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Boris Groys

Religion as Medium (2006)

A list of Boris Groys’ official engagements, research interests and vocations – ‘philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist’ – is given on the press release for his current exhibition at Cubitt, ‘Thinking in Loop: Three Videos on Iconoclasm, Ritual and Immortality’. This otherwise dauntingly comprehensive list of Groys’ activities leaves off the titles curator and artist despite his practising both disciplines in recent years. The omissions signal a certain ambivalence towards these designations, whilst making clear that the work here remains theoretically bound. Tentatively proposed as films, his artistic output constitutes a conscious attempt at mining (or undermining) the interstices between disciplines.

The three films shown at Cubitt, or ‘video collages’ as Groys terms them – Iconoclastic Delights (2002), The Immortal Bodies (2007) and Religion as Medium (2006) – explore, variously, cinematic iconoclasm, life after death and the dissemination of religious propaganda. These thematic designations provide Groys with a framework within which to range over a number of topics that have constituted his critical-theoretical work of the last 30 years: iconoclasm, aesthetics and politics, cinematic and mass media modes of attention and articulation.

Each video collage follows the same format: a series of silenced film fragments are overdubbed with a ‘lecture’ incanted by Groys. There is a disjunction between text and image that is, for Groys, crucial. For him the fact that the images, which come from movies and ‘film documentations’, are not described or explained by the spoken text disrupts the text-image relationship that structures images in the mass media and mainstream commercial cinema. This polemical and contradictory point foregrounds all three films: the medium of video is ubiquitous to the degree that it usurps all other media.

Iconoclastic Delights begins, ‘Film has never stood in a sacred context,’ spoken over the famous eye-cutting scene from Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), ‘always a bedfellow of cheap mass entertainment.’ Groys analyses the dialectic of film’s illusion of movement and the cinema’s ‘immobilization’ of the viewer: ‘Everything film shows is translated into movement and thereby profaned.’ Clips from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (1996) and Batman (1989) follow, as Groys’ words worry at this central problem of film. As with all the works shown here, the final clip has sound. In this instance it is the closing, crucifixion scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). Groys makes his final point about the moving image becoming invisible, or film becoming ‘iconoclastic toward itself’ as Eric Idle bursts into song: ‘Always look on the bright side of life’.

Groys insists that the problematics of text-image comprehensibility is in part produced because the film fragments are completely cut off from their origin. However, this discourse is hard to reconcile with that of appropriation, which Groys claims to have shifted from the ‘art world’ into the medium of film. The other question that hangs over these claims is the extent to which the overarching project of his film-critical practice – to liberate the image and at the same time interrogate it – is not also the project of many ‘critical’ filmmakers and film essayists since the 1960s.

Dan Kidner