In The Flow by Boris Groys

Abstract

Aside from quantifiable political, technological and social changes, how might we understand the differences between our cultural era and those of the past? Boris Groys posits our contemporary age as one whose chief interest is in its own contemporaneity. While the Renaissance was interested in reviving classical antiquity, and Modernity in breaking with the past while looking to the future, Postmodernity is left making sense of a globalized, pluralistic, heterogeneous present. Evidence of our navelgazing can be found in the proliferation of museums, galleries and art fairs dedicated to the exploration of what it means to be contemporary, each, in its own way, contributing to a zeitgeist whose essence eludes clear definition. In the Flow, like his previous titles Art Power and Under Suspicion, is a collection of essays penned by Groys over the past half-decade. The ideas succinctly flow into each other, analysing the intersections of technological progress, politics and culture. His view is expansive, as the writing comfortably assembles centuries of theory into what he calls a rheology of art: ‘discussion of art as flowing’. Currently the globally distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany, as well as a curator and critic, Groys is identifiably one of the prominent art theorists of our time. His qualified depth of thinking is displayed convincingly in such essays as ‘Becoming Revolutionary: On Kazimir Malevich’, where he poses the question of whether the Russian avant-garde was a co-producer of the October Revolution of 1917. If yes, he asks, can it function as a model for contemporary art practices that aspire to political and social change? The essay concludes with the idea that being a revolutionary artist means to submit your self and work to this ‘universal material flow’ that destroys all temporary political and aesthetic orders. One must allow materialist product to become ‘infected’ by this infinite non-teleological process, as opposed to resisting it in a misguided goal for immediate social change. In linking the twentieth century of thought to the present day, Groys thrillingly glances off moments in history like a factually grounded Baudrillard crafting original, refreshing takes on a breadth of topics including the archive, modernism, activism, information technologies, globalism and mass media. Connecting the essays is this idea of flow, which appears like a strand running through the book. Depending on context, the word might address the liberation, destruction and reproducibility of information or conjure imagery of global capital networks or the circuitry of exchange between subjects and objects collectively, which make up a web of ideas