Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion.

by Boris Groys

As communism collapses into ruins, Boris Groys provokes our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists' demands that art should move from depicting to transforming the world. The revolutionaries of October 1917 promised to create a society that was not only more just and more economically stable but also more beautiful, and they intended that the entire life of the nation be completely subordinate to Communist party leaders commissioned to regulate, harmonize, and create a single "artistic" whole out of even the most minute details. What were the origins of this idea? And what were its artistic and literary ramifications? In addressing these issues, Groys questions the view that socialist realism was an "art for the masses." Groys argues instead that the "total art" proposed by Stalin and his followers was formulated by well-educated elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the future-oriented logic of avant-garde thinking. After explaining the internal evolution of Stalinist art, Groys shows how socialist realism gradually disintegrated after Stalin's death. In an undecided and insecure Soviet culture, artists focused on restoring historical continuity or practicing "sots art, " a term derived from the combined names of socialist realism (sotsrealizm) and pop art. Increasingly popular in the West, sots-artists incorporate the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrate its similarity to supposedly opposing myths.

Genres: Art, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Russia, Philosophy, Theory

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Boris Efimovich Groys (born 19 March 1947) is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and Senior Research Fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed Professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the Courtauld Institute of Art London.

Reviews

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back to Boris Groys—we've been here before. The Russian-born art theorist's first major book appeared as Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin in German in 1988 and was published in Charles Rougle's English translation in 1992—"[a]s communism collapses into ruins," or so the jacket copy proclaims. Its very appearance, thin like a volume of poetry, tells us that it is a work of aesthetic philosophy, not art history. Groys's sweeping and summary treatment of individual artists and artworks may therefore annoy the historian or connoisseur, but for an amateur such as myself, who reads all nonfiction as philosophy and all philosophy as literature, it more than serves.

A little intellectual autobiography, if you'll indulge me, will wind through my review. I came to this book over a decade ago, led by citations in Peter Y. Paik's From Utopia to Apocalypse , a brilliant critique of the utopian project as materialized in classics of superhero comics, anime, and science fiction cinema. I was drawn to Paik's book for its counterintuitive readings of Alan Moore's Miracleman and Watchmen as conservative cautions against crypto-gnostic leftist world-making; I was drawn in turn, through Paik's study, to The Total Art of Stalinism because I was just starting a doctoral dissertation to defend the autonomy of art from its leftist critics. I had already read Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, or some of it, which, if I recall, posits a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde, even though these two tendencies have been lazily grouped together. For Bürger, the avant-garde (think Bauhaus, Futurism, Constructivism, etc.) had the admirable ambition to overcome the autonomy of art by generalizing art as the total aesthetic recomposition of the state and civil society. Modernism, by contrast, intensifies art's autonomy by creating artworks about their own form, which turns art in on itself and away from the public. Bürger, a Marxist, laments the failure of the avant-garde and scorns modernism as just more bourgeois art-for-art's-sake ideology. I read his theory against the grain, though, and applied it to British literature by seeing the likes of Pater, Wilde, Joyce, and Woolf as admirably refusing the imperial role of realist-novelist-qua-social-commisar sermonizing the public on its moral duties, an abdication that paradoxically makes the reader of modernist novels a more self-conscious because unconscripted ethical agent.

For Groys, on the other hand, the avant-garde succeeded and in the process swallowed up both realism and modernism. Groys claims that socialist realism in Stalin's USSR was not, as is commonly assumed, the enemy of the avant-garde but rather its successor in the agency of remaking society: "Under Stalin the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life of society was organized in monolithic artistic forms, though of course not those that the avant-garde itself had favored." While Groys seems lukewarm toward Hegel, his method is nonetheless dialectical: he shows how avant-garde art, socialist realism, and what he calls the "postutopian art" of the post-Stalin period are three distinct stages of art history, each of which grows out of its successor's inability fully to realize its own insights.

Avant-garde art begins from this premise: modernity has dissolved the metaphysics that held the world together as an object of the artist's mimesis. The artwork should in consequence formalize its own emptiness of empirical content by becoming what Groys, glossing Malevich's Black Square, calls "a sign for the pure form of contemplation, which presupposes a transcendental rather than empirical subject," a "nothing" that manifests "the pure potentiality of all possible existence that revealed itself beyond any given form." From this rarefied iconoclasm comes the conviction that humanity, now freed of the illusory images that had imprisoned it before modernity melted all that was solid into air, is ready to begin life again from an "absolute zero" to be organized into the substance of the everyday by the artist. Hence the revolutionary sympathizes and totalizing ambitions of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s.

Revolutionary art, however, was still somehow just art; it takes a statesman to reorganize the state and everything in it from top to bottom. Stalin, therefore, becomes the ultimate total artist, alone able to realize the avant-garde's dream. The art he promoted—socialist realism, with its traditional form and idealized content—looks regressive, Groys argues, only if you miss its point, which is its dramatization of the "demiurgic" activity that is the Stalinist hero's reshaping of society, always under threat by the counter-demiurge of the wrecker. The avant-garde's transformation of artistic form is realized as the content of socialist realism; thus, the movements are in ideological continuity. Groys explains his thesis lucidly:

Although the design of the avant-garde artistic project was rationalistic, utilitarian, constructive, and in that sense "enlightenist," the source of both the project and the will to destroy the world as we know it to pave the way for the new was in the mystical, transcendental, "sacred" sphere, and in that sense completely "irrational." The avant-garde artist believed that his knowledge of and especially participation in the murder of God gave him a demiurgic, magical power over the world, and he was convinced that by thus crossing the boundaries of the world he could discover the laws that govern cosmic and social forces. He would then regenerate himself and the world by mastering these laws like an engineer, halting its decline through artistic techniques that would impart to it a form that was eternal and ideal or at least appropriate to any given moment in history. […] The avant-garde was perfectly aware of the sacred dimension of its art, and socialist realism preserved this knowledge. The sacred ritualism of socialist realist hagiography and demonology describes and invokes the demiurgic practice of the avant-garde. What we are dealing with here is not stylization or a lapse into the primitive past, but an assimilation of the hidden mystical experience of the preceding period and the appropriation of this experience by the state.

Socialist realism, however, reaches a limit of its own: reality. As Soviet culture confronted its increasingly obvious failures to produce the promised utopia after Stalin's death, it produced official and unofficial versions of an anti-utopian art, which Groys, citing Solzhenitsyn, sees as conservative, nationalistic, and its own way contiguous with avant-gardism since it too claims absolute access to the real.

The more productive post-Stalin aesthetic is not anti-utopian but postutopian. Similar to western postmodernism, and probably influenced by it as Groys allows that Russian artists were reading Barthes and Foucault by the '70s and '80s, postutopian art exposes utopia as a simulacrum made of signs, a constructed grand narrative without final or transcendental authority. But postutopian art also goes beyond postmodernism, which Groys judges to be trapped no less than anti-utopian conservatism in the avant-garde dilemma, given postmodernism's iconoclast mission to purge humanity of semiotic illusion. The postutopians don't imagine that utopia can be dispelled by rational critique à la Barthes's debunking of myth, and so their art produces utopian visions and the critique of utopian visions in a single gesture:

Postutopian art incorporates the Stalin myth into world mythology and demonstrates its family likeness with supposedly opposite myths. Behind the historical, this art discovers not a single myth, but a whole mythology, a pagan polymorphy; that is, it reveals the nonhistoricity of history itself. If Stalinist artists and writers functioned as icon painters and hagiographers, the authors of the new Russian literature and art are frivolous mythographs, chroniclers of utopian myth, but not mythologists, that is, not critical commentators attempting to "reveal the true content" of myth and "enlighten" the public as to its nature by scientifically demythologizing it. As was state above, such a project is itself utopian and mythological. Thus the postutopian consciousness overcomes the usual opposition between belief and unbelief, between identifying with and criticizing myth. Left to themselves today, artists and writers must simultaneously create text and context, myth and criticism of myth, utopia and the failure of utopia, history and the escape from history, the artistic object and commentaries upon it, and so on. Just as Keyserling predicted when he said that he was not worried about Stalin and Hitler, because eventually all Europeans would enjoy the rights reserved to these two men alone, the death of totalitarianism has made us all totalitarians in miniature.

This is remarkably congruent with the thesis of my doctoral dissertation, give or take that shock in the last sentence, which doesn't become less true because of how provocatively Groys phrases it. I didn't see that then, though. A dirty little secret of academe is that one builds a bibliography by reading quickly and partially, so I applied myself to this book's introduction and first chapter and then skimmed the rest without really understanding his point about the postutopian and therefore not recognizing that it was my point too.

Luckily, the imagination—not my imagination but the imagination—can build castles from rudiments; everything I couldn't say in my dissertation I poured into a novel called Portraits and Ashes that dramatizes in both form and content the final phases of Groys's argument without my having comprehended it rationally. (The book has Malevich’s Black Square on its cover.) It is a novel about artists, considered only as metonyms for free human beings as such, who have to learn to remake themselves in conjunction with the world, rather than forcing their poiesis on recalcitrant matter or a docile public. The intense romantic realism of the novel's style itself, alternately gritty and rhapsodic, theoretical and vulgar, raises this postutopian doubleness—the vision and the critique of the vision, at once and as the same thing—to the level of form. I am American, petit bourgeois, and doubtless too sincere. Groys's main example of postutopian art, by contrast, is the witty painting by Melamid and Komar that adorns his book's cover: a stolid realist portrait of the Yalta conference with Spielberg's E. T. sitting in place of Roosevelt and Hitler behind Stalin and the alien with a shushing finger to his lips. About what does Hitler enjoin silence? Groys explains:

In their work The Yalta Conference, Komar and Melamid create a kind of icon of the new trinity that governs the modern subconscious. The figures of Stalin and E.T., which symbolize the utopian spirit dominating both empires, reveal their unity with the national-socialist utopia of vanquished Germany. It should be observed here that in all their art Komar and Melamid proceed from this inner kinship between the basic ideological myths of the modern world. Thus in one interview Melamid maintains that the common goal of all revolutions is to "stop time," equating in this respect Malevich's Black Square, Mondrian's neoplasticism, Hitler's and Stalin's totalitarianism, and Pollock's painting, which "generated a notion of individuality beyond history and time; powerful as a tiger, it will destroy everything just to be left alone. It is a very fascistic concept of individuality."

20th-century art and politics has been all of a piece, therefore, from Soviet socialist realism to Russian and American avant-garde painting to German fascist politics to U.S. mass culture. In every case, art slips its leash, colonizes the polis, ends history, and reveals history always to have been an aesthetic construction. (The insertion of Spielberg's schmaltzy little alien prophesies how American popular culture, with its misleadingly misfit heroes who in fact inspire allegiance to the rights- and recognition-bearing ideal of America, becomes the equivalent of socialist realism for the U.S.-led neoliberal empire.) The genius of the postutopian artists, though, is that they are the first artists to grasp both utopia's inevitability and its danger and to produce it as such in their art as a pastoral care for the utopian imagination rather than an attempt to eliminate it, since all such attempts are doomed instead to repeat its calamities. From that vantage, Groys ends his book with a mocking dismissal of French theory's pretense to have exited this modern dilemma:

Deleuze and Guattari, of course, think that they are once and for all rid of the "subject" and all of "consciousness" and mythology. All they are doing in reality is repaving the way for the "engineers of human souls," the designers of the unconscious, the technologists of desire, the social magi and alchemists that the Russian avant-gardists aspired to become and that Stalin actually was.

Anti-essentialist anti-humanism—at least in part what we used to call postmodernism, at least in part the thing we’re now calling “wokeness”—is continuous with the avant-garde desire (which it officially disavowals) to clear the ground of nature and humanity and rebuild a "new man" in the ruins, a desire that serves in the end the powers and principalities of the modern world, including some of the most destructive? Hitler says keep it to yourself.

[Kaarel Aadli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Äärmiselt sorav ja meeldiv lugemine, mõnusad mõlgutused ja mõttekäigud. Kogu stalinistlik režiim kui kunstiteos, mõtleks vaid! Siiski kadus kohati Mikita kanti ja jäi ehk toppama või läks natuke ulmeliseks. Muidu väga soe!

[V.]

This is a very interesting and highly readable book of art criticism/art history about what might seem like a highly inauspicious subject: the socialist realism of the Stalin era.

Western art critics (according to Groys) have a tendency to patronizingly admire the Russian avant-garde art of the 1910s and 20s (like Rodchenko's Constructivism or Malevich's Suprematism) for their minimalism, conceptual modernism, stark geometric symbolism, etc., and to deplore the "kitschy" socialist realism of Stalin-era Soviet art as a regression into "not even art".

Groys says this is all wrong. Stalinist socialist realism, he says, is actually the summation and consummation of those earlier avant-garde movements; Malevich and Rodchenko waxed grandiloquent about using modern art to remake society, to clear out and transcend all of traditional art, etc.—and socialist realism is just what it looks like when this process is actually carried out, and the avant-garde project really is extended to the entire society. The avant-garde can't remake society from top to bottom if every individual artist is pursuing his own individual vision; under Stalin, there was only one artist, the Man of Steel himself, and every painter and novelist was just an extension of his will.

Under Stalin, the victory over the past was so complete that tradition was no longer threatening; instead of childishly rebelling against traditional forms like the abstract and minimalist painters, Stalinism was so secure in its victory over the old world that it felt free to loot the storehouses of traditional beauty. In Groys's analogy, the figures in socialist realism are like extraterrestrials, with the skinsuit of traditional beauty cloaking the inhuman, vertiginous void of the avant-garde revolution beneath it.

He analogizes Stalinist socialist realism to its contemporary, Surrealism: Dali painted the dreams of Dali, but the result of that is just a painting. Socialist realist art was in its own way just as surreal—Stakhanovite steelworkers laboring for days on end without sleep, cripples rising from their wheelchairs by force of will—but the dreams that were painted were Stalin's dreams, and part of the artwork was that you had to force yourself to dream as he did, so that even your subconscious would not betray you. The avant-gardeists of the 1910s and 20s got their wish: all of society became a canvas, and with this victory, many of what Western critics consider the charming experimental features of Suprematism or Constructivism were discarded, replaced by the pharaonic monolith of socialist realism, a civilization-sized work of art.

The last couple of chapters focus on the post-Stalin period, and I admit I started to find this a little hard to follow, not least because writing about this period necessarily involves bringing in a lot of heavy-duty French theory. There was some cool stuff in this section, though: I really liked the discussion of Bulatov's "Horizon", and the part about the novels of Sokolov really made me want to read Palisandriia, which is discussed in some detail. Groys's basic contention about all of this is that Soviet postutopianism differs from Western postmodernism because it is unable to accept the left-utopianism of poststructuralists like Deleuze or Barthes, and so tends toward narratives that emphasize the interchangeability of utopian patterns rather than a rejection of them. But I admit I didn't fully get this part.

Overall, really good. Accessible, exciting, and short. Opened me onto a lot of stuff I didn't know much about, and makes a compelling case for caring about a much-ridiculed and -dismissed chapter in the history of European art.

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

THISISTHESHIT

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will add more to this review in time, but suffice it to say this book, which for a long while has been considered the final word on Socialist Realism alongside Katerina Clark's magnificent "The Soviet Novel", is at best misguided and often delusional. Operating from stereotypes about the period and his not-so-subtle disdain for the Soviet Union, Groys makes increasingly wild assertions (and almost always without citations) to paint socialist realism as entirely based in the will of a single individual (Stalin). This position has been thoroughly debunked by scholars like Clark, Dobrenko, and many others. Groys takes a page from the ideology he despises in that all of his conclusions are politically motivated and fitted to his anti-modernist agenda.

Groys sees himself as beyond totalizing ideologies and attempts to show that any modernist project is doomed to end up in concentration camps (shades of Lyotard). This of course presumes that the type of decentralized post-modern contingent position he advocates for (when he is in one of his rare moments of consistency) is not also a kind of system, and in fact the operating cultural strategy in the period of neo-liberalism. Aside of his premise being invalid, scholars like Julia Vaingurt have done considerable damage to the idea that there is only one modernism which would render the avant-garde and socialist realism totally inseparable.

Essentially this book can be read besides Sinyavsky's criticisms as a historical piece reflecting the comfortable cliches and academic prejudices toward Socialist Realism leading up to the 1990s. His style and ideas are certainly compelling despite their lack of evidence, which is a part of the books widespread success. On a positive note, his work has sparked a renewed interest in the subject which has led many to reexamine this critical period in art history-- but those actually interested in learning about the period should certainly look elsewhere.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

A total banger - I wrote down many pages of quotes from this one.

[Chet]

Now that cold warrior "dissident" politicization is waning few Eastern European intellectuals gain notoriety in US academia (Solzhenitsyn is dead long live Solzhenitsyn). There are to my mind three exceptions (listed in order of decreasing notoriety): Slavoj Zizek, Alexander Dugin, and Boris Groys. The middle name given post-SMO hysteria might as well be Adolph Hitler as far as the American university is concerned. The first and the third have yet to face such rancid "cancellation" and I'll focus on them. In this popular academic consciousness Zizek and Groys are like mirror images of each other. Zizek appears subversive (posters of Stalin on his wall, a passing fondness for Mao), but beneath this "court jester" surface is easily found a militant apologist for 21st century NATO supremacy. Groys, by all appearances appears in lockstep with NATO mythology (Stalin in the text under review is near indistinguishable from Hitler ala Arendt et al), but again beneath the surface lies something else. Why at the forefront of Groys adulation do we find for example the latent (nascent?) 21st century American communist movement (MAGA communism, Haz Al-Din, Midwestern Marx, Logo Daedalus, Jackson Hinkle)? The Stalinist kernel of Groys's lockstep anti-Stalinism lies in his ability to articulate the dominate mood and philosophy of 1930s Moscow on its own terms, i.e. in a way its proponents would recognize and acknowledge (see also his "The Communist Postscript"). Once he has accomplished this (with reference to the infamous CPSU "Short Course" no less), whatever NATO-approved stance he takes on the matter is rather besides the point. Yes in such repressive climes as we find ourselves today even daring to articulate Stalinism on its own terms amounts to deep subversion. It likewise opens the gateway to today's China. Narrators of communist history are supposed make up horror stories and leave it at that (ala Orwell or Timothy Snyder). That Groys refuses to do so (and knows what he's talking about) renders him dangerous.

[Galatea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let me preface this by saying that the 2010 afterword to this book (originally published in English in 1992), should have been placed right in the front as an introduction.

That aside, this book is a fascinating, though extremely dense book on the cultural and intellectual core of the Russian Avant-garde and Stalinist Socialist Realism, as well as the art the responds to those traditions. Taking a look at the history, culture, and the ideology behind these movements, Groys shows how the Russian Avant-garde took an extremely radical approach of using art to quite literally shape the world. From the quasi-mysticism of Form and Shape that formed certain parts of Suprematism, which attempted a complete and total break with the tradition and history of before, rejecting mimetic art and through abstract figures attempted to create art based on "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling", an art that would change the world in the most literal sense, coinciding with the complete upheaval of everything old that was currently occurring during the Russian Revolution.

Constructivism took that and radicalized it even further, accusing Suprematism of "formalism" (a common buzzword used to denounce any intellectual activity as anti-communist, regardless of its discipline in the arts and the sciences), and held that in order to be true to the goal of changing the world, art should be on the same standing as politics. What Suprematism held to be /supreme/, which was "pure artistic feeling", Constructivism put in its place the supremacy of Human Will, the ability of Man (and it was almost all men) to change the world by sheer willpower which would be objectified into the world around them. Hence, its works would focus on such fields that were deemed useful to political goals, such as architecture, graphic design, industrial design, etc.

Productivism took that and radicalized even further, accusing Constructivism of "formalism" (a common buzzword used to denounce any intellectual activity as anti-communist, regardless of its discipline in the arts and the sciences), and held that in order to be true to the goal of changing the world, art should be subservient to politics. What Constructivism held as to be the /construction/ of the new world, which was "art in the service of the revolution", Productivism put in its place the construction of art for the proletariat.

Socialist Realism took that, and so on and so forth.

This constant striving towards utopia, this constant willing to power, became entrenched with the concrete political power of the Stalin era, specifically of Stalin himself. He, in his constant striving towards Communist Utopia, had an effect on the arts and culture of the time remarkable similar to what the Avant Garde and its three -isms attempted to accomplish: total aesthetic domination. What differed was Socialist Realism's permissiveness towards history (provided it passed Party guidelines), but the intent was remarkably similar.

Once Stalin ordered himself purged, the constant aesthetic hegemony of these styles were ripe for satire, lampooning, and criticism, with new rights afforded during the relative thaw of the leaders after him. In them, we see post-utopianism, the acknowledgement that utopia has been attempted, but that right now in this uncertain world, to attempt a journey without even a firm idea of where one is, is to lead to disaster, or at least disappointment.

One of the best books dealing with the Russian Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism that I've ever read, though that's to be expected, as this was my first.

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

This study is itself a complete work of art, written in a compelling style and filled to the brim with counter-intuitive insights . . . and yet it strangely turns things on their head by positing aesthetic discourse as the primary driving spirit behind developments in Soviet history.

[Sergey Lebedenko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Что бы вышло, если бы в мультике про Пинки и Брейна главными героями были Сталин и Малевич.

[Anja Weber · Rating 5 out of 5]

ART AS A POSTSCRIPT KOMUNSTIČKI
Boris Groys / ART UTOPIA

Boris Groys in circles of philosophers, aestheticians and art historians as one of the most influential theorists of post-modernity. Veovatno that his back ground intellectually, a mathematician by training, linguist, semiotician would say we have a vocation; affect the precision of the analytical approach to the work of art in the book before us: "The Art of Utopia." About that Boris will say that is a collection of essays, written laconically, but explores the epoch, which is in a sense not only hidden in museum storerooms, but then deleted from memory and consciousness of today's Russians - staljinksa art. Yet he remained involviarna contemporary trends in the Russian post-modern and therefore should be "historically valorized"! Thus works of art as it emerged in the Age of Stalin or Hitler to be properly analzirati to win their historical context.
The notion of utopia in contemporary philosophy, the term is no longer kontaciju, but relates to Nominum, that is to say in the order of the modern world of the XXI century utopias are no longer possible. But they are still possible in art; anyway .. artist lives in an ideal world he creates and shapes and in this case it was Stalin in all aspects sufficiently environmental phenomenology.
The collection of essays Groys is painted on two parallel levels:
First Konceptalizuje, interpetira and clarify artistic eksprement Gesamtuksntwerk Stalin era.
Second The experience of reflection about this experiment.
So, we have three time frames in which the moving Groys: Art avant-loop post-utopian avant-garde art in which structurally belongs to the socialist art.Staljinov Gesamkunstwerke is really founded on the idea of parallel with Hitler, no Stalin, as such, was an avant-garde artist the world is used for the artwork (but along the way during the NEP, war communism; wiped out the entire avant-garde) and turned socialist realism. So it would seem that the Soviet man lived or perhaps bitisao in one imaginary reality, "Inside the Kunst-a!"-Boris Grojs.Ovde have to work not only paradigms are shifting paradigms and already are at work.

Groys, postmodernism rejects the view that the subject and object disappears, the author and the work, that was the end of history and the arts, and as such came to an end as the vanguard and disappeared. That leaves only the traders, the market dictated the price, and on the other powers that you buy. Absolutely value are expensed. Rather, metaphysics and immortality, are still the subject of philosophical, artistic discourse and even the survival of the human subject is considered Groys. In this sense, our philosopher believes that the plans and directions of the Russian avant-garde used in Staljnovo Age and assimilated with the specific differences in the entire twentieth century, art history in regard RUSSIA communist era, in which Groys insists, it is also a subject of this book. . This is what will help us in every way to open your eyes and help you look at all that much different .. compared to what we were taught, or maybe we got some opinions based on prejudice. The Russian avant-garde, led by Malevich and Suprematism and a whole generation of artists until the arrival to power of Stalin, predstvaljala and the West is absolutely worthwhile art in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Today, we are part Maljevičevih prices at auctions in Sotheby's virtually unattainable, and he died in poverty, completely isolated!
While the official Soviet art, almost nihilizira ..; however by Groys does not end historicism / history of creativity in the USSR, but the life and art of running on its course .. (historically) .. The terms of reference of ideological taboos that coming from the RC; yet informal social-realist groups with high aspect ostensibly a Kosovo and a new atmosphere in the cultural policy. Vanguard slowly becomes repressed .. zavaljujući tough course to dismiss what potentially comes from the West.

It would be utterly incoherent underestimate the art of the twentieth century Russia what was being created after 1924, Groys considers. Gesamkunstwerke work is a kind of dialogue with the living umetncima, analysis of their context, their stategedije and controversy.

[Dermonduebersoho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Das Buch folgt würde ich sagen der Methode die Lukacs in dem frühen Essay "Alte und neue Kultur" beschrieben hat: "wenn wir die Kultur einer Zeit richtig erfassen, so haben wir in ihr die Wurzel der Gesamtentwicklung erfasst, als wenn wir von der Analyse der wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse ausgegangen wären." Das Buch hat zwar Stalin im Titel, ist aber würde ich sagen eine Geschichte der ganzen Sowjetunion (symbolischerweise kam es 1988 heraus). Mit etwas mehr als Hundert Seiten ist es ziemlich kurz, was mir einerseits sehr viel Spaß beim Lesen gegeben hat, andererseits wünscht man sich bei den aufgeworfenen Thesen dann noch eine etwas ausführlichere Begründung. Ich würde sagen, dass die Hauptpunkte mir aber schon eingeleuchtet sind oder zumindest relevante Diskussionen, erstens dass es eine Kontinuität des künstlerischen Avantgardismus (der 10er, 20er, inklusive des russischen) zur Kunst/Alltag der Stalinzeit gibt (das fand ich eigentlich am spannendsten und könnte mir vorstellen, dass es in "am Nullpunkt" vielleicht ausführlicher und exemplarischer darum geht), 2. Dass das anhalten der Zeit eigentlich ein sehr kommunistisches aber vorläufig leider gescheitertes Konzept ist, 3. Dass die Kultur der Sowjetunion dem Westen gewissermaßen überlegen war (wertend gesagt) insofern sie auch in ihrer inneren Opposition ein höheres Bewusstsein für die Einheit der Welt und die Politisierung der Kunst hat.
PS Die gesamten letzten 30 Seiten hab ich nicht verstanden

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoy reading art history since it’s both familiar and strange compared to literary studies. This book I take to be a somewhat unusual member of the discipline, predictably controversial for its defence of socialist realism as more avant-garde than the avant-garde, always truly too taboo for the western museum. Groys is also a really good close reader of art works though and this book takes off in the third section where he uses paintings and writings of the Russian “postutopians” of the 70s to tell the history of the recapture and surpassing of the figure of Stalin by the genuine heirs of socialist realism. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the horizon as a visual topos in Russian painting and specifically in Erik Bulatov, which he then efficiently links to Nietzsche’s mention of the destruction of horizons as constitutive of the death of god, taking us straight from the formal properties of the paintings to the theory of history that it produces and lives. Surprised also by the sudden Deleuze & Guattari quote on the last couple of pages and the seemingly unfinished suggestion about how the aesthetic engineering of the new unconscious of the political future will produce an ambivalent utopia that cancels and outstrips Stalinism. Not sure if it’s good or bad though.

[Maksim Karpitski · Rating 3 out of 5]

One shouldn't trust Groys but it would be a blunder to overlook his work (wildly innacurate at times and with little to no evidence of 'proper academic research', but also full of insightful, thought-provoking observations and simply a good read).

[James Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

All killer, no filler.

[Krankenverse]

Groys gives us a history of the little discussed art of the USSR, from the early avant garde, through the development of Social Realism to later Sots art. If you aren't aware of much of this history, I recommend it as a good reference work for familiarising yourself with Russian art history. Much widely available work on modern Russian art focuses entirely on a few big names like Malevich or filters everything through a western European viewpoint.
Groys argues persuasively that there was a unique dynamic between the early avant garde and the party, which informed the development of social realism under Stalin. He goes further to speak of a certain artistic aspect to the creation of the 'new man' and Soviet society as a whole- meaning that the apparatus of the art world itself became a tool in the creation of a total art.
These are heady and original ideas in comparison to the traditional western reading of social realism as a simple interruption or blind alley in the development of Russian art. Particularly interesting was the latter half of the book and the afterword, I producing me to the fascinating Erik Bulatov and drawing a comparison between postutopian thinking in the USSR and Derrida.

[Sergei Prostakov]

Блестящая, глубокая, остроумная книга-приговор русскому авангарду, который изгажен в большевистских преступлениях не меньше, чем соцреализм. Между Малевичем и Герасимовым не так много разницы, как можно подумать. Ну, и изящное объяснение, почему Сталин не ушёл в прошлое, а растворился в будущем. Кажется, сам Гройс при написании книги в конце 1980-х это понимал не до конца.

[Javo Pacheco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.

[Peter Rowe]

Gas

[Berislavp]

круто

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Muy sugerentes las ideas que Groys vierte en este sorprendente libro.

[Stevphen Shukaitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a clever, provocative book. The argument that Stalinism is the heir of the avant-garde desire to erase boundary between art and everyday life and to radically reshape society is quite interesting. It does a very good job of debunking the 'myth of the innocent avant-garde.' But I think Groys' argument is perhaps a bit too simplistic and runs rough shod over the liberatory potential of Russian avant-garde currents. In this sense the stripping away and reduction of the avant-garde during the 1920s that Groys describes, its reduction to role of decorator, is more significant than discussed here. It is a transformation more than a continuation, as the constituent power of the avant-garde is rendered into a constituted power for the state, and it is that which is Stalinism is the heir to. So in short, Groys is a clever art theorist, but a bad state theorist – and despite that raises a number of important points for consideation.

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most things seem mussed in this book -- I'm not so sure if Groys truly understands and delineates the various long words and seemingly tough categories he deploys here -- except for his discreet dislike of Stalin and his era. And even regarding that part -- that dislike -- Groys seems non-committal to elaborate. His words are left scattered then in the end. And the mess does not do anything