November 7, 2010
e-flux is pleased to announce the release of Boris Groys’ Going Public the third in an ongoing series of books published by e-flux journal with Sternberg Press.
Book launch and Conversation with Saul Anton and Boris Groys
NY Art Book Fair at PS1/MoMA
Sunday, November 7th, 12PM (conference room)
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 (1947, East Berlin) 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.
Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, Eds.
To order a copy, please contact Sternberg Press sales: mail [at] sternberg-press.com
Other titles from e-flux journal:
What Is Contemporary Art?
e-flux journal reader 2009
Coming soon:
e-flux journal reader 2010
www.e-flux.com/journal
www.sternberg-press.com
Reviews
“Going Public, by Boris Groys”, International Sculpture Center • Glenn Harper
It may seem paradoxical, but the on-line publisher and aggregator e-flux has started a new publishing operation, on paper. In collaboration with Sternberg Press, e-flux is sponsoring a new series of small books under the banner of the e-flux journal , the first volume being a collection of critical essays by a regular contributor to the journal,...
It may seem paradoxical, but the on-line publisher and aggregator e-flux has started a new publishing operation, on paper. In collaboration with Sternberg Press, e-flux is sponsoring a new series of small books under the banner of the e-flux journal, the first volume being a collection of critical essays by a regular contributor to the journal, Boris Groys.
His Going Public is as quirky and enlightening as his earlier books, ranging from design theory to Duchamp to religion to the museum. The introduction, “Poetics vs. Aesthetics,” sets a tone that balances art history and critical thinking, looking for a tool to think about artists as producers (a poetics) rather than looking at the reaction to their products (aesthetics).
Groys is particularly good at placing contemporary art in the history of modern art and modernity, without sacrificing the unique qualities of the contemporary situation. He also balances artists and critical figures like Greenberg with European (particularly Russian) art and thought, broadening the discussion in useful ways.
I read the book on the plane on my way to give a talk at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, and found myself scribbling quotes from Groys all over my text, since what he had to say was not only compelling but pertinent to the day’s topic, the continually expanding field of sculpture. It’s the one book of criticism that I’ve read recently that sparked that kind of reaction (I had hopes for Rosalind Krauss’s Perpetual Inventory, but after a very interesting introduction of just a few pages in length, the collected essays look backward rather than forward both in terms of the art covered and the ideas espoused).
—February 16, 2011