Valentin Dyakonov. Forward looking Kabakov

On September 30 , 2003, the most famous contemporary Russian artist in the West , Ilya Kabakov, turned 70 years old. This event was celebrated in the artist’s homeland with two exhibitions. A small retrospective of Kabakov’s works from Moscow collections has opened at the State Center for Contemporary Art (NCCA). The Moscow House of Photography on Ostozhenka organized an exhibition of photographic materials related in one way or another to the artist. The artist himself celebrated his birthday in Berlin. Kabakov has not traveled to Moscow for a long time.

The exhibition at the NCCA is a selection of Kabakov’s works from Russian collections. Several large works from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Tsaritsino . Excerpts from his famous albums - unfortunately, not a single one in its entirety. The late period of his work is represented only by art albums, lying in special stands interspersed with children's books, which he designed in Soviet times for the sake of earning money.

There is a late Kabakov in MDF. But only in photographs. Kabakov at work on his next installation. Kabakov arm wrestles with the father of Western conceptualism, Joseph Kosuth. Kabakov in the American steppe with the famous minimalist Donald Judd. Kabakov with conceptual theorist Boris Groys is a common plot. The exhibition is worth seeing primarily for Yuri Rost’s photo-cycle, which documents a walk with the artist along Chistye Prudy shortly before Kabakov’s emigration. The cycle is designed like a Kabakov album: photographs are interspersed with transcripts of conversations during a walk, printed without punctuation.

Both exhibitions leave a feeling of unsaidness. Who is this most famous artist? What did he do to be in the top ten best artists in the world according to the ARTnews magazine rating? Let's try to figure it out.

After Kabakov left for the United States, interpretations of his art on both sides of the ocean took different paths. In Russia they are preoccupied with epistemological issues. The cult critic Andrei Kovalev asked the question in the mid-90s: does Kabakov exist ? And if so, then why is it not given to us in sensations? Serious feelings are hidden behind a frivolous question. Kabakov in the West works, at first glance, with the same material: verbal garbage from a communal apartment, Soviet life. Moreover, he is in the top ten best artists in the world , not in Russia.

The question of why this happened is answered by Western criticism. The fact is that Kabakov managed to turn the “Soviet” into a metaphor. “Soviet” in Kabakov’s installations no longer means “different,” that is, “different.” A comparison with red paint suggests itself: artists use and will continue to use it, not taking into account that this is the color of the USSR flag. Presumably, the artist had to work a lot on the translation. And among Western viewers, the connection to Soviet symbols as a direct indication of the image of the enemy is still great. But nevertheless, in his most successful works, Kabakov managed to clear the elements of Soviet life from ties to place and time.

1. One of

In order to understand how he succeeded, let us consider the artistic context with which the name Kabakov is associated. Ilya Kabakov is a participant in perhaps the most successful movement of Soviet unofficial art, namely conceptualism. In the late 70s, social art grew out of conceptualism. Both directions were and remain extremely popular in the West.

There are reasons for this. In the 70s, when conceptualism flourished, it became possible to look at Soviet society as a huge installation. Let's use an example from the literature. In one of the iconic works of the Thaw, Alexander Yashin’s story “Levers,” the transformation of ordinary peasants with their earthly interests into cogs of an ideological machine, which occurs at a party meeting, is shown as a tragedy. In the 70s, such transformations were not a reason for sublime feelings. At the end of the 70s, Vladimir Sorokin’s story “Meeting of the Factory Committee” was written, in which the ritual of public censure turns into a meaningless reprisal against a cleaning lady who disrupted the smooth flow of bureaucratic language with her personal attitude towards the parasite condemned at the meeting. The 70s saw Soviet society as a model, ideological language as its mechanism. Conceptualists felt that they had the power to create their own models of Soviet reality. To construct models of Soviet society, conceptualists used ideological language. They forced ideological language to play a descriptive rather than a regulatory role. This achieved an unprecedented absurdist effect.

Most conceptualists developed some kind of their own sector of ideological language. Kabakov's focus was on regulations, instructions, lists - the leftovers of the petty bureaucratic life of the Soviet state. Other conceptualists focused on other aspects of Soviet visual and literary language. The favorite model of the conceptualists is Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev: both as the embodiment of the last resort of Soviet society, and as, so to speak, a design, an ideological bouquet with flowers-medals for imperfect feats. The artist Erik Bulatov painted a portrait of Brezhnev, stylistically indistinguishable from the ceremonial works of Nalbandian . This is a statement of the inviolability, the deadness of the system: even an unofficial artist draws a portrait of the leader and does not perform any interpretative work on him that is visible to the eye. The sculptor Boris Orlov parodied the imperial militarism of the USSR in the era of late socialism: he built busts hung with medals and meaningless signs, inspired, it seems, by the same Brezhnev. Komar and Melamid instilled a wild socialist realist plot into French academic painting in the spirit of Gericault.

Western viewers were interested in finding out what was hidden behind the external tinsel, political threats and boastful gestures of the Soviet state. Does this strange Soviet language have a binding, unifying meaning? Is he cementing Soviet society? The conceptualists' answer was historically correct - the Soviet language did not stand up to any criticism at that time - and digestible for Western viewers. This answer was, one might say, reassuring. If the principles of organization of Soviet life, expressed in ideological language, can be so easily reinterpreted in an ironic way, then the “evil empire” turns into a colossus with feet of clay.

After the collapse of the USSR, conceptualism and social art were affected by a general crisis. But pretty soon it turned out that even though Soviet signs had finally turned into linguistic garbage, into dust, conceptualism had some experience. Any society can be represented as a model. The language is bureaucratic, administrative, everywhere, under any regime, it is based on a certain convention. Soviet conceptualists learned this from the most extreme experiences. Further steps in art depended on their ability to process this experience. Ilya Kabakov made a strong move. Without abandoning Soviet garbage, Kabakov turns its cycle into a metaphor for the organization of the world in general.

2. On your own

Ilya Iosifovich Kabakov was born in 1933 in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. In 1951-1957 he studied at the Surikov Institute. In Soviet times, he made a living from book illustration. Since the 60s, Kabakov has been interested in emptiness, white and - through a passion for metaphysics, in particular - the developments of the great graphic artist Vladimir Favorsky - comes to conceptualism. "The Light of Favor" cleared the space of Kabakov's painting and devastated it. And she, like any vacuum, began to absorb all the surrounding objects: poverty, communal life, verbal and visual garbage. But this garbage is still organized, catalogued, divided into communicative units. A unit of visual garbage is a lapidary image of some banal object, a unit of verbal garbage is a statement heard in a communal apartment and transferred to paper.

The style of the images was suggested to Kabakov by his “daytime” work in children’s illustration. The speech was simply heard, imprinted in the mind. The rubbish nature of the statements with which Kabakov operates results in the fact that most of his works are on the verge of a foul. You may not notice them, they blend so much into everyday life.

Let's take, for example, the work "Whose grater is this?" It is a green stand with a real grater glued to the center. In the upper left corner of the picture there is a replica of a certain character, repeating the name of the picture. In the upper right corner is the answer of another character: “This is so-and-so’s grater.” Names don't matter here. In the context of communal life, the question “Whose grater is this?” vital. In a communal apartment, the boundary between one's own and another's is so blurred that finding out who owns this or that object dissolved in the dormitory turns into a matter of paramount importance - the War of the Scarlet and White Roses, the creation of the world. More likely even the latter. At the beginning of the communal world there was not a word, but an object. Determining his place in the world is the task of the characters in the picture, who are known to us only by name.

In this context, the painting has a powerful energy charge. But as a work of art, it is made with maximum lapidaryness. It does not capture the texture and composition. Kabakov, being not only an artist, but also a theorist, tried to resolve the problem with the following statement: “a rope hung on a nail by a great artist differs from a rope hung on a nail by an ordinary person, because the latter does not take into account the entire history of culture.” But this is not so, and Kabakov’s entire artistic practice proves exactly the opposite. Units of visual and verbal garbage, torn out of the elements, must fit into some conventional space, since there is no way back to the elements. And Kabakov came up with such a space.

Since the early 70s, Kabakov has been turning to the album genre. They are, as a rule, united by a cross-cutting character: “Anna Petrovna has a dream”, “Primakov sitting in the closet” and so on. He was not the inventor of the idea of ​​combining several graphic sheets into an album. This technique became widespread among Moscow conceptualists in those years. In those same years, Lev Rubinstein was already making his first works on library cards, following the same principle. For Kabakov, albums became an opportunity to give forward movement to trash and lapidary. Garbage, both visual and verbal, was included in the narrative. As Grigory Revzin writes, “ Next to Kabakov you can... build a row of names... Zoshchenko, Platonov , Dostoevsky, Gogol, and, in my opinion, he will turn out to be very organic there. Another thing is that Kabakov quite strongly modified this tradition He does not have those for whom he grieves separately, but he, the humanist, is separate. He himself is one of the characters in the communal apartment, and his work is a thing from the same communal apartment, a “bad thing” in his terminology, dirty, crooked, poorly made, with all its qualities - color, light, texture, form - speaking of the misfortune of the world from which it came ." The figure of a humanist author is impossible for Kabakov for other reasons. The brilliant publicist Boris Paramonov once wrote that postmodern society is a society of “gray fish.” There is no place for brightness in it, and therefore there is no place for hierarchy. Paramonov wrote about Western society in the 80s, but looking at Kabakov’s albums, all these endless names and surnames, you involuntarily remember the “gray fish” of postmodernity.

It seems logical to assume that Kabakov’s emigration occurred not only because the time had come for Russian unofficial art to be sold and exhibited. A rope on a nail had not yet become art until Kabakov had the opportunity to make it part of a “total installation.” This is a term coined by the artist, and it means a work that cannot be viewed from the outside - you have to enter it, live in it. The first "total installation" was "Ten Characters" at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. And the first significant success in the new genre was “The Red Pavilion,” for which Kabakov received the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Art Biennale. He built something between the Spasskaya Tower of the Moscow Kremlin and a Chinese pagoda and decorated the unprepossessing structure with Soviet symbols. It seems that what made the greatest impression on the international jury was not the architectural associations, but the size of the Red Pavilion. Next to the monumental pavilion of the architect Shchusev, built in 1938 specifically to measure strength with Nazi Germany, Kabakov’s pavilion looked like the tip of an iceberg, the main part of which, the “evil empire,” went underground.

The first successes confirmed the correctness of the chosen path. Kabakov is so prolific in creating “total installations” that it evokes comparisons with Woody Allen in cinema 1 . Moreover, with each new work, Kabakov moves further and further away from Soviet themes as such. It remains the material, the native language, but in his best works Kabakov gives the communal element a different meaning, more, perhaps, a universal one. In the installation “We Live Here,” a huge pavilion is occupied by a town of construction workers. Spectators see a construction site in the middle of the town, see on the stand a majestic building in the “Stalinist Empire” style that is about to be erected. But then it turns out that the construction site has been standing for a long time, and in the temporary huts scattered on the construction site, life continues, life around the great construction site. On the one hand, in this installation Kabakov continues to develop the theme of “ruins of utopia,” beloved by many theorists and practitioners of art. But there is another plan, ahistorical, or rather, more related to biblical history than to Russian or European. Another recent installation is a boat in which photographs, documents, notes, and scraps of the life of a certain character are collected. All of them are placed in the hull of a huge boat in chronological order. Associations with Charon’s boat crossing the Styx, and, more accurately, with Noah’s Ark, are appropriate here. As the artist himself says: “ I have lately had an insane desire to reflect the entire life of our Soviet society, not to miss a single piece of paper, because there was a hope that we would all be revived en masse. There will be curators who will revive .” The boat, it seems, was built precisely in this hope: the garbage should not forever sink into oblivion. If it is organized in a conditional space, then it will survive and float out. There will be “curators” (read: spectators, gods) 2 who will put these fragments together. The artist Anatoly Brusilovsky in his memoirs had every right to compare Kabakov with a “tzaddik” who tells parables 3 . And with each new period of the artist’s work, the parables become more and more visual due to the reduction of untranslatable ancient Soviet words.

3. Not here and not now

Kabakov’s exhibition fate in Russia is not developing as many fans of his work would like. There is no place in Moscow where Kabakov could exhibit himself without losing face and is not expected to do so in the near future. First of all, there is no money. Kabakov’s fame in the West automatically implies a high level of organization of both the exhibition space and the work with the media that accompanies the exhibition. Not a single private gallery in Moscow can afford to bring Kabakov’s installation and properly “promote” it. And it’s undignified: to be exhibited by “private owners,” when the artist’s works usually occupy the huge halls of the largest Western museums. Director of the NCCA Leonid Bazhanov sadly says that for now there is no place for Kabakov’s installations in Russia. And he adds: “Maybe when we finish construction...”, meaning the new building of the Center.

In Germany, Bazhanov continues, they are building a Kabakov museum. “And here...” the director of the NCCA waves his hand and suddenly says: “It seems that they are going to give him an order. This issue is being discussed at the Ministry of Culture ...” If this is true, then two considerations immediately arise. Firstly, the very fact of the award will be the answer to the question “Does Kabakov exist?” Once awarded, it means it exists. Orders are not hung on empty places, except in the stories of Saltykov-Shchedrin . And secondly. There is an old work by Kabakov at the exhibition at the NCCA. This is an A4 sheet with the following written at the top: “This work has been awarded:”. Instead of listing awards there is emptiness. In the hypothetical perspective of the order, this work takes on a sarcastic intonation. Kabakov was not “awarded” any foreign awards, that is, he was not raised to the level that he “deserves,” but his work was appreciated. Kabakov may just be “honored” with a state award. In this case, the circle will be closed. And the unofficial ones will become official - through the same reward system. It seems that the only solution for the artist would be to attach the order to the above-mentioned graphic sheet. Or create a new stand: “Whose order is this? - This is Ilya Iosifovich.”

Notes:

1 This comparison, however, is too far-reaching to be properly developed here.

2 The figure of the curator in Kabakov’s words is understood as the figure of the demiurge, by whose will the history of art is written, and more broadly, history in general.

3 Brusilovsky A. The Time of Artists. M.: "Art Shop", 1999. P. 118.