7/31/2019 BORIS GROYS: THINKING IN LOOP

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BORIS GROYS:THINKING IN LOOP

Since Boris Groys first published his seminal Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin(1988; and in translation as The Total Art of Stalinism, 1994), he has donemuch to extend his thinking beyond the confines o academia, even goingso ar as to become a member o the International Association o ArtCritics. However Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual andImmortality, an exhibition o three video compilations accompanied by avoiceover o Groys reading short theoretical texts he himsel has written,is the first time to my knowledge that this aesthetic theorist has decided toinhabit more ully the role (o artist) and produce the (art) works that haveso oten served as the objects o his attention.

Each o Groyss three texts meditates on one significant philosophicaltheme iconoclasm, religion, immortality but does so with an eye to the

privileged modes by which those themes find embodiment in our currentpost-enlightenment moment. Thus religion, defined as the suspensiono all opinion, finds its most contemporary expression through the massmedia, which reveals it, in Groyss terms, as the pure mediality o humanityand so as the avant-garde o our present world. The vampire and thezombie become figures or that very secular immortality that lies at the rooto modern medical science. And iconoclasm takes up residence in nothingother than the moving image itsel, which Groys conceives o both as thestorehouse or all our antasies o sel-annihilation and as the very mediumby which such annihilation, in the orm o audience passivity and cognitivesubmission, may be enacted over and over again.

Importantly, Groys notes that it is only when the moving imageenters the exhibition space, or the space o everyday lie, that its temporal

flows, and so its control over our time, may be either interrupted oroverlooked. Hence Groyss move into the space o the gallery, and tovideo as a means o multiplying the texts he ofers to the audience. Theidea here, o course, is not to illustrate the philosophical rumination withvisual aids but to interrupt or perhaps to jam the transmission. So orexample in the Immortal Bodies video text (2006) we see ootage o thestory o the golem, o Gunther von Hagenss Body Worlds exhibition, ando George Romeros classic Night of the Living Dead(1968). The montageoIconoclastic Delights (2002) includes ootage rom Un Chien Andalou(1929), Mars Attacks!(1996) and Monty Pythons Life of Brian (1979).

The only problem here is that Groyss texts do indeed and are nodoubt meant to stand on their own as philosophical sketches (that they

may be downloaded rom the Apex website and are available in printedorm in the gallery only attests to this act), leaving their subjection to thevideo mixes seem rather contingent. O course this kind o rough open-endedness is a stance coveted by art in general, but there remains somequestion as to whether it is efective, or strategic, or productive whencrossed with the sharp edge o critical thought (and Groyss is sharper thanmost). That it is merely diferent is not, in itsel, enough.Jonathan T.D. Neil

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