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{{mergeto|Ilya Kabakov}}
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'''Ilya Kabakov''' is a contemporary [[conceptual art|conceptual]] and [[installation art|installation]] artist. Born in [[Dnepropretovsk]], [[Ukraine]], he now lives and works in [[New York City]].

Throughout  his forty-year plus career, Ilya Kabakov has repeatedly attempted to depict the former Soviet Union, but has only recently developed what could be called a contemporary style that addresses postmodern issues.  Kabakov began as an official artist of the Soviet Union but never integrated fully into Russian society.  He adopted the lifestyle of an unofficial artist, finally relinquishing both his official career and life in the Soviet Union to work in the West as an avant-garde artist, where he often depicted the society he left behind.  
By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov attempts to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first modern society to disappear.  In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovers elements common to every modern society, and in doing so he examines the rift between capitalism and communism.  Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov describes it as one utopian project among many, capitalism included.  By reexamining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potential authoritarian nature in everyone.
For a living artist, there has been a lot written about Kabakov.  This paper does not necessarily offer a new interpretation to the literature on him; rather it creates a chronological examination of his oeuvre.  Several authors have arrived at similar conclusions that I do, but based their readings on a limited number of his artworks.  In this paper, I followed the artist’s career from the very beginning to the most recent installations, examining how his ideas have changed, been altered by time and place, and remained the same.
Ilya Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.  His mother, Bertha Solodukhina, was from a Jewish family where the father spoke only Yiddish and the mother read only Hebrew.  She met Ilya’s father, Joseph Kabakov, in a communal apartment where they both lived.  He was described as a bully, forcing Bertha to abort her first child, but she insisted on carrying to term the second pregnancy, Ilya.  In 1941, when Ilya was seven, his family fled Dnepropetrovsk on foot as German troops and planes attacked the city.  In 1943 they settled in Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Kabakov’s father joined the Russian Army later that year.  That same year Kabakov entered the Leningrad Academy of Arts, which had moved to Samarkand when Leningrad was besieged.   He demonstrated his ability to the admissions committee with drawings of military motifs, including a panzer tank, and signed his name in red—which may have suggested that he was a devoted communist. 
After World War II, the academy returned to Leningrad, but Kabakov was unable to attend because he failed to obtain the required official papers allowing him and his mother to live there.  Instead, he would attend and reside at the Moscow Art School.  His father never returned from the war but his mother remained close to Moscow, in Zagorsk, working in a textile warehouse.  She never received the proper papers herself and was forced to wander, staying in places such as an abandoned bathroom and on a table in an office.   It was during these early years that Kabakov reports becoming aware of a disjuncture between what he experienced and how he felt within—that is, what he was told to believe and the way he was told to act differed from what he saw and understood.   This separation between his inner being and his public self would have a great impact on his artistic career.
In 1951, at the age of 18, Kabakov entered the Moscow Surikov Academy, the most prestigious art school in the Soviet Union, to study graphic arts and book illustration under Professor B. Dekhterev.  He did not enter the more respected painting section due to his lack of talent.  He was described by a peer as a “no colorist.”   However, during his second year, Kabakov was already earning income illustrating children’s books.  He would rely upon his income from book illustration until 1987, when he moved to the West and quickly began to earn a living as an installation artist.   He later admitted that his success as an illustrator allowed him to lead a bourgeois life, better than the average Soviet citizen.  
In the Soviet Union, untrained and unofficial artists were not allowed to purchase or receive materials or create artwork in their own homes under penalty of law.  However Kabakov, as a book illustrator and official artist, was able to obtain materials and produce artwork in his home and studio.  By the mid-1950s he was successful enough to build his own studio where he could make drawings that were not commissioned by the state, claiming that the extracurricular works were exercises.  Between 1953-1955 Kabakov began making his first unofficial works, which he called ‘drawings for myself’, and which seemed inspired by Abstract Expressionism.  The phrase ‘drawings for myself’ acts as a title for the works and an explanation.  None of these early projects were anything more than sketches on paper, never titled, and similar in style to his book illustrations.  Although the strategy of never appearing to be anything but an official artist would haunt the rest of his career and lifestyle while he remained in the Soviet Union, some of these early unofficial projects did stray from what was acceptable.  
Kabakov reports that between 1953 and 1960 he experimented with Abstract Expressionist color drawings, making over five hundred.  Some have survived and remain as parts of later albums.   The bravery to create unofficial artwork can be linked to a visit Kabakov and his friends had made to the studio of Robert Falk, an artist working in a style called ‘Cézannism-Cubism’.  Falk was a successful and well-known artist outside of the Soviet Union but since the 1930s had not been allowed to work professionally within the country.  Falk never gave in to the authorities and continued to work in his own style until he died in 1958.   Although Falk had a painting style that was no longer considered avant-garde in the West, Kabakov and his peers were unfamiliar with the works by earlier Soviet avant-garde artists such as Malevich and Tatlin since their works were never exhibited or discussed.  The visit to Falk’s studio and the realization that an artist could work independently, albeit in secrecy, must have been liberating.  Kabakov describes the stifling atmosphere in plain terms: “Private conversations and whispering would have been politically incorrect.”   Private artworks in private studios were deemed all the more inappropriate.
In 1957, Kabakov graduated from the Academy and three years later he traveled to East Germany (DDR); it was his first trip abroad.  He recalls that he had felt as if the atmosphere was quite different from the Soviet Union, perhaps because of the DDR’s proximity to the West.  Although he did not encounter anything radical in the DDR, the trip informed him of how different life in the Soviet Union could be, an insight that encouraged him to address his inner, more secretive thoughts about the only society he had ever known. 
In 1960 Kabakov applied to the Soviet Union of Artists for a studio and began to share a rented space with fellow artist Ulo Sooster.  In 1962, Sooster took part in the 30th anniversary show of the Moscow Artists’ Union, which led to Khrushchëv’s infamous remarks about the unofficial artwork.   The incident ended the thaw for artists and from that time on Sooster’s apartment became an important venue in which to show and discuss artwork that was not officially recognized by the Soviet Union.  That same year Kabakov began a series he would dare to title, albeit loosely, ‘absurd drawings.’ These were eventually published in a 1969 Prague magazine.   Prior to this, however, Kabakov had his first taste of publicly challenging the Soviet regime.  In 1965 a member of the Italian Communist Party exhibited a number of works by Soviet artists in L’Aquila, Italy.  The goal of the show was to prove that the Soviet Union had a more diverse culture than was known to the West and even to the Soviet people.  Kabakov lent a series of drawings entitled Shower.  Yet he was still not bold enough to look too outrageous, avant-garde or bourgeois; the drawings remained in the same style as many of his book illustrations.  
In the original Shower series from 1965, a man is depicted standing under a shower but with no water.  Kabakov interpreted the work as a simple but universal metaphor about the individual who is always waiting for something, but never receives anything.  Instead, the Italians and critics of communism interpreted the work as signifying Soviet culture and its lack of material reward.  The minor publicity Kabakov received prevented him from getting work as an illustrator for four years, forcing him to work under someone else’s name.   The use of an alter ego would become a common tool in Kabakov’s unofficial artwork.  Henceforth, although the exhibition in Italy was not officially sanctioned by the Soviet state, when the Krushchev thaw abruptly ended, the unofficial art scene in the Soviet Union was already too complex to halt.  It was a common and well-founded belief that the KGB had bugged every artist’s telephone and most of their studios and homes.  The secret police apparently knew when artists would have foreign visitors, but ironically the foreign visitors lent a measure of protection to the artists.  As long as the artists’ unofficial work did not become too visible to the public, the KGB was hesitant to punish them for fear the West would use the incidents to criticize the Soviet Union. 
In 1968, Kabakov’s association with Sooster was intensified when both artists, along with Ernst Niezvestny, Mikail Brussilovsky, and Yurri Sobolev, occupied studios along Stretenski Boulevard.  The spaces were also used as venues to show and exchange ideas about unofficial art.  Some of the other artists who were regular visitors were Vladimir Yankilevsky, Eduard Shteynberg, and Erik Bulatov, with whom Kabakov would later often be associated.  The majority of visual artists who became part of the Stretenski Group worked officially as book illustrators and graphic designers.  Most were trained in the art academies, maintained tidy homes and good marriages, and in general seemed like conforming members of Soviet society.  This was drastically different from another group known as the Lianozovo artists; untrained, unofficial bohemians, they were often harassed and in some cases imprisoned.   It is apparent that Kabakov and his associates were conformist as a survival strategy, a tactic which began at the art academies.  Kabakov reports that during school and throughout his early career he did everything expected of him and, on the surface, accepted the Soviet reality.  However, even during childhood he recalls having been aware of trying to lead a double life so that “reality wouldn’t destroy” him.   
It was at the studio on Stretenski Boulevard that Kabakov’s unofficial work took a new turn.  Previously, his work consisted of relatively modest-sized drawings of approximately 8 x 11 inches.  Now it began to develop into larger paintings, some as big as 50 x 40 inches.  Because these artists’ studios were rather small, the larger paintings often encompassed an entire wall.  The Russian Series, completed in 1969, consists of three paintings in a row. All are 49 x 77 inches and are covered with a sandy brown.  Within each, there are minute details and objects alternatively on the surface or hidden beneath the sandy color.  The details interrupt the viewer’s gaze, which would otherwise be overwhelmed by the color of the brown enamel.  The Russian Series, included in a retrospective at Bard College in 2000, is typical of Kabakov’s works because the paintings are accompanied by a text.  The middle painting, In the Corner, is the most indicative of what Kabakov was trying to achieve.

If you watch the empty corner, something “light blue” starts to twinkle in the corner.  By shifting the gaze to the corner, small houses that are lit by the sun are seen.  But the gaze reverts to the center of the stand as it is hard to look into the corner for a long time. 

In all three works of The Russian Series the details are located in the corners or away from the center.  The wholeness of the “sandy color, that of soil” is left intact, interrupted in a discrete manner almost secretively or mistakenly.  Yet the dominance of the center overpowers the viewer, returning his gaze to the middle and away from the discrepancies in color.  Kabakov would repeat this strategy from 1983-1988 with a second series called Three Green Paintings.  In this series, rather than depict objects, he placed texts on the upper left and right hand corners of what is otherwise a field of green enamel paint.  In these two series of paintings, the totality of the surfaces and the indiscrete, yet impossible to ignore, out-of-place text and objects can be interpreted as characteristic of Soviet society.  Any action or individual not in line with the state is conspicuous.  Even ordinary objects like the belt, nail, and vase in They Lie Below, the third painting in The Russian Series, are prone to being overwhelmed by the field of color.  
	Kabakov described the colors of paint in The Russian Series and Three Green Paintings as the main characters.  The brown sandy soil color of the first series was the same enamel used in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s to paint everything from roofs to hallways, but most often floors.  Kabakov points out that the color of the state is red but the color of the country is gray, due to its “humdrum existence”.   He then suggests that if you mix these two colors you end up with the brown sandy soil color, which signifies both the floors and the ground that support the feet of the populace of the Soviet Union.  The green of the second series is enamel that was used to paint the lower part of the walls up to one meter high in order to protect them from dirt and scuffs.  Kabakov assigns these colors of brown and green, so common throughout the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, a metaphysical meaning of earth and nature as controlled and depicted by the Soviet state.  For Kabakov, these colors evoke feelings of unavoidable hopelessness.   More pertinent to this argument is what these series of paintings do not address.  Political ideology is absent and only impersonal colors exist to dominate minor features, all of which are faceless texts and objects.
	 At the Bard College exhibition, the two series of paintings engaged viewers’ attention by their sheer enormity and consistency.  However, both series were made in Kabakov’s Soviet studio, with no other setting in mind.  Even as late as The Green Paintings in the 1980s, Kabakov was not determined to move to the West, so the idea of exhibiting his unofficial work in a museum was not a concept affecting the work.  Kabakov’s studio differed drastically in size from Western galleries and museums and, originally conceived in his private space, both series overwhelm the viewer.  Thus it can be argued the new paintings were a strong move towards installation work, especially since the paintings evoke the ambiance of life in the Soviet Union and mimic the physical design of the society because the canvases, which cover the walls of his studio, were covered with the same paint used directly on the walls in public housing.
	Throughout the 1960s, Kabakov’s work became more experimental and irregular, rather than fully developed.  We can look forward to a much later point in his career and find motifs that would become important to the artist.  For example, Queen Fly of 1965 is a smaller and quite unique work in that a decorative, semi-geometric design covers the plywood base and frame.  However the fly, a lone element separate from the painted pattern, is also the main character, and one that reoccurs throughout Kabakov’s oeuvre.  
The fly motif is so important that it remained in his work until after he moved to the West.  The 1992 installation in Cologne, Life of Flies, consists of several halls in which the economy, politics, culture, and an entire civilization, specifically the Soviet Union, are associated with flies.  The civilization has an atmosphere so boring that flies die from it.   Throughout Kabakov’s oeuvre the flies represent two seemingly different themes: human lives and garbage.  The dual motif becomes more complex when a resolution is attempted.  One possibility is that human life is equal to garbage.  The second, and more positive view, is that even within the profane, a great value can be found; specifically, life itself.  The third interpretation of the dual motif is the concept of a fly haphazardly existing within a bureaucratic or totalitarian system.   From interviews to writings, Kabakov conflates the motifs and themes of his artwork, ultimately allowing the viewer to decide what the correct interpretation may be.
Another early work, In the Room (1965-1968) is a work that is different from most of Kabakov’s other pieces.  The small painting depicts one room containing a table, three chairs, a hanging lamp, two round frames and one square frame hanging on the wall.  A door is situated on the left side of the room and from it a man protrudes horizontal to the floor, defying gravity.  Opposite him another man stands on the wall, also horizontal and gravity-defying.  The two men’s heads share the same space, creating an optical illusion, with one man’s bowler hat becoming the other man’s head and vice versa.  Unlike the man on the right, however, the man entering from the doorway has his back to the viewer and his face cannot be seen.  To further differentiate the two men, the latter wears an orange-reddish suit and the former is dressed in a white jacket with grey slacks.  Thus, the person entering from the outside is faceless, while the man in the room is left intact.  Although his attire is not red, the orange-ish color might refer to the Soviet State and its effects upon the individual in the public sphere, whereas the man who is completely in the private room retains his personality.  And yet, without the clever optical illusion, the work would otherwise be unremarkable.  However, it could be argued that In the Room foreshadows Kabakov’s later installation work when he begins to turn typical Soviet homes into fantasies that defy both gravity and the control of the state.  
The title of the work alone points to a theme he would develop his entire career, even after moving to the West: while in a private space, whether an actual room or in the imagination, anything is possible and no rules need apply.
In the 1970s, several factors led Kabakov to become more conceptually oriented.  The first was the Soviet intelligentsia’s adoption of the structuralist theory from France, which helped shift interest from art to its context.  Next, perhaps in part due to the influence of structuralism, the intelligentsia began to question the friend-or-foe attitude toward Soviet ideology.  Dissident artists and intellectuals began to be seen by Russian structuralists as supporting the gulf within society and between the industrialist societies of the East and West.  In the 1970s, rather than be anti-Soviet and pro-Western, many artists took a neutral position that would allow them to question and analyze the perceived gap between the ideologies.   
For Kabakov, these developments led to his friends and colleagues forming a group that became known as the Moscow Conceptualists, which developed out of the Stretenski Group.  It is problematic to determine exactly who was a member of the group, just as it is difficult to determine who was a Sots artist.  Many of the works by unofficial artists of this time have complex meanings that are open to interpretation.  For example, Boris Groys suggests that Komar and Melamid, two of the best-known Sots artists, were members of the Conceptualists.   For Kabakov, however, the reputation as a conceptualist is more accurate.  Even in the earlier works, Queen Fly and In The Room, it can be suggested that conceptualism played a part because the frames are painted, making the viewer aware of the context and questioning the notion of a finished work of art detached from everyday life.  The 1960s were a fertile period of development and experimentation for Kabakov but it was in the 1970s when his output began to coalesce into a formative oeuvre.  
During the 1970s, Kabakov began to create a series of albums, each original and self-published, in the style of other Samizdat artists.  Often, his albums consisted of ink and colored pencil drawings on loose pages in fabric covered boxes.   One of Kabakov’s earliest albums, Agonizing Surikov of 1972-75, demonstrates his move towards conceptualism.  The text explains that whenever Surikov, the main character, attempts to examine his surroundings, all he is able to see is a small detail, as if through a keyhole, whereas the majority of his vision is an impenetrable barrier.  The drawings that accompany the text illustrate what appears to be a wall covered with coats of paint that are chipped, faded and peeling.  A small hole pierces the wall and looks round as if it had been made by a bullet.  Through the hole an idyllic pastoral scene can be glimpsed.  Like the Shower, one can use the drawings to support Western beliefs: the wall can be compared to the Iron Curtain, the idyllic scene to Capitalism.  Rather, the work was done in the 1970s, when the rhetoric of pro- and anti-Soviets was called into question.  Seen in this light, Agonizing Surikov could be a work critiquing both the unofficial anti-Soviet and official Soviet cultures.  , each of which supported and maintained the promise of a utopian future while failing to address the current state of living.  The unofficial anti-Soviet culture argued there could be a utopian future without the current regime, and metaphorically peaked beyond the Iron-curtain to the West as evidence; whereas the official Soviet culture created regulations that maintained a certain level of degradation.  The former fashioned the illusion of the idyllic pasture, while the latter formed the barrier preventing the viewer from seeking the truth of the matter.
After Kabakov moved to the West and began to exhibit to a wider public, he transformed the albums in various ways.  For example, 10 Characters retains the album feel, yet he placed the loose pages into clear plastic protective covers and had them bound.  The second method the artist has employed, in response to the exhibition methods of Western galleries and museums, is to frame each page and either hang it on the wall or place the sheets under glass on a table, thus making each album a miniature show.    In this vein, a four-volume album, A Universal System for Depicting Everything was exhibited in 1999 in Palermo.  The work proves to be a significant development for Kabakov’s oeuvre because of its ability to question notions often held about the differing contexts of making and exhibiting art.  The albums sardonically illustrate the idea of the artist as providing an answer and the ability of the viewer to ask a question; although something is being depicted, details cannot be discerned.  A room was filled with small-framed images, some on the wall and several below glass on a table.  Against one wall was a diorama that appeared to be a circle bent into a ninety-degree angle, creating rounded edges for the sky and ground.  The shape of the diorama mimics many of the drawings on the images, which resemble horizontal figure-eight, amoebae-like figures.  Typical of Kabakov’s exhibitions, a text provided a description, offering an understanding that might otherwise elude visitors.   
For decades, many artists have been trying to resolve the problem that seemingly is beyond the power of graphic art to resolve: how to depict on a stationary and flat canvas what is really only within the power of a book or a theater to demonstrate .

The text points out the severe limitations of relying on a single flat surface to depict a fourth-dimensional world.  Ironically, Kabakov then claims to have solved this problem.  He explains that the system-solution must contain the viewer’s perspective and the depiction must be spherical and illustrate not only the moment, but also every instance of time before and after it.   The system sounds possible only in the text, for the illustrations Kabakov provides resemble whirlwinds of figures and objects blended together and warped, presumably by the attempt to represent time and space on one flat surface.  It is not entirely clear what the illustrations are, which adds to the irony of claiming to have developed a universal system.  The outlines of the illustrations are similar to the sign for infinity (∞), a sly reminder that art is a construction or signifier and cannot achieve the complexity or duration of reality.  The diorama, although mimicking the spherical shape of the drawings, is clearly a rural scene with mountains and a blue sky with clouds, representing just one moment of time.  .  
Although the viewer in Palermo may have understood the ironic gesture Kabakov was making with his Universal System, it is only in the original album form that Kabakov’s poetic gift can be realized.  Published in a commercial book format in 2002 for the occasion of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle, it begins with several pages, each containing a short text that explains the rules of the Universal System.  The first image is a loose colored scrawl, which the text calls ‘Iris’ and explains that the center of Iris is obstructed by ‘petals’.   Iris is used to demonstrate the Universal System, as in subsequent drawings it is methodically divided and dissected by charts.  Slowly, the viewer is taken down along the petals to the center of Iris, which is revealed to be round but, upon further inspection, is discovered to be an Earth-like world.
The idea of a world within a world is not original to Kabakov, but rather it is the clever manner in which he ties his works together using such concepts that is unique.  In a later album, The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, the character utilizes ‘petals’, described as forms of energy, to escape the Earth.  Thus, using albums and installations, Kabakov has, over the years, created an alternate universe of intertwined fantasies that mimics and sheds light on our own universe.  In essence, A Universal System for Depicting Everything allows the viewer to delve deeper and farther into Kabakov’s alternate universe, only to find one of its characters attempting to escape the world the viewer has just discovered.
	With A Universal System for Depicting Everything, Kabakov offers the best explanation and defense, if both are even needed, for his albums.  The explanation can also be used as a proposal for his later installations.  By revealing the severe limitations of drawing and painting Kabakov suggests that only through a form similar to that of a book or theater can a viewer come to understand and appreciate the significance of a story.  
	If A Universal System for Depicting Everything serves as a proposal for his later work, the series of albums called 10 Characters acts as a description of the artist himself.  Composed of 10 different albums, each based on a fictional character, a separate text tells the story of the primary fictional character.  While writing his biography, the man finds he cannot explain his life through just one personage, since nothing much ever happened to him, and most of his life amounted to impressions of people, places, and objects.  To solve his dilemma, the character creates 10 fictional personages in order to describe his own biography.   The main character is fictional, but with his installations and stories Kabakov shares similar tendencies with the personage.
Kabakov’s official work as a book illustrator continues to have a strong presence in this piece.  In one of the albums from 10 Characters, called The Flying Komarov, average Soviet citizens grasp the wings of undersized versions of airplanes, some being pulled by ropes like water skiers in the sky. The illustrations also depict, in a cartoon-like fashion, the townspeople holding hands and forming large circles while floating in the air.  The drawings are highly fanciful and could easily be used for a children’s book, if not in the Soviet Union then certainly in the West.  The written explanation, however, suggests a deeper, perhaps more cynical meaning.  

This character, after long and excruciating discussions with his wife, after almost entirely mutual recriminiations and accusations, in total despair, and having opened the balcony door…Suddenly he sees that in the sky…there are people hovering in the air…hovering between them in the air are things of their everyday existence—mugs, tables, couches, coat racks…Our character, having climbed up on the railing of the balcony, waves his arm and also tries to take off after them.  

Thus the protagonist is in total despair until he discovers the people in an extraordinary state.  His personal condition is contrasted with the disposition of the town’s citizens; the disparity the character encounters represents the tremendous gulf between the Soviet citizen’s concepts of public freedom and private despair.
	The albums that compose 10 Characters address themes or “state of consciousness”  of the main characters in each book, whose life revolves around exploring their personal theme.  Each of the 10 minor characters is an aspect of the main character, as if his personality and life had become schizophrenic.  The absence of important events in the main character’s life forces him to create the imaginary lives, bound together in an album to comprise his biography.  
Each album ends with a blank white page which Kabakov suggests is for the viewer to add an imaginary commentary.  In a limited retrospective in 2000 at Bard College, 10 Characters was given a room to itself, each album resting on a table. The viewers were encouraged to sit down and flip through the albums, reading the texts and looking at the illustrations as if they were books in a library.  Kabakov claims the albums are a genre somewhere between several types of art including literature, fine arts, and cinematography.  “Most of all,” he suggests, “the ‘albums’ are a type of ‘domestic theater’…like old theater conducted on a town square in broad daylight”.   He compares his albums to theater where the viewer is bound by action and darkness, which does not allow for examination and evaluation of the action.  The interest in giving the viewer the freedom to interact and interpret the artwork is central to Kabakov’s oeuvre.  None of his works are didactic or attempt to deliver a political statement, as we shall now examine.
Unlike many Soviet artists who emigrated to the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kabakov remained in Russia until 1987.  His first trip to the West was to Graz, Austria when the Kunstverein gave him an artistic residency.  Between 1988 and 1992 Kabakov claimed no permanent home yet stayed in the West, working and living only briefly in various countries.  In comparison to many Soviet émigré artists, Kabakov was immediately successful and has remained so ever since.  Between 1988 and 1989 he had exhibitions in New York, Bern, Venice, and Paris.  In 1989 Kabakov also began working with another artist, Emilia, who would later become his wife.   It was not until 1992 that the Kabakovs moved to New York City, where they have remained. 
The series of albums such as 10 Characters helped formulate much of Kabakov’s later work.  In the albums he offers the viewer a narrative of a fictional character.  When he moved to the West he was finally able to build installations, an idea he had been formulating since the early 1980s, but was unable to attempt for lack of space.  The Ropes as described by Alexander Rappaport  would later become the communal kitchen, one room in his best-known installation 10 Characters and the first to be shown in the West, and, which happens to share the title with his seminal album series.  
Exhibited in New York City in 1988 when Mikhail Gorbachev was attempting to enact sweeping reforms in the Soviet Union, 10 Characters was described by critics as demonstrating the spiritual brilliance and inventive imagination of a people even amid material desolation.   Similar to the Italian Communists’ interpretation almost 20 years before, Kabakov’s artwork was seen as addressing the lack of material reward under Communism.  Kabakov has never disagreed with such interpretations, but he has hinted that there is a deeper, more universal meaning to his work. 
The installation 10 Characters is similar to the album with the same name in that 10 fictional people are created, each of their lives devoted to an eccentric pursuit or habit.  However, unlike the album, Kabakov created an installation where the gallery was transformed into an accurate replica of a Soviet-style communal apartment.  The characters are all residents, and each room is made to seem as if it is still occupied but the resident has just stepped out, perhaps to use the communal kitchen or bathroom.  Several rooms contain older works by Kabakov; for example the room of The Short Man (The Bookbinder) has drawings from the Shower series, therefore the characters “are all different personas of Kabakov’s varied artistic talents.”  
The viewer enters the installation through a single door and is invited to visit the separate rooms, only one of which cannot be entered and must be viewed through cracks in a door that has been shoddily boarded up.  The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment tells the story of one of the residents who built a catapult-like contraption to shoot himself through the roof into outer space, where he would travel on powerful streams of energy.  A text describes the story as narrated by three of the other residents, one of whom happened to know the cosmonaut better than the others yet admits, “I didn’t know him well.”  The room still contains the contraption, a gaping hole in the ceiling, and scientific drawings and diagrams tacked to a wall that is covered with wallpaper composed of old Soviet propaganda posters.  A diorama of the town shows the man’s expected projectile path into outer space.  The text explains that shortly after the man went into orbit authorities arrived and boarded up the room.  Timothy W. Luke, in his book Shows of Force, interprets this character as Kabakov ironically taking on the progressive illusions of the Soviet intelligentsia, science, and technology.   But this seems too simple an explanation because it fails to address the narrative about the streams of energy.  If the artist was seeking to criticize, he could have ended the story after the successful launch rather than develop an entire explanation for how the character was to live in outer space.  More so, ironic criticism of the Soviet Union would not explain another room, that of The Untalented Artist.
In this room, three large canvases rest on the floor against the walls.  Each canvas is divided in half horizontally and depicts various scenes, including a soccer match, a drawing class in an art academy, a group of workers, and three views of the countryside with assorted landmarks or industrial settings.  The narrative of The Untalented Artist describes the man as 50 years old (approximately Kabakov’s age when he created this work), who took some art classes when he was younger and now works for the state.  The paintings resemble the crude works created for propaganda, agitation and advertisements for official events.  The narrative suggests the works are “a dreadful mixture of hack-work, simple lack of skill.”   The art can serve to criticize the Soviet Union’s official artistic preferences but can also critique poorly produced commercial work in Western countries.  To do so, however, would ignore the final statement of the text that serves to rescue the paintings, “The rejoicing of the sun somehow breaks through and exist[s] in the work” despite the artist not having devoted all of his time and heart to them.   Here Kabakov reclaims the objects that are otherwise perceived and valued as ordinary at best.  By defending the paintings, Kabakov also forgives the untalented artist by explaining that his lack of attention allowed the sun to break through and exist.  The aspect of attention, or lack thereof, is an interesting way to absolve guilt.  However, this small detail might be a commentary on the extreme amount of attention the Soviet Union paid its citizens; or, it could imply that Kabakov was empathizing with an individual stuck in a position he did not care for, especially since he himself was forced to make illustrations for a living, but something many people can understand.
Another character, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away collects and treasures ordinary and discarded items.  The walls are adorned with Three Green Paintings along with another of Kabakov’s artworks; also called The Ropes, strings are tied in rows several feet above the floor, from one wall to the other.   Countless items hang from the strings and below each item a small piece of paper explains its origin.  The character writes about garbage, lamenting that the world that surrounds him is a dump and wondering if every other country is likewise covered with garbage.  He points out that the land, owned by no one, has become a dump and looms threateningly beyond the walls, submerging the apartment.   
The characters who occupy the communal apartments of the installation Ten Characters seem to reach similar conclusions while pursuing different ends.  Common objects, phrases and moments are attended to with the utmost interest, and residents escape their ordinary existences through extra-ordinary means.  Kabakov’s “On Emptiness”, an essay that seems to have developed out of the text from The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,  best explains his installation.  He describes a burrow as being the sole place of residence for the inhabitant of emptiness.  The singular room in the communal apartment is the only haven away from the vast hopelessness for a person living in the Soviet Union, or, for that matter, elsewhere.  The emptiness is not unique to the Soviet Union, and he wittingly refers to the emptiness inhabiting the country “from sea to shining sea”, a phrase used proudly in song to describe the United States.  He suggests nothing can escape the emptiness—neither government, society, nor ideology.  For Kabakov, emptiness is a substratum of existence and anything built to control it or enable one to ignore it is equal in value, whether it is with the form of art or music.  
Along with the recurring theme of emptiness is the idea of privacy.  In the Soviet Union the single room in the communal apartment is the place that becomes a stage where the individual’s imagination can be developed.  In The 10 Characters, each room is a manifestation of the occupant’s imagined attempt to escape life’s drudgery.  And yet, it does not seem as if Kabakov sees the emptiness as negative or wrong, but rather as an opportunity to imagine.  In A Universal System a viewer is depicted dreaming “about a little stream while studying for exams”, and eventually journeys across the sea to a green island.   Thus, emptiness and dreariness are openings that allow for a utopian fantasy, if only occasionally and not in reality.
Kabakov has adopted an aesthetic reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, but the meaning is deeper and more complicated than a condemnation of the country in which he lived or over 50 years.  Kabakov does not support a political ideology; instead, he attempts to tell the story of the Soviet Union.   His art serves as a history lesson.
Red Wagon was exhibited in 1991 at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Germany.  Compared to other installations, Red Wagon is rather simple.  Entering a large gallery with a high ceiling, the viewer finds an unfinished wooden ramp and a series of ladders and platforms.  Able to explore the construction, the viewer discovers the final ladder is directed upwards diagonally but does not lead anywhere.  Moving past the unpainted wooden construction, the viewer enters what might appear to an American to be a trailer home but which is modeled on a Russian wagon, which at one time could have been used as a railroad car.  The exterior is decorated with Socialist Realist paintings.  Music emanates from the wagon’s darkened interior, and, upon crossing the threshold, the viewer finds a mural depicting an idyllic Soviet city, peaceful, harmonious, and prosperous, with a blue sky filled not with clouds but apparently with an airshow of biplanes, hot-air balloons, and zeppelins.  Benches are placed opposite the mural, allowing the viewer to rest and take in the music and imaginary scenery.  At the rear of the wagon a final door takes the viewer to a room strewn with piles of garbage, but, unlike most of Kabakov’s other installations, a narrative is not offered to clarify the setting.
The concept of The Red Wagon began in 1985 when Kabakov and his friends began to sense the Soviet Union collapse, and with it the feelings and sensations from an entire period of history.  The Red Wagon is the result of attempting to memorialize and remember what Soviet citizens experienced.   Kabakov imagined the history of the Soviet Union as a bridge, the beginning of which he states as having lasted from the 1917 October Revolution until 1932.  It is represented with wooden platforms and ladders.  The time was full of hope and faith in the new government and the belief that the new system could only lead upward.  Thus, the ladders seem to lead to heaven.  The wagon, with its interior mural of an idyllic yet immobile and imaginary landscape, and the exterior in which more Socialist Realist paintings hang, symbolizes the second period.  According to Kabakov, this was the Soviet Stalinist Paradise.  It lasted from 1936-1963, and he described the feeling during this era as if “time had stopped”.    The final period is represented by the last room full of garbage and symbolizes the decay and loss of dreams for a better future.
The Red Wagon is a memorial, not a critique.  If Kabakov had wanted to accomplish the latter, more graphic depictions could have been used, especially for the period of Stalin’s reign.  Kabakov is quick to oppose any suggestion that his work is about ideology and politics; instead, he addresses artistic legacies.  The Red Wagon refers to the avant-garde but overturns the symbols of Constructivists like Tatlin and Lissitzky: the wagon is built for speed but has no wheels; the ladders are meant to bring people upwards but lead nowhere.  Similarly, Kabakov sees the three phases of the Soviet Union as corresponding to artistic legacies.  The early phase is the avant-garde, the second Socialist Realism, and the third belongs to the unofficial Sots artists.  However, memorializing and explaining the past is not the only theme Kabakov addresses. 
The Toilet is an installation that was erected in 1992 for Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany.  Visitors entered a small building to find a public restroom containing six toilet stalls.  The room, however, was filled with furniture and appeared to have been used as a living space with a bed, crib, dresser, nightstand and a table that looks as if it were in the midst of being set for dinner.  There was more clutter left about and some of the toilet stalls became storage closets.  As in many of Kabakov’s installations, the viewer was left with the impression that the inhabitant had just stepped out and might return at any moment.  
Apart from the surprise of a living space among toilets, the work could easily correspond to a Westerners’ idea of what life must be like in the Soviet Union with clutter, dirt and worn-out furnishings.  For Kabakov, the work has more significance.  “In the Soviet situation, the situation itself is unbearable, tragic, but man lives a normal life in it.  He tries to make it warm and cozy.”   Therefore, even in the ridiculous circumstance of having to live in an unused public restroom, a Soviet citizen is found to be similar to any other human being by attempting to make it the best situation possible.  In his typical fashion, Kabakov doesn’t disagree with the description of his artwork as being about education or ethnography.  But he does draw the line when someone suggests the Soviet system is to blame for the schizophrenia apparent in his artwork.  He states, “No.  This schizophrenia can be experienced by everyone.”   Inspiration for The Toilet might have come from an instance in the life of his mother, when she was forced to live for a time in the toilet of a children’s boarding school.  Kabakov reports having been embarrassed by his mother and one may hypothesize that this work may be an attempt to reconcile and appreciate the struggles his mother had suffered through.   The work can also be seen as an ironic set-up for the unsuspecting, but assuming, Westerner.  Compared with 10 Characters, The Toilet represents Soviet life in just one room, thus offering a brutal summary, as if the artist was intentionally encouraging and allowing the viewer to justify his or her own beliefs.
Despite the continued examination and use of Soviet icons and themes, Kabakov adds depth and meaning to his projects.  The Palace of Projects is an installation that was originally conceived in 1998 for Roundhouse, an art space in London.  Mimicking the building’s structure and perfectly placed within a central ring of columns is a smaller enclosure in the shape of a spiral, glowing from within and illuminating the otherwise dim interior of the Roundhouse.  Built of wood, steel and fabric, the structure resembles Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International.  Kabakov’s building was ironically designed with less ambition than Tatlin’s but is far more functional.  
The text provided states, “the installation displays and examines a seemingly commonly known and even trivial truth: the world consists of a multitude of projects, realized ones, half-realized ones, and ones not realized at all.”   Thus, despite the immediate reference to the Soviet Union’s utopian project, the viewer is told that this installation refers to the entire world.  The text continues and promises the viewer that within the palace are over 60 projects, some complete, many not, but one that, perhaps, is the viewer’s own and which will give meaning and significance to his life.  The text insists that a life is worth living only if it has a project of some sort.   
The catalog for the Palace of Projects was published with cheap, unadorned cardboard covers, the typeface was chosen to resemble that of a dated typewriter and, overall, it has the feel of an inventor’s sketchbook.  The book design plays into the sense Kabakov seeks to convey.  The text describes the palace as a “museum of dreams…even if they are unrealizable.”  Kabakov is not being ironic or cynical, and the text offers clarification:

The visitor to such a “Palace” will encounter stimulus for his own fantasies, much will prompt him toward the resolution of his own tasks, will awaken his imagination and, the main thing, will provide the impulse for his own creative activity in a “positive direction.” 

The artist’s commentary explains that most of the projects have to do with forms of transportation or communication, but all pertain to improving the world.  Many of the plans have already begun and are now, in the year 1998, well under way.  The Palace of Projects addresses the utopian ideas, past and present, that have failed and those that are still under way.  The text warns that many of these projects deal with attaining power and the movement towards a gravitational center where power is controlled through tyranny or oppression.   Transportation, the ability to come and go at will, and communication, the ability to speak as one believes, is symbolic of freedom.  Thus, the moral to the story is found in the structure of the building.  As if the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had been turned upside down, less the elevator, the viewer is led in an upwards spiral and eventually arrives at the highest point that is also the center of the structure, but is nonetheless a dead end.  The viewer is forced to turn around and return the way he came in.  Kabakov does not condemn these projects and the text even promotes them, but overall the motives spurring the projects are called into question.  
The concept of the monument is a motif used throughout Kabakov’s oeuvre.  Monument to a Lost Glove was a public project created in 1996 for Lyon, France to coincide with the G7 summit.  Later in the year it was placed on the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street in New York.   A red plastic woman’s glove is attached to the ground and around it is placed a semicircle of nine metal music stands, each engraved with a text from a different imaginary character and written in poetic form.  The texts, written in four languages (French, English, German and Russian), are recollections of the woman inspired by the dropped glove.  
In a text separate from but pertaining to the public project, Kabakov explains his focus of attention for Monument to a Lost Glove.  From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the ability to create a sonnet, eulogy, or epigraph was highly valued.  By the end of the “iron twentieth century” the literary tradition had been lost.  “To resurrect it is the goal of our project”, the artist declares.  Therefore, the glove symbolizes the lost tradition of poetic verse and the ability to “shroud…thoughts in poetic form.”   Allowing fictional yet ordinary characters to voice their memories through poetry is similar to The Palace of Projects and Ten Characters; people devote their lives to independent projects that somehow become artful ways to live.  Simultaneously, Monument to a Lost Glove states the artist’s opinion of the Modern project.  Blaming the “iron twentieth century” for lost traditions, Kabakov links the Soviet Union, symbolized by the red color of the glove and the lost literary traditions, to modernization.  By using the phrase “iron twentieth century” Kabakov is attacking not only the ideology that supported modernizing the Soviet Union but also the motives and intentions that eventually took control.  By removing ideology, and therefore politics, as the cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Kabakov rescues the USSR from being the demagogue opposing the West.  Rather, he sees characteristics in the former nation that exist in every Modern society and every person.
Monument to a Lost Civilization is at once the most comprehensive retrospective to date and Kabakov’s grandest statement.  Originally exhibited in Palermo, Italy, in 1999, the monument includes 38 installations out of a self-declared oeuvre of 140 artworks.  The installations within Monument were chosen because they all reference the Soviet Union, or the lost civilization.  The monument serves as a reminder to the Sicilians in Palermo who hope to create a new society.  Emilia Kabakov warns, “Don’t repeat our mistakes, look at your dreams clearly, but don’t sacrifice the people in the name of ideology.” 
According to Kabakov’s plans, Monument to a Lost Civilization is to exist below ground in a space without any windows, which might allow the viewer to find solace through the sight of the sky.  The space was to be designed like a cavernous lair impossible to navigate where visitors will get lost. They will ask directions to the garden and be told they must find the final room, only to discover the door to the garden, which the artist equate with paradise, locked.  In part due to the monument’s enormous size, viewers would enter and forget where the exit is, but never forget what is outside as they begin to feel an atmosphere resembling the Soviet Union, thus giving “an idea of totalitarianism.” 
Kabakov has developed a concept he refers to as total installation.  It is not entirely clear which of his installations are total, but it can be assumed that Monument to a Lost Civilization and Palace of Projects, where the viewer is completely immersed by Kabakov’s fictional universe, are good examples.  Total installation replaces the viewer’s known world with Kabakov’s, and what was once controlled or dominated by the viewer’s concept of the world, is suddenly altered and controlled by the artist.  Kabakov continually emphasizes the atmosphere of his installations.  “You go inside, you experience some different feelings, rather than your own, ‘normal’ world.”   It is not good enough if the installation is interesting, conceptually or aesthetically; with total installation, the viewer must be affected emotionally.  Hence, with Monument to a Lost Civilization, the absence of windows denies the viewer the ability to look at anything that is not part of the total, or totalized, installation.
The concept of the sky as a route to escape is used repeatedly by Kabakov.  Looking Up, Reading the Words is a public project that was temporarily installed in 1997 for the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, Germany.  The sculpture resembles a 50 foot tall radio antenna.  At the top, aerials protrude horizontally creating an oblong shape.  The aerials form lines on notebook paper and there are words made from metal letters sandwiched between, with the sky used as a backdrop.  The words, written in German, read:

My Dear One!  When you are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back, there is no one around you, and only the sound of the wind can be heard and you look up into the open sky—there, up above, is the blue sky and the clouds floating by—perhaps this is the very best thing that you have ever done or seen in your life.

The text simultaneously directs the viewer’s gaze to the sky and obstructs his view.  Furthermore, as Iwona Blazwick points out, the transmission from the text crackles with irony:  “Why was such an exquisite piece of new technology devoted to something so simple as a handwritten text?  We had come here (to the park) to escape but, with his tender irony, Kabakov had reconnected us with the pains and the neglected pleasures of reality.”   Like Monument to a Lost Glove but in a more evident manner, the utopian visions pushing technology and modernity are questioned and challenged.  “Wasn’t the utopia that we were all drawn to by this divine receiver, the very thing that we were running away from, the void?”   Looking Up, Reading the Words points the viewer upward to the sky, a symbol of a heaven but which is also an uncontrollable element.  He sarcastically reminds the viewer that the simple pleasures of nature would have been forgotten if not directed to by way of a metallic antenna and verbal declaration.  Yet this artwork looks to another source for inspiration, specifically Donald Judd’s Untitled sculpture of 1977 that resides in the same Münster park.  Judd’s work consists of two concentric concrete rings that Kabakov felt connected the earth and sky and turned the Münster sky in to a “Texan-style Big Sky.”   Indeed, the concrete rings do seem to offer a silent nod, a portal between the earth and sky, but Kabakov’s Looking Up, Reading the Words does the exact opposite by denying the viewer.   
The exploration of the authoritarian nature of technology and utopian aspirations are not Kabakov’s only concerns.  Like The Red Wagon, and ever more so since living in the West, Kabakov has been making artworks that deal with the nature of art and history.  
The Artist’s Despair, or the Conspiracy of the Untalented of 1994 tells the story of an exhibition.  The text informs the viewer that the three paintings, which are part of the work, are chosen for an exhibition.  The night after the opening the artist returns and damages the artworks.  An influential art critic then convinces the gallerists to add some props and call it an installation, which they do.  Kabakov’s text offers the criticism from a fictional artist, who denounces the series of events as a conspiracy.  The final imaginary statement is from an art historian who accepts “the naturalness of this process.”   The story is meant to be ironic, and maybe even critical, of the way in which the art world can work at times.  Through the voice of the art historian everything from the creation to destruction and subsequent rebirth of the artwork is justified.  The message is left ambiguous, just as the very title allows the viewer to be the final judge of, and contributor to, the artwork.
Since emigrating to the West, Kabakov’s work has slowly and cautiously taken on new meaning.  His most recent installation was at the 2003 Venice Biennale in an independent exhibition, rather than in the Russian or American pavilions.  Kabakov’s Where is Our Place? Is a literal question posed to viewers.  A gallery is decorated with an exhibition of modern art, specifically small black-and-white photographs surrounded by white mats and black frames.  Above the modern art hang the bottom portions of oversized, antiquated gold-leaf frames of 19th century paintings.  The frames are cut off by the ceiling, as are two pairs of giant legs garbed in 19th century attire, the only visible portions of the oversized exhibition.  The humor of finding viewers of outmoded paintings decapitated at the knees is instantly lessened when the contemporary viewer notices a third level at the baseboard of the wall, below the modern art.    In a crevice in the floor, covered with Plexiglas, a separate world is discovered, complete with terrain, buildings, and people.    The weight of the question that serves as the exhibition’s title, Where is Our Place? is made authentic by forcing the real viewer to question his own significance, especially at an event such as the Venice Biennale: the importance of the Biennale is trivialized and lowered into the baseboards of the gallery housing Kabakov’s installation.  With the works Where is Our Place? and The Artist’s Despair, Kabakov has moved from Soviet era conceptualism concerned with readdressing historical narratives to Western postmodernism that deals ironically with art for art’s sake.  His oeuvre, however, continues to evolve as some of his former motifs are altered to address new issues.
Kabakov’s In the Closet of 2000 was another installation shown at the Venice Biennale in the Utopia Station pavilion, a group show without allegiance to any country, composed of a diverse collection of artworks.  The curators, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravaniji, created the show as an examination of what utopia is or might be at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.  The curators do not offer a decisive answer, and only prove the ideas of utopia are as diverse, and personal, as the artists in the exhibition.  
In the Closet resembles a simple wooden armoire crammed with decorations and belongings that suggest it was being used for someone’s living space.  The closet is dreary and drab, similar to the burrows in the communal apartments Kabakov had previously recreated, but with far fewer imaginative devices; even more notable is that nothing refers to the former Soviet Union, and it is only the knowledge of Kabakov’s previous installations that lends itself to comparison.  The diminutive installation does not offer text to further explain the closet, but the concept behind the group show, utopia, informs the viewer what is being addressed.  In the Closet effectively updates Kabakov’s earlier installations of the Soviet era communal living spaces by conflating the idea of privacy with a phrase, ‘in the closet’, that is almost universally defined as a hidden deviance from the norm.  Thus, Kabakov finds the idea of utopia, a recurring interest of his, in anything but the average and everyday.  More significantly, perhaps, is the artist’s preference for a private utopia, rather than a colossal public project.
Having experienced a much greater oppression than is commonly known in the West, the Ilya Kabakov attempts to nudge the viewer into acknowledging certain aspects of his or her personality that lend themselves to authoritarianism, but also, and in particular the imagination, characteristics that might liberate them from a previously accepted oppression.  Kabakov’s installations have acted as documents and reminders of a failed socialist project and society.  His artworks serve as fictional stories and biographies that demonstrate universal characteristics within every human.  Most recently, in the Western art world and an increasingly westernized world, completely removed from the Soviet Union he grew up knowing, Kabakov has grappled to address relevant, and yet still universal, concepts.from|Kabakov}}

'''Ilya Kabakov''' (born [[1933]]) is a contemporary [[conceptual art|conceptual]] and [[installation art|installation]] artist. Born in [[Dnipropetrovsk]], [[Ukraine|Ukraine]], he now lives and works in [[New York]].

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==References==

*[[Kolodzei Art Foundation]]

*[http://www.KolodzeiArt.org Kolodzei Art Foundation and Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art]

[[de:Ilja Kabakow]]