Boris Groys
Comrades of Time
1. The Present
Contemporary art deserves its name if insofar as it manifests its own contemporaneity—and this is not simply a matter of being recently made or displayed. Thus, the question “What is contemporary art?” implicates the question “What is the contemporary?” How could the contemporary as such be shown? [Throughout this essay there is a confusing back and forth between “contemporary” and the “immediate present.” I trust that Prof. Groys is not unfamiliar with past attempts to address the “contemporary” or to attempt to depict reality at a given moment, such as Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum that “Everyone is contemporary” or her sitting by a rural garden wall writing a text and inserting a statement that a nut had just fallen off a tree and thus interrupting the continuity of whatever she was writing at that sitting. Cf. also the entire enterprises of Cubism and Futurism.]
One facet of Being contemporary can be understood as being immediately present, as being here-and-now. In this sense, art seems to be truly [the word “truly” is superfluous and didactic] contemporary if it is authentic, if for instance it captures and expresses the presence of the present in a way that is radically uncorrupted by [why not omit the dramatic and simply say “that excludes”] past traditions or strategies aiming at success in the future. Meanwhile, however, we are familiar with the [not “the;” merely “a] critique of presence, especially as formulated by Jacques Derrida, who has shown—convincingly enough—that the present is originally corrupted by past and future, that there is always absence at the heart of presence [“Absence?” Groys and Derrida radically need to get back to basics by reviewing Plotinus and Augustine, as in Book IX of Augustine’s “Confessions”: “Who can lay hold of the heart and give it fixity, so that for some little moment it may be stable, and for a fraction of time may grasp the splendor of a constant eternity? Then it may compare eternity with temporal successiveness, and will see there is no constancy, and will see there is no comparison possible.” Where Derrida saw absence, the Desert Fathers saw fullness and re-union with the One. Something has gone off the track here. Perhaps Derrida left the desert too soon], and that history, including art history, cannot be interpreted, to use Derrida’s expression, as “a procession of presences.” [No argument from Augustine or me. History is almost definitionally a transcendent aggregation of data points.]
But rather than further analyze the workings of Derrida’s deconstruction, I would like to take a step back, and to ask: What is it about the present—the here-and-now—that so interests us? Already Wittgenstein was highly ironical about his philosophical colleagues who from time to time suddenly turned to contemplation of the present, instead of simply minding their own business and going about their everyday lives. For Wittgenstein, the passive contemplation of the present, of the immediately given, is an unnatural occupation dictated by the metaphysical tradition [the myopeia of a philosopher out of the Austrian empire; anyone todays knows that the on-off swich for passive contemplation is dictated by the needs of the process of capital.], which ignores the flow of everyday life—the flow that always overflows the present without privileging it in any way. According to Wittgenstein, the interest in the present is simply a philosophical—and maybe also artistic—déformation professionnelle, a metaphysical sickness that should be cured by philosophical critique. [Au contraire. It’s the concentration on the flow that needs to be cured by an awareness of divine immanence in the present.]
[There is something not quite right about the author’s transition at this point from “contemporary” to “present.”]
That is why I find the following question especially relevant for our present discussion: How does the present manifest itself in our everyday experience—before it begins to be a matter of metaphysical speculation or philosophical critique?
Now, it seems to me that the present is initially something that hinders us in our realization of everyday (or non-everyday) projects, something that prevents our smooth transition from the past to the future, something that obstructs us, makes our hopes and plans become not opportune, not up-to-date, or simply impossible to realize. Time and again, we are obliged to say: Yes, it is a good project but at the moment we have no money, no time, no energy, and so forth, to realize it. Or: This tradition is a wonderful one, but at the moment there is no interest in it and nobody wants to continue it. Or: This utopia is beautiful but, unfortunately, today no one believes in utopias, and so on. The present is a moment in time when we decide to lower our expectations of the future or to abandon some of the dear traditions of the past in order to pass through the narrow gate of the here-and-now. [Contemplation as postulated here by Groys impedes the flow of daily life. I give him credit for using the word “initially” above, but thank goodness active, healthy human beings not depressed by association with academics and curators often if not usually find refreshment and strength in occasions of awareness of the present.]
Ernst Jünger famously said that modernity—the time of projects and plans, par excellence—taught us to travel with light luggage (mit leichtem Gepäck). In order to move further down the narrow path of the present, modernity shed all that seemed too heavy, too loaded with meaning, mimesis, traditional criteria of mastery, inherited ethical and aesthetic conventions, and so forth. Modern reductionism is a strategy for surviving the difficult journey through the present. Art, literature, music, and philosophy have survived the twentieth century because they threw out all unnecessary baggage. At the same time, these lightened loads also reveal a kind of hidden truth that transcends their immediate effectiveness. They show that one can give up a great deal—traditions, hopes, skills, and thoughts—and still continue one’s project in this reduced form. This truth also made the modernist reductions transculturally efficient—crossing a cultural border is in many ways like crossing the limit of the present. [“Modern reductionism is NOT a strategy for surviving the difficult journey through the present. It’s a strategy whereby the formerly disadvantaged and lower orders of society, having attained sufficient wealth as the result of surplus produced through the process of capital, turn on their predecessors, arbitrarily proclaim a new order, such as a Corbu couch, and attempt to displace those predecessors.]
Thus, during the period of modernity the power of the present could be detected [by those who had distanced themselves from the “spiritual”] only indirectly, through the traces of reduction left on the body of art and, more generally, on the body of culture. The present as such was mostly seen in the context of modernity as something negative, as something that should be overcome in the name of the future, something that slows down the realization of our projects, something that delays the coming of the future. One of the slogans of the Soviet era was “Time, forward!” Ilf and Petrov, two Soviet novelists of the 1920s, aptly parodied this modern feeling with the slogan “Comrades, sleep faster!” Indeed, in those times one actually would have preferred to sleep through the present—to fall asleep in the past and to wake up at the endpoint of progress, after the arrival of the radiant future. [No argument here.]
2. Disbelief
But when we begin to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present, the contemporary, becomes important, even central for us. This is because the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision—by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. And that is precisely what the contemporary is—a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay. Søren Kierkegaard famously asked what it would mean to be a contemporary of Christ, to which his answer was: It would mean to hesitate in accepting Christ as Savior.1 [Highly doubtful that this statement had anything to do with an analysis of the present. One is always either decided or tentative in the present.] The acceptance of Christianity necessarily leaves Christ in the past. [Groys evidently hasn’t listened to any sermons informed by the cult of immanence lately. They are now legion.] In fact, Descartes already defined the present as a time of doubt—of doubt that is expected to eventually open a future full of clear and distinct, evident thoughts. [The present is a time of conviction for a suicide bomber at the instant before he detonates his bomb, n’est pas?]
Now, one can argue that we are at this historical moment in precisely such a situation, because ours is a time in which we reconsider—not abandon, not reject, but analyze and reconsider—the modern projects. [If you have nothing else to do.] The most immediate reason for this reconsideration is, of course, the abandonment of the Communist project in Russia and Eastern Europe. [Of course? The Communist project was always overrated (but for Soviet possession of nuclear devices), and it is now generally recognized as just another tiresome exercise in the creation and pursuit of differing forms of capitalist subjectivity. See, for one example among the countless, Felix Guattari, “Molecular Revolution in Brazil,” page 39 and passim.] Politically and culturally, the Communist project dominated the twentieth century [perhaps those of us born in East Berlin think so]. There was the Cold War, there were Communist parties in the West, dissident movements in the East, progressive revolutions, conservative revolutions, discussions about pure and engaged art—in most cases these projects, programs, and movements were interconnected by their opposition to each other. But now they can and should be reconsidered in their entirety. Thus, contemporary art can be seen as art that is involved in the reconsideration of the modern projects. [Perhaps it’s a bad translation from German, but surely not “Thus.” How does he jump from a reassessment of Communism to a characterization of contemporary art? In my experience an important characteristic of persons engaged in thinking about contemporary art today is a gross absence of any knowledge of history in the conventional sense.] One can say that we now live in a time of indecision, of delay—a boring time. Martin Heidegger has explained boredom precisely as a precondition for our ability to experience the presence of the present—to experience the world as a whole by being bored equally by all its aspects, by not being captivated by this specific goal or that one, such as was the case in the context of the modern projects.2 [My guess is that Heidegger became bored with the daily commonplace succession of events and subjection to the capitalistic subjectivities that demanded constant concern with projects and fled to contemplation for relief.]
Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. [Leaving aside the millions of people in the West who have been amply rewarded by those promises.] Classical modernity believed the future to be infinite—even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all [well, a small part of it at least]: archive, library, and museum promised secular permanency, an infinitude that substituted the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. [Speak for yourself, Groys.] During the period of modernity, the “body of work” replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. Foucault famously called such modern sites in which time was accumulated rather than simply being lost, heterotopias.3 Politically, we can speak about modern utopias as post-historical spaces of accumulated time, in which the finiteness of the present was seen as being potentially compensated for by the infinite time of the realized project: that of an artwork, or a political utopia. Of course, this perceived compensation obliterates time invested in the production of a certain product—when the final product is realized, the time that was used for its production disappears [Notwithstanding that God has been watching and been aware all of the time? There is no such thing as lost time.]. However, the time lost in realizing the product was compensated for in modernity by a historical narrative that somehow restored it, using a narrative that glorified the lives of the artists, scientists, or revolutionaries that worked for the future. [If, as Foucault might say, that is what a person or entity with enough power wanted in that way. Previous repositories of power, like certain Popes, would simply buy a material manifestation of that project, such a Moses in marble. Is it possible that media art is the result of a lack of concentration of power in present-day equivalents of the Popes?and its transfer to the Beuysian masses of pseudo-artists Groys describes below?]
But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. [It never had any plausibility either to people who didn’t get modernism or to those, like Augustine, thought that any awareness or contemplation of a future was evidence of a distancing from the One.] Museums, for example, have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned—the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable. And the past is also permanently rewritten—names and events appear, disappear, reappear, and disappear again [As Orwell foretold, sensing early that the dispersion of power in the course of the process of capital would cause these events]. The present has ceased to be a point of transition from the past to the future, becoming instead a site of the permanent rewriting of both past and future—of constant proliferations of historical narratives beyond any individual grasp or control. [Why can’t it be both?] The only thing that we can be certain about in our present is that these historical narratives will proliferate tomorrow as they are proliferating now—and that we will react to them with the same sense of disbelief. [Agreed.] Today, we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future. We simply lose our time, without being able to invest it securely, to accumulate it, whether utopically or heterotopically. The loss of the infinite historical perspective generates the phenomenon of unproductive, wasted time. [The masses never had any perspective.] However, one can also approach this wasted time more positively, as excessive time—as time that attests to our life as pure being-in-time, beyond its value within the framework of modern economic and political projections. [Hallalujah! Groys suddenly sticks his head outside the dark cave.]
3. Excess Time
Now, if we look at the current art scene, it seems to me that a certain kind of so-called time-based art best reflects this contemporary condition. It does so because it thematizes the non-productive, wasted, non-historical, excessive time—a suspended time, “stehende Zeit,” to use a Heideggerian notion. It captures and demonstrates activities that take place in time, but do not lead to the creation of any definite product. [This is news? The caveman did lots of things that didn’t end up in a product. So did Jesus and Ghandi. Can we just let Marx fade away?] Even if these activities do lead to such a product, they are presented as being separated from their result, as not completely invested in the product, absorbed by it. We find exemplifications of excessive time, that which is not completely absorbed by the historical process. [Nothing is excluded from the historical process; it might be from specific histories.]
As an example let us consider the animation by Francis Alÿs, Song for Lupita (1998). In this work, we find an activity with no beginning and no end, no definite result or product: a woman pouring water from one glass to another, and then back. We are confronted with a pure and repetitive ritual of wasting time—a secular ritual beyond any claim of magical power, beyond any religious tradition or cultural convention. [I hope so. Isn’t this video just a follow-on to Naumann and his attempt to strip away all representation except for that is basic and “zu Hand.” I don’t think the work is about what Groys wants it to be about.] One is reminded here of Camus’ Sisyphus, a proto-contemporary-artist whose aimless, senseless task of repeatedly rolling a boulder up a hill can be seen as a prototype for contemporary time-based art. This non-productive practice, this excess of time caught in a non-historical pattern of eternal repetition constitutes for Camus the true image of what we call “lifetime”—a period irreducible to any “meaning of life,” any “life achievement,” any historical relevance. [Camus, if properly interpreted here, veered off the track. The Sisyphian rock rolling had a meaning; it was punishment for arrogant flouting of ethics and social convention.] THE INFERNO The notion of repetition here becomes central. The inherent repetitiveness of contemporary time-based art distinguishes it sharply from happenings and performances of the 1960s [who wanted to create sharply defined moments intended to rouse the public from its slumber rather than documenting that slumber]. Now, a documented activity is not a unique, isolated performance—an individual, authentic, original event that takes place in the here-and-now. Rather, this activity is itself repetitive—even before it was documented by, let us say, a video running in a loop. Thus, the repetitive gesture designed by Alÿs functions as a programmatically impersonal one—it can be repeated by anyone, recorded, then repeated again. Here, the living human being loses its difference from its media image. The opposition between living organism and dead mechanism is obscured by the originally mechanical, repetitive, and purposeless character of the documented gesture.
Francis Alÿs has also spoken about the time of rehearsal as a similarly wasted, non-teleological time that does not lead to any result, any endpoint, any climax. An example he offers—his video Politics of Rehearsal (2007), which centers on a striptease rehearsal—is in some sense a rehearsal of a rehearsal, insofar as the sexual desire provoked by the striptease is itself unfulfilled. In the video, the rehearsal is accompanied by a commentary by the artist, who interprets the scenario as the [a] model of modernity, always leaving its promise unfulfilled. [Stop it.] For the artist, the time of modernity is the time of permanent modernization, never really achieving its goals of becoming truly modern and never satisfying the desire that it has provoked. In this sense, the process of modernization begins to be seen as wasted, excessive time that can and should be documented—precisely because it never led to any real result. In another work, Alÿs presents the labor of a shoe cleaner as an example of a kind of work that does not produce any value in the Marxist sense of the term, because the time spent cleaning shoes cannot result in any kind of final product required by Marx’s theory of value [I had a job shining shoes as a kid, and I got paid for it because I added value to the shows and the customer. Again, the portrayal of a shoe shiner is an exercise in phenomenological practice and not a lame excursion into outmoded Marxist theories of the value of labor].
But it is precisely because such a wasted, suspended, non-historical time cannot be accumulated and absorbed by its product that it can be repeated—impersonally and potentially infinitely. Already Nietzsche has stated that the only possibility for imagining the infinite after the death of God, after the end of transcendence, is to be found in the eternal return of the same. And Georges Bataille thematized the repetitive excess of time, the unproductive waste of time, as the only possibility of escape from the modern ideology of progress. [So is playing soccer. So what?] Certainly, both Nietzsche and Bataille [obligatory references to post-modern deities that do not advance this discussion] perceived repetition as something naturally given. But in his book Difference and Repetition (1968) Gilles Deleuze speaks of literal repetition as being radically artificial and, in this sense, in conflict with everything natural, living, changing, and developing, including natural law and moral law.4 [Did Deleuze mean like a stutter or a Grogorian chant? Give me a break.] Hence, practicing literal repetition can be seen as initiating a rupture in the continuity of life by creating a non-historical excess of time through art. [Alys and, say Ceal Floyer, don’t rupture anything. They produce artworks about repetition as a part of the capitalist flow in which we are all engaged and entrapped.] And this is the point at which art can indeed become truly contemporary. [We are now sinking to unsupported gibberish.]
4. Vita Activa
Here I would like to mobilize a different meaning of the word “contemporary.” To be con-temporary does not necessarily mean to be present, to be here-and-now; it means to be “with time” rather than “in time.” “Con-temporary” in German is “zeitgenössisch.” As Genosse means “comrade,” to be con-temporary—zeitgenössisch—can thus be understood as being a “comrade of time”—as collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties. And under the conditions of our contemporary product-oriented civilization, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless. [Time has problems? People have problems when they spend unproductive time.] Such unproductive time is excluded from [certain] historical narratives [depending on the power and situation of the historian], endangered by the prospect of complete erasure. This is precisely the moment when time-based art can help time, to collaborate, become a comrade of time—because time-based art is, in fact, art-based time. [I am always avoiding trying to define “art,” but this formulation by Groys really tests anyone’s resolve in that respect.]
Of course, traditional artworks (paintings, statues, and so forth) are time-based as well, because they are made with the expectation that they will have time—even a lot of time, if they are to be included in museums or in important private collections. But time-based [media] art is not based on time as a solid foundation, as a guaranteed perspective; rather, time-based art documents time that is in danger of being lost as a result of its unproductive character—a character of pure life, or, as Giorgio Agamben would put it, “bare life.”5 But this change in the relationship between art and time also changes the temporality of art itself. Art ceases to be present, to create the effect of presence—but it also ceases to be “in the present,” understood as the uniqueness of the here-and-now. [Valid point, but the last time I looked films are run and DVD’s are played and watched in the present.] Rather, art begins to document a repetitive, indefinite, maybe even infinite present—a present that was always, already there, and can be prolonged into the indefinite future [Douglas Gordon’s finger, yes. Takeshi Murata’s reworked movies, no.]
The ideology of modernity—in all of its forms—was directed against contemplation, against spectatorship, against the passivity of the masses paralyzed by the spectacle [and economic ordering] of modern life. Throughout modernity we can identify this opposition between passive consumption of mass culture and an activist opposition to it—political, aesthetic, or a mixture of the two. Progressive, modern art has constituted itself during the period of modernity in opposition to such passive consumption, whether of political propaganda or commercial kitsch. We know these activist reactions—from the different avant-gardes of the early twentieth century to Clement Greenberg (avant-garde and kitsch), Adorno (cultural industry), or Guy Debord (society of the spectacle), whose themes and rhetorical figures continue to resound throughout the current debate on our culture.6 For Debord, the entire world has become a movie theater in which people are completely isolated from one another and from real life, and consequently condemned to an existence of utter passivity.
However, at the turn of the twenty-first century, art entered a new era—one of mass artistic production, and not only mass art consumption. To make a video and put it on display via the Internet became an easy operation, accessible to almost everyone. The practice of self-documentation has today become a mass practice and even a mass obsession. Contemporary means of communications and networks like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, and Twitter give global populations the possibility to present their photos, videos, and texts in a way that cannot be distinguished from any post-Conceptual artwork, including time-based artworks. And that means that contemporary art has today become a mass-cultural practice. [Not so sure. Are these people doing art or just consuming Apple products?] So the question arises: How can a contemporary artist survive this popular success of contemporary art? Or, how can the artist survive in a world in which everyone can, after all, become an artist? [Are we restating Walter Benjamin here?]
One may further speak about our contemporary society as a society of the spectacle. However, we are now living not among the masses of passive spectators, as described by Guy Debord, but among the masses of artists. In order to recognize himself or herself in the contemporary context of mass production, the artist needs a spectator who can overlook the immeasurable quantity of artistic production and formulate an aesthetic judgment that would single out this particular artist from the mass of other artists. But it is obvious that such a spectator does not exist [isn’t that your job?]—while it could be God, we have already been informed that God is dead. If contemporary society is, therefore, still a society of spectacle, then it seems to be a spectacle without spectators. [We have wandered off-message here.]
