The artist of our life – Kommersant

On May 27, the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Foundation published sad news: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Ilya Kabakov, a great artist, philosopher, beloved husband, dear father and adored grandfather. A man who dreamed of utopia all his life left this world surrounded by his loved ones, before reaching his 90th birthday.

Ilya Kabakov was, by his own definition, a classic introvert and trusted few people. Moreover, he could not trust someone to speak about him and on his behalf. And he solved this problem in a cardinal way: he himself wrote, said, outlined what he saw fit to convey about himself, his art and his time. There is no other artist in the history of Russian art who left behind so much text. Thick volumes of interviews, conversations, monologues, lengthy descriptions of his works, their many-part titles – all this practically blocks the will of critics and art historians: why speak when Kabakov has already said everything about this himself? Even today, when dozens of obituaries are being written, almost every author of them is holding himself with both hands so as not to name his text the way his hero “ordered” – “The man who flew into space …”. Indeed, one of his first total installations, “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” in 1985, accurately describes the current state of affairs: Kabakov flew into his hole in the ceiling, in the roof, in the sky, and everyone remained on Earth the same mess, dregs, dirt and violence as throughout his life.

For several decades, Kabakov – dearest of Russian artists and one of the most expensive contemporary artists in the world. The fierce millions paid by museums and collectors for his work, it seems, should have provided him with something like a happy earthly life.

However, Kabakov is also one of the saddest contemporary artists, able to lead any attentive viewer into this sadness of his.

“An artist must work with the collective memory of people,” he argued, and over and over again turned his personal memory into a collective one. And what else could be the memory of a boy who was born in 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk in the family of a locksmith Iosif Bentsionovich Kabakov and an accountant Berta Yudelevna Solodukhina, evacuated at the beginning of the war to Samarkand, extremely gifted and therefore enrolled in an art school evacuated to the same city at the age of ten at the Leningrad Academy of Arts, and at the age of 12 transferred to the Moscow Secondary Art School. A terrible hostel, orphanhood with living parents, a mother who moved to the Moscow region and rented corners (and once a piece of a toilet room) in order to be closer to her son and feed him, then communal apartments. Kabakov will experience this experience over and over again, forcing both “his own” and foreign viewers to literally “enter” the stuffy, dirty, tragic world of very small people entangled in the web of a gigantic social experiment.

“Not everyone will be taken into the future” was the title of Kabakov’s 1983 essay, and this phrase is always relevant. Although most often it was read as a statement that Kabakov would definitely be taken there.

This was never doubted by those who were with him in the circle of “Moscow Conceptualism”, one of the leaders of which he was. The influence of Kabakov in the unofficial artistic Moscow of the 1960s and 1970s can hardly be overestimated. He made excellent money illustrating children’s and, to a lesser extent, adult books, but his workshop was a space for meetings and dialogues for those who had nothing or almost nothing in common with official art. “Then the main question was: what is art for, what is it for? The question “how to do it” was not raised at all. Comprehension was in the first place,” Kabakov will recall, lamenting that “now the general strategy is the cessation of meaning formation,” and “this is the end of the great era of modernism, the rethinking of the values ​​of the art world.”

When Kabakov finally moved to the West in 1989, his success was a foregone conclusion: he made visitors to the Kassel Documenta (1992) stand dumbfounded in the Soviet toilet near the railway station; he put the audience of the Venice Biennale in the “Red Wagon” without wheels and a motor (1993), he taught the whole world to read the absurdity of Soviet rhetoric as a tragedy of inconspicuous people (Primakov sitting in a closet, Komarov flying, Gorokhov, a joker, Anna Petrovna dreaming); follow Life of the Flies (1992); read through the half-blind typescript of My Mother’s Album (1990), one of his most poignant installations.

It seemed that sometimes the artist also sees the light: more and more often angels and stairways to heaven appeared, and the classical order of forms slowly pushed aside the eternal chaos.

The doors of all the main museums were opened to him, personal exhibitions walked around the continents, “Ilya Kabakov” became “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov”, but he kept getting gloomy, silent, much more often than the duty vernissage smile, one could see the back of a short old man in a checkered shirt and soft wrinkled trousers with the usual plastic bag in hand. To some extent, he flew into space a long time ago. And we were witnesses of this, paying tribute to its greatness and place in history. Here he himself played with the words: “In life we ​​appear as losers, this stimulates good luck, and then it turns out that luck is a special last failure …”

Kira Dolinina