13. Sverdlov Square, 5 May 1920 The brilliant American researcher A. E. Newman, seeking new material beyond the canon of established primary sources in Russia, recently backed a hunch and took the Kama Express from Moscow to the Urals city of Perm. Working on his doctoral thesis, The Fruition of Old World Ambitions in American Minimalism, Newman had heard rumours of a suppressed art movement at the time of the October Revolution led by a Sidor Gubkin who was deported to Siberia in 1921. Perm, formerly Molotov, had long been a transit centre ferrying prisoners to mineral mines in the Ural Mountains or across into the Tayga of Siberia. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had once shuffled up these same streets in leg irons. In the vaulted storage basement of the Perm State Picture Gallery, Newman came across a brown envelope bearing the Soviet censor's stamp and containing two fragments; this dated photograph and a hand bill declaring The Materialist Manifesto. It read; Materialism is a perpetual present without past or future, without history or ideal. Materialism belongs to the indifferent world of matter and celebrates its formless profusion. Materialism serves no god or ideology, acknowledging only its own self-perpetuating and self-seeking institutions. Materialism is brute reality, specific , intractable and unquestioning. Materialism is gravity, density, weight, mass, bulk, solidity, surface, strength and stability. Materialism is truth to matter. It was signed by Sidor Gubkin and dated 1916. Newman posits two explanations for the object in the photograph; either it was a temporary structure left under cover of darkness in a guerrilla action by the Materialists, or it slipped past the censor amongst the May Day celebrations organised that year by O. D. Kaneneva. In the latter case we might be looking at the wooden shuttering used to cast reinforced concrete. Either way Newman claims the monolith as the purest expression of the Materialist Manifesto aims and an artistically radical conception that outstrips Malevich's 'Black Square' in importance and presages subversive developments in recent American art.