Boris Groys Books

Against the Anthropocene scrutinizes the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch regarding climate change. In this slender but dense volume, cultural theorist T.J. Demos analyzes the biases within contemporary visual culturepopular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projectsdemonstrating that it does not merely describe a geologic period, but actively supports the neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geo-engineering as a preferred method of approaching climate change. To develop creative alternatives, Demos argues we need to carefully consider the underlying motives the Anthropocene thesis. T.J. Demos is Professor of Art and Visual Culture and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. Past publications with Sternberg Press include Decolonizing Nature and Return To The Postcolony.

Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other dimensions altogether, other spatiotemporal politics, other timescales, other understandings of matter, other forms of life—not only as works, but as a basic condition for being able to perceive artworks in the first place. Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms that anticipate, surpass, or even bend around their purported origins in canonical European and American regimes of representation, as well as what we currently understand to be the horizon of artistic practice.Design by Jeff Ramsey, cover design by Liam Gillick

For the philosopher and media theoretician Boris Groys, Google performs the function of philosophy and religion as a ubiquitous means of negotiating the world. Philosophical precursors for Google's dissemination of discourses and the emancipation of words from grammar include Plato, Saussure and Derrida; another analogy is the twentieth-century avant-garde's production of 'word clouds' severed from their context, as found in the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s. Groys identifies this tradition as "the struggle for a utopian ideal of the free flow of information-the free migration of liberated words through the totality of social space."

Philosophy is traditionally understood as the search for universal truths, and philosophers are supposed to transmit those truths beyond the limits of their own culture. But, today, we have become sceptical about the ability of an individual philosopher to engage in ‘universal thinking’, so philosophy seems to capitulate in the face of cultural relativism. In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, Boris Groys argues that modern ‘antiphilosophy’ does not pursue the universality of thought as its goal but proposes in its place the universality of life, material forces, social practices, passions, and experiences – angst, vitality, ecstasy, the gift, revolution, laughter or ‘profane illumination’ – and he analyses this shift from thought to life and action in the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Derrida, from Nietzsche to Benjamin. Ranging across the history of modern thought, Introduction to Antiphilosophy endeavours to liberate philosophy from the stereotypes that hinder its development.

An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations.

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art--which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place. Boris Groys is Professor at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Design, Karlsruhe. He is the author of many books, including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, Art Power, The Communist Postscript, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of “unofficial” artists in Moscow—artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences—created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde. The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group—including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov—became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

The author focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. He identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity -- a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions.