Ilya Kabakov

                           Ilya Kabakov and  Emilia Kabakov

 

 

Ilya Kabakov is a Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish descent. He was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. By using fictional biographies such as “Charles Rosenthal,”many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which he judges to be the first modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov notes elements common to every modern society, and in doing so he examines the gap between capitalism and communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western capitalism, Kabakov describes socialism as one utopian project among many that have been tried.

Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and theoretical texts. Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Ilya Kabakov completed 155 installations between 1983-2000. The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment is one of Kabakov’s more famous installations. Created in 1984, the viewer enters the installation through a single door and is invited to visit the separate rooms, only one of which cannot be entered. This room must be viewed through cracks in a door that has been shoddily boarded up. The fictitious hero of this installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space.This apartment resident builds a catapult-like contraption or slingshot to shoot himself through the roof into outer space. But this dream is also an individual taking of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. A text describes the story as told by three other residents, one of whom happened to know the cosmonaut better than the others.  The room still contains the contraption, a gaping hole in the ceiling, and scientific drawings and diagrams tacked to a wall that is covered with wallpaper composed of old Soviet propaganda posters. A diorama of the town shows the man’s expected projectile path into outer space. The text explains that shortly after the man went into orbit authorities arrived and boarded up the room. The miserable room and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet utopia, where cosmic vision and the political project of the Communist revolution are seen as indestructible. 

 

All of Kabakov's work is made in the name of other, fictitious artists, like “Charles Rosenthal.” This reveals a hidden rule of the modern art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The installation is a narrative, the validation of a fictitious event. The installations are powerful comments on the Soviet Communist System of that time.

In the 1970s, several factors led Kabakov to become more conceptually oriented. The first was that Soviet thinkers embraced the structuralist theory from France, which shifted focus from an art object to its context. Further, maybe due to the influence of structuralism, the intelligentsia began to question the friend-or-foe attitude toward Soviet ideology. In the 1970s, rather than be anti-Soviet and pro-Western, many artists took a neutral position that would allow them to question and analyze the perceived gap between the ideologies. Kabakov was never considered a dissident as he remained loyal to the Soviet System.  His artistic comments on his society reflected symbolic statements rather than negative commentary on the Communist System. For example, in The Shower Series from 1965, a man is depicted standing under a shower but with no water flowing from it. Kabakov interpreted the work as a simple but universal metaphor about the individual who is always waiting for something, but never receives anything. Critics of communism interpreted the work as signifying Soviet culture and its lack of material reward.

Later developments led to Kabakov’s friends and colleagues forming a group that became known as the Moscow Conceptualists Group, which broadly encompassed the Sots artists and the Collective Actions group, both of which were influential in the construction of Russian conceptualist art.

When I view Kabakov’s artworks, they make me feel uncomfortable. His works give me a sense of apprehension, confined and close, like being trapped in a small and messy room. I feel controlled, with little room for movement.  I don’t like his works because I don’t like the feeling of confinement.  In a cultural context, Kabakov’s artworks to me reflect more despair than optimism, hopelessness rather than an improving society.