Kabakov's Abyss

The viewer squints through a few crudely nailed boards to see a slingshot suspended from four corners of a littered room. A gaping hole has been punctured through the ceiling. Books, shoes, and paper clutter the floor. The walls are covered in red Soviet political propaganda. A shabby cot hides behind a board perched precariously between two chairs. A model city is illuminated by a single lamp. This describes the installation by Iiya Kabakov called ““The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment.” After the Soviet Police banned outside artist exhibitions, Russian artists began creating “aptart” or apartment art in their private apartments. Harriet Murav examines how the dark political past of Soviet Russia affected Iiya Kabakov’s career. Soviet Russia incurred a type of amnesia. “The past only had value as a launch pad for the perfection that was always just about to be achieved.” (Murav, 123) Socialism was theoretically the ideal communal construct that would trump all that came before and after. Soviet police controlled the media distribution. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did memory return with full force, and among all the trauma laden in it. According to Cathy Caruth, “trauma’s ‘enigmatic core [is] the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming experience’.” (Murav, 124) Russians experienced tremendous difficulty acknowledging the horrible atrocities that had occurred under the Soviet regime. “As Aleksandr Genis wrote: ‘Those forces which put Soviet literature — socialist realism — in motion ceased long ago. What remains are only the ruins of words’.” (Murav, 124) Murav explores contiguity and similarity disorder, two types of aphasic disorders that occurred after the Soviet Union. The Russian people were unable to verbally communicate a logically consistent story of what had occurred to them. Kabakov’s art allowed a way to visually process the harmful effects of Soviet Russia. Basically, he made art out of trash. Before becoming a professional artist, Kabakov illustrated children’s books. In 1960, he discovered a unique visual language and helped found Moscow Conceptionalism. In that paradigm, art is seen as a “series of practices and refusals, rather than a characteristic set of formal principles.” (Murav, 125) Moscow Conceptionalism rejected the art object and the civic mind of socialist realism and embraced private artistic practice. Verbal language became prominent in Kabakov’s work. Kabakov was adamantly against Russian socialism, saying “the entire cultural ideology of socialism, including all the generations of the avant-garde with their programs, didn’t care at all about the biological species called the human who was living on the territory where they conduced their manipulations.” (Muray, 129) Often speaking in third person, he created alter egos the teacher Rosenthal and disciple Igor Spivak to represent the timeless father-son story present throughout history. Born Jewish, Kabakov’s “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment” features an object resembling a Jewish prayer shawl. The talis is associated with flight, as with prayer human beings find safety in God’s wings. The empty room in the installation symbolizes the disappearance of Christ’s body and the resurrection. The arrangement of the ropes themselves evoke a cruciform image. Kabakov did not hide the barbarism of Soviet history. He created art that symbolized the void existing in that historical moment. “Kabakov’s use of these spaces, coupled with his emphasis on Rosenthal’s painting as symptomatic of some of kind of pathology typical of his time makes a claim about blindness itself as fundamental to art.” (Muray, 131) Margarita Tupitsyn researched how Kabakov’s origins affected Kabakov’s personality. She describes “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment” “This work consisted of a shack with a boarded-up entrance through which the viewer gazed at optimistic pictures of Soviet life collaged on the interior walls, where they clashed with the dismal furnishings of a communal apartment. Perhaps agonized by just these kinds of dichotomies, an unseen character had apparently escaped through the ceiling, leaving a spectacular gash.” (Tupitsyn, 66) According to Tupitsyn, after immigrating to the United States from Russia, Kabakov planned to make up for 30 years of missed exhibition and promised in 1998 “I know for sure that I will never return to Russia.” (Tupitsyn, 66) Although eventually he did return to St. Petersburg in 2004 and Moscow in 2008 for exhibitions. Additionally, he returned in 2013 for his 80th birthday. As Kabakov grew older, he increasingly began to speak in the first person. “Are these indications of decreasing symptoms of what Freud diagnosed as the splitting of the self under repression, a condition that made Kabakov generate an army of characters? If so, Kabakov now seems ready to detox and reclaim his elusive authorship, free at last of the Magritte-stye dictrum ‘This is not Kabakov.’” (Tupitsyn, 69) Through his art, Kabakov’s endeavored to reconcile his Russian-Jewish identity with his principles. Schlegel outlines Kabakov rise to fame. Without his background, Kabakov’s work has less meaning. “Kabakov’s difficult process of transition from Communist Soviet culture to democratic Western Society is not complete, nor is it likely ever to be. Emigration has permanently changed the physical conditions of the artist’s life and artistic production, though he claims that, at least psychologically, he remains a Soviet artist. ‘I have to say that today I have a comfortable feeling that I didn’t emigrate, I didn’t leave my country.” (Schegel, 98) Kabakov compared himself to “a stray dog” (Schegel, 99), displaying an obvious identity crisis. As a young boy, he was forced to evacuated Ukraine due to the Nazi invasion. In Russia, he never became an official member of the upper class Soviet art community. His success in the West was due to his unique combination of linguistics and art. “Self-conscious graphomania is a narrative strategy that parallels West post-structuralist theories of authorship. Both do away with the figure of the author endowed with individuality, subjectivity, and agency, in favor of open-ended, indeterminate polyvocalism.” (Schegel, 99) Originally, Kabakov’s artistic process’ purpose was to survive under the strict conditions of the Soviet Union. But even in old age, Kabakov continued to demonstrate graphomania. Schegel speculates it was in an sustained effort to protect his privacy, which had been disrespected for fifty-six long years living in the Soviet Union. Through exhibitions in the United States, Kabakov became a public character. “My art has turned out to be oriented toward normal, general humanistic values of the little person; . . . my works rouse the appropriate reaction when it ceases to be important that I am a Russian, American, or German.” (Schegel, 100) He believed in the supremacy of installation art. “There will come a time when there are only installations, and . . . everyone will live in an installation.” (Schegel, 100) As the Soviet Union became a memory, Kabakov saw his art as pertaining to the world at large. “My art has extremely open principles in which each aspect has a very clear level and which everyone can relate to according to their own interpretation.” (Schegel, 100) Since most of Kabakov’s art is inspired by inner and outer turmoil, it raises the question: Is suffering necessary for creativity? Essentially, Kabakov’s art is a warning. “Don’t repeat our mistakes, look at your dreams clearly, but don’t sacrifice the people in the name of ideology. Stay together and don’t forget the past. Do everything possible not to repeat our mistakes and to make your dreams become reality.” (Schegel, 100-101) We should not emulate Kabakov. We should stay true to ourselves in order to find the identity Kabakov expended a lifetime to recognize.

Works Cited: Kabakov, Iiya. The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. 1982-84. Murav, Harriet. “Iiya Kabakov and the (Traumatic) Void of Soviet History.” Slavonica, vol. 17, issue 2, Nov. 2011, p123-133. Schlegel, Amy Ingrid. “Kabakov Phenomenon.” Art Journal, vol. 58, Issue 4, Winter 1999, p98-101. Tupitsyn, Margarita. “Becoming Kabakov.” Art in America, vol. 102, issue 1, Jan. 2014, p66-69.