Boris Groys

Boris Groys
Born 19 March 1947
Berlin, Germany
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental
Main interests
 Political philosophy, religion, ethics, art theory

Boris Efimovich Groys (born 19 March 1947) is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed Professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the Courtauld Institute of Art London.

Biography

Groys attended high school in Leningrad (known since 1991 as St. Petersburg). From 1965–1971 he studied mathematical logic at the University of Leningrad, subsequently working as a research fellow at various scientific institutes in Leningrad. From 1976-1981 he served as a research fellow at the Institute of Structural and Applied Linguistics at the University of Moscow. In 1981 he emigrated from the USSR to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he pursued various scholarships. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Münster, Germany.

During his time in the Soviet Union, Groys participated in the unofficial cultural scenes of Moscow and Leningrad, publishing in 37, Chasy, and other samizdat magazines. In 1979 he published the essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” in the art magazine A-YA, in which he coined the term applied to the art movement “Moscow Conceptualism.”

Groys is a pioneering theorist in reflection on socialist art and postmodern art, without evaluating either. Western thinkers such as Clement Greenberg had criticized socialist art, especially socialist realism, for being mass art and made it an aesthetic taboo. Groys re-evaluated socialist art production, challenging the norms of aesthetics by pushing a thesis based on Walter Benjamin in the very interpretation of politics, claiming that modernism had survived in the "total artwork" (Gesamtkunstwerk) of Stalinism.[1] This thesis is charged with having pushed a new generation of thinkers into re-evaluating the Socialist aesthetic heritage (among others Miško Šuvaković, Marina Gržinić, and Ana Peraica) recognized as the discourse of post-socialist art.

Groys is a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICAO), and has served as a fellow of numerous institutions including International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Austria, Harvard University Art Museum, and the University of Pittsburg. In 2001 he served as Director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. From 2003 to 2004 he headed the research program Post-Communist Condition[2] in cooperation with Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany.

During December and January Boris Groys was Visiting Professorial Fellow of the Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, where the following conversation was recorded. Question: Does this suggest that philosophers have a naturally closer relationship with artists than do art historians? BG: "We can look at artists in two ways. First, as if we were biologists, trying to construct a neo-Darwinian story of ‘art species’; how artists developed, how they succeeded, failed, survived. In these terms art history is formulated a little like botany or biology. The second way of considering art history is as part of the history of ideas. We have the history of philosophy, the history of science, the history of cultural history, just as we can have the history of art. So the question is whether we define art history more like botany, or more like the history of philosophy – and I tend more to the latter, because, as I have suggested, the driving force of art is philosophical."[3]

Selected publications

Groys has written over 150 articles on modern and contemporary art and Russian art and intellectual history in several languages. His books include

Groys has also published Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual and Immortality (DVD, 2008). The videos were produced between 2002 and 2007. Each of these videos combines a theoretical text written and spoken by the author with film footage fragments taken from different movies and film documentations.

Curatorial activities

Groys has curated numerous exhibitions, including

References

  1. ↑ Groys, B. (1992). The total art of Stalinism : avant-garde, aesthetic dictatorship, and beyond. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford, Princeton University Press.
  2. ↑ http://www.postcommunist.de/home/index.php?kat=projekt&lang=en
  3. ↑ Text of interview with John-Paul Stonard in: Immediations (2007)

External links

Research and projects

Lectures and interviews

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