In Memoriam
News — May 27, 2023
In the Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat in Amsterdam, a work of art consisting of three ladders was attached to the facade of the Mentrum psychiatric clinic in 2009. At the very top, on the next to last rung, was a figure wearing a backpack whose arms reached toward the sky. The work, created by the artist duo Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, is called How to Meet an Angel. It represents a hopeful stance which is necessary for ascending a ladder on the path to liberation.
Ilya Kabakov passed away on Saturday, May 27, 2023, in New York. He was 89. He was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, present-day Dnipro, in Ukraine. When his father was sent to the front in 1941, he and his mother were evacuated to Samarkand, where the Leningrad art school was also temporarily located. He commenced his art education there, at the age of ten, which he continued in Moscow following the war, until 1957. He became an illustrator of children’s books, through which he earned his living. In addition, he began producing independent work. Because it did not conform to the rules of socialist realism as prescribed by the Soviet regime, he only showed this work within a small circle of like-minded individuals.
Understandably, nothing about this underground art from the Soviet Union appeared in Dutch newspapers until 1973, when NRC published an article titled “The Marginals of Moscow,” following an exhibition in Paris at which legendary gallery owner Dina Vierny showed non-conformist art under the title “Avant-garde Russe, Moscow 1973.” Vierny, in her earlier years the muse of Aristide Maillol and others, was originally from Moldavia and maintained sufficient Russian connections in Paris and elsewhere. In the 1960s she traveled through the USSR and smuggled this new art out of the country. She brought together Kabakov’s work with that of Oskar Rabin, Erik Bulatov, Maxim Arkhangelsk, and Vladimir Yankilevsky. By selling the works as “Russian pop art,” she made them appealing to the American market. For the time being, it remained as such in coverage in the Netherlands as well. It was not until the mid-1980s that, thanks to Mikhail Gorbatchov’s perestroika and glasnost policies, greater freedom and openness emerged. The Stedelijk Museum also benefitted from these developments: in cooperation with museums in Moscow and Leningrad, director Wim Beeren succeeded in realizing a major Malevich exhibition in March 1989. In October of that year, Ilya Kabakov came to Amsterdam for the first time to recreate the corridors of a communal dwelling in Moscow at De Appel. One of its rooms has until recently been occupied by an artist; a neighbor woman takes over the empty space and places all the blank canvases left behind by the painter in the hallway, to deliver them to the garbage the next day. The canvases are propped in between other trash, cardboard boxes, cleaning rags, brooms, and buckets. In an interview with artist Louwrien Wijers, Kabakov said:
I’m trying to show the canvases I created from 1966 onward in the Russian atmosphere of rubbish, unsatisfied pessimism, and the impurity of a destroyed world. Personal possessions don’t exist. Everything is extraneous. Even my shirt. Everything is rubbish. Everything is the property of the state. It is from that principle I have made this installation.
Responses to the work varied. “Those in power think it is terrible how much attention my work is getting in the West,” Kabakov told Catherine van Houts of Het Parool. “They don’t consider it art. They call it crazy. They have lost touch with their contemporaries.” The average Russian also looked upon the work with a pitying gaze: Kabakov displayed perfectly normal objects in an everyday setting. And those piles of trash; that must be an exaggeration. It wasn’t so bad, was it? For the Western viewer, the work was alienating in a different way; it revealed a totally unknown world, one that, in order to comprehend it, had to be incorporated into the more well-known Arte Povera and conceptual art.
In 1992, Ilya Kabakov moved to the United States with his wife Emilia. She intensively worked together with Ilya, although for a long time the work was credited solely to him. Kabakov’s installations would soon make him world famous. Wim Beeren was fond of his work and followed developments in Eastern Europe closely. Kabakov created an installation for the exhibition Binnen de USSR en erbuiten (In the USSR and beyond) (1990) and participated in Wanderlieder (1991). The first installation at the Stedelijk dealt with the mentality of the average Russian. Kabakov recorded the banal, everyday existence and considered himself an “archaeologist of Soviet life.” He combined images with texts, because, according to him, Russian culture is predominantly a verbal culture. Everything is always talked about. It is never quiet in the communal dwelling. Voices are everywhere.
The literary tradition in which Kabakov saw himself is that of Gogol and the absurdism of Daniil Kharms. This all came together beautifully in a subsequent project at the Muziektheater Amsterdam, where Alfred Schnittke’s opera Life with an Idiot (1992) premiered with Kabakov’s installation of a communal dwelling as its backdrop. The Soviet Union had already collapsed. The idiot was Lenin.
In early 1993 the Stedelijk Museum organized the exhibition Grand Archive. It was the final exhibition of Wim Beeren’s directorship, cleverly programmed shortly after the controversial Jeff Koons retrospective Made in Heaven. One could hardly imagine a greater contrast to hedonistic consumerism. In the museum’s upper rooms, Kabakov portayed a bureaucracy gone mad. The visitor was led through a series of dusty offices filled with counters and desks. To reach the exit, an enormous volume of documents, forms, and certificates had to be completed. Upon entering, the visitor had to identify themselves in order to be classified within a specific official category, such as city dweller, laborer, or person over the age of seventy. As the visitor progressed, they were required to provide still more data and gather stamps. Under a dropped ceiling with dim lighting from bare bulbs, signs with instructions and voices from loudspeakers steered them from one counter to the next. The light at the end of the route signaled an awakening from a bureaucratic fever dream.
The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition consisted of a cardboard file folder containing documents. Included was a testimonial for the artist, issued by “The Director,” as “proof of the fact that the artist Kabakov has demonstrated himself to be a conscientious, tidy, and disciplined worker during the preparation of the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum. He always appeared at work neatly dressed and on time. His attitude toward the work attests to a sense of responsibility, and he carried out every task assigned to him by the management of the museum.”
A few years later the Stedelijk was able to purchase The School Library (1995). It was Kabakov’s first room-filling installation in the collection of a Dutch museum. In this work, too, the visitor was guided into a sparsely lit space where, contrary to what the installation suggested, there were hardly any
books to be found. A small number were kept in a display case, evidencing how poorly the students treated borrowed books. One tome was even filled with doodles. In the middle of the room stood a wooden trellis with pink strips of wallpaper on which the children had pasted texts, drawings, and cut-out illustrations. The collected children’s fantasies formed a “library of occurrences.” Against the walls stood school furniture containing teaching materials. The whole made a lyrical, uninhibited impression, but only in appearance. The totalitarian system is everywhere, keeping watch over everyone, including through the children’s assignments, where they are told to describe and illustrate what their relatives do. As always, Kabakov presented a divided world where individuals attempt to find a balance between their own self and the omnipresent controlling power.
Once established in the so-called “free” West, Kabakov saw the approaching dictatorship of the computer and the decline of classical reading culture when he visited the library at Amsterdam University. In brightly lit, unadorned spaces that reminded him particularly of dilapidated cafeterias, he observed students staring at their screens like hypnotized rabbits. In response, he created The Old Reading Room (1999) in the library’s antiquated Doelenzaal, a nostalgic 19th-century repertory with high, narrow cabinets filled with old books. The nostalgic atmosphere was enhanced with opening music by Wagner’s Tannhaüser and a breeze through the windows, which gently billowed the diaphanous white curtains.
Rarely has an artwork been so disparaged at its celebratory unveiling. State Secretary Rick van der Ploeg asserted in his speech that Kabakov’s reading culture had never existed and that the computer would indeed relegate this fairy tale to the mausoleum of history. This alleged culture of reading would be superseded by the provision of information. Fortunately, Van der Ploeg delivered his speech in Dutch and museum director Rudi Fuchs was wise enough not to translate it too precisely for Kabakov. The West, too, is not without absurdism.
After the late 1990s, Kababov faded from the Stedelijk’s view. As the “Soviet Warhol,” he established himself at the apex of the American art market. An excellent monograph by American author Amei Wallach, tellingly titled The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (1996), sealed Kabakov’s place in art history, in which the context and glamour were not lost on the reader. Wallach had met Kabakov back in 1987, when Gorbatchov’s glasnost was still being dismissed in the skeptical American media as mere propaganda. She closely cooperated with the artist in authoring her book. Later she would produce the beautiful documentary Ilya & Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here (2013), chronicling how the pair returned to Moscow in 2008 for a major exhibition at Garazh that was made possible by the oligarch Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova.
Residents along the Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat needed to grow accustomed to How to Meet an Angel (2009), even though the installation of the sculpture had received approval from the neighborhood and the psychiatric clinic. Was the work in fact appropriate for that location, and did it not seem as if the person would take their own life by leaping from the highest rung?
Kabakov suggests something else, which wholly conforms with the core of his work: the human being who endeavors to survive amidst the forces that assail their own sense of self. The figure reaches for a guardian angel, with the open-mindedness of a child who has not yet lost anything.
Everything is still possible.