Art Power

by Boris Groys
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
224 pp. Trade, $22.95
ISBN 0-262-07292-0.

Reviewed by Boris Jardine
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge

bj210@cam.ac.uk



Extracting a sustained argument from Art Power is no easy task. It purports to be a program piece, but is in fact a ‘collected essays’. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a peculiar mix of circularity and jumpiness in its narrative — Groys repeats himself on numerous occasions, even quoting the same source twice, but each repetition brings a subtly different emphasis. The effect is disconcerting; there is a certain scattergun quality Groys’ thinking. His generalizing, powerful and contrary tone is all that persists from start to finish.

Yet there is a line — one of many, no doubt — that can be drawn through Art Power, one that shows just what this kind of high aesthetic theory can achieve. It begins in the first essay, on the relationship between chronology, art, and difference. Here Groys argues for the ‘equality of aesthetic rights’ — for the systematic suspension of traditional modes of aesthetic judgement:

“The art world should be seen as the socially codified manifestation of the fundamental equality between all visual forms, objects, and media.” (p. 14)

This, Groys concedes, is an old idea, with its origins (as with so much else in Art Power) in the work of Marcel Duchamp. More pertinently, it can be read as an expanded version of Perry Anderson’s claim that aesthetic pluralism might save us from the tyranny of chronologically defined art, from modernism, postmodernism, and, presumably, the threat of post-postmodernism. [1] Compare, for example:

“The axes of aesthetic life would, in other words, […] run horizontally, not vertically.” (Anderson, p. 113)

With:

“Hence, it is not to the ‘vertical’ infinity of divine truth that the artist today makes reference, but to the ‘horizontal’ infinity of aesthetically equal images.” (Groys, p. 17)

Anderson’s conclusion has become Groys’ premise. The next step is for Groys to explain that within the logic of equal aesthetic rights, the sole criterion for judgement rests on the degree to which an artwork can be said to promote and sustain aesthetic diversity. Twenty years on from Anderson and 80 from ‘Fountain’, we might be forgiven for thinking that this is a particularly feeble move. But for Groys it is the necessary, basic assumption on which critical and curatorial apparatus must be based. Moreover, there is something admirable in a formulation that takes seriously the task of undermining traditional criteria of judgement so wholeheartedly. One suspected all along that the pessimism in Anderson’s and his contemporaries’ writing was borne of a desire to have their ideological cake and spit it out — to rejoice in the avant-garde’s critique of bourgeois aesthetics and yet still feel able to decry art on some aesthetic grounds. For Groys, with all traditional grounds gone, we can build from difference alone — a thankless task, but an honest one.

Following this, Groys offers a defence of the role of both the museum and the critic. These are timely interventions, and constitute the beating heart of the book. The privileged museum space, regardless of its historical origins, must now serve as an artistic garrison, fending off the attacks of the art market and mass media. Far from being undermined by the humiliations of modernism and postmodernism, the museum has found itself to be the only space in which art can be recognized as such. To be sure, this puts the museum in a precariously close relationship to the commercial gallery and wider art market, but it also means that the museum is the only space in which proper aesthetic rebellion can take place and be recognized as such. In parallel with the raising of the ordinary to the artistic, the museum allows us to downgrade the visual hyperbole of reality into the manageable calm of an exhibited artwork — it is a veritable space for all seasons.

Complementing the museum is its orator, the critic. Groys first shows us how powerless and emaciated artistic commentators have become — merely dressing artworks for the market, or telling the public that their favourite artists really are that good — before presenting a new model. This new critic, well-versed in aesthetic equality and difference, would delight in showing how one avant-garde stance differs from another, politically, morally, and perhaps even historically and aesthetically. There is more in these middle-essays than it is possible to summarize, and they offer ample recompense for the book’s chaotic nature.

Returning to what nearly becomes Art Power’s central theme, Groys presents us in closing with a truly politicized essay, entitled ‘Europe and Its Others’. Here we have a synthesis of sorts: aesthetic equality and the attendant paradox of art’s sovereignty are set against the backdrop of the European desire to legislate and self-efface in equal measure, to export the universal dicta of human rights and at the same time draw back from the pseudo-imperial projects of modernization theory. The argument contains an almost Heideggerian dose of slippage through metaphor and metonymy, but it also contains some valuable insights. For example, the modern, cross-cultural and a-historical communities of mass-communication are compared to the communities of art galleries. The crucial difference between the arbiters of these communities, argues Groys, is that the blank vehicles of the media cannot be reflexive, working as they do in the manner of commodity not art. At the end of this particular line through Art Power, we reach a point at which Groys can, as it were, agree with himself: paradoxical art, as all good modern art is, will flourish and interact with its communities at the meeting-point of internally conflicted politics (pace contemporary European politics), new technology (pace formal and generic diversity), and institutional struggle (pace the museum as barracks).

This, at least, is one reading of Art Power. It is a struggle, but extracting an argument is worth the effort.