From Documenta News Today

Boris Groys on Ilya Kabakov

THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, modern and contemporary art in the West sought either to cheat history or to travesty it. To cheat history is to outrun it in gestures aimed at utopian schemes (as envisioned by Suprematism or the artists of De Stijl) or dystopian destruction (as in Futurism or some variants of Dada). Among modernist avant-gardes, history offered a necessary dialectical framework for its own supersession—this is why the rhetoric of revolution remains so appealing and ubiquitou...