Boris Groĭs

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art--which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place. Boris Groys is Professor at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Going Public

Moscow conceptualism

History becomes form

Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other dimensions altogether, other spatiotemporal politics, other timescales, other understandings of matter, other forms of life--not only as works, but as a basic condition for being able to perceive artworks in the first place. Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms that anticipate, surpass, or even bend around their purported origins in canonical European and American regimes of representation, as well as what we currently understand to be the horizon of artistic practice. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Contributors Claire Bishop, Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, Jörg Heiser, Terry Smith, Anton Vidokle, and Sarah Wilson

Conceptualism Revisited

Moscow Symposium

Die Kunst des Denkens

Marius Babias

Kerry Oliver-Smith

Project Europa: Imagining the (Im)Possible considers the relationship of art and artists to the promise of democracy after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Nineteen artists from Turkey to the British Isles explore the conflicts and contradictions of Europe's democratic dream while confronting a paradox: Europe as the site of possibility and impossibility for creating an egalitarian society.

Imagining the (im)possible

Project Europa

Moscow Conceptualism

History Becomes Form

Искусство утопии

Peter Weibel

Anne von der Heiden

osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus

Zurück aus der Zukunft

Petra Kipphoff

Artwork by Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Dan Graham, Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Jason Rhoades, Robert Smithson, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Weiner, Dan Flavin, Hans Haacke, Edward Kienholz. Text by Boris Groys, Petra Kipphoff.

Boris Groĭs

Books

Your next favorite book is out there