2023-05-28 15:53:30
Ilya Kabakov died surrounded by relatives, in the arms of his wife Emilia, with whom he lived happily for more than 30 years and who became his co-author and supporter. Those who leave this world are often referred to as “gone”. But not about Ilya Kabakov: he did not leave, but flew away, like a fictional character in his famous installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room.”
“Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future” is the name of one of the main total installations by Ilya Kabakov, conceived in the early 1980s, first realized in space in 2001 and then shown more than once in the most famous museums in the world. It gave its name to the artist’s first and last major retrospective, which swept from London to Moscow in 2018. And now, with the death of the master, it has turned into a kind of parting word and parting word.
Kabakov wrote this philosophical essay, later visualized in an installation in the form of a rapidly leaving train with the inscription “Not everyone will be taken”, behind which paintings are piled up in a heap, at a time when he did not yet hope that he would receive recognition and fame. Then, in 1983, for almost 20 years he was engaged in “other art” (which could not be understood and accepted by the Soviet authorities), earning money by illustration, and more and more moved away from “bread” (book graphics) into an imaginary world. He built a different reality in his attic workshop on Sretenka, into which one can fly away from the cramped space of being.
He first described each such imaginary reality in detail in the text and sketches. This essay is inspired, oddly enough, by the work and fate of Kazimir Malevich, who dreamed of Kabakov standing along with “a small bunch of stern people” on a cliff. “Malevich. Calm. Aged. He is fully prepared for the enormous responsibility that has fallen to his lot. Recommends to move on, straight to the sky. He considers the edge of the cliff at his feet the end of his past life. It was here and now that the whole past history of mankind, all its deeds, its art, ended. The “old” land is over. Ahead is a new earth, fanned by space, a new rank of being, ”Kabakov wrote, in fact, standing on a cliff himself, preparing to jump into the sky. He thought: “They won’t take me.”
Some five years later, Kabakov was already living in New York, receiving scholarships from cultural foundations that allowed him to realize his “paper” noemas (a mental representation of the objective world) into total installations. And a couple of years later, from the beginning of the 90s, he received worldwide recognition – dozens of his exhibitions were held in the main museums of the planet. It seems that he did not fully believe that his art would be taken into the future, but it has long been clear to the rest that Kabakov is a milestone at which one era of visual thinking ended and a new one began. Today, the genre of total installation, which involves absolute immersion in the theme and atmosphere, the creation of a special space for ideas, is used everywhere. Any high-quality exhibition builds architecture according to Kabakov’s principles. And the starting point of this transition to a new level of perception was the installation “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room”.
She was born around the same time as the essay on the future, in 1982. First on paper, and four years later – in space. From it one can count the beginning of the “total installation” – as a new form of work of art, built on inclusion within oneself. In the story where “the man who flew into space…” lived, the viewer finds himself in a cramped room without windows, pasted over with bright posters and lined with modest furniture – a folding bed, a couple of chairs, worn-out shoes on the floor. There is a catapult in the center, and a hole in the ceiling, which, it seems, the inhabitant of the room has just punched with his own “I”. Everything is clear without words – a man flew into space, freed from everyday life. Here, for the first time, the main idea of Kabakov’s philosophy was expressed, which became a continuation of Malevich’s cosmism. There is an object-household world in which a person exists, and there is an ideological-fantasy world, a dream. And this conceivable, more precisely, meaningful life is more important than the everyday environment.
That is why the image of a communal apartment arose and occupied one of the central niches in Kabakov’s work. The artist grew up in a communal country and knew about cramped conditions, like any average Soviet citizen, firsthand. A communal apartment, garbage, a toilet (which appear so often in his various works) is the most contemptible and expressive metaphor of all possible. Many perceived the installation “Toilet”, first presented at the “Document” in 1992, and later, in 2008 in Moscow at the “Winzavod”, as a parody of Soviet reality. The project caused a wave of enthusiasm and indignation. Irony in the image of a house, cozy and habitable, located in a public restroom, of course, is also there, but the main thing here is different. This is a metaphor wider than the Soviet space, it is about the coexistence in human being of the imaginary world and the real world. Each of us lives in the world of ideas and brings fantasy to the place where we live, filling it with those who seem beautiful and pleasing to the eye. This intention is about the intersection of two worlds – real and fictional, no matter how comfortable your “toilet” is, it’s still just everyday life, but everyone needs something more – a flight of thought. It is the dream that makes a person a person, the ability to think cosmically. And, oddly enough, the more constrained the space around, the higher the flight of fancy. Ilya Kabakov came up with his first installations in the late 60s and early 70s in the attic, when it was extremely dangerous to engage in such “other” art, but he did not want to do otherwise.
Malevich as an artist was formed while living in art communes, among people of similar interests and occupations, in the 1900s. Then, on the eve of the revolution, people believed that it was possible to build a social society where it would be convenient and comfortable to live together. This idea crashed against the communal life that Kabakov painted decades later, at the beginning of the thaw, when, after years of oblivion, they began to speak and write about Malevich again. Man is a social being, he cannot live without other people, but at the same time, we cannot be with other people all the time, for a flight of fantasy, a personal vacuum separate from everyone is needed. Both artists tried to find the balance of this formula of being. The last of the large-scale installations by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Ship of Tolerance, was shown in New York, Venice, St. Moritz, Sharjah, Miami and Moscow, and it is about the same thing: humanity is the same communal apartment, and everyone is fighting here for their piece of personal comfort, forgetting about the common good, but you need to learn to live together: “not to show yourself what every adult or child wants, but to show that the other is exactly the same as you.” Here is the result that Kabakov came to: it is not enough to break out of the prison of everyday life, one must be sensitive to others. It would not be superfluous to recall here that if it were not for Emilia Lekah, who in the 1980s fell in love with the imaginary world of Kabakov and began to fly in it with him, helping to realize ideas, perhaps the world would not have recognized the great artist and his whole philosophy so and stay in the attic. In 1989, they got married – from that moment on, a closed, self-absorbed dreamer-philosopher began a great voyage around the world art arena.
Another important feature under reflections of more than 60 years is summed up in the already mentioned retrospective “Not everyone will be taken into the future”. A total installation of 13 rooms takes the viewer through Kabakov’s creative search, making a circle. The immersion begins with the early works of Ilya Kabakov in the 1960s, where he first attempts to go beyond traditional painting, using cheap building materials instead of canvas, supplementing landscapes with story texts, hangers or children’s toys. The story is told from the perspective of various fictional characters, in which the artist reincarnates. We pass through a museum of emptiness (without paintings), a library where the artist’s books are collected, representing, according to Kabakov’s definition, the “metaphysics” of objects in absurd connections”, through “Two Times”, where scenes from Soviet everyday life and plots of paintings are superimposed on each other classics like Caravaggio and Rubens, and the White cycle, where Soviet memories are powdered with snow. We go a long way to get into childhood. Into the labyrinth from a dark corridor, where the viewer finds the memories of the artist’s mother, Berta Solodukhina, about the war, the revolution, and Soviet everyday romance. And in the finale we hear the voice of Ilya Kabakov, singing Russian romances, we go to him and find ourselves in the space of light – in the city of angels. In the center of the space there is a long staircase, on which a small man climbs and at its top stretches out his hands to the angel, who strives to meet him…
In 2018, in the installation How to Meet an Angel, Ilya Kabakov seemed to imagine what would happen five years later – now. “When a meeting with your angel seems inevitable, all that remains is to look around,” read the handwritten text with an illustration. One more line could be read there – that artists are happy because “we turn reality into fantasy, and because we never leave the imaginary world.” Now Ilya Kabakov has broken away from the material world and flew into the imaginary world, leaving us with the main parting word – do not be afraid to dream and travel into space and different times, everything in the universe is absurdly intertwined, happiness is to be able to feel these connections and not limit yourself to everyday life. You can fly without leaving the room, and this skill can uplift and glorify.
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