Art Should Show Things People Do Not Want to See
In an effort to make art more accessible, progressives have often campaigned for its democratization. Speaking to Jacobin, the art historian Boris Groys argues that these initiatives tend to rely on a commodified vision of culture which we should reject.
Boris Groys, photographed in 2013. (Valerij Ledenev / Flickr)
- Interview by
- Carlos Egaña
Few living people have been as influential in the fields of art theory and history as Boris Groys. Born in East Germany, he grew up in the Soviet Union and currently teaches as part of the Russian and Slavic Studies Department of New York University and is the author of over a dozen books on the relationship between artistic experience and politics.
Central to his work is the idea that art should not seek to reassure or comfort its viewers: it is the antithesis of marketing and propaganda. In this interview, Groys spoke with Jacobin about the problems with the idea of democratizing art, the role of the internet in contemporary culture, the value of the modern museum, and the aesthetics of memes.
You did your undergraduate studies in mathematical logic at the University of Leningrad, yet nowadays you’re mostly known for your works on art theory and art history. It seems to me like this is an important shift – especially considering the hyperspecialization of academia, its more and more niche research topics. I would like to know, then, how you link your experience with mathematical logic to art history.
It’s hard to say if such a shift would be possible today. When I was a university student, I became interested in the underground, dissident, unofficial art of the time — art that was not officially exhibited in the Soviet Union. So it would not have been possible for me to write about this art in the official Soviet press.
Parallel to my studies, I began to circulate in the unofficial scene, and I began to write about poetry and art in the underground magazines. I did it in the Soviet Union for the whole time I was living there. After I finished university, I was officially working using my mathematical and logical skills. Then I was also working at the Moscow University in the Institute of Structural Linguistics. And parallel to that, I wrote more and more about unofficial Russian art. And I began to publish my work in the West.
I emigrated in 1981. And that was the beginning of the interest in the unofficial Russian art scene in the West. And so, I switched to this activity. I had practiced it for a long time, since 1968. And I had already published in the West, so it was not a problem for me to switch.
In a very famous essay titled “On the New,” you write that
In the Bible, we can find the famous statement that there is nothing new under the sun. That is, of course, true. But there is no sun inside the museum. And that is probably why the museum always was — and remains — the only possible site of innovation.
Do you think this quote also applies to virtual museums? Or could we see the internet as a virtual museum?
When I do something for the internet and for the virtual media, I assume that what I am doing will survive my death. In fact, when we look at the internet — take Google, for example — we already go into the other world, the world of shadows. When we are confronted with certain information, with a certain person, we don’t know if this person is still alive or not.
In this respect, the internet is like a library or a museum. Because when we come into the museum, we also don’t know if the artist is still alive or not. And it is basically irrelevant for us, so it is very similar.
You also live in New York, so you can understand this example: When I need something from a pharmacy, I go on the internet, I find it, I find the description, and I go to the place. I may discover that the pharmacy closed two days ago and that it doesn’t exist anymore. That is an illustration of this kind of instability of the relationship between internet and offline reality. Life and death of institutions, life and death of individuals are not necessarily reflected on the internet.
The second question is to what degree the internet is able to secure the survival of images and texts. That is an open question for two reasons. Now there are NFTs; they promise to secure images and texts. But we don’t have the feeling that this technology is able to recreate a museum system or a library system on a virtual basis — at least for the moment.
The medium of the internet is electricity. And the flow of electricity is a very problematic basis. We have a paradoxical situation: the basis of stability is a flow. And I always compare the flow of electricity with irrigation. Irrigation, as you know, was the basis of the Roman Empire and Asian empires. And when you travel, for example, to Italy or France, you see aqueducts, but there is no water there. So I have always thought, “It is the internet of the future.” There will be computers and all these things but maybe not electrical flow. So yes, the internet has a certain archiving function. But this archive itself is unreliable, and it is difficult to imagine a stability in this archive.
The idea of the new only works if you can compare the contemporary to the past. If the past is there, you know if what you have is new or not. And look, our culture today is based on pure contemporaneity. The past is basically forgotten. Nobody compares what is done now with what was done before. Nobody compares contemporary poetry with Dante or Homer. And nobody thinks about the future. And that means that the role of the archive — and that is partially because of the internet — as a stable system of reference that allows us to identify something new as really new is diminished. Not totally lost, but diminished.
In a conversation you recently had, published in e-flux, you ask the following:
What is the internet, generally? It is a mirror that reflects you, it is a terribly narcissistic way of communicating with the world because you only get what you click. You know a word, and you click it, getting information about this word, concept, event, or whatever it is. But if something does not interest you or you don’t know it, you cannot click on it, and you cannot learn anything about it.
Can art online, nonetheless, disrupt this apparent segregation and pave the way for a more democratic internet?
In a couple of texts of mine, I indicate that museums or big exhibitions have this ability to bring the visual material from the different areas of the internet into one space. You can see in such exhibitions the works of the artists, maybe political attitudes, also cultural phenomena, that you don’t meet on the internet. They are on the internet, but you don’t meet them because you don’t click them, and you don’t click them because you don’t know them. It’s a trap.
Compare the internet with the street. If you go to the street, you see mostly the things you don’t like to see. On the internet, you see only things that you like to see. Art should be like the street and not like the internet. Art should show you things that you don’t like to see, don’t want to see, or are not interested in seeing.
I relatively recently had a conversation in Lisbon with a group of people who wanted to democratize the museum by organizing some kind of a poll, asking people what they want to see in the museum. This poll had to identify the particular objects, and these objects should be shown in the museum. It struck me as nonsense, because if people already know these objects, why see them again? It’s a kind of tautological, repetitive mode of thinking. This mode of thinking very much dominates our culture in general and our internet culture.
If art does something against it, if it shows things people do not choose and do not want to see, then art will contribute to expanding our experience of the world.
In an essay titled “Iconoclasm as an Artistic Device,” you write that “history is also made up more of revivals than of innovations, whereby most innovations make their appearance as revivals and most revivals as innovations.” Could we relate this to memes as an art form? If we are to take them as innovative ways of communicating, what are they reviving indirectly?
To what degree memes are a medium of artistic activity is an open question. But I would say that to innovate means to introduce new memes. And the question is: How do we introduce new memes?
When we are remembering our past, we think about what just remains and what is given to us. But we can go back to the anterior past, passé antérieur. We go to the time before the time that we remember, and that is what the whole identity talk is about. Because memes have something to do with identity, right?
So, identity is not your real identity; it’s not your real past. Identity is a condition from your ancestors, and you don’t know anything about your ancestors. Identity, then, is always an imagined identity — an identity imagined before you were born, actually. If you try to remember or imagine this past before the past, you create a new identity. It is the concept of Renaissance.
Renaissance was the first operation of this kind. People in Italy and France asked what was the Roman Empire before Christianity, so they imagined that, and that was the beginning of modernity. We kind of invented the future by inventing the anterior past, the past before the past.
You have also said that
there was still a life-building impulse in Stalinist culture, a desire to remake life completely, rather than leave it the way it was — using the methods at the disposal of the authorities. But this life-building energy was completely absent after Stalin’s death.
Do you believe there is life-building energy in any state-sponsored art nowadays?
First of all, life-building — that is what the Soviets were doing. If you look, for example, for state patronage in Nazi Germany, it was very much about race, about struggle. It was not life-building in the sense of Soviet art. The same goes for Italian fascism. I saw an exhibition that was organized recently; it is the story of all the exhibitions of fascist art that took place during Benito Mussolini’s government. It was very dark: it was about desolation, solitude.
State-sponsored art depends on what kind of art people want to sponsor. For a long period of recent developments in Western art, state-sponsored art was institutional critique, because institutional critique was basically sponsored by institutions. But it seems to me that now art is more and more defined by the art market. So, if you want to look at the influence of state ideologies, you have to watch the movies, you have to watch the TV, and you have to look at public design and art in the public space. You should look more at the art forms that are directed at the masses, for the masses.
Art is not directed at the masses but at a small portion of society. If a politician asks a creative person to say something, who will they look for? A rock singer, a rap singer, maybe an actor, but never an artist or an intellectual. We are living in a period of mass culture, and if you want to detect state and ideological influence, we have to look more in the direction of mass culture.
In In the Flow, you write that
art does not predict the future, but rather demonstrates the transitory character of the present — and thus opens the way for the new. Art in the flow engenders its own tradition, the re-enactment of an art event as anticipation and realization of a new beginning, of a future in which the orders that define our present will lose their power and disappear.
Can we relate this with contemporary art forms or expressions in contemporary Russia? Is there any artist that demonstrates the transitory character of what has been going on there with Vladimir Putin as the head of government?
From the beginning of the 1990s, we have had a development of actionist art in Russia: artistic actions in the public space. Pussy Riot is part of that, but there were and still are many artists who are working in this field. I don’t know if you know Petr Pavlensky, for example. We have many artists who organize actions and performances and happenings that have this character of protest. They don’t want to produce something like an art form; they want to produce an event. But of course, if you produce an event, you are very much dependent on the media. And the media in Russia is more and more dependent on the government, less and less free. So the information about these events does not reach the public as it did before. That’s the problem.