This is a great exhibition, genuinely original, imaginative and thought-provoking. It is a major retrospective of these two pioneering Russian artists which ranges from enormous installations, through large oil paintings, big wooden models and fanciful book illustrations, down to small and beautiful drawings.
Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933, just as Socialist Realism secured its grip on Russian artistic life. Twenty years later, he began his working career just as Stalin’s influence was at its height, society was completely stifled and the gulag labour camps were full to overflowing (N.B. Stalin died in 1953 but his baleful influence lived on for some years.)
Wisely, Kabakov chose to go into the harmless field of children’s illustration and spent thirty years making a living illustrating a range of books. In 1959, Kabakov became a ‘candidate member’ of the Union of Soviet Artists (he later became a full member in 1965). This status secured him a studio, steady work as an illustrator and a relatively healthy income by Soviet standards. In secret, he created more subversive and experimental works to be seen only by a close circle of friends.
The first thirty years or so of work are effectively solo pieces by Ilya. In 1989, as the USSR collapsed and Ilya for the first time travelled abroad, he was reunited with his distant cousin Emilia who had emigrated in 1975. They began working together and were soon married. So the second half of the show – and the title – reflects the fact that the works for which he is most famous – the large-scale installations – are collaborations devised and made by both of them.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
The smallest works on display here include a room of charming drawings and small abstract paintings from the 1960s, mildly in the style of Kandinsky, maybe. Later on Ilya developed the idea of creating portfolios of prints each dedicated to a fictional character – the Ten Characters series of albums. One whole room of the exhibition contains about twenty school desks, each with one of the portfolios on it.
Thirty years later the situation in Russia had significantly changed. It was still rundown, dirty, backward, grey and depressing. But Stalin was long dead, to be replaced first by Nikita Khrushchev, and then the long years of decline under Brezhnev (1964 to 1982).
Conceptual works
During the 1960s and 1970s Ilya rented an attic studio on Sretensky Boulevard in Moscow where he created experimental works which were to make his reputation: conceptual installations.
This is Ilya’s first whole-room or total installation, which he created in his Moscow studio in 1985. It expands on the idea of the fictional narratives mentioned in the portfolios. Here he has imagined that a man has built a home-made space travel device from springs and rubber straps and has used it to propel himself free from life in his cramped filthy communal flat, through the roof, and up into space and freedom.
Man who flew into space From His Apartment by Ilya Kabakov (1985) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
As you can see there’s more than a little of children’s humour in this idea. It can be read as a po-faced comment on the permanent housing shortage in the USSR; or it could be seen as a light-hearted Heath Robinson device designed to make us smile.
Next to it is a similar room-sized space in which Ilya has suspended from thin cords about forty household objects of the most boring kind, as found in all such shabby communal blocks of flats – a lot of metal pots and pans and mugs.
Incident in the corridor near the kitchen by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (1989) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
You get the idea. The clutter of pots and pans represents the endless confusion and bickering caused by cramped communal living in blocks of flats with permanently broken fixtures and inadequate living space. The large oil paintings on the wall are of natural scenery and presumably represent windows, either real or imaginary windows which some of the block’s inhabitants look through into a dream landscape.
A key element not quite visible in this photo is the music stand to one side which holds a written account of the scene. Text is important in all the Kabakovs’ works. Many of the early paintings contain big chunks of text, for example, By December 25 in Our District…
By December 25 in Our District… by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (1983) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
This hyper-realistic painting of a half-built tower block, adrift in a sea of mud and building works, has Cyrillic text all down the left-hand side. The text is a list of all the buildings which the authorities promised would be completed by 25 December 1979. Since the artwork was made in 1983, four years later, it comes across as yet another example of the shabby, failing reality and broken promises underlying so much Soviet propaganda.
That said, I loved the two dirty shovels attached to the canvas. I love text in paintings and objects attached to paintings so I also really liked the four big paintings in an earlier room, which were realistic depictions of life in some Soviet new town but which had scrunched-up sweet wrappers glued on to them in regular grids like graph paper. Why? Why not?
Beyond the flying pots and pans is a big room devoted to an installation titled Three Nights (1989). Three massive paintings, each taking up an entire wall, refer to the theme of night – there’s a starry sky, a night scene and (a little disconcertingly) a huge nocturnal insect.
What makes the room striking, though, is the way that three massive plywood walls have been erected in front of each of the paintings almost completely blocking your view of them. For each there is only one gap in the plywood wall which visitors can see the paintings through.
In front of each of these gaps is a monocular (a single-lensed binocular) on a tripod. If you bend down and squint through these monoculars you see… that each of the paintings has a minute set of little white men made out of white paper, cut out and stuck on the surface of the paintings. Little white men?
Aha, we had seen some of these in the previous room, room 4, which included the piece Trousers in the corner (1989).
Trousers in the corner by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (1989) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Little white men? According to Ilya the little white men are inhabitants of a parallel world who can occasionally be glimpsed by human eyes. Now they’ve been pointed out to me I go back to some of the earlier works and, yes, sure enough, inside the rims of some of the flying pots and pans are twos or threes of tiny, white, cutout silhouettes. Maybe they’re everywhere? From now on you can’t be certain.
The commentary claims the mysterious presence of the little white men is part of the artists’ strategy to create ‘subversions of perspective and scale’, and gives other examples. Yes, no doubt. But it’s also funny. It bespeaks Ilya’s long career as an illustrator of children’s books. It makes you smile.
Not Everyone Will Be Taken into The Future
Following the night room is one of the biggest installations I’ve ever seen: a big long room has two rails through the middle, a mocked-up railway platform along the opposite wall from you and, at the far end of the room, the rear section of a train which seems to be leaving the station. Above the back door of the train is a tickertape digital sign reading ‘Not everyone will be taken into the future’.
Not Everyone Will Be Taken into The Future by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2001) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
This has a slightly complicated back story. The title derives from an essay Ilya contributed to a journal of Russian art published in Paris. It was an essay about the noted Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich, the man who reduced painting to one black square and so, in his own opinion, brought Western painting to a full stop.
This huge installation imagines Malevich as a charismatic visionary selecting some artists to be taken into the bright shiny Future, while others will be discarded and forgotten – as symbolised by a number of canvases abandoned across the rail lines. Who will be taken and why? Who will be left behind and who will mourn?
This work is big, but I didn’t really get it as a work of art: it didn’t seem to be saying anything important or interesting; some artists and many many works of art will be forgotten and lost. Didn’t we know this already?
Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album)
The train work is quickly eclipsed by possibly the most powerful work in the show, the beguiling and entrancing Labyrinth from 1990. Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album) consists of a maze of narrow corridors with an apparently endless series of abrupt turns. Like some of the earlier works, this is designed to evoke the shabby badly-lit corridors of Soviet communal housing.
Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album) by Ilya Kabakov (1990) © Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
Each stretch of corridor has hung on the wall a series of large-ish prints which comprise photos of life in mid-century Soviet Russia, set on a patterned background with a fragment of typewritten text in Cyrillic attached. Propped up above each print is a translation into English of the Cyrillic text.
It turns out that the black and white photographs were taken by Ilya’s uncle and the texts are excerpts from a memoir by his mother, Bertha Urievna Solodukhina, describing the difficulties of bringing up her son in poverty. As you progress slowly through the maze of corridors, the sound slowly gets louder of Ilya Kabakov himself singing Russian romances in a low, depressed Russian voice… until you arrive at the heart of the labyrinth, to discover it is a derelict cupboard, the kind you keep brooms and dustpans in, with wooden planks across it, the floor covered in plaster crumbled from the roof. More symbols of Soviet dilapidation and… the failure of the utopian dreams.
In fact there are no fewer than 76 of these excerpts from his mother’s memoir, too many to read unless you want to spend several hours in here… and also a little difficult to read because they are propped on the picture frames about 6 foot from the ground. The gallery does offer a booklet which includes every single excerpt but other people had it when I went round. The fragments I read were evocative and moving. It would be interesting to read the entire memoir.
Contemporary oil paintings
The final few rooms are full of the enormous oil paintings the Kabakovs have been doing in recent years. These are completely figurative i.e. realistic portrayals of people and places with the catch that they all feature the same gag or idea – in that they are paintings of collages, portraying scenes from Soviet life as if torn up from magazines and pasted together, sometimes on backdrops of ‘classic’ European painting, to make the visual ironies all the sharper. So they are integral painted surfaces but made t olook as if they’ve been cut up and pasted together.
The Appearance of the Collage #10 by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2012) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery
According to the commentary in these modern works ‘the artists layer scenes from different art historical moments to explore ideas of collective memory and cultural heritage’. Maybe. But after the scale and imaginativeness of the apartment spaceman, the floating pots and pans, the huge train station or the spooky labyrinth – ordinary oil paintings, no matter how inventive, feel less imaginative and impactful.
How to meet an angel
The final room changes the tone yet again, with a suite of works devoted to angels. Angels? It includes a harness of feathers which you could strap on to turn into an angel, some delightful pictures which have the feel of children’s illustrations of angels, a lovely little model of a common or garden stool positioned over a tiny model landscape with a tiny, tiny model angel suspended over it by a slender thread.
But dominating the room is a huge wooden construction, a tilting scaffold built up into the sky at the end of which a little wooden man is reaching out his arms and, not far away a much bigger wooden angel is stretching out his arms to meet him. Will they ever meet? Can we ever achieve our dreams? Can we ever escape from the grubby human condition?
How to meet an Angel by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2009) © Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Who knows, but this huge exhibition, showcasing over 300 objects and works by these big confident conceptual artists, the first in the UK, curated and laid out with the advice of the artists themselves – suggests you can have a lot of fun trying.
The video
Tate made an extended interview with the Kabakovs at their studio.
Related links
- Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future continues at Tate Modern until 28 January 2018
Books & Boots 