QCQ: Boris Groys - On Art Activism
“The museum institutionalizes the truly radical, atheistic, revolutionary violence that demonstrates the past as incurably dead. It is a purely materialistic death without return—the aestheticized material corpse functions as a testimony to the impossibility of resurrection. (Actually, this is why Stalin insisted so much on permanently exhibiting the dead Lenin’s body to the public. Lenin’s Mausoleum is a visible guarantee that Lenin and Leninism are truly dead….”
“Thus, since the French Revolution, art has been understood as the defunctionalized and publicly exhibited corpse of the past. This understanding of art determined postrevolutionary art strategies—until now. In an art context, to aestheticize the things of the present means to discover their dysfunctional, absurd, unworkable character—everything that makes them nonusable, inefficient, obsolete. To aestheticize the present means to turn it into the dead past.”
Not only artistic aestheticization turns useful into unuseful, it also serves as a testament that the past is dead and the art on the wall is the proof. While the point that Lenin was displayed in the Mausoleum as a tool to make sure the movement is dead is pretty controversial, it makes perfect sense since Lenin’s corpse literally confirms he can no longer lead and poses no threat; he is there for a sick ritual created by the soviet ideology as their take on religion and God. Lenin has been posed as something absurd, dysfunctional, and obsolete, a mere symbol of the glorious past without any prospects to influence the present and the future.
Do you share the opinion of Boris Groys that artistic aestheticization is the most radical way to turn the present into past? Is it actually that effective or it is merely the consequence of a radical event like revolution and the proof, after the fact, that the past is dead?
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