The Strong and the Specific

a work in progress

I became intrigued with the philosopher Boris Groys after seeing reference to him on the blog ArtFagCity and reading comments that called him the strongest art thinker today. After reading a couple of his pieces culled from eflux, I focused on his essay The Weak Universalism. While I find his thinking to be lacking and his proscriptions to be simplistic, he does raise some very interesting issues which I want to explore further.

To be clear, when I say that his thinking is lacking, what I mean is that in the few essays that I have read, Groys has this tendency to set up straw-man arguments and then avoid addressing them. He also has the habit of introducing definitions of key terms and then materially changing their meaning half way through. And his proscriptions fall into the simplistic pattern of just taking the opposite of what he critiques and presenting that as something dynamic.

What I propose to do here is to take the main themes of his The Weak Universalism essay and, first, critique his argument and then second, outline my thinking as an alternative direction. The main themes are: the avant-garde, historical time, artistic messianism, weakness, and ending up with the role of the artist.

The Avant-Garde

Groys begins the meat of his essay by talking about the avant-garde but almost immediately he undermines himself by not identifying what it is that he meand by avant-garde. He introduces the term the historical avant-garde but then nowhere does his define who or what he is referring to. Does he mean the utopian Bauhaus, the proto-Fascist Futurists, the idealistic Dada/Surrealists, the painterly Cubists, the idiosyncratic Van Goghs or Gaugins, the Supremists, the Constructivists, the Impressionists, the Manets, or even the Courbets? Without a definition, it becomes difficult to understand what he wants us to take away when he says things such as:

The tradition in which our contemporary art world functions—including our current art institutions — was formed after the Second World War. This tradition is based on the art practices of the historical avant-garde — and on their updating and codification during the 1950s and 1960.

Without a grounding in historical reality, we are left to guess at what, exactly, he thinks was codified in the 50s and 60s. Without this grounding, it is impossible to understand who he refers to as the avant-garde of today, what they are supposed to espouse, and how this impacts their production. We end up with a sense that either everything or nothing is the avant-garde, depending on what's our point of view about the tangles of late 19th and early 20th century art history. And that is assuming that the historical avant-garde, whatever it is, is important for determining the activities of the avant-garde today.

There are a couple of things I want to say about the avant-garde. First is an idea about what the avant-garde is supposed to be. The second is the idea that not all credible, important artists are of the avant-garde. And the third is the idea that the idea of the avant-garde has outlived its usefulness.

To the first point. The definition of avant-garde is "the advance group in any field, esp. in the visual, literary, or musical arts, whose works are characterized chiefly by unorthodox and experimental methods". This definition suggests that there's a certain conflict between the idea of historical and avant-garde. By the definition, the historical sets the stage for the avant-garde ; the codification of the historical, be it mainstream or the previous avant-garde, is part of the context against which the current avant-garde is unorthodox. There is, then, a certain contradiction in talking about an historical avant-garde because as the unorthodox becomes historical, it also becomes orthodox.

The second point is just a reminder that there vast periods of history when the important artistic production was not created by an avant-garde. So the issue is as much the historical temper of a time and whether there is a need for an avant-garde. There are many times when, either through exhaustion or abundance, the social and cultural need is for a regrouping and consolidation, not an exploration. It can be argued that the past three decades in American art were such a time, and it can be fruitfully debated whether this was a period of consolidation of important explorations or a regrouping as the energy of formative ideas has run out.

Finally, I begin to question to whole notion of the avant-garde, not from the point of view of "orthodox and experimental methods" but from the view that the term itself is too historically charged. Avant-garde is a French term and refers initially to the experimental groups of the late 19th and early 20th centuries centered on the European continent. The term is tied to that time, that place and to the social, economic and cultural developments of the age of the high industrial and the mechanically deterministic. Yet we are in a new age of electronics and quantum probabilities and these old terms don't resonate to these times and perhaps should be left behind with the other notions of that past era.

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Historical Time

In the second section, Groys introduces what he means by weak. At its heart are Groys ideas about time and ideas of Giorgio Agamben about messianic apostles. First I'd like to discuss Groys's ideas about time.








Here we see that this apostle has mastery, is an expert, (and not a de-expert or non-expert). Referring to artists, Groys states:

Now I would suggest that the avant-garde artist is a secularized apostle, a messenger of time who brings to the world the message that time is contracting, that there is a scarcity of time, even a lack of time. ...

Clearly, it seems, he is contradicting what he just carefully laid out in the section before because if the artist is an apostle, then the artist is an expert and in that sense is a professional.

A second part of this Ambagen/Groys framework is the sense of the impending end of time and that the strength of signs is tied to time:

Such weak signs are the signs of the coming end of time being weakened by this coming, already manifesting the lack of time that would be needed to produce and to contemplate strong, rich signs.

So, faced with an end of times, the avant-garde artist/apostle must make weak signs. Any attempt at making strong signs is futile at best, reactionary at worst. Groys explains the messianic repercussions as:

St. Paul believed that an individual soul—being immaterial—would be able to cross this border without perishing, even after the end of the material world. However, the artistic avant-garde did not seek to save the soul, but art.

As an example of this messianic process, Groys then goes on to interpret Kandinsky and Malevich (are they the historical avant-garde?) as artists/apostles of the weak sign. He sees their formal reductions as a response to the end of time so that their images can survive any upheaval.

Kandinsky believes that all images already created in the past or to be created in the future can also be seen as his own paintings—because regardless of what the images were, are, or could be, they necessarily remain combinations of certain colors and shapes.

And in describing Malevich's work, he talks about the paintings being an erasure:

Every image made in the context of any imaginable culture is also a black square, because it will look like a black square if it is erased.

Here, too, however, Groys is contradicting himself. Kandinsky's paintings, in their formal reduction, represent all images both past and future. By Groys's definition, that means they are incredibly strong images that are not about lack of time but about all of time. Similarly, Malevich's paintings are not erasures. Black is not the color of emptiness but of fullness, of everything material, of everything that is not light (the transcendental).

In the third section, Groys begins to sum up and wrap the avant-garde in with mass culture and internet culture. Again he stubs his toe by contradicting his own arguments.

He begins by talking about the "transcendentalist, universalist avant-garde art". This is bothersome for two reasons. First, it seems that he is finally trying to pin down what he means by the historical avant-garde but in doing so introduces more confusion. Transcendentalism has a different agenda than universalism, the first being other-worldly and the second being idealistic but very much of this world. So this avant-garde is either everything or nothing but in either case, the definition isn't very useful.

Second, in talking about the weak images and gestures of this avant-garde he begins to hedge on the time element. As discussed above, the weak image is the outcome of an end of times made by the artist/apostle with no time to expend on creating a strong image. Here, however, he begins to talk about how the weak image must be constantly repeated:

That means that the weak, transcendental artistic gesture could not be produced once and for all times. Rather, it must be repeated time and again to keep the distance between the transcendental and the empirical visible—and to resist the strong images of change, the ideology of progress, and promises of economic growth.

And in this need for repetition, Groys changes the role of artist from that of apostle preaching the end of time to that of an agent of resistance to the marxist/capitalist/market mainstream. The weak image, then, becomes not about a temporal apocalypse but an ongoing subversion of the main cultural dialog. These are two radically different approaches and begins to empty the notion of a weak image of any real importance.

It is in the realm of the weak repetitive that he talks about the internet and mass cultures. He leaves the impression that mass culture is the home of the strong gesture and that the dismissing of mass culture leads to the burgeoning of a participatory weak one. But to do this successfully, he seems to believe, it is proper for art production to descend into a pit of self-gratification:

This kind of participatory practice means that one can become a spectator only when one has already become an artist—otherwise one simply would not be able to gain access to the corresponding art practices.

In summation, in The Weak Universalism, Groys introduces an idea of an historical avant-garde which he either doesn't define or defines in a contradictory way. He says that artists are no longer experts but then says that they are expert apostles. He channels the apocalypse and defines the weak image as the result of the end of time. Then he calls for the ongoing repetition of these weak images through time. And finally, he reduces artists to the narcissism of spectators watching themselves perform.

This inconsistent rambling through weak images is supposed to somehow address the proposition Groys set for himself in the prologue to this essay:

But who is this artist, and how can he or she be distinguished from a non-artist — if such a distinction is even possible? To me, this seems a far more interesting question than that of how we can differentiate between an artwork and a "simple thing."

Clearly I don't think Groys answered his own question. In fact, he raised more distraction with his shifting definitions of weak and his confusing time dimensions. However, that does not mean that the issues raised - the avant-garde, the role of artist, and the nature of time - aren't important.

Groys's essay brings up some good issues which are worth investigating further.

• the end of times = the end of the Enlightment
• hunter/gatherer -> agriculture -> industrial
• gatherer/hunter -> agriculture/industrial -> electronic
• the end of the european avant-garde
• the spiritual and the artistic
• weak vs. strong
• incompetent vs. lazy
• the role of artist
• apostle - no time
• shaman - wheel of time
• scout - arrow/wave of time
• artist - spiral of time

Groys's concludes his essay by referring back to Hegel:

But avant-garde art has shown that art still has something to say about the modern world: it can demonstrate its transitory character, its lack of time; and to transcend this lack of time through a weak, minimal gesture requires very little time—or even no time at all.

In once sense he is correct. The European avant-garde has run out of its time. Rather than putting Kandinsky and Malevich at the end of that time, put them at the beginning of a new time where all the images packed into their abstractions can unfold, like a universe created from a big bang where the totality is blown apart into unique discernible fragments of the whole.