CASTELLO DI AMA
2010: ILYA & EMILIA KABAKOV
The Observer
“The power of utopia rests precisely in its absolute unreality”
...one of the sweetest memories of my childhood in Moscow is how I and my mother are walking along the old streets in the city center peeping through people’s windows on the ground floor while discussing the cozy and fulfilling life that we would imagine under the warm light of the chandeliers inside.
Ilya Kabakov has been constructing, forming and formulating spaces throughout his long and illustrious artistic career, in the last 20 years together with Emilia Kabakov. He has defined the genesis of the Eastern installation, which is to say – their installation (as opposed to the Western one in the political and cultural sense), as originating from the “picture”. The “picture” is conceived here in a very straight way as a “picture of the surrounding world..., when its frame is like the frame of a window”. i Kabakov is stressing the parallels between the icon and such a picture “where the heavenly creation is blazing through rather than being radiant”.ii For him the installation should exist according to the same rules except for “the viewer is being inside”.iii That is why the actual real space, the proportions, the distances and the correlations are so much more important.
In the beginning the artist was analyzing the properties of the pictorial surface in an organic connection with his “official” work as a book illustrator. The objects and the sentences related to the fictitious characters were arranged on the sheets of paper to define pathways for the gaze (The Answers of the Experimental Group, 1970-1971). Those planes-sheets with drawings compose evolving narratives and occupy a common space in boxes that are called albums (for example, Anna Petrovna Has a Dream, 1972-75). Sometimes actual objects or phrases seem to float out of the depths of the monochromatic masonite panels (Whose Fly is This?, 1986); sometimes the texts are “suspended” in front of the classically organized composition as if to prevent the gaze from doing its visual duty – to penetrate deeper and deeper into the picture.
Later on within the invented, created, analyzed and described by the artist genre of the “total installation” space is handled as an object by being physically hammered out of wooden planks, by being laid down in bricks or by being constructed from a variety of other materials. The second lecture from the cycle published under the title On the Total Installation (Moscow 2008) starts with the following line: “the definition for the total installation is – a completely transformed space”iv. The same lecture explicates in depth how such space is created and what kinds it might be – misleading and looking like a sculpture in the The Red Wagon (1991) while dissolving its volume for the more curious visitors who venture into the space; or camouflaged like in The Toilet (1992). Both the media and the audience at documenta IX in Kassel were totally confused and thought that this is a ready-made exposing the sins of socialism that had just malfunctioned. In fact they missed the point – this was an original project, structure and space making an acid comment and presenting a global metaphor.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov installations are usually made different from the space they occupy by the thoroughly thought out walls and floors, ceilings and entrance-exit doors; sometimes by the obligatory routes for the viewer and the proscribed directions of the gaze, sometimes by the hierarchies of visual attention. The attention of the viewer is so dedicatedly concentrated inwards of the installation space, which is urging reading, examination, and comparison as well as tactile and sound impressions, that everything else that happens to be on the “outside” seems to be only a resource for the perfectionism of the artists’ “total” statements. The Red Pavilion (1993) at the La Bienale di Venezia literally incorporates the actual Russian pavilion within its own field of spatial gravity with the fence made of wooden planks. In The Happiest Man (2000) the viewer, having walked into the specially constructed domestic interior (room) or staying within the outer “shell” of the cinema hall, can see only a screen projection of a variety of cheerful movies from the Soviet past. In the Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into The Future (2000) the core installation is positioned behind a solid fence – if you want to sneak through you have to climb up on a special footbridge; from there you can see the dead end of the tracks and the backside of the last coach with the title text – simple and clear metaphor for the relevance of contemporary art, which is pulling the “innocent” viewer within the space of a memento mori situation. It seems that so far only in the Looking Up. Reading the Words... (1997), the work from Münster, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov let their audience walk out en plein air and find themselves enveloped by the actual earth and sky. Here the viewer has a simple task: “... When you are lying in the grass, you look up into the open sky...”
Now, more than 10 years later, the artists are once again creating an open air space for their work in Castello di Ama. They suggest looking outwards, through the window frame and the wall; they let the gaze glide over the dry land, over the vineyards, the olive and cypress trees, over the whole heavenly landscape... (I have never been to Tuscany but I have a clear vision of its cultural image – rolling hills in the distance behind saints and soldiers from the paintings of Botticelli and Uccello). Ultimately in The Observer (2010) the artists are disciplining the viewer by positioning a telescope in the wooden shack under the pine trees, which is fixed and focused on the window of a lonely house in the far distance. There are people and... angels there sitting around a table; they do not expect our gaze, they are angelically calm. Maybe they have walked over from a Renaissance painting; maybe they are the kind of people Kabakov has met in his life: “guides who are pushing the train of fate in the needed direction”v One has to look again through the telescope – are they still there? It’s hard to believe in their existence; very few are chosen to see them; this might only be possible in the area of Castello di Ama where the “guides” are coming back by force of habit to mingle with artists...
The rest of us are only given the chance to sneak in and feel like in childhood when you always suspect that while you are away or not looking, your toys are playing and having all kinds of fun. After that, like in the statement on the earlier Ilya and Emilia Kabakov work in the landscape, you may realize that: “...perhaps this is the very best thing that you have ever done or seen in your life”.
Iara Boubnova