An interview with Ilya Kabakov - Russian artist - Interview - Cover Story

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Robert Storr

Viewed from abroad, Russian modernism stopped cold in the 1930s. By 1932, Stalin's seizure of the bureaucratic reins of power had brought a final halt to what art historian Camilla Grey once called "The Great Experiment" of Soviet vanguard art. The freeze on artistic freedom was a long one, and the gradual thaw was for the most part hidden from public view. Against the backdrop of decades-long Soviet efforts to export turn-of-the-century Russian Realist and Socialist Realist art--presented, for example, in the "Russian and Soviet Painting" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1977 [see A.i.A., June '77]--the slow emergence of "unofficial" work that began in the late 1960s was barely noticed in the West. Moreover, the "unofficial" artists who did win attention in Europe and America were those who emigrated. They ranged from the abstract painter and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, championed by English critic John Berger and for many years a presence in downtown New York, to Komar & Melamid, whose wry commentaries on official Soviet painting remain the only examples of contemporary Russian art generally familiar in the U.S.

Busily if quietly at work for a quarter century, as well, were other artists from the same circles who did not emigrate. Based primarily in Moscow, they included Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vassilyev and Ivan Chuikov. Among their number was Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933), known publicly as a respected illustrator of children's books for state publishing houses. Kabakov's unsanctioned art works and environments--for example, his more than 50 albums of personal work in a vein of allegorical realism--proved tremendously influential for much of the post-Stalinist Russian avantgarde from the 1970s until his emigration in 1988.

What follows is an interview with Kabakov that covers the artist's early life, his education as an artist, his meeting with the first-generation modernist painter Robert Falk and the emergence of "unofficial" Soviet art. It also offers Kabakov's reflections on his later encounter with the Mimimalist sculptor Donald Judd, for whom he created an installation last year at Judd's Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

By any reckoning Kabakov's career has bridged an exceptional variety of situations and concerns. He remains better known in Europe (where he was featured in the last Venice Biennale) than in America, where he now resides. His ideas and observations raise significant questions about the development and future of installation art--which remains his principal artistic form--and about our current esthetic horizons.

Robert Storr: Who do you see as your audience when you present an installation in a public place?

Ilya Kabakov: I think one can draw an analogy to the audience that frequents a music conservatory. Here you won't find people from the street saying, "What's a music conservatory? Let's go inside and have a look." Instead you find people who intentionally buy tickets, who go to a specific concert, knowing that this is music and not just the stomping of elephants. The same can be said of installations. Installations are built in art museums; if this is not the case and they are just anywhere, then already they are virtually not installations.

In actuality, when you do an installation you are aiming at two parallel audiences at the same time: first, the layperson who doesn't understand anything, so there must be an element of the everyday in the installation; and second, the specialist who is very experienced, a connoisseur. I think that there are also two layers in the conservatory, for if the music is intended only for the specialist, then in my opinion it doesn't work.

RS: Let me be a little bit more pointed. Most of the work that you've done has invoked a Soviet social world and a Soviet imaginative world, suggesting both how people actually lived and how they sought to transcend their situation. In the West, the symbols that you use are foreign, they have associations that are very different from those that they would have in Russia. Whether it's the layperson or the expert, the Western audience brings to your installations certain expectations and prejudices. In making your work, do you try to anticipate and deal with those differences?

IK: I know very well that a Western audience has a preconceived understanding of Russian society and culture. The negative image of Russia is one of chaos, confusion, absurdities, continual ruin and incessant scandals. But at the same time there is a positive image that was created by two great eras in Russian history. These are, of course, the era of the great Russian literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the era of the Russian artistic avant-garde of the 1920s. Naturally any Western viewer who approaches anything Russian, whether it's a Russian painting or an installation, expects to encounter both the positive and the negative aspects. Knowing this, I take it into account, I work with both of these things as background factors.

What is especially important is that in the West, individual Western artists are assumed to be distinct personalities, whereas in terms of Russia there is a general notion of "the Russian artist," even though he may have a specific name like Ivanov, Petrov, Kabakov. The power of the great mass of Russia which stands behind him is more important than he is. I sense this very well in myself. Let's say that I imagine myself to be very reflective, coldly analytical and so on. In reality there is a lot of chaos, disorder, swinishness, dirt, sentimentality and romanticism in my works.