Boris Groys

The topic of these videos by art historian and philosopher Boris Groys is, actually, video as a medium: the use of the image within the video, the analogy between video and essay, the difference between private and public use of the video, the video running in loop as a contemporary form of ritual. The film footage is not used here as a mere illustration to make the text more comprehensible, or to make certain theoretical positions more evident. Rather, these video lectures thematize the gap between what we hear and what we see, and reflect on the relationship between image and word in our media-driven world.
Boris Groys, Global Professor at New York University, is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist and an internationally acclaimed expert on late-Soviet Postmodern art and literature, as well as on the Russian avant-garde. Dr. Groys' writing engages the wildly disparate traditions of French Poststructuralism and Modern Russian philosophy.

Total Enlightenment is a superb and much-needed survey of the Conceptual movement in late- and post-Soviet Russia, a movement which even today remains still relatively unknown in the West. The book owes its title to a 1974 essay by the influential theorist Boris Groys, in which he asserted that Moscow artists held a unique relationship to the traditional art of Russia, which set them apart from their Western role models and contemporaries. He also noted that, for these artists, who were laboring under the censorious gaze of the government, the political content of their work constituted a genuine risk-taking. This volume features key works and paintings, drawings, photographs and installations by some of the most important artists of this era: Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov, Igor Makarevich & Jelena Jelagina, Andrej Monastyrskij, Boris Mikhailov, Dmitri Prigov, Leonid Sokov and Vadim Zakharov.