Interview with Boris Groys
By Finley Rhys / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
Boris Groys: The AI problem is a central one, and it's really a new development that was not reflected in the book at that time.
There are many problems there. I think for writers and artists, the central problem is authorship.
What we already see today is an inundation of the internet space by images, AI produced images that look like they have no authorship. I would compare this situation with the emergence of photography at the end of the 19th century, the sudden influx, the massive influx, of images without authorship. And that was something that deeply shocked the artists at that time.
I would say AI is a kind of photography for the writers. For the artists, it is a second shock. For the writers, it is a first shock of this type. I always told my students that the work of writing is not an intellectual work. It is basically a manual work. It is just pushing one letter after another, putting the letters on a paper or on a screen. It is a purely manual activity subjected to certain kinds of rules of grammar and social rules and conventions. All of that can be easily mathematically described and turned into algorithms.
Now the question is, is it possible to think of authorship in this ocean of AI text and images? I think yes. We tend to think today that the decision to make a click is a personal decision by a photographer. It is quite obvious that it was not considered to be a decision leading to authorship some decades ago. Now it is so. In the case of AI, it is prompting. I think that what the click is for the photograph the prompting is for the AI. And even more so, because prompting is formulated in language. It is an action inside logos, inside language.
Now, we don't ask about prompting. People look at the images, people look at the texts produced by AI, but they don't ask themselves what the authorial prompting was. Prompting remains something like a private affair of an artist or a writer. But precisely because it is a private affair, it is a location of authorship. So I think that the development of this whole story will go in the direction of investigating the function and forms of prompting.
And then a second short remark, on how it fits into my system. I speak about flow. So if we prompt the AI systems, we should not forget that these systems are in the flow because they are changing all the time. It's not systems of a stable memory. It is a memory flow. That makes any individual prompting historical. It inscribes itself in a certain history, in a history of development of human writing and image production. Because after all, it's all produced by mankind.
So we have these two moments, individual prompting and a specific historical point at which this prompting occurs. The difference from a classic paradigm is not so big as it seems to be.
FR: Contemporary art increasingly privileges embodied experience — immersive installations, participatory works — while simultaneously trending toward disembodiment through virtual and augmented realities. How do you reconcile these seemingly opposed trajectories, and do they open new possibilities for art?
BG: Well, I don't see these two moments as contradictory. I'll explain why. Because basically, traditionally, what is the difference between an artwork and ordinary object? An ordinary object doesn't stay under protection. An artwork is staying under protection and under a system of conservation. Thus, according to the traditional idea of art, an artwork has more time, a longer duration, than any ordinary object.
Now if we look at installations and participatory works, they have a short period of existence. They have less time of existence than the ordinary objects.
I was involved recently in a project in France of a participatory work for 1,000 years. So let us see how it will work. But all the installations and participatory works I know don't have a long time.
Now the question is, why do we know anything about them and why do they exist in our sphere of knowledge and our sphere of imagination? It is only through the documentation - because they are integrated in the system of artwork documentation, which includes videos, photographs, and textual explanations.
Of course, the art documentation is also exhibited from time to time in the viewing zones of galleries or big exhibitions like Documenta. But the most obvious way to memorize these installations or the participation events is virtual reality.
So if we ask the question of how we memorize short-term time based art, then of course the connection between documentation and real artistic event and between real space and virtual space - this connection becomes obvious for me.
FR: Adriano Pedrosa's Venice Biennale shifted its focus markedly toward artists from the Global South. How do you view this curatorial decision in light of your ideas about the geography of art — does it challenge existing power structures, or does it reinforce them?
BG: I don't see here any change of power relationships in art. Zero; I see the expansion of existing art institutions into new territories.
You should not forget that every museum, any big museum in America or in Europe, includes from the beginning non-European cultures: Chinese and Japanese and so on. Of course, it only included traditional cultural forms belonging to the past. And now art institutions, almost all the museums in the West and also big exhibitions, tend to expand their representation of contemporary art on recent art in the non-European or, rather, non-Western parts of the globe.
But this kind of expansion is already inside the genetic code of the Western Art institutions because the Western Art institutions from the beginning were conceived with a goal to present the universal culture. So, I don't see any shift in the their power structure. It is the same insitutions, it is the same power structure, but becoming more powerful because it includes what was earlier excluded and expands on the new areas.
FR: The Biennale also featured a proliferation of works that directly — and often didactically — addressed political issues. How do you situate that kind of explicit engagement in relation to your concept of "art power"? And what are the costs of making politically committed art?
BG: Well, of course, the concept of art power relates to the avant-garde and maybe neo-avant-garde of the 50s, 60s, 70s. So the idea was at that time to give to a society a certain shape, a certain design, a certain form, because European societies for a very long time had a certain form, had a certain structure. And this structure was given to them by the church. The project of the avant-garde at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, was an effect of Marxist and Nietzschean critique of the church, religion, an attempt to establish a new order, to abolish the old order and install a new order.
At that time, it was thought that art had an ability to install such a new order. You can find some rests or remnants of that impulse also in America, actually. If you travel to Marfa and see what Donald Judd made out of the city, that is an attempt of an artist to implement certain artistic ideas on a social scale, at least on a scale of a town, a more or less direct continuation of the ideas of Bauhaus of the early period.
If you are a politically engaged artist, then you are not sovereign. You join a certain movement or a party or a political trend that is already there, and you serve by your art for the success of this trend, of this party, of this movement. You have to be successful as an artist. However, when you look, for example, at the successful artists, they are not, of course, artists in the areas that we have in mind. They are people like Taylor Swift. So real popular influential artists are, I would say, pop singers in our time. But if you look at how they organize empires, they are based on commercial principles, not on political principles.
You know, the problem is that I don't have a feeling that visual arts today are considered as, let's say, having a lot of power. But things are changing. I mean, we know that things are changing.
I must say I'm ambivalent in this relationship.
I'm ambivalent in this relationship because if you have a goal, a political goal, you serve this goal, you support a certain political organization, you're engaged for this political organization, and you use your abilities as an artist for the success of this organization, then you subject what you are doing, what you are doing as an artist, to the goal of success. And okay, not accidentally, I mentioned Taylor Swift. I mean, the logic of success is a very strong logic. For example, what you do has to be easily accepted by the people. The people have to like what you are doing.
That is already what prevents you from being sovereign even in your own art, because you make art that from the beginning has to be liked. If you look at the avant-garde artists, you see that they were not so much interested in being liked. They rather imposed or tried to impose what they were doing on the public. And yeah, in some cases, public followed them. But they didn't follow the taste of the public.
That was a 19th century strategy. It was a strategy to be liked. If you look at the European art of the 19th century, and that was also a classical period of political engagement art, Courbet in France and many political engagement artists also in Russia and so on. All of them wanted to be liked by the public, because if you are not liked by the public, you are not effective in your political strategy. You are not contributing to the success of the political movement you are working for. And so you become dependent on the already existing taste, already existing aesthetic attitudes. That was always a stigma of social engagement art. They were radical in political terms, but they made compromises in aesthetic terms.
On the other hand, you have people who tried to make no compromises on their aesthetic terms, but you can argue that they compromised on political terms. If you don't compromise politically and aesthetically, and some artists did that, they moved into a complete isolation, like Hugo Ball, the founder of Dada movement, who abandoned art and began to write cultural criticism. Because if you are writing, you are not so much dependent on the market, on the liking or disliking by the public, on the money system and so on.
So I would say it is a question of choice. Where is an area you want to be radical and sovereign? And where is an area you are ready to make compromises? And if you do social engagement art, you have to make compromises on the aesthetic level. There is no way around it.
FR: The national pavilion structure has long been critiqued as a relic of geopolitical order. Given your thinking on deterritorialization, do you see any continued value in the model?
BG: I like it. I can say why. Because you know, the globalized art system has a certain kind of a very predictable system of choices, attitudes, and so on and so on. So if you see even the Documenta, if you see a big exhibition made by one curator or a group of curators on a kind of global basis, you have a very homogeneous image. And you have a feeling that the art system is very homogeneous and everybody feels and thinks more or less the same.
But these national pavilions show you that it's not quite the case. Of course, there is a general trend. At the same time, you suddenly see work you would never see in a kind of global exhibition.
It can be something that is imposed on the curators of the national pavilions by the involvement in the national politics, some influential groups that make pressure, or some locally famous artists these curators can't ignore and so on and so on. And suddenly you see something you wouldn't see in the more homogeneous globalized exhibition. So it has a kind of weird effect that I like about this structure.
FR: How has your theoretical approach been shaped by non-Western aesthetic traditions, and how do you navigate the tension between universalizing frameworks and culturally specific artistic expression?
BG: The answer to this kind of question is always depending on what is Western and what is non-Western?
For example, I grew up in Russia and until I was 35 years old, my friends were Russian artists and also I have written about Russian art. Is it Western? Probably not. But is it non-Western? Probably also not. So these differentiations are problematic.
Now, still I can answer your question. You know, being in Russia and also after I left Russia, I always was interested only in one type of work. And I wrote only about the artists who practiced this type of work. You can name it "Conceptualist", of course, as I did. But you can use very different names. So they make work in which precisely these questions were problematized.
So what is Russianness? Is it Western or not? What is artwork? Is it like an ordinary thing or not? Is artwork generally a thing? A certain object or maybe a non-objective idea that cannot be seen but only grasped by a certain kind of imagination? For example, my friend Ilya Kabakov always suggested that there is a kind of nothingness, some kind of blind spot, something invisible in his works. So all these questions, what is Western? What is non- Western? What is art? What is non-Art? And so on, that's all should be problematized inside the artworks themselves.
If an artist just says, "Okay, I am Russian, so I make Russian art". Their work is maybe good, maybe bad, but not interesting for me. For me, what's only interesting, is the work of the people who precisely didn't know how to answer these questions of identity.