black cube

Germany - Frankfurter Rundschau
The fuss over a black cube

Two years ago artist Gregor Schneider
http://www.gregorschneider.de/
submitted plans to set up a 13-metre black cube which evokes the Kaaba in Mekka at Venice's biannual arts festival.

However, owing to fears that it would incite protests from Islamic fundamentalists, the project was withdrawn - as was a later attempt to have the cube put on show in Berlin.

Now the black cube is on show at an exhibition in Hamburg about Kasimir Malevich's Black Square in the context of 20th century fine art.

Elke Buhr writes that the cube is worth seeing but that unlike Malevich's picture, which "in the imperial Russia of 1915 had a considerable impact, also politically", with the cube "the observer finds it hard to understand the anticipated political controversy".

Things are different nowadays, Buhr remarks. "Unfortunately, over the past century the Black Square hasn't turned out to be a door to a different world. Instead it has become what it already was in the times of supremacism: a much-cited logo, a piece of design that fails to lift the world out of its trap. Thus, the Kaaba in Mekka continues to reign supreme as the true gate to heaven." (27/03/2007)
http://www.fr-online.de