Boris Groys

IS POWER IMMANENT IN ART?
By Andrew Maerkle


Spread from The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917).

Born in the former East Germany in 1947, Boris Groys is one of the leading critics of contemporary art and culture today. Working in the intersections between contemporary art, media theory and philosophy, he has published books including The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), Art Power (2008), The Communist Postscript (2010), Introduction to Anti-Philosophy (2012) and In the Flow (2016). In these and other texts, he combines a comprehensive knowledge of Western intellectual traditions with readings informed by the history of the Russian avant-garde and the post-Soviet context to upend the assumptions of contemporary thought – as when he draws a connection between the readymade and Kierkegaard’s notion of Jesus Christ as manifesting a difference beyond difference, identifies the relationship between biopolitics and the prevalence of documentation in post-conceptual art, or exposes the contradiction of claiming “European” values as universal values, noting that “European humanism sees the human being as first and foremost a work of art. Human rights are in fact the rights of art, but applied to human beings.”

From the historic connections between the Russian and the Japanese avant-gardes to the leading role Japanese corporations have played in shaping the era of social networking, and in light of events like the Japanese government’s introduction of the “My Number” social security and tax number system or US President Barack Obama’s meticulously staged visit to Hiroshima in 2016, there are multiple points of resonance between the themes Groys addresses and current issues in Japanese society. Now, a Japanese translation of Art Power, published by Gendai Kikakushitsu, will help to introduce Groys’s recent writing on contemporary art to a broader Japanese audience. Additionally, Groys is coming to Japan for a series of symposiums in Osaka and Tokyo exploring the theme, “Is Power Immanent in Art?” In advance of his visit, ART iT conducted an e-mail interview with Groys about the current relations between art and power.

Organized by the Boris Groys Japan Invitation Committee, the symposium series with Boris Groys will be held between January 15 and 21 at multiple venues in Osaka and Tokyo. For a complete schedule, see here.

Interview:

ART iT: It has been a momentous eight years since Art Power was published in English in 2008. Over this time we have seen, among other things, the global financial crisis of September 2008, followed by the rise of populist movements on the left and right like Occupy and the Tea Party, as well as the Greek sovereign debt crisis and the Brexit referendum; the Arab Spring, the emergence of Islamic State, and the migrant crisis in Europe; the Russian annexation of Crimea, Chinese encroachment upon the country’s neighboring territories, and Cuban rapprochement with the United States; and a tendency toward increasingly nationalist and authoritarian governments in countries ranging from Israel to Turkey, Poland to India, Japan and now the United States. How would you assess the essays in Art Power, written over a period ranging from 1997 to 2007, from the vantage point of today?

BG: The essays in Art Power, as well as many others I have written in the meantime, deal with the relationship between the political and aesthetic fields. Politics became increasingly aestheticized during the period of modernity. In our time, the combination of politicized art and aestheticized politics has dominated the public sphere. I do not believe that this domination has changed over the decade since the appearance of the book.
The second important topic of the book is the use of new media such as video and film in art spaces, and the presence of art on the Internet. Here again, I do not see any radical changes in the situation that I tried to describe in Art Power.

ART iT: In the Total Art of Stalinism and in Art Power, you argue convincingly that in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, art was coopted by politics, and Stalin and Hitler tried to shape a future audience for their visions in the same manner as the avant-garde. I am less clear on your position on art’s capacity to shape politics. Do you think that in the current market-driven media environment art has the capacity to shape politics in an immediate way, or is it consigned to always operating on a deferred politics of the future?
 
BG: Well, the avant-garde wanted to transform the public sphere, including the political sphere, in its totality. Such a project does not look so plausible today. However, there is still a possibility for art to become engaged for this or that political force. This kind of engaged art was created throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is also being created today. Beyond that, there is a possibility for art to analyze the functioning of language, images and media in contemporary culture. This kind of critical analysis also has a political dimension.

ART iT: Does the market/privatization not have the same totalizing effect as, say, communism in the USSR? In a market-dominated society where language and ideas are commodified, how are we to distinguish between content/analysis and style/form – or establish a critical position at all?
 
BG: The art market is simply a tool for the distribution of the artworks. The commodification of an artwork does not automatically annul its message. The mere fact that one can buy bread does not prevent one from eating it. Similarly, the fact that one buys an artwork does not prevent us from perceiving its message, including the critical one – of course, only in the case that this artwork has a message.
Beyond that, the absolute majority of art spectators (in museums, at exhibitions, on the Internet, etc) do not look at art with the goal to buy it. The majority of the contacts between art and its spectators take place outside the art market.


Hikaru Fujii – Installation view of Record of the Bombing (2016), mixed-media installation, in “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: In much of Asia, as in many other parts of the world, support for contemporary art is often tied to a statist agenda. For example, in Japan contemporary art festivals are promoted by municipal governments with the explicit aim of “urban regeneration,” and the notion of “Asian contemporary art” often seems to be invoked as a means of projecting regional hegemony. What does this say about the politics of contemporary art in general? Internationally, why has contemporary art prevailed over other forms of art (Socialist Realism, traditional painting, etc)?
 
BG: Contemporary art is the heir of the artistic avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th century. These avant-gardes wanted to break with all national traditions to create an international, universal art – related to our industrial civilization, our contemporary means of communication, etc. Contemporary art is also international art – that is why it is more successful than different versions of national and regional art. Of course, contemporary art can be used by regional or national powers as it can be used by the art market – but that does not change its international character.

ART iT: But not everyone is equally international. If you look at major exhibitions that define contemporary art like the Venice Biennale or documenta, you might come to the conclusion that there is an unstated quota on artists from certain parts of the world. And at the very least it requires capital to bring the international conversation to new places, as exemplified by the success of the Sharjah Biennial and the annual March Meeting program. So how do we account for this split between the international as a projection/aspiration and as a field of representation?

BG: There is no way to deny that contemporary art has differing degrees of institutional support and public interest in different countries. This is also true for Western countries. To create such support is a difficult task. In some cases, it requires an individual initiative, as in Sharjah, while in others there is socio-political pressure leading to a new interest in contemporary art, as was recently the case in Mexico or in China. In still other countries, contemporary art has been rejected in the name of national traditions. But it is important to see that internationalism and universalism are the intrinsic characteristics of contemporary art – independent of statistics concerning its spread and success.

ART iT: How would you respond to the case of Japan, where privatization, and the lack of an American-style patronage and fund-raising system (notwithstanding its own problems), means that municipal museums are now dependent on ticket sales for revenue? The result is that every year we get a mix of fashion, architecture and animation-related exhibitions, because these attract huge audiences, with one or two contemporary art exhibitions thrown in. The justification is that you make the blockbuster to finance the “passion project,” but certainly this commodification of the museum, with the spectator as consumer, affects the kind of art that can be displayed there, and the messages it can spread.

BG: When I speak about the international character of contemporary post-avant-garde art, I mean the following. One important source of this art is the abstract geometry – which, in its turn, corresponds to the contemporary industrial world and design. The other is the analysis of color and form – which can be applied to any artistic tradition, because every image is a combination of color and form. And yet another is the collage – which corresponds to the contemporary use of digital media that operates by copy and paste. One can go further, but it seems to me that these examples suffice.
Now, we all fly airplanes and use the Internet – even if the production of airplanes and Internet devices is different in different countries. Japan is a technologically advanced country in many respects. So I think it will also develop support for contemporary art at some point in time. After all, in ancient Greek, art was called techne.



Left: Envelope for The Album of Proletarian Art, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Japanese League of Proletarian Artists, 1930), collection of eight color postcard reproductions of selected works from the 3rd Great Proletarian Art Exhibition, 1930. Right: Arai Mitsuko – Dou age (Toss Up), color postcard from Album of Proletarian Art, vol. 2. Below: Spread from Mavo, no. 7 (August 24, 1925), with illustrations of Soviet architecture (left) and print by Tatsuo Toda (right). Photo Kei Okano. All: Collection of the Art Library, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

ART iT: What is your understanding of the relationship between art and ideology today? Couldn’t we say that there is a reflection of neoliberal ideology in contemporary art?
 
BG: I would not say that. Personally, I have never met an artist or curator who reads Friedrich Hayek or Ayn Rand. The art world is, rather, very heterogeneous – much more heterogeneous than the wider public. One should not forget that the art world is small compared to cinema, TV, sport, advertising, design, etc. The small size gives the art world a chance to accept and include attitudes, opinions and projects that would be unacceptable for wider audiences. Marinetti called for the destruction of all museums and monuments, glorified war as the “hygiene” of mankind, and despised women. On the other side of the avant-garde spectrum, Melnikov required the collectivization of sleep – creating collective sleeping spaces for hundreds of sleepers. These ideas had no chance of being accepted by the majority of the population and, thus, to become points of discussion in the framework of the democratic political process. But they were accepted by the art world as possibilities of imagination – even if not practically realizable. That is why all the important intellectual movements of the late 20th Century – from neo-Marxism and psychoanalysis to structuralism and post-structuralism to Deleuze and speculative realism – found their primary non-academic audience in the art world. The art world would be interested in neoliberalism only if it were rejected by everybody else.

ART iT: Does contemporary art not have some kind of cumulative symbolic meaning, both within a specific context (a certain country, say) and in an international context? What is happening at the Venice Biennale, for example?
 
BG: No, contemporary art does not have a cumulative meaning. Maybe that is what irritates people – because our broader economic and political spaces are more homogeneous. Generally, the public shares a common understanding of what is important and what is unimportant – even if opinions about the related issues differ. But every artistic practice has its own criteria of importance and non-importance. Individual artistic projects are very individual, indeed. The art world has no inner unity, no common message, nor even a common system of coordinates. It consists of many different groups that mostly do not like each other. These groups are only loosely interconnected – and their inner structure is also loose and shifting.
The big exhibitions present a unified spectacle only if one looks on them from a great distance. If one begins to be really interested in the individual artistic positions, one very quickly comes to the conclusion that they are, actually, incompatible – even when they are put in the same space. Beyond that, the curators also have different attitudes – so that different editions of the Venice Biennale look completely different, if one remains with the example. This heterogeneity can be frustrating. But it makes no sense to deny it.

ART iT: How do you view the rhetoric of “lateness,” in counterpart to newness? Do you think ideas like “multiple modernities” or “contemporaneity” which have arisen in counter to the rhetoric of lateness are productive, or do they in some way obscure the reality of modernity?
 
BG: Well, it seems to me that today artists think not so much about their position in the historical context – in terms of newness and lateness – as they do their originality and recognizability in the global contemporary landscape. We are living in times of Google, so the past and present seem to be synchronized – separated by one click. Accordingly, artists look at what their contemporaries do to find their own way. But that does not mean that they can go back to the past, because the past, as I already said, is also contemporary, also available here and now.

ART iT: Do you have any retrospective thoughts on “lateness”? After all, along with “derivativeness,” this was one of the major rhetorical devices for policing the borders between modern/contemporary art and its margins, and to a degree the notion of lateness remains internalized on both sides of the “margins” even today. Perhaps this is why we see so many artists, curators and researchers from across the world showing an interest in digging up forgotten histories to recuperate in the present. So doesn’t the “time lag” in some way inform our sense of nowness or contemporaneity?
 
BG: Yes, sure – artists are looking for inspiration in areas that are relatively unexplored, out of sight. These areas can also be found in the past. But their use in the contemporary context changes their “original” meaning – if there ever was one. A pharaoh’s mummy in the British Museum is not the same as it was enclosed in an Egyptian pyramid.

ART iT: Has the Internet homogenized time? What is the horizon of contemporary art?
 
BG: The Internet is de facto very fragmented – different groups of people click very different sites. The interests are specialized. The rise of the Internet abolished the unified public space with a common horizon that was created by press and TV. Today even news is becoming personalized.



Above: Alfred Barr – “Torpedo” diagram, 1941. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Below: Yukinori Yanagi – Absolute Dud (2016), installation view in “Wandering Position” at BankArt 1929, Yokohama, 2016. Photo ART iT.

ART iT: What is the role of the museum in relation to the autonomy of the artwork, as you describe it in your essay, “The Logic of Equal Aesthetic Rights”? Is the autonomy of the artwork here contingent upon the museum, or is it necessarily independent of the museum? 
 
BG: The artwork is never really autonomous. It always depends on the context of its production and reception. The museum can experiment with the context of art reception – and it does. The contemporary museum is less the place of a permanent collection as it is a stage for changing exhibitions.

ART iT: But if we reject the notion of autonomy, what is the justification for the museum, or the art institution in general, to be considered a space of “free speech”?
 
BG: Through the museum, the contemporary artist gets a certain distance from his or her own time. In the museum one places one’s work in the context of the past – and at the same time addresses future generations. That liberates the artist from the prison of the present, and provides a chance to think beyond the box.

ART iT: What happens when the museum becomes the target of censorship or other forms of control of expression?

BG: Well, that can always happen – and happens, indeed, often enough. The possibility that is available today is to protest using the media and especially the Internet. The Internet opens the possibility of making art public while avoiding censorship by any museum. 



Above: 1,000-Yen Note Trial: Catalogue of Seized Works (Modified) (Tokyo: 1,000-Yen Note Incident Round-Table Conference, 1967), poster, front and back. Below: 1,000-Yen Note Incident Round-Table Conference – The Great Courtroom Exposition 1: Men’s All Catalogue by Nakanishi Natsuyuki (1966/94), documentation of presentation of art works in defence of Genpei Akasegawa in his 1,000-yen note counterfeiting trial, Tokyo District Court, 1966.

ART iT: I’d like to propose a thought experiment: viewed from the extreme margins, for someone encountering the notion of “art” for the first time, there would be no anti-art, just art, and, specifically, a continuous Western tradition of art. For example – perhaps in the case of an animist for whom everything is sacred – the opposition between sacred and profane that is essential to anti-art would have to be learned according to Western values, and as such would simply be something that defined “art.” There is an inherent cultural component to the techne of contemporary art. Does this affect the universal nature of anti-art/contemporary art in anyway?
 
BG: Yes, sure – one should know a certain tradition to be able to recognize a protest against this tradition, a break with this tradition. But here there is another interesting question. Let us assume that somebody does not know the Western art tradition – but knows only his or her national, eg, Japanese, tradition. And then this somebody would decide to break with this tradition and do art in a radically different way. Would the results of this decision be similar to the Western results, or not? As with every conjectural question, this question cannot be answered with any evidence. But still, it is difficult to imagine that the results of this break with tradition would be very different. Then: to break with an artistic tradition without switching to another means, 1) either to analyze it in a formal way, or 2) to move into the territory of non-art. That is what happened in the context of the Western tradition and is also – I would assume – what would happen in the context of any other tradition.
In other words, the traditions are different – but the break with them has to be similar. Or: people live in different ways – but they die in the same way.
 
  
ART iT: We are seeing a resurgence of nationalist politics across the world, often developed in explicit rejection of universalist ideals. For example, the ruling party in Japan is seeking to amend the constitution to redefine individual rights from within a particular “Japanese cultural context,” rather than as absolute, universal rights. What would you say are the prospects for universalism today? What could be a starting point for rethinking universalism?
 
BG: The people who proclaim the specificity of the Japanese, the Russian, the Chinese, etc, cultural context use the same technology, drive the same cars, write on the same computers. Nobody would fly on an airplane made according to a particular cultural identity, but not according to the international technical standards. It is true: nationalism is growing. But it is growing because we are living in a world in which different nations compete in the economic field. It is like in football. What is universal in football? The football itself.

ART iT: To conclude, how would you parse the words in the title of your book, Art Power? How does art today negotiate between the emancipatory and the “elite”? How does it negotiate between hegemony and difference?
 
BG: The notions of elite, norm and hegemony imply a certain set of images, narratives and rituals that already belong to the sphere of art. The same can be said about emancipation and difference: the different is also always recognized through certain images and narratives. Now art can contribute to making the signs of difference look attractive and valuable – and the traditional “elite signs” look old-fashioned and uncool. The opposition between the elite and the emancipatory, as well as that between norm and deviation, is fluid. The terms of these oppositions are constantly changing places. It is in this process in which art plays an important role, and maybe even the leading role.

Boris Groys: Is Power Immanent in Art?

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