On the New by Boris Groys

Author:Boris Groys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

1See William A. Camfield, Marcel Duchamp: Fountain, Houston, 1989, pp. 29ff.

2See, for example, Nikolai Taraboukine, Le dernier tableau.

3Duchamp took much of his inspiration from Raymond Roussel’s novels, which contain, among other things, descriptions of the exotic use of everyday objects in mysterious rituals: ‘It was basically Roussel who was responsible for my Verre “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même”. It was his Impressions of Africa that indicated, broadly, how I should proceed’ (Marcel Duchamp, Du champ du signe: Ecrits, Paris, 1975, p. 173).

4The surrealists repeatedly took the equation of the sacred with the violation of taboos (including all social taboos) as an object of their theory and practice. See especially Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash, Champagne, 2001, as well as Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alistair Hamilton, London, 2001. For a critical analysis, see Jean-Michel Heimonet, Politiques de l’écriture Bataille/Derrida: Le sens du sacré dans la pensée française du surréalisme à nos jours, Paris, 1990.

5‘But there is no icon on which the holy is a zero. The essence of God is zero salvation … If the heroes and saints were to become aware that the salvation of the future is zero salvation, they would be confused with reality’ (Malevich, Suprematism: Die Gegenstandlose Welt, trans. Karsten Harries, Cologne, 1962, p. 57). Malevich’s suprematism sought to rescue the hero and saint from their confusion with a new icon of zero-salvation. Malevich’s suprematism sought to deliver the hero and saint from their confusion by mobilizing a new icon of zero-salvation.

6In explanation of his own paintings, Kandinsky proffers a terminology of colours and forms that is borrowed from the theosophical tradition. Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’, in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds. and trans., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, The Documents of Twentieth Century Art, Boston, 1982, pp. 177ff.

7Ibid., p. 135ff.

8As has already been shown, expressionism also makes use of quotations from primitive art and the art of the mentally ill, as well as mystic doctrines of colour, and so on. However, it is above all the concept of ‘genius’ that it appropriates as a ready-made.

9Yuri Tynyanov, ‘O literaturnoj evolutsii’, in idem, Poetika: Istorija literatury, Moscow, 1977, pp. 270–81, and Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskij sčet, Moscow, 1989, pp. 120–38.

10Published as P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle, Baltimore, 1991.

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