81010610

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ボリス・グロイスにおけるアートと政治の交差について

Art and Politics in the Art Theory of Boris Groys

Japanese (日本語)

国際文化学研究 : 神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科紀要

51

83*-104*

神戸大学大学院国際文化学研究科

2018-12

2019-01-10

Boris Groys (1947—) is one of the most influential art critics today. He is concerned with the relationship between art and politics, which can be seen in his books Art Power (2008) and The Total Art of Stalinism (1992) and so on. The reasons for this concern may be rooted in his experiences while participating in the “unofficial” cultural scenes in the Soviet Union. In this paper, I consider this theme—art and politics—by focusing on Groys’s reflections on “the new” and “archive.” By attempting to distinguish his new from the new in both modernity and postmodernity, he expresses this “newness” as “a difference beyond difference.” He finds the model of this newness in Marcel Duchamp’s artwork. In my opinion, this reinterpretation of the new by Groys is motivated by searching for some clues about how to overcome contradictions in our political reality as well as considering the present condition of art. Groys gives much importance to archival spaces, such as museums, because he believes they are an indispensable condition when producing the new. While modernists and postmodernists generally think that existing cultural systems could damage the freedom of art, Groys still believes in the potential of the contemporary art system, and relies on it for its political possibilities. Groys thinks that the museum is an archive, where every image has an equal right to struggle for recognition. Therefore, we can consider it as a substitution for a political arena, that is, a space for appearance in Hanna Arendt’s definition. In addition, archives can redraw the boundaries of our political notions and categories; they deprive stable contexts in reality, giving multiple contexts and places. Groys does not find the potential of art in its direct statement on politics, but in its possibilities to produce the new.

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