2020年经济学人 眼前的黑不是黑(4)（在线收听）

“Trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world,” he later wrote, “I took refuge in the form of the square.” Malevich painted many squares of different colours, but “Black Square” is the one people remember. Unveiled against the backdrop of the first world war and turmoil in Russia, Malevich’s “Black Square” marked a turningpoint in modern art.

马列维奇后来写道：“我拼命想把艺术从现实世界的沉重负担中解放出来，而方块这个形状让我得以解脱。”马列维奇画了许多不同颜色的方块，但人们最记忆深刻的是《黑色方块》。在第一次世界大战和俄国动荡的背景下，马列维奇的《黑色方块》标志着现代艺术的一个转折点。

Malevich was a huge influence on his successors, especially the American abstract expressionists, but time has not been kind to “Black Square”, at least not physically. These days it is shrunken, cracked and slightly miscoloured. All the same, the challenge that it represented to artists is as powerful as ever.

马列维奇对他的后继者，尤其是美国抽象表现主义者产生了巨大的影响。但时间没有饶过《黑色方块》，至少在外观上是如此。近日来，这幅画开始皱缩、开裂和轻微掉色。尽管如此，它给艺术家们带来的挑战还是一如既往的强大。

It was exactly a century after “Black Square”, in 2015, that Mr Kapoor secured the rights to make art using Vantablack, the blackest black ever created. It is not a paint so much as a dense coating of tiny “nanotubes”—“ Vanta” stands for “vertically aligned nanotube array”—which, instead of reflecting light, traps it almost completely. (It was developed as a material that might be useful in hiding satellites.) In a recent display in his studio, Mr Kapoor’s artworks seemed to have no shape or contours. A circle of Vantablack on the floor could be a rug-like coating or a bottomless hole; a bowl shape could be convex or concave. There was no way of telling.

2015年，《黑色方块》恰好诞生了整整一个世纪，卡普尔在这一年获得了使用“超级黑”创作艺术的权利，“超级黑”是有史以来最黑的颜料。与其说它是一种颜料，不如说是一层由微型“纳米管”组成的致密涂层（“Vanta”代表“垂直排列的纳米管阵列”）。“超级黑”几乎可以完全吸收光线，而不反射光。（它原是作为一种可能有助于隐形卫星的材料而研发的。）在他工作室最近的一次展览中，卡普尔先生的作品似乎没有形状和轮廓。地板上的“超级黑”圆圈就像是一块地毯，也像是无底洞；碗的形状看起来像是凸起的，也像是凹陷的。我们无从判断。

During the Renaissance, artists saw that paint could be used to portray objects in three dimensions. Vantablack seems to remove the object altogether. Speaking to Artforum, a magazine, Mr Kapoor once said: “Imagine walking into a room where you literally have no sense of the walls—where the walls are or that there are any walls at all. It’s not an empty dark room, but a space full of darkness.” For the viewer, as for the artist, these works are another step in the quest for the meaning of black.

文艺复兴时期，艺术家们发现可以用绘画来三维描绘物体。“超级黑”的使用似乎完全抹除了所描绘的物体。卡普尔曾在接受《艺术论坛》杂志采访时说：“想象一下，当走进一个房间，你根本感觉不到墙壁的存在，你感觉不到墙在哪，或者根本就没有墙壁。这不是一个空荡荡的暗室，而是一个充满黑暗的空间。”对于观者和艺术家来说，这些作品是对黑色意义的又一次探索。