deforms, transforms and
re-contextualises) works by William Morris, Kazimir Malevich and Hans Richter.
During their lives the work of these three artists was considered, in different ways, to be
artistically and socially radical, but today their practices are seen as somewhat dead
and lacking in critical potential. In Rhythm 69 I see if it is possible to create a new burst
of energy and life out of their work.

Practical
In 2004, Jennifer Harris, Curator of Textiles at the Whitworth Art Gallery, gave
me a Morris & Co. 1960s block printed wallpaper sample book produced by Arthur
Sanderson and Sons. I had just finished curating Ministering to the Swinish Luxury of
the Rich at the Whitworth and the book was being donated to the Gallery, but the
Whitworths collection already contained examples of the same book. Harris kindly asked
the donor if she could give the book to me. I was really pleased since after displaying
pages from a 1920s Morris pattern book in the Whitworth exhibition I had already
decided I wanted to work with a pattern book. At the first opportunity I set about
dismantling it and by sawing through three large rivets and extracting some very large
staples that bound the book together I was able to remove each page, destroying the book
and leaving three circular holes and numerous smaller gashes and tears down the left
hand side. In displaying these signs of the books destruction, I was flagging the violence
of the pages transition from their collectors item status. I then glued the 69 pages of
wallpaper in sequence onto separate canvases and painted images from a Hans Richter
storyboard onto them, completing their destruction as objets dart. During this process, I
also painted a different heritage Morris & Co. colour onto the border of each canvas in
the order they appear on the Morris & Co. colour chart, which gives the work another
sequence in addition to the wallpaper and storyboard. The heritage colours modern
recreations of Morriss palate evoke the nostalgia with which Morris is often now
associated; they contrast with the black, blue, green, red, orange and yellow acrylics
used for the Richter storyboard, which still signify a form of Modernist
contemporariness.
The paintings can be hung in two different grid formats that bring forth different
readings of the work. If the paintings are hung horizontally across the wall, the
installation emphasises the bookness of the work as the pages are read left to right.
However, if the paintings are hung vertically down the wall, the work is read from top to
bottom and the hang emphasises the filmic qualities of the work. The decision as to how
to hang the work will be informed by the space and context in which it is to be hung.
Either way, the formalist grid represents a rationalist order and discipline, which can

perhaps be seen as a metaphor for the regulative practices of industrialised society.

Historical
Morris
William Morris thought that interior design had a fundamental role to play in the
transformation of everyday life. This essentially political motivationa commitment to
the radical potential of designis behind much of his work as a designer and craftsman
and the setting up of Morris & Co. In English political life, he was known firstly as a
member of the National Liberal League. As he moved leftwards he became a leading
member of the Social Democratic Federation, and in 1883, he founded the Socialist
League. This political work was an extension of his project of social transformation, as
he increasingly recognised (with the help of Marxs Das Kapital) that social change
could not be achieved by design alone but required the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalist industrial society by the organised working class.
Morriss designs constituted a radical break with the orthodoxy of neo-Gothic of
his time. They are highly schematised representations of nature, where it is always
summer and never winter; the plants are always in leaf, often flowering, with their fruits
available in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labour in sight. This is a
Utopian vision, an image of Cokaygnebut one easily acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
Today his work is seen as safe and comfortable, and his wallpaper and fabric designs
are widely reproduced in machine printed form. They can be found in an array of
domestic environments and uses, from furnishings in the bourgeois and conservative
semis of middle England, to the Willow Boughs tea towel my grandmother used to have
in the kitchen of her council house, to the mugs with crude Morris patterns transferred
onto them in my local greasy spoon in New Cross.
Although a form of democratisation of Morriss designs, their wide availability is
also a debasement, as a compromise is made whereby what Morris called beauty is
sacrificed for cheapness. These mugs and tea towels would have horrified Morris. He
opposed industrialised production for both political and aesthetic reasons, and
researched Medieval forms of manufacture that used traditional craft skills, which he
then developed to the highest technical standards; ironically, of course, this meant that
only the wealthiest could afford his work.
The seeming contradictions between his designs, the economics of production and
his political project are exemplified in the block printed wallpaper pattern book. It shows
Morriss individually handcrafted wallpapers which are still produced, now retailing for
between 600 to 800 per roll, depending on the complexity of the pattern rather
expensive compared to the contemporary machine-produced equivalent. The pattern book
presents each wallpaper cut down to a 15 x 19 page, irrespective of the individual
patterns repeats; it functions as a miniature shop display that can be borrowed and
taken home, from which middle class customers can browse, select and purchase
wallpapers for their homes. This book is the point where Morriss handcrafted
wallpaper enters the marketplace.
Malevich
In the years leading up to the Russian revolution, Kazimir Malevichs
experiments in painting led avant-garde artists into pure abstraction, a language of
geometric forms that rejected any recognition of nature. The works he called

Suprematist are based on the idea of painterly realism as opposed to painterly

illusionism. He was concerned with the material properties of art as its primary content,
seeing painting as a thing in its own righta radical materialist concept. Later,
Malevich seemed to see no contradiction between broadly supporting the revolution and
developing his own form of Utopian mysticism, as he and his followers dreamed of
overcoming gravitational forces for an ascent into the infinity of the cosmos. These ideas
seem eccentric now, but aeroplanes had just been invented and workers had overthrown
the state; anything seemed possible. This has enabled viewers of Malevichs Suprematist
work to see it as materialistic and spiritual simultaneously, a dualism which remains of
interest to critics today.[1]
Malevichs three-page film script Artistic and Scientific Film Painting and
Architectural Concerns Approaching the New Plastic Architectural System was
produced for Hans Richter in 1927, after he had seen Richters work at the Bauhaus and
recognised its similarity to his own early Suprematist paintings. In this script Malevich
uses written notes to set out a historical narrative that leads directly to Suprematism. He
follows this with a mixture of written notes and drawings to represent some of his earliest
Suprematist paintings, in order to illustrate his ideas for an artistic-scientific film[2]
in anticipation of his collaboration with Richter.
Richter
Hans Richter was one of the originators of experimental avant-garde film,
producing the abstract films Rhythmus 21 and 25, but he was also a painter, sculptor
and writer who was influential in many Modernist developments including
Expressionism, Constructivism and Surrealism. He was a participant in the short-lived
Bavarian Republic of Workers Councils as Chairman of the Action Committee of
Revolutionary Artists, a position for which he was sentenced to five years imprisonment. I
make a point of this in order to demonstrate the association of revolutionary politics with
abstract avant-garde art. Such a claim might seem rather fanciful now given the
co-option of abstract art during the cold war, and given that it is now sold on the art
market as an utterly harmless accessory to designer living; but the association was
strong at the time.
Malevich and Richter
It is unclear to what extent, if ever, Malevich and Richter actually collaborated.
Kent Mitchell Minturn suggests that they were working together in 1927 to develop a film
from Malevichs script.[3] But, according to Margarita Tupitsyn,[4] it is not clear if
Richter was aware of Malevichs script in 1927, or only encountered it when it was first
published in Germany in 1962. For Rhythm 69 I have used storyboards drawn by
Richter in 1970 for a proposed but never completed animated film[5]. They were
developed from Richters own very similar drawing for Rhythmus 25 (1925)[6] and
Malevichs script, and synthesised the concerns of Richters earlier abstract Rhythmus
films and drawings and Malevichs Suprematism.
Richters 1970 drawings, unlike Malevichs script, are more conventional
storyboards with images running down the pages vertically in strips, in imitation of
frames from a reel of film. Many of the individual drawings or frames in the storyboard
are formally very daring. There are examples of extreme marginal composition, large
vacant spaces and single vertical strips as well as different sized squares, circles,
rectangles and crosses. They look a lot like American Avant-Garde painting and
sculpture of the 1950s and 60s, which at the time had begun to be associated with the
values of American freedom and democracy during the cold war. This renewed currency

might perhaps indicate a reason why Richter returned to his earlier Rhythmus work; it
again looked contemporary. In the context of 1970s America these images would
probably have been read very differently, no longer being associated with the radicalism
of 1920s Europe.

Rhythmical
My title Rhythm 69 borrows from the early works of Richter; his Rhythmus
series were numbered after the years in which they were produced. The number 69 was
arrived at by the number of wallpaper samples in the pattern book, but it can also be
interpreted as a sexual innuendo, suggesting the form of dialogue between Morriss now
safe, comfortable and conservative patterns and the now safe, comfortable and
conservative politics associated with the abstract images in the Richter storyboard. I
sometimes painted the Richter images over Morriss leaves, fruits and flowers, leaving
the background of the design to show through; at other times I painted onto the
background of the design, letting the leaves, fruits and flowers show through. In either
case, the Morris pattern is always allowed to emerge through the overlaid Richter image.
The decisions were made according to what would most effectively draw Morriss and
Richters designs into dialogue, resulting in an unstable picture space that is never fixed,
and in which Morriss patterns and Richters formalist Modernism never fully merge or
separate. As a result, a charge of energy is produced that supersedes and resuscitates
the corpses of Morriss and Richters workswhich, of course, makes me Frankenstein
and Rhythm 69 a beautiful monster.
A version of this paper was first given (alongside a PowerPoint presentation which sequentially showed
each painting from Rhythm 69) at the William Morris Research Seminar, University of Northampton,
2007.

[1] See T J Clark, God is not Cast Down in Farewell to an Idea. New Haven:Yale
University Press,1999, 254.
[2] An English translation can be seen in Oksana Bulgakowa, ed. Kazimir Malevich, The
White Rectangle: Writings on Film. Berlin and San Francisco: Potemkin Press, 1997, 51-58.
A reproduction of the original script appears in Margareta Tupitsyn. Malevich and Film.
New Haven:Yale University Press, 2002, 58-59.
[3] Kent Mitchell Minturn. Seeing Malevich Cinematically. Art Journal. December 22,
2004.
[4] Tupitsyn, Malevich and Film. Op. cit., 62, 89, 91.
[5] The drawings are reproduced in Tupitsyn. Op. cit., 90.
[6] The drawing is reproduced in Stephen C. Foster ed. Hans Richter: Activism, Modernism
and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press.1998, 87.

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