What hurts me when I remember the last chapter of Malevich's life? What hurts me when I recapitulate the humiliations he experienced then, earlier, and after his death? It is the way historians and researchers have ignored the issue, passing it over in silence. I am 92 years old. I do not want to take with me to the other side an undecipherable mystery that was once shared with me in Leningrad by Anna Leporskaya, the artist's, her teacher's, confidant.

My memory serves me correctly. In 1935 I saw for the first time the Black Square, or rather its reproduction, in an issue of the now-defunct avant-garde periodical BLOK. I felt like confronting something infinitely attractive, though unfathomable.

From May 12th to May 14th 2008 Prof. Douglas Crimp stayed in Warsaw on the invitation of the Foksal Gallery Foundation. In the Avantgarde Institute he held seminars which concentrated on the questions of subjectivity, memory, history and the identity politics. The point of departure for these discussion, as well as for the public lecture "Action around the Edges", were fragments of his two recent books together with texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Yvonne Rainer Andy Warhol's films.

Luiza Nader: Beginning our conversation, I would like to refer to your compelling seminars and lecture in the Avantgarde Institute in Warsaw in May 2008.

On death, humour, intelligentsia, history, modernism, art in Russia and worldwide