Ilya Kabakov

In conversation with William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 10, Number 1, 1989

Transcript

Ilya Kabakov talks about his installation ‘The Untalented Artist and Other Characters’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1989.

William Furlong: Ilya, we are here in your installation at the ICA, The Untalented Artist and Other Characters. It consists of a series of room spaces that have been cordoned off and divided. In the catalogue you talk very vividly of Soviet apartments and you clearly have a very strong relationship with the experience of having lived within apartments in Moscow.

Ilya Kabakov: I don’t want to depict the reality of a communal apartment and the details of living in one. It’s not actually intended to represent the real thing. I really want to talk about other things in my work. It is more generally a question about a person having to live in a space of four walls, and how he/she actually has contact with other people in this situation. In one respect it is a perfect situation for constant exchange and contact, being always surrounded with other people. Individuals have to find some way of maintaining their personal selves, separate from this huge sea of people around them. The communal apartment is more a depiction of how a person mixes and protects the self from the surrounding others.

WF: So in a way the apartment is merely being used metaphorically as a way of exploring the human condition. The installations here seem to be inhabited by, on the one hand, the comic characters, and on the other, very tragic characters. There is, however, a sense of the private here, of withdrawing into a private space.

IK: Another important metaphor in the situation of a communal apartment is that nobody chooses his/her neighbours. They are just thrown together and they have to live with them as they find them. The communal apartment divides into two parts, really: the corridor and the separate rooms where people live privately or separately in their own area, and the communal kitchen, which is a kind of battleground where there is constant exchange and contact. Sadly there isn’t a communal kitchen in this particular installation, as it doesn’t have a part in it.

WF: Let’s just walk through to another part of the installation. This interior is entitled The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment and it is rather like a cell, with a seating contraption that looks as if it could launch somebody, and indeed there is a hole in the ceiling of this cell that someone could actually have been projected through, and the floor is covered with rubble from the hole in the ceiling. There are also various objects in the room that seem to evoke the presence of a human being.

IK: Every room is always like a prison, in a way, to a person. If you live in a room, to get to the outside world seems to be the ultimate desire. If you want to, you can just go out of the room into the corridor to the kitchen to meet other people. But this outside world of the communal apartment is not adequate for him, and he wants to get right out of it. So the cosmos of space that he wants to get out into is for him like some kind of other world, some heaven, some wonderful place or paradise.

WF: In that respect it opens up those issues to do with the artist’s relationship to the state, which clearly one has to deal with when looking at the work, certainly within this British context.

IK: I don’t think that is right, really. I am not arguing, but it is more about an attempt at trying to get into the other world by your own means, and although this character has tried to get into the other world by this crazy invention, it has a kind of pathos because it is obviously not adequate. It seems to us that it is silly and comic and idiotic, but on the other hand when he flew away nobody found him on the earth afterwards. So it may have been a successful experiment. We had no proof to the contrary. So it is an open question.

WF: This next one is again an enclosure with the title The Short Man. I also saw the Riverside Studios (London) installation where you had a maze of facets of books (the Albums series) that are narratives. One thing that interests me is the way in which what are clearly autobiographical experiments are expressed through a third party.

IK: This room has three characters. There is the ‘short man’, who put the thing together and who composed it; there are my drawings, and there is also another character, who thought up the installation as a whole. So there are three characters working all at once, and it is not clear who is the main character, whether it is one of those which have been invented, or whether it is the further character who emerged and created the whole.

WF: We are standing now in the main section of the gallery which, rather as at Riverside, you haven’t been content to leave as the almost shrine-like space that it normally is. You have actually painted the gallery here rather like an institutional building with a colour halfway up the wall, and there are paintings leaning against the wall. Can you talk a little bit about that sense of the unfinished?

IK: This uncertainty about whether something is in the process of being built or in the process of being taken apart and thrown away is very elemental, in the way the communal apartment functions. There is a sense of movement all the time and never knowing in which direction you are going. When I actually put this installation together I never really knew whether it was going to be built any further than it is or whether it was going to be taken down. At what point that feeling begins is also unclear, because when you are building something there is always rubbish and when you are taking something away there is always rubbish, and the rubbish is very much a symbol of this uncertainty of movement. The rubbish is a symbol not only of the ruin of destruction and of entropy but also has a particular potential, because all these people’s lives are really basically a clutter of things that they have drawn out of the rubbish to make their lives. So rubbish has a capacity to go either way. It is sort of neutral but a symbol of both things, of construction and destruction. There is always the chance that nothing but a lot of rubbish comes out of it!

WF: We are now in the space between the galleries here upstairs at the ICA. The Composer who Combined Music with Things and Images reminds me of one of the stories in the book of a concert in an apartment or in the corridor of an apartment and the ensuing complaints that were documented. Perhaps you could elaborate on this piece?

IK: It is about this character who is very upset because people are just interested in washing up their saucepans and running around and not actually thinking of culture or having any cultural part of their lives. He wanted to force or encourage them to think about something more highbrow, and so he got them all together to sing as a choir and put together this combination of pictures and texts. It was very difficult to stop people rushing about and get them together, so he stopped them by actually putting up stands in the corridor. It was a way to compel them to join in. Terrible rows occurred and fights took place, and it is a fable about how people drive one another to their deaths.

WF: What I find very interesting about the work is that although it is clearly derived from a very specific experience that is removed from a Western audience, it still seems to me to speak in a sort of universal language in relation to the human condition through the use of metaphor and symbol. I think it deals with issues such as private spaces as opposed to overwhelming social and political pressures of whatever order. There is a sense of private, personal survival being investigated here.

IK: There were problems with the installation. It was very difficult to get people to understand what a communal apartment was, and why, if it was so awful, people actually lived in it. But there is definitely some consideration of these more general issues there. It is a very successful metaphor of human life and existence, and this can’t really be conveyed in something abstract; it has to be portrayed in something that the artist knows extremely well as a reality. If you have a really pure metaphor then it loses its bearing on anything real, whereas if you use something that is straight from reality then it will seem too autobiographical and not referring to other things. I hope this installation has somehow fallen between the two.

WF: How would you locate yourself within Soviet art?

IK: Avant-garde art suddenly came to an end, and then there was socialist realism, which came to its own end as well, and then at the end of the 1950s unofficial art emerged, and I see myself as part of the unofficial culture. Some people see that as having already come to an end now. These three different movements have been directly connected one to the other.

WF: It’s interesting, the idea of the unofficial, because if there ceases to be an official, then what is the unofficial?

IK: It has always existed and it always will. It just has a different name. It used to be called socialist realism and now they call it something else.

WF: Are there any Western artists that have been particularly important to you in the area of using one’s real experience and developing it into installation?

IK: It is really hard to say whether they have had an influence, because we were so isolated and we have only had acquaintance with Western arts through little cuttings in magazines and bits and pieces. Only when we came to the West were we able to see these works and have real contact with them. But I feel there may be certain parallels in art because things emerge and are so universal that they come out of their own accord in art or in an artist and they develop by themselves. It is possible that a similar situation would provoke similar artwork.