“What kind of Russia is this? XIX century” – Weekend – Kommersant
In 1987, the most complex book of philosophy and art by Boris Groys, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, was written – a work that turned the generally accepted views on the avant-garde and its relationship with power, and at the same time – one of the manifestos of Soviet conceptual art. To the 35th anniversary of the book Igor Gulin I spoke with Boris Groys about the fate of the avant-garde heritage, evolution in art, the possibility of new revolutions and a return to the 19th century.
In “Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin” you describe the art of the second half of the 20th century, how it will turn into pro-interpretation, how it will survive the utopian impulse of the avant-garde era. Has anything changed since then?
Nothing changed. The main change came after the war. This is privatization, private appropriation of the avant-garde. The avant-garde projects of the beginning of the 20th century are universal projects, creating somehow to change the future, to create a plan of cosmic proportions. The neoavant-garde of the 1960s is their private interpretation. An individual artist did a project for himself or for a group of friends, for some community. Such individual myth-making appeared already in the late 1950s. Just look at Mark Rothko, who builds a chapel for himself, introducing his religion.
But after all, in the 1960s, there was still a pathos of unity, a search for the universal? 1968, new age.
In the 1960s, this myth-making really took on a more radical, communitarian character. There are hippie communes, the Situationist International. But these groups break up briefly and quickly. Just a new age – an absolutely private thing. You sit in the lotus position and go out into space, but this unity with space is not connected with other people. They sit in some other posture and unite with something else. The reason for this individualization is not that people work self-centered. They just got higher expectations. There was a conviction that one should not interfere in the affairs of another person. Therefore, now they are talking about what needs to be given to women, to give voice to blacks. Behind all this is the feeling that there is nothing in common between people, which is the common result of the false theories of the Enlightenment and the European colonization of the world. Therefore, it is impossible to speak for something else. You can’t even speak up for your family because women are them. Ultimately, you can only speak for yourself and for yourself. In the 1920s, speaking for others, in the name of others, is considered good. If you gave your voice to the speechless crowd, like Mayakovsky, it was right. And now he thinks that you humiliate them, oppress them and deprive them of their voice, replacing their voice with your own. This caution in relation to others and projects in the spirit of the avant-garde and early socialism is impossible.
In the book, you describe the post-war reality as the world after the end of history, a kind of museum of erroneous utopias. The impossibility of working for the repetition of the repetition with such a sense of the end?
The way it is. At the end of a story, history does not disappear, it begins to multiply: instead of one story, many stories appear. The history of women, the history of children, the history of the Alaska Indians, the history of the city, the neighborhood, the community. And a personal story. That “museum” you are talking about – I would say that it is such a living museum and all today’s people use museum exhibits. They are special for appropriating the collective projects of the past. This is clearly seen in Russian art.
And what has changed in Russian art with temporary conceptualization, in what process of appropriation of football?
I would say that nothing much has changed either in Russia or in the West. It just seems like things are changing. The process of appropriation of utopias is simply being academicized. For example, if we take Russian art, then the difference between Kabakov and, say, Zhilyaev is the difference between David and Ingres. In the Upper French Revolution, the life-building project of the republic looked fresh and full of energy – in particular, destructive energy, which David can clearly see. And with Ingres, it already has a more formalized, aestheticized character. I would say that all the art of the post-war period is an avant-garde academy. This is the convenience of the process. The academization of the Renaissance took several centuries. I think that the academicization of the avant-garde is also waiting. Everyone thinks art is fashion. But art, in particular, concerns a conservative occupation, it is built on conservation. After all, fashion is revealed in the fact that you throw away yesterday’s dress, and you hang yesterday’s picture in a museum. And that’s it.
That is, do you think that we will live for a long time, looking back at the beginning of the twentieth century, without the possibility of any new break?
In order for the gap to occur, ultrasonic changes are needed. The rupture of the fetus at the back of the Renaissance was the transition from theology to humanism. That is, he decided that there is no God, but only man, and they stopped dealing with God, but began to deal with man (it doesn’t matter what happened with this murder). The consequences of this decision stretched for many centuries – until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was decided that there was no man, but only a machine. Insofar as a person works, he is a machine, and insofar as he does not work, it is not clear why he is needed. If we look at modern posthumanism, transhumanism and so on, these are all absolutely the same ideas. They are simply rewritten. Some Negarestani writes that man must be overcome. Nietzsche already said this. That is, this tower is spinning further and further, and it will spin until the time when people decide that something else happened instead of the car. There are new technologies, but they are used to rewrite older technologies. Technology is also conservation: the same thing is done all the time. What is an algorithm? Repeating the same thing, no matter what. How long will this repetition last? Just how much technology will be supported. Einstein’s old joke? When it is determined how they will fight in a world war. He replied that it was difficult for him to say, but he knew exactly how they would fight in quarters, namely, with stones and sticks. Now, if technologies were destroyed, then a new art would arise, but as long as they exist, art in essence does not occur.
But the avant-garde, after all, took the car and saw in it a means for reorganizing the human body, special art often fetishizes a car that does not look like some kind of project.
No, it simply proposes an individual project: Turning oneself into a machine. Andy Warhol has already said that he wants to be a machine. That is, you yourself turn into a machine for the manufacture of some product. To live in a machine civilization means to live in a project. The artist creates his own project: he produces something, he creates a design office out of himself, he creates management, a business plan, PR, and so on.
What you are describing is absolutely capitalistic logic. The vanguard involved in acquiring a way out of it. Is there any vision of a way out now?
The avant-garde thought—and perhaps was right—that industrial civilization was undergoing a denial of competition. One can imagine that technology will be so popular that conflict will become impossible in it. If so, then capitalism will die by itself. Because when there is no competition, there is no capitalism. Many at the beginning of the 20th century believed that this would be the case – Bogdanov, for example. It may very well be that this techno-socialist utopia is being realized. But I don’t think that art grows much from this. Now artists are discovering each other, but less and less. Because when you communicate only for yourself, implement your project, it is not clear how you can compete with someone. You have your own audience, and the other audience will not accept you anyway. The connection was for getting a place in the museum. But it is clear that museums will go bankrupt because they are too expensive. This means that the artists will exhibit on the Internet. But what kind of competition is there? He has a website and you have a website.
And what will happen not to the artists, but just to the people? Will there be no more competition?
And there are no more people. People disappear. There are women, there are white men, there are millennials, there are IT people, there are artists. There were people in the premises of humanism, but there are no more people.
Then another question: what will happen to progress, because of which avant-garde utopias and revolution are revealed?
Progress will likely stop on its own. Here I live in New York. Here the metro was built at the beginning of the 20th century, but it seems that it was built under Cheops, like pyramids. And just like the pyramids, it is not clear how it can be rebuilt. It’s the same with the road system: it was created when the car was first installed, you can’t change it. Already now it is not visible how it is possible to remake the Internet. There is still progress in some documents. But if you have already done some class once, it is difficult to change it somehow, and the lifestyle associated with it is also difficult to change.
You can talk not about technology, but about verification. There is no utopian project in the events that are observed now, but there seems to be a desire from the approaching course of history. Is it possible to somehow connect them with your favorite revolutions?
They have no such desire. The wars that are going on now are covered by competition. So we discussed that in the future, maybe there will be no more competitions. But now she is. We live under capitalism. Capitalism is a competitive model, it is different from socialism. Functions to cover other devices, as well as cases of detection of other devices. Note that during the Cold War, when China, the Soviet Union, the countries of the social bloc were isolated from the competitive system, there were no big wars. Only colonial wars. We have already observed the moment when, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Germany, Italy and Japan moved from a non-competitive state to a competitive state, that is, they entered capitalism. This entry into capitalism caused two world wars. We see that other countries – among them Russia, China – have left socialism and entered capitalism. As more and more countries are now entering capitalism, there is great potential for clashes.
That is, structurally this situation does not differ from the beginning of the twentieth century?
The whole current situation is the free end of the 19th century: free range, imperial politics, nationalism, the dominance of the media (then it was newspapers), stars – in general, the whole social structure. What is the 19th century? Look: it was the 18th century with its utopian projects. The 19th century was the century of ideological reaction and the development of capitalism. Next comes the 20th century. The 20th century was like the 18th. It was the century of a new era of enlightenment, revolution, utopia. Now it’s over. The 21st century has begun – it’s like the 19th: utopias have collapsed, an era of regression has begun. Once again, conservative nationalist ideologies dominate everywhere, on the one hand, and competitive capitalism, closely associated with nationalism, on the other. We live in an age of restoration. After all, what is nationalism? This is the activation of the past. When people say: we are not Soviet, we are Russian, what do they mean? The Cherry Orchard, the Russia we lost. What is this Russia? XIX century. They will be sold in the 19th century.
But is Soviet history somehow inscribed in this cherry orchard?
No, they don’t want Soviet history. It’s all an illusion. Because Soviet is internationalist, no one liked it. I remember well the end of the Soviet Union. There was a terrible nationalism. Absolutely everything is taken into account that their cases are due to other states, and that if you get rid of them, everything will be fine. Armenians evaluate that they live like in Paris, Georgians like in New York, everyone evaluates that they will separate enough, how they live in all the power and beauty of their national commitment. They provide international assistance to Cuba. Then Russia will also live happily and richly. It all started from this common opinion: nationalism destroyed the Soviet Union. Nothing has changed over time and is unlikely to appear in the near future.
It turns out that there is a kind of out of sync between the world community and art: in art, competition is gradually disappearing, but in politics, on the contrary, is it returning?
I wouldn’t say so. Both artistic and political conflicts affect the entry of new countries and strata of society into the technosphere. goals, a desire arises to push out those who have already taken their place in the technosphere, including the media sphere, a desire to find their voice, to realize their own realization. These conflicts begin to fade away, each time he wants to get his techno niche and the desire to keep this niche, which will exceed the desire to expand it. But, of course, this total processing of the technosphere takes a very long time.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram