From Hybrid Socialism to Universal State Groys

7/25/2019 From Hybrid Socialism to Universal State Groys

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Boris Groys

NSK: FromHybrid

Socialism toUniversal State

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of IrwinÐ the artistic group that was and still is a part ofthe wider art movement known as ÒNeueSlowenische KunstÓ (NSK). NSK has dominatedthe Slovene art scene of the past few decadesand has influenced many artistic practicesthroughout Eastern Europe. At first glance, theart practice of Irwin seems to be a specificversion of postmodernism. Indeed, in their works

Irwin artists combine quotations from differentartistic periods, styles, and movements in a waythat is typical of Postmodern art of the 1980sand Õ90s. On the other hand, IrwinÕs practice isdifferent from Western postmodernism in manydecisive respects. Western postmodernism was a reactionagainst the Modernist canon Ð against theemergence of a new Modernist salon and theestablishment of normative rules for theproduction and appreciation of art. In otherwords, postmodernism was a reaction against

the academization of modernism. Indeed, in themid-1970s the Modernist canon dominatedWestern art museums, institutions of arteducation, the art market, art history, andcritique. The goal of postmodernism was torehabilitate everything that was repressed andexcluded by this canon: a certain type offiguration (Italian transavanguardia, Germanneo-expressionism), photography, cinema,performance, and so on. The same can be said ofarchitectural postmodernism, which wasdirected against the Modernist architecturalcanon, and of literary postmodernism, whichrehabilitated literary trash of all kinds.Postmodernism privileged reproduction vs.production, secondarity vs. originality, anonymityvs. individuality. However, Westernpostmodernism also had its own utopiandimension. Postmodernism dreamt of infiniteflows of desire and information and of a ÒhivemindÓ or Òcrowd mindÓ that had the power toundermine every attempt to control and securethe meaning of individual signs: all these signswere supposed to be turned into empty, free-floating signifiers. Thus, even if Western

postmodernism in its different forms was areaction to late-Modernist formalism, it inheriteda formalist attitude towards signs and images.All artistic forms were understood as zero-forms,devoid of any specific content or meaning.According to Postmodernist dogma, all contentand meaning was permanently deconstructed bythe anonymous processes of reproduction anddissemination. The only way to give meaning toart forms was to use them artistically in the hereand now Ð the meaning of any particular formbeing totally dependent on its contextual use.

And because all art forms were understood asempty Ð as mere forms without content Ð every

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Diplomatic passports of NSK members. Installation view of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital, Moderna galerija,Ljubljana, 2015. Photo: Dejan Habicht. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

individual artist had a right to combine andrecombine them in every possible way. Thus, thefamous Òdeath of the authorÓ was easilycombined with the proclamation of unlimitedartistic freedom and the vocabulary of formsinherited from the various artistic movements ofthe twentieth century. However, all thesecombinations and recombinations became, inthe end, as empty as their individual parts.

The emergence of this type ofpostmodernism was not possible in Yugoslavia,nor anywhere else in Eastern Europe, becausethe conditions under which art was practicedthere were completely different. First of all: theModernist canon was never established,formalized, and institutionalized in EasternEurope to the same degree that it was in theWest. Even if Modernist trends were permitted insome Eastern European countries Ð or evenwelcomed, as in Yugoslavia Ð they did not havethe same normative power as in the West. Here I

mean the normative power supported by artinstitutions with an international reach, bigmoney, and so on. But most importantly, art ingeneral, and Modernist art in particular, wasnever totally depoliticized like it was in the West.In the Eastern European countries, public spaceremained controlled: the Postmodern vision of

the totally free, potentially infinite flow of signscould never take hold there. Signs were not free-floating but politically charged Ð and the artforms that circulated in the same space werealso politically charged. They were neverexperienced as empty signs that could get theirmeaning only through their individual artisticuse. Living in a Communist country, one still felt

a close connection to the artistic practices of theearly avant-garde from the beginning ofhistorical communism. For a late-Socialistsubject, the black square of Malevich was notmerely a self-referential image that initiated theinternational zero-style of geometricalabstraction. Rather, in the Socialist countries theblack square, as well as other images from theearly Russian avant-garde, signified thebeginning of the Communist era, with all itsutopian aspirations. Similarly, old realist imagesdidnÕt function as simple, politically innocent

representations of landscapes or city scenes,but symbolized the national tradition that waspartially denied and partially ideologicallyreinterpreted by the regime. The same can besaid about Socialist Realism and Nazi art. Andthe same can be said about late-Modernist art. Itwas experienced not as a production of empty

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Installation view of IRWIN, Birds of Feather (Like to Like): IRWIN-OHO, 1985, at the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital,Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2015. Photo: Dejan Habicht. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

signifiers, but as a commitment to a Westernorientation and Western cultural values. In otherwords, every use of this vocabulary of imagesmanifested not the creative freedom of anindividual artist, but a certain political stancewithin the sociopolitical field in which this artistlived. Thus, under Socialist conditions the artistcould not, in the Western Postmodern manner,operate freely with empty art forms understood

as language without content. Using aHeideggerian phrase, one can say that undersocialism, die Sprache spricht (language speaks):the forms that the artist uses are always alreadyideologically charged. Their combinations arealso ideologically charged Ð and so thesecombinations have their own message that notmerely undermines but rather overdeterminesany subjective artistic message.

1. Socialist and Post-Socialist Hybridity

When Heidegger says die Sprache spricht, he

means that it is the community, the nation, thatspeaks through the artist because any languageis basically always a national language. This isprecisely the point at which the art strategies ofIrwin and other late- and post-Socialist artistsemerge. The event of historical communismproduced a broken national identity in Eastern

European countries. Communist ideology wasand still is universalist and internationalist Ð inevery country, its worst enemy was the localnationalism, which was regularly characterizedas Òbourgeois nationalism.Ó However, at thesame time, the epoch of historical communismwas defined by StalinÕs decision to buildÒsocialism in one country.Ó From the beginning itbecame clear that the program of socialism in

one country would lead to the rebirth ofnationalism Ð and in a certain way, it did. TheSocialist camp began to split along nationallines: after Soviet communism we got Yugoslavcommunism, Chinese communism, Albaniancommunism, and so on Ð up to theEurocommunism of the Italian and FrenchCommunist parties. However, these nationalcommunisms remained committed to auniversalist message. In a certain way, this wasalready prefigured by the Stalinist definition ofSocialist Realism: Socialist in content and

Realist (in fact, national) in form. This definitionpresupposed, of course, that the Socialistcontent remained identical throughout all thedifferent national forms. However, the nationalform began to shape and thus fragment theSocialist content. But this fragmentation did notproduce a simple return to traditional national

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Installation view of one of the NSK department rooms at the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital, Moderna galerija,Ljubljana, 2015. Photo: Dejan Habicht. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

Installation view of IRWIN, Was ist Kunst, 1984-, at the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2015. Photo:Dejan Habicht. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

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cultures Ð understood as specific, evenidiosyncratic ways of life. Every particularcommunism had a claim to represent theuniversal and authentic truth of communism Ðinterpreting the Communists of other countriesas Òrevisionists.Ó Here the analogy withChristianity is obvious, as the latter was alsosplit along national lines during the period ofReformation and religious wars. Yugoslavia

understood its own national version of socialismas transnational Ð first of all because Yugoslaviawas a union of several national republics, butalso because Yugoslavia was an importantmember of the Non-Aligned Movement. Thus,late Socialist and post-Socialist national identitycould not be taken for granted. Accordingly, thelanguage, including the visual language, thatartists were supposed to use was not given butreconstructed. Now let us consider what such aproject of reconstruction actually means. The goal of national reconstruction was

explicitly formulated by the Irwin group at thebeginning of its activities. ItÕs no accident thatthe word Òretro-avant-gardeÓ has been used tocharacterize IrwinÕs practice and, more generally,NSKÕs practice. ÒAvant-gardeÓ here is basicallyconstructivism. Reconstruction is theconstruction of the past for the future, and at thesame time the construction of the future as workon the past. Retrospectively, one can say thatIrwin and NSK did this work of reconstructionbetter than any other Eastern European artists orartist groups. There are different possibleexplanations for this. It may have been becauseSlovenian identity was broken at different placesand along different lines; there was not only theSocialist, Yugoslavian past, but also the Nazipast, which could not simply be ignored: the Nazipast was related to a certain more traditionalGermanness in Slovenian identity. It may havealso resulted from the fact that the level oftheoretical reflection and philosophicalawareness was much higher in Slovenia than inother late- and post-Socialist countries.Whatever the reason, the Irwin group found abetter solution to the problem of broken identity

than many other artists and art theoreticians Ð infact, the only possible solution. This solutionwas, like any true solution, very simple. Insteadof trying to repair the broken identity, Irwinintegrated into this identity the forces that weresupposed to have broken it: the radical avant-garde, Socialist Realism, and Nazism. All theseforces that had denied a separate identity toSlovenian art were interpreted by Irwin and NSKas forces that had modernized this identity. Acertain combination of the revolutionary Russianavant-garde, Socialist Realism, and Nazi art

retroactively became the image of the Slovenianavant-garde. Could one say that this Slovenian

avant-garde never existed, that it was simply alater invention, a construction of the NSK? Yesand no. Yes, because all these phenomena wereimposed on Slovenian cultural identity and nothistorically produced by it. And no, because evenif all these ideological and artistic attitudescame from abroad, their particular combinationwas characteristic only of Slovenia, and not ofany other place on Earth. So it is enough to

reevaluate this combination, to perceive it asauthentic, as being an integral part of thegenuine historical fate of the Slovenian nationinstead of being imposed from outside, to beable to reconstruct and not merely to constructthe Slovenian avant-garde as a part of Sloveniancultural identity. And that is precisely what NSKdid. In this way Irwin also substantiallyexpanded the field of art forms available toartists living under standard conditions ofpostmodernity. At first glance this seems

paradoxical because Irwin has operated in therelatively closed late-Communist/post-Communist ideological space. But this expansionof artistic vocabulary has its explanation.Indeed, the Postmodern free and allegedlyunlimited play of empty, or rather floating,signifiers was based on its own rules of exclusionand censorship. The ideologically motivated artof Socialist Realism and Nazi art was excludedfrom this play of signifiers. The explanation forthis exclusion is simple enough. One had moralscruples when emptying art forms of theircontent, and the content of Socialist Realismand Nazi art seemed too toxic, too contagious tobe completely removed through the operation ofaesthetic purification. This is why the Holocaustand other crimes of the twentieth century wereproclaimed to be Òunrepresentable.Ó One fearedthat if the related images were allowed to jointhe multitude of modern art forms, they would inturn be deconstructed and emptied, and wouldbegin to function as pure aesthetic objects. Inthis way their toxic, contagious character (whichwill never really go away) would becomeneglected Ð and thus, these images could slowly

infect the whole field of modern art forms. Thisanxiety regarding the infection of aesthetic formby ideological content is still so strong thatimages from the period of Socialist Realism andNazi art are still excluded from the contemporarysystem of art representation. Here we have apretty strong form of censorship. But the sameform of censorship also has weak versions. Forexample, when I traveled through MiddleAmerica I saw a lot of artworks from the period ofthe New Deal Ð with explicitly progressive,political, ideological content. These artworks

(mostly murals, especially by Thomas HartBenton) are hardly represented in standard

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American art history Ð one struggles to findcatalogues or books about them. For Irwin this ideological, toxic character ofartforms referring to totalitarian regimes was notsuch a problem Ð because for Irwin all art formsare ideological and toxic to the same degree.Irwin does not see art forms as empty signifiersÐ and thus Irwin has no reason to suppresscertain images as ideological. So Irwin shows

that if we accept that all signs are ideological tothe same degree, we become much freer in ourchoice of artistic forms and means than if webelieve that signs can or must be empty. Theremobilization of signs from the early avant-garde as well as totalitarian art was used byIrwin to give more energy to their project ofreconstructing Slovenian national culturalidentity. ÒRetro-avant-gardeÓ here means notonly the reenactment of certain avant-gardeattitudes and gestures, but also Ð and maybeprimarily Ð the influx of avant-garde energies

into IrwinÕs artistic practice. The general mood ofpostmodernity was a certain melancholy afterthe end of the love affair with utopia. However,the project of reconstructing Slovenian nationalidentity required some utopian energy Ð energythat Irwin got from the sources of radicalmodernity. One can ask, of course, whether we neednational cultural identities at all today Ð be theybroken or unbroken, simple or hybrid. Is it notbetter to swim in anonymous flows ofinformation and operate globally in our time ofglobalization? Yes, today we live in the age ofglobalization and the internet. Both are effectsof the end of the Cold War and the erasure of theideological divide between the West and theEast. However, instead of producing the infiniteflows of desire and information that weresupposed to undermine and ultimately kill theModernist subject of self-reflection and self-control, the internet has delivered an almostunlimited power to algorithmically organizesurveillance and control. The cultural aspect ofglobalization also hasnÕt turned out the waymany people initially expected.

In fact, contemporary globalization is thedirect opposite of the modern ideal ofinternationalism and universality. The world ofglobalization is not a world of internationalsolidarity or shared cultural values. Nor isglobalization the realm of the anonymous ÒcrowdmindÓ as it was celebrated by postmodernism.Rather, it is the world of the global competitionof everybody against everybody. This competitionpushes the subject who participates in it tomobilize his or her own human capital. Andhuman capital, as described, for example, by

Michel Foucault, is primarily the culturalheritage that is mediated by the family and

milieu in which an individual grows up. That iswhy the contemporary logic of globalization,unlike Modernist internationalization anduniversalization, leads to cultural conservatismand an insistence on oneÕs own cultural identity.The combination of globalization and extremecultural conservatism defines the politics and artof our time. My Western colleagues ask me from time to

time: How are the Russian and Eastern Europeanartists doing Ð did they already move on fromCommunist and post-Communist times? Thisquestion actually means: Have they alreadyforgotten the repressions and traumas ofcommunism and become what they always wereÐ Polish, Slovenian, or Russian? From thisperspective, for Eastern European artists tomove on means, in fact, to go back Ð back to anational cultural identity before it was allegedlyrepressed and distorted by communism. Here, ofcourse, emerges the question of how far they

have to go back to be able to rediscover andreappropriate their own cultural capital.Obviously, Russians have to go back to at least1916. Maybe to 1913. This means that on the wayto post-Communist normalization andglobalization they have to abandon and subtractfrom their cultural capital almost the wholetwentieth century. The situation of other post-Socialist countries is not so dire Ð they have togo back merely to the period before World War II.But they still lose several decades Ð and, interms of cultural capital, this is not such anegligible amount of time. Thus, today the old line between the Westand the East reemerges in a different form. TheWest is not supposed to subtract certain periodsof its cultural history from its cultural capital(maybe the only exclusion here is the German artof the Nazi era). This produces obvious inequalityin the conditions of cultural accumulation andcapitalization. However, on the level of officialcultural policy, this Western point of view hasalso been adopted by Eastern Europeancountries. This culturally conservative discoursecurrently dominates the public scene in Russia.

But also in Eastern Europe, communism isunderstood mostly as a mere interruption,interval, or delay in the so-called normaldevelopment of these countries Ð a delay which,once it was over, left no traces other than acertain appetite to Òmake up for lost timeÓ andbuild capitalism of the Western variety. Theproject of building capitalism through theerasure of the leftovers of communism remindsone of the well-known politics of erasing theleftovers of capitalism, with the goal of buildingcommunism.

One can say that this is the anti-Communistperspective on the phenomenon of Eastern

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Installation view of the NSK common room, at the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2015. Photo: MatijaPavlovec. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

European Òreal socialism.ÓHowever, Westernleftist intellectuals share this perspective, evenif they do so for different reasons. When it cameto the Soviet Union, Western intellectuals wereconvinced that they understood Marxism muchbetter than Russians did Ð and this insight wasenough for them to see the entirety of Sovietculture as a historical mistake. So for them, anyfurther investigation of Soviet culture made no

sense because it was clear from the beginningthat this culture was based on an interpretationof Marxism that was simply wrong (dogmatic,primitive, and so forth). State socialism of theSoviet variety was seen as a perversion and abetrayal of the Communist ideal, a totalitariandictatorship that was more a parody ofcommunism than its true fulfillment. Thus, fromthe position of the Western Left, real socialismalso looks like a mere delay Ð this time, a delay inthe development of the communist ideal. Thus,there is a consensus among the Left and the

Right in the West that the Eastern EuropeanCommunist experiment should be forgotten.Both the Left and the Right reject Òhistoricalcommunism,Ó or Ònational communism,Ó orÒcommunism in one countryÓ because it offers apeculiar mixture of particular national traditionsand the universalist Communist project. The

conservatives hate communism forcontaminating the national traditions that theywant to purify from everything Communist. Andthe Neo-Communists want, on the contrary, toremove all the elements of Russianness,Chineseness, and so on, to restore theCommunist ideal in its absolute purity. Indeed, StalinÕs project of building socialismin one country led to the hybridization of

communism and nationalism Ð and thus to acertain folklorization of communism and theartistic avant-garde. By ÒfolklorizationÓ I meanthe integration of Communist ideology andavant-garde art into networks of legends andmyths that constitute the historical memory of aparticular people, or rather a particular nation.Socialist revolutions inscribed political utopiasand the artistic avant-garde into the massculture of the countries in which theserevolutions took place, to a degree that wasunthinkable for the countries of the West. For a

contemporary post-Soviet citizen there is nobasic difference between MalevichÕs blacksquare, MayakovskyÕs yellow vest, LissitzkyÕs redwedge that beats the whites, and jokes aboutChapaev and PetÕka. The emergence of this new folklore, orÒkitsch,Ó was diagnosed by Clement Greenberg in

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Installation view of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2015. Photo: Dejan Habicht. Courtesy Moderna galerija, Ljubljana.

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his famous essay ÒAvant-Garde and KitschÓ from1939. At the end of this essay Greenbergformulates the hope that the avant-garde will besaved by international socialism, i.e. Trotskyism.AndrŽ Breton, in his manifesto-like text ÒOn theTime When the Surrealists Were RightÓ (1935),takes a similar position. He quotes the somehownave-sounding letters about loving oneÕs motherand respecting oneÕs parents published in

Komsomolskaya Pravda as a reason for his finalbreak with the Soviet Union. (Obviously theseletters were kitsch for him.) However, it is precisely this Socialist/post-Socialist folklore, or if one wants, kitsch Ð thismixture of Communist tradition and nationalcultural identity Ð that is used as material bymany contemporary Russian and EasternEuropean artists. Irwin is here again anespecially good example because they practicethe folklorization of the avant-garde in a verysystematic and conscious manner, combining

avant-garde images with heavy, traditional-looking frames, placing them together with deerheads and thus referring to the atmosphere of aprovincial stube, and so forth. One speaks aboutmodern antiquarianism. Irwin makes modernfolklore. It is possible to find other examples of thisfolklorization of modernity all across EasternEurope. The use Ð or better yet, the production Ðof folklore is a Romantic tradition. At thebeginning of the nineteenth century, romanticismwas a reaction to the collapse of theuniversalism of the French Enlightenment andthe failure of the French Revolution. Romanticpoetry and art, with their mixture of desire andhorror, the beautiful and the sublime, weremanifestations of nostalgia for revolutionarytimes. Our time Ð the time after the end of thegreat universalist projects and secular utopias ofthe twentieth century Ð very much reminds oneof the nineteenth century: it is dominated by thesame combination of open markets, nationalism,and cultural conservatism. Under theseconditions only art is able to maintain thememory of the hybrid, national communisms of

an earlier time. And it is precisely this memorythat constitutes the main cultural capital ofcontemporary Eastern European artists andwriters.

2. The NSK State

Among many other things, this memory is amemory of a Communist internationalism thatwas formulated in opposition to the project ofglobalization, understood as the creation of openglobal markets Ð the process of economicglobalization initially started and, as stated

above, was partially realized already in thenineteenth century. At that time Ð or even earlier,

in the eighteenth century Ð emerged thecorrelative project of a world culture in which allparticular national cultures would be includedand dissolved. This vision of world culture is, ofcourse, a fascinating one. However, the questionremains: Can this vision be realized by the powerof open markets alone? Of course, culturalproducts, like all other cultural commodities,have become globally accessible. But cultural

products are not consumed like othercommodities. If I consume bread, it disappearsafter I eat it. If I buy a car, it becomes myproperty and can be used Ð and also ruined Ðonly by me. However, cultural products areconsumed in such a way that they do notdisappear in the act of consumption. Thus, theyneed archives to be preserved Ð libraries,museums, universities. Open markets are notable to create and sustain such culturalinstitutions Ð this is a task, historically andtoday, for national states. Art and culture in

general function today in this ambivalentsituation: they are globalized as commodities butremain preserved as parts of national culturalheritage. There are no international museums,libraries, or universities. Of course, one canargue that the internet is such an internationalarchive Ð and this is partially true. But theinternet is based on the following simpleprinciple: it answers the questions that you askit. The internet does not give you informationthat you do not want to know. And people usuallyask for information they are taught to ask for. Inthis sense the internet cannot substitute fornational educational institutions. Beyond this,the internet is in private hands Ð and thusreflects the cultural identity of the Americancorporations that own it. IrwinÕs answer to thissituation was the creation of the NSK state. Herewe have the rehabilitation, or the artisticreenactment, of the Hegelian/Marxist idea of auniversal state, which already in the nineteenthcentury was opposed to the capitalist vision ofglobalization. At the beginning of the 1990s, a book thatseemed to capture the mood of the time was

Francis FukuyamaÕs The End of History and theLast Man (1992). This book was mostlyinterpreted as a celebration of the victory of theWest over historical communism and theimpossibility of further social change. In fact, thebook was not celebratory but rather pessimistic(Òthe last manÓ). The figure of the end of historywas initially formulated by Alexandre Koj•ve inthe lectures on HegelÕs Phenomenology of Spirit(1807) that he gave at the ƒcole des Hautesƒtudes in Paris from 1933 to 1939. This coursewas regularly attended by leading French

intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, JacquesLacan, AndrŽ Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

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and Raymond Aron. The transcripts of Koj•veÕslectures circulated in Parisian intellectual circlesand were widely read, notably by Jean-PaulSartre and Albert Camus. Fukuyama was astudent of Leo Strauss, who himself admiredKoj•ve but believed that Koj•ve described theend of history too optimistically Ð due to theinfluence of Marx and his historical optimism.Strauss followed Nietzsche in believing that the

post-historical mode of existence is the realm ofthe last man, the realm of decay and decline.Actually, at the end of his life Koj•ve also becamemuch more skeptical about the post-historicalcondition. Fukuyama shares this pessimisticviewpoint and follows Koj•ve very closely in hisinterpretation of history and its end. However, hemisses the central point in Koj•vian discourse.For Koj•ve the end of history is marked by theemergence of a universal and homogeneousstate. The end of history means political and notmerely economic globalization. So from the

Koj•vian point of view we are still not at the endof history. The universal state remains utopian Ðit has to be implemented, but it has not beenimplemented yet. The NSK state is precisely such a utopianuniversal state, built on the territory of art. Whatthe artists practice here is a kind of Romanticbureaucracy Ð the artist becomes a bureaucrat,a clerk of the nonexistent universal state. In hisfamous essay ÒLa trahison des clerksÓ (TheBetrayal of the Clerks, 1927), Julien Benda aptlydescribed the ethos of post-Hegelian modernbureaucracy. He named its members Òclerks.ÓThe word ÒclerkÓ is often translated asÒintellectual.Ó But in fact, for Benda theintellectual is a traitor of the clerkÕs ethos,because the intellectual prefers the universalityof his or her ideas to the duty of universalservice. The true clerk does not commit himselfto any particular worldview Ð even to the mostuniversalist one. The clerk, rather, serves othersby helping them to realize their own particularideas and goals. Benda saw the clerk primarily asa functionary, as an administrator in theframework of the enlightened, democratic state

that is ruled by law. Today the state Ð even if it is internallyorganized in the most universalist way Ð remainsa national state. Its clerks, notwithstanding theiruniversalist ethos, are necessarily embedded inthe apparatuses of power that pursue particular,national interests. This embeddedness is one ofthe reasons why the traditional clerk ethos, asdescribed by Benda, has become utopian. One can argue that the contemporaryartworld tries to compensate for the lack of auniversal state. Here one has to remember that

Koj•ve was not only a follower of Hegel but also anephew of and commentator on Kandinsky.

Indeed, there is an inner affinity between themodern state and modern art: both believe in thepredominance of form over content. The modernstate is a form Ð a beautiful form. The truebureaucrat Ð or true ÒclerkÓ Ð serves this formbefore he loves it, because his thinking isformalistic through and through. The bureaucratwho serves not the form but the Òcontent,Ó be itthe content of his own desires or the desires of

others, is a corrupt, bad bureaucrat. The samecan be said about the Modernist artist: he servesthe form and tries to avoid corrupting it throughhis personal psychology or through externalinfluences, motives, interests, and goals. Asstated above, Conceptual and even Postmodernart inherits this service to pure form. Of coursethe artist, as also a bureaucrat, cannot becompletely immune to corruption throughcontent of different kinds. But both see theirprofession as an attempt to resist this corruptionand to serve the beautiful form of art or the state

as selflessly as possible. This concerns not onlythe creation but also the presentation of art inpublic space Ð the task in which art and politicsnecessarily collaborate. In this respect the figure of the independentcurator is especially interesting. Earlier curatorswere appointed by the state. Today, so-calledinternational curators appoint themselves. Intheir curatorial practice they navigate amongmany private, institutional, and local interests,but their goal is to create an image ofinternational art. In this sense they act asappointees of a nonexistent universal state. Thecontemporary international curator is aRomantic bureaucrat. NSK creates not merely acuratorial program but a Romantic state in whichevery participant Ð every curator or writer orartist Ð becomes a bureaucrat, one who isresponsible for the well-being of the state, andwho is selfless and conscious of his or her socialduties. This artistic appropriation of the stateand state bureaucracy seems paradoxicalbecause the artist is supposed to be ananarchist. But anarchy and institutional critiqueare good when there are art institutions. In

Eastern European countries though, artinstitutions are not very strong Ð and the artmarket is not especially powerful. In thissituation artists have to create art institutionsthemselves Ð together with the state that istheoretically responsible for maintaining theseinstitutions. Here again the artists of Irwindemonstrate their precise grasp of the currentcultural and political situation; they thusannounce the era in which all people will becomecitizens of their state Ð or of any other universalstate.

!

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Boris Groys is Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, andMedia Theory at the Center for Art and MediaKarlsruhe and Global Distinguished Professor at NewYork University. He is the author of many books,including The Total Art of Stalinism, Ilya Kabakov: The

Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, TheCommunist Postscript, Going Public, and Art Power .

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From Hybrid Socialism to Universal State Groys

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