Everything except a dog

2023 Movie image, Installation, Performance Event

Duration: 8 hours

Collaboration with Gorilla Advertising in London, UK

Everything except a dog is an event piece in the Modalism series, a video documentation of critical pseudo-documentary films broadcast in an eight-hour parade by a television advert in locations such as the Tate Gallery, London Bridge, the Palace of Westminster and Chelsea.The work breaks away from the traditional modes of video that have been dissolved by whitecube, bringing huge screens and critical content to the streets of London, presenting narrative through grotesque elements.

Connecting through multiple mediums, the work explores the blind spots of mobile art in the public sphere.

From the start of modernity art began to manifest a certain dependence on theory. At that time—and even much later—art’s “need of explanation” (Kommentarbeduerftigkeit), as Arnold Gehlen characterized this hunger for theory was, in its turn, explained by the fact that modern art is “difficult”—inaccessible for the greater public. According to this view, theory plays a role of propaganda—or, rather, advertising: the theorist comes after the artwork is produced, and explains this artwork to a surprised and skeptical audience. As we know, many artists have mixed feelings about the theoretical mobilization of their own art. They are grateful to the theorist for promoting and legitimizing their work, but irritated by the fact that their art is presented to the public with a certain theoretical perspective that, as a rule, seems to the artists to be too narrow, dogmatic, even intimidating. Artists are looking for a greater audience, but the number of theoretically-informed spectators is rather small—in fact, even smaller than the audience for contemporary art. Thus, theoretical discourse reveals itself as a counterproductive form of advertisement: it narrows the audience instead of widening it. And this is true now more than ever before. Since the beginning of modernity the general public has made its grudging peace with the art of its time. Today’s public accepts contemporary art even when it does not always have a feeling that it “understands” this art. The need for a theoretical explanation of art thus seems definitively passé.

_Boris Groys