Lecture | Rex Butler ‘Boris Groys: Communist Art Historian’
Boris Groys: Communist Art Historian
Rex Butler
It might seem strange to argue it, but Boris Groys, who made his name with The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), a brilliant analysis of the complicity between the Russian avant-garde and Stalinism, might be our greatest Communist art historian. How? Groys’s critical writing — pursued primarily today through the internet in such journals as e-flux — is transcendental, unsurpassable, indespensible, precisely in its weakness, its unemphaticness, its non-judgementality, even its self-erasure and self-contradiction. In a radical sense, as Groys admits, it is not even critical, in the sense of negating, excluding, opposing to the world as it is the way it should be. Rather, Groys’s discourse attempts simply to double the world, opposing we might say the world only to itself. The world now, after the revealing of its transcendental condition, which is also nothing else but more of the world, is at once unchanged and totally transformed. Like the world after communism.
Date: 6–7.30pm, Wednesday 10 April 2021
Venue: Theatre A, Old Arts Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville
Presented by Discipline journal and the Art History Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
