The Dream and Trauma of Soviet Life: On the Death of the Artist Ilya Kabakov

At the end of the 1990s, when the nearest S-Bahn station was still called “Lehrter Stadtbahnhof”, the Hamburger Bahnhof hosted the exhibition “Treatment with memories”, which Ilya Kabakov had set up. Ilya and his wife Emilia Kabakov were already considered the most important artists that the Soviet Union had produced since the end of the Stalin era. The Berlin exhibition title got to the heart of what constitutes her artistic work. The Kabakovs worked with memory, which they ceaselessly both unearthed and constructed themselves. In this way they worked on the social trauma of the Soviet Union and its citizens, and therefore of Soviet people in general.

Fear is the reason for artistic creation. It is a means to freedom.

Ilya Kabakov

Imaginary existence of the “little man”

In the Hamburger Bahnhof, the clinic hallway and sickrooms of a Soviet clinic were built in, with an unremitting succession of slides projected on the wall opposite the metal beds in each room, which seemed to come from a family album and depicted events from Soviet life. These were private moments that at least one Soviet-socialized observer could remember as having experienced or remembered in a similar way. In the course of his unofficial, clandestine existence as an artist in Moscow, the trained – and highly productive – children’s book artist Kabakov imagined the existence of the “little man” “who never throws anything away”.

That was basically himself. He didn’t let any memories disappear, but captured them in his and his wife’s installations or generally materialized them in expansive visualizations of Soviet buildings. The Kabakovs deciphered the Soviet system as one of eternal recurrence, in which great ideas have crumbled to the smallest everyday shabbiness, and around which people revolve as in a theater of the absurd.

The most absurd theater was the “Komunalka”, the community apartment with its forced coexistence of whole families, plus the lower instances of the party bureaucracy, which tried to regulate the lives of all residents. The Kabakovs set up this installation in Leipzig in 1998, among other things, under the title “Voices behind the door” and supplemented by a book publication that contains all the written documents, which are absurd in their seriousness, such as a “Protocol on improper behavior”. The community apartment is what Ilya Kabakov deciphered early on as “society in a box” and gradually made conscious of it in his downright manically realistic installations.

Hopes raised and disappointed

One of the best-known was the installation “The man who flew from his apartment into the cosmos”, which he originally installed in his Moscow attic apartment, including the ceiling that appeared to have been pierced by the occupant who fled by catapult. A more apt symbol for the simultaneously awakened and disappointed hopes of the Soviet citizen could hardly be imagined. Kabakov possessed the serene melancholy of one who has seen through all illusions and nonetheless understands their existence as unalterable, if not vital.

Ilya Kabakov was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine, now Dnipro again, to Jewish parents. During the war he was evacuated to Uzbekistan, where he entered an art school as a child. He studied in Moscow and graduated as an illustrator. Only gradually did he begin to work independently alongside drawings for children’s books, without any prospect of publication. The attic apartment he moved into in 1967 became a meeting place for Moscow conceptualists. He became known in Western museum circles with drawings smuggled from the Soviet Union. When he was able to accept a scholarship to Austria in the course of perestroika, he left Russia forever. In 1988 he met Emilia, who had already emigrated in 1973 and, like him, came from Dnipro; they married in 1992.

The installations by the Kabakovs met with a highly receptive audience in the West, to whom they gave at least an idea of ​​the conditions in the Soviet Empire, but at the same time pointed far beyond that in their artistic penetration. After a daad scholarship in Berlin, exhibitions in major museums such as the Center Pompidou and at the documenta followed. His work was shown twice at the Venice Biennale, as well as honors such as the Goslar Kaiserring.

Irritation, fiction, reality

At the 1992 documenta, they placed a habitable toilet building behind the Fridericianum, with a chair and bed next to the latrines – a symbol of the human condition. The Kabakovs have long devoted themselves to what they called “total installations”, and with which they virtually eliminated the tension between art and life on the part of art. The viewer was always confused by not being able to distinguish between fiction and reality. In a conversation on the occasion of her exhibition at the Berlin Museum for Architectural Drawing 2019, Emilia Kabakov, who always spoke for both, explained: “Our work was always based on fantasy and imagination. Ilya used his imagination and invented everything freely.” But one could guess the feint in that, too.

The numerous paintings were created solely by Ilya Kabakov. The artist began his independent work in the 1960s in the medium of painting. Schooled in official “Socialist Realism” as well as in the Soviet avant-garde movement of the 1920s, well known in artistic circles, he grappled with these apparently incompatible positions.

Later, the Kabakovs were also able to show their works in Russia, most recently in 2018 in an extensive exhibition in the Tretjakov Gallery, the national gallery of Russian art in Moscow, in which painting played a major role. On Whit Saturday, Ilya Kabakov died at the age of 89 in his exile home in New York. With him, a good part of the memory of everyday life, of the dreams and trauma of Soviet existence, disappears.