Ilya Kabakov, to the West, is the most prominent living Soviet artist.
Not Russian but Soviet, for at age 60 he is a product of that system, and the work he creates continues to reflect upon it, even though the Soviet Union has collapsed and Kabakov lives in New York producing temporary artworks such as “Incident at the Museum, or Water Music,” the work now on view at our Museum of Contemporary Art.
Few in the West had heard of him before 1985, though his paintings had begun to appear in group exhibitions of unofficial Soviet art 20 years earlier. At that time, in Moscow, he was one of a group of pioneering conceptualists, and while he always has drawn and painted, his celebrity today still rests on the concepts behind his artworks.
Unlike most conceptual art in the West, however, Kabakov’s has a capacity for visual storytelling, and this has widened its appeal to viewers, making it seem natural that he should also create the sets and costumes for “Life with an Idiot,” an allegorical opera by two old friends, novelist Victor Erofeyev and composer Alfred Schnittke, which received its first performance in Amsterdam in 1992.
“It’s . . . an allegory of Soviet society under communism, but at the same time it’s a general existential problem,” wrote Juergen Koechel about the opera. And much the same applies to Kabakov’s installation pieces, for they usually proceed from a specific condition inside the former Soviet Union that has a larger, wider application.
“To understand the Soviet people, you have to understand that everybody is double minded,” Kabakov says. “First, people live for outside, for everyone around them. They are used to it, they are raised to behave like this. But always they reflect on their situation.
“Everybody plays a role and at the same time knows they are playing roles. And each of the characters-the one we play or the one who reflects on the one we play-is real. So for me it has been easy to create characters (in my work) because I knew them. And when I moved to the West, I saw a very similar structure. Everybody is playing a role in society and every role is serious.”
In “Incident at the Museum” Kabakov creates the character of Stepan Yakovlevich Koshelev, a painter who played the role of an official Soviet artist. At one point, he came close to the vanguard, but mainly he was a Social Realist. After his death, at age 50 in 1934, his works went to the Barnaul Art Museum, where they have remained a secret.
We see several paintings in galleries that have a late-19th Century look, with dark colored walls and gilded moldings. These spaces, too, play a role, appealing to one’s memories of an old, respectable, somewhat luxurious museum.
“The tradition of a character, of the creation of a character, is that there are two aspects,” says Kabakov. “One we take seriously and accept as a serious personality. The other we laugh at and understand there is a joke inside. It is always up to the viewer. Here he can look at the artist and the paintings seriously or ironically.”
Kabakov does not force the viewer either way. However, he presents the galleries deserted, with streams of water leaking from a rainstorm that apparently has damaged the roof. This works against taking things simply at face value, that is, seeing the paintings of “Koshelev” apart from the circumstances. One has to consider the spaces themselves, scrutinizing the rooms and everything in them.
“The problem of this exhibition is a problem of total installation,” Kabakov says. “It revolves around an old discussion: Has painting come to the end of its life or is it still going on? Possessing the Soviet mentality, which is opportunistic, I am on the side of people who think painting is coming to its end. But, on the other hand, I think painting has a place in installation. I am trying to integrate it.
“In the (present) piece we see a very exact example of total installation, where all parts are balanced including some very heterogeneous elements. Painting has a special role, but it is not the most important.
“Much more important is the atmosphere of a museum and all the details that come together to create it.”
The transition from paintings to everything around them is still for many viewers difficult, and when “Incident at the Museum” appeared in New York, some collectors wanted to buy individual canvases and some critics said Kabakov had reverted to bad painting, proving both had missed the point.
Total installation, as Kabakov conceives it, is not only the space, the objects, the paintings and whatever else is included. It is also the movement of viewers through the space while reflecting upon all the parts in relation to each other and to outside world.
“Artists have had many conceptions about the place of museums in life,” Kabakov says, “and mine is completely the opposite of avant-garde artists at the beginning of the century. They felt museums stood in the way of new art, preventing it from coming to the people. But since then we have had various movements that integrated art into life, and the museum’s role was diminished.
“After World War II, however, museums started to regain a significant position in society because, strangely enough, they were like religious places where people kept high moods and ideas during the viewing of paintings. Today people go to museums unconsciously to regain the feeling; for them, the objects are sacred.
“This makes museums the natural place for installations because installations hold and strongly convey atmosphere, the museum’s religious atmosphere that already exists. If approached in this way, (“Incident at the Museum”) does not treat museums ironically. It is an apotheosis of the museum and should be considered as such.”
But what of the dripping that suggests destruction? Visitors must listen to it, as the apparently random sounds are, in fact, a kind of John Cage-like music by Lithuanian composer Vladimir Tarasov, who has controlled tempo, rhythm and pitch by regulating water flow and using containers of different materials.
“In this installation, two great cultures are combining,” Kabakov says. “Visual culture and musical culture are coming together. People can sit on the benches, listening to the music, looking at the art. My idea is that installation can combine everything in itself.”
Thus far, Kabakov has created 66 installations for museum and gallery exhibitions around the world. “Incident at the Museum” is only the second installation that has traveled. But several have entered permanent museum collections, in Austria, France, Germany, Spain and, more surprisingly, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
“There were three periods in European art history that came one after the other,” Kabakov says. “They were the periods of icons, frescoes and paintings . . . Now is the period of installation.”
