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Art criticism in the post-medium age Boris Groys in conversation with Anna Lovatt

19 May 2014 at 19.30–21.00

Robert Morris, Untitled 1965, reconstructed 1971. Tate. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025.

  • Boris Groys
  • Anna Lovatt
  • Find out more

Robert Morris
Untitled (1965, reconstructed 1971)
Tate

© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025

How has formalist and poststucturalist thinking shaped our understanding of art and art history in the 20th century? What relevance do such ideas have today, in an age where anything goes and artists work in a ‘post-medium’ world? 

Professor Boris Groys and Dr Anna Lovatt explore the work of modernist critic Clement Greenberg and his brilliant student Rosalind Krauss, considering among other things the changing role of the art critic and scholar, the continuing potency of the idea of the avant-garde, and the fate of the modernist project in the 21st century.

Boris Groys

Boris Groys is a philosopher, art critic, and curator whose research centers on modern Russian philosophy, French poststructuralism, and contemporary media. He is the Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, New York. In addition Groys is Senior Fellow for Philosophy and Media Theory at the Academy for Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung) in Karlsruhe since 1994. He co-curated with curator Qiu Zhijie Reactivation, 9th Shanghai Biennale, 2012 and was the curator of After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2012 and Empty Zones, Russian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice, 2011. His published works include: Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media (2012); Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012); The Communist Postscript (2010); and Art Power (2008). Groys lives and works in New York.

Anna Lovatt

Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Manchester. She has written extensively on art of the 1960s and its legacies, including essays on Trisha Donnelly, Rosalind Krauss, Sol LeWitt, Dorothea Rockburne, Anne Truitt and Ruth Vollmer. Her writing has been published in Artforum, Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal, Tate Papers and Word and Image. From August 2014, she will be the Marguerite Hoffman Scholar-in-Residence at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

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Date & Time

19 May 2014 at 19.30–21.00

Find out more

  • Sol LeWitt A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations 1970

    Ideas in Transmission: LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and the Question of Medium

    Anna Lovatt

    This article considers Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings as artworks poised on the cusp of the ‘post-medium condition’ of installation art. While the wall drawings are site-specific, they eschew the spectacular, immersive effects of subsequent multi-media installation art. They also adhere to the practice of drawing at the precise moment when conventional, medium-based categories were under attack. It is argued that LeWitt’s wall drawings refuted the modernist conception of ‘the medium’ as an autonomous entity, foregrounding instead its relational and communicative potential.

  • Trisha Donnelly Untitled 2010

    Wavelength: On Drawing and Sound in the Work of Trisha Donnelly

    Anna Lovatt

    This article considers the relationship between drawing and sound in the work of American artist Trisha Donnelly (born 1974). Against recent theories of the demise of individual media, Donnelly’s work is seen to indicate a more complex set of cross-modal and inter-medial relationships.

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