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Totalitarianism of Art.

Article Excerpt
Boris Groys. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 190 pp. $22.95

Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual, and Immortality. Exhibition organized by Boris Groys. Apexart, New York, February 20--March 29, 2008

The scope of Boris Groys's Art Power is as broad as the title suggests: the book takes up the cause of the image, its "power," and maintains this position throughout the fifteen essays that constitute the volume. A professor of philosophy and art theory at the Center for Arts and Media Technology in Karlsruhe and a visiting professor at the Slavic department of New York University, Groys offers an unusual perspective on contemporary art practice. Written and published during the last decade, the essays discuss multiple aspects of today's art world--the role of the museum, curatorship, and the shifting nature, of the artwork--framed by the author's reflections on the meaning of it all and his persistent efforts to fit diverse facts into a reductive dialectical schema. Because of Groys's synthesizing tendency, Art Power comes across as primarily a work of philosophy of art, despite its manifest critical intention. This philosophical bent is reinforced by the structure of the book, which is divided in two sections. The first part reflects on the various tendencies within today's world that affect the manifold appearances of the artwork--its (dis)placement within the museum, digitalization, and iconoclastic tendencies acting on and within it; the second focuses on "art at war," when art's relationship with politics is tested to the extreme, for example during the totalitarian regimes of fascist Germany and communist Russia or the transition to democracy within the former Soviet Union and its socialist satellites.

As a rule, the essays in the second part are more insightful and rigorous, and thereby more convincing than those in the first. This is due not only to the author's explicit intention--to make a case for political art, for art that has maximum power, at its apex having merged with the state and come out on top--but also to our expectations as readers. For an English-speaking audience, especially for English-speaking art historians, it is difficult to avoid being puzzled by the style and ambition of this volume. Whereas the best art-historical and critical writing in the United States has always been concrete, detail-oriented, and partisan, Groys declares such an orientation "frustrating" in the introductory paragraph of his first chapter. To avoid "taking sides" and "being accused of one-sidedness" (1), he endeavors instead to speak on today's art in the most general terms, making observations about it that would be true regardless of where and when within the scope of the Western definition of modernity a particular manifestation of art-making had occurred. To reach this...

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