Ilya & Emilia Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov: A critical biography

by Rod Mengham

Ilya Kabakov's work is now exhibited internationally, with the number of commissions he receives growing every year. But this level of attention has only been achieved during the last two decades, and particularly since his relocation to the West in 1987. Before that, he had lived from childhood in the Soviet Union, making art in difficult circumstances for more than three decades.
Born into a Jewish family, on 30 September 1933, Kabakov was the son of a locksmith, Josif Benzionovich Kabakov, and a bookkeeper, Bella Judelevna Solodukhina. They lived in Dnepropetrovsk, the Ukrainian town on the river Dnieper, until 1941, when the approach of the German army turned them into refugees. They moved first to the Caucasus and then to Uzbekistan, settling for a few years in Samarkand. In 1943, Kabakov's father left home in order to fight the Germans, and in the same year, Kabakov made his formal entry into the Russian art world, in the shape of the art school at the Leningrad Academy of Arts. Following the bombing of Leningrad, the Academy had been moved temporarily to Samarkand; during these years, many Soviet institutions were as itinerant as Soviet citizens themselves. In 1944, when the Academy shifted yet again, this time to Zagorsk outside Moscow, Kabakov and his mother went with it, finding accommodation at the Troitsky-Sergiev monastery. With the end of the war, the Academy returned to Leningrad and resumed its former identity as a boarding school. Kabakov, however, did not board there, since his mother was unable to obtain the necessary permit to reside in Leningrad. With the help of the Director of the Leningrad Academy, he transferred to the Moscow Art School, living in a student dormitory, while his mother stayed in nearby Zagorsk, working in a textiles warehouse.
After graduating in 1951, he passed the entrance exam to the Moscow Surikov Academy, where he joined the faculty of graphic arts. In his second year, he selected book illustration as his major, and while still a student began to earn money illustrating children's books. This was to become his chief source of income until 1987.
The first book to be published, one on which he collaborated with his friend Kirill Sokolov, was 'The Green Inkwell', a story by G. Lupsyakov. Kabakov was to produce sets of illustrations for over 150 children's books before managing to earn his living as an installation artist in the West.
Alongside this pragmatic activity, he also began to assemble the components of an oeuvre to which he felt more personally committed: aseries of projects he has referred to as the 'work for myself'. The first efforts in this vein consisted of a huge number of abstract colour drawings using crayon on paper. The artist has calculated that between 500 and 600 of these drawings, which often evoke the principles of abstract expressionism, were completed between 1953 and 1960. Most have now been lost, or were given away at the time, but a certain number have survived as contributions to the two albums, 'The Beginning' and 'Four Albums'.
A number of important personal contacts were made during the years spent at the Surikov Academy, where an especially influential teacher was Mikhail Alpatov, Kabakov's tutor in art theory. Among the students, Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev were particularly close associates, meeting often at Bulatov's dacha outside Moscow. With Bulatov, Kabakov forged a link with an earlier generation of Russian artists in the person of the painter Robert Falk, who had been a member of the pre- Revolutionary group 'Knave of Diamonds'. There is no doubt that Kabakov treated Bulatov's dacha as something of a haven and a place he found remarkably conducive to work. It was here that he painted a number of canvases in the style of Cezanne: a portrait, a landscape, and seven or eight still-lifes; the portrait and landscape are now in New York, but the still-lifes, like so many of the compositions of Kabakov’s Russian years, were left behind in Moscow when the artist emigrated.
For several years, both before and after graduating from the Academy in 1957, Kabakov travelled energetically around the Soviet Union, hiking around Moldavia and the Caucasus, and making expeditions to Samarkand and Svakhetia. He went to Svakhetia in the company of Bulatov and Vasiliev, all three nearly coming to grief when they lost their footing in a landslide.
In 1960, however, he made his first trip abroad, to the East German Republic, and was so captivated by the difference he felt in the cultural atmosphere that he almost remained there. East Germany was firmly within the Soviet bloc, yet Kabakov had sensed its proximity to the west and in one sense never looked back. For the next two years he spent a great deal of time learning German and culturally reorientating himself. 1960 was also a significant year for Kabakov in practical terms. He joined forces with the artist Ulo Sooster in order to rent a studio space. The two of them secured a basement area leased to the Soviet Union of Artists by the local housing administration (ZHeK) on Malye-Kamenshtshiki Street. Kabakov's first application to join the Union was made in this year; he was to become an elected member several years later in 1966. Membership meant improved access to materials, which were often scarce, and entitlement to stay in the so-called 'houses of creativity', retreats for artists located in rural areas; Kabakov was to use this privilege to good effect, especially during stays in Lithuania and the Crimea. For the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Artists' Union, an exhibition was organized at the Manege Gallery, mixing the work of an older generation of formalists, including Falk and Schevchenko, with that of a younger group of nonconformist painters, including Niezvestni, Bielutin and Sooster. An official reaction of strong disapproval was expressed by Krushchev in person, and from this point onwards it became increasingly difficult to show in public work that did not reflect Soviet government policy.
One of the most important venues for the alternative art scene that developed in these conditions was the apartment Ilya Kabakov: Critical Biography - Page 3 by Rob Menghan of Ulo Sooster, Kabakov's associate. Sooster hosted a series of meetings throughout the 1960s, the celebrated 'Vtorniki', always held on a Tuesday.
Western journalists played a crucial role at this stage, drawing attention to the kinds of Russian art that would otherwise remain completely hidden. A key figure was the Italian writer Antonelli Trombadore, who staged an exhibition comprised entirely of unofficial art works. Kabakov was involved in this, alongside Sooster, Niezvestni, Brussilovski and Sobolev. These five artists were drawn closer together by the circumstance of occupying studios in the same vicinity, that of Sretenski Boulevard.
Kabakov moved there in 1968, having obtained permission from the Artists' Union to have a studio created in the attic of the Rossiya Insurance Company’s building at no. 6/1. The work was done by David Kogan, who had carried out many similar commissions. It was Kabakov's first purpose-built studio; Sooster moved into a similar space at the same address. Kabakov's studio was to become the focus of an active exchange of ideas, a venue for lectures and discussions among friends who later became known as the Sretenski Boulevard Group. Kabakov's new working conditions had a significant impact on his own output, not just on the activities of the group of artists he was associated with. He was able to conceive of his various projects on a wholly different scale of operations.
Prior to 1968, the bulk of his work consisted of drawings (between 200 and 250 during the period 1960-1968) all of manageable proportions, typically 20 × 30 cm. This output was punctuated by the occasional large painting, but the small number of such works emphasizes that they were exceptions to the rule. The most notable large canvases were 'Head with a Sphere' (200 × 160, 1965), 'Boy' (186 × 160, 1965), 'Pipe, Stick, Ball and Fly' (130 × 160, 1966) and 'Machine Gun and Chicks' (100 × 100 × 50, 1966).
After 1968, Kabakov initiated several extended projects, the individual components of which were often executed on an ambitious scale.
In 1969, he began a series of large 'White Paintings', all in masonite on commonplace board, emphasizing the flatness of the picture's surface, which is mostly taken up with an unbroken whiteness, interrupted only by minute details. The first composition in this mode was 'Berdyansk Spit' (150 × 100, 1969-70), ostensibly a landscape, in which the few figurative elements barely intrude upon the large area of blankness that the viewer's mind has to invest with significance. 'Berdyansk Spit' was followed by 'A Man and Small House' (150 × 100, 1970) and 'Death of the Dog Alya' (180 × 230, 1970). This phase of work was in some respects a prelude to the series of enormous canvases completed several years later, in which an even larger white surface is conceived of as capturing light coming from both behind and in front of the painting, accentuating focus on the tiny figurative details but also allowing that focus to be more easily overwhelmed. The pictures in this group include '12 Little White Men Above a Plate' (260 × 380, 1977), 'Flying' (260 × 380, 1978) and 'The Garden' (260 × 380, 1978). The size of these works and the obvious challenge they issue to the viewer emphasizes the conditions of reception to a peculiar degree; they presuppose both a physical and a conceptual relationship between art and its audience that brings the question of ambience into the equation.
Kabakov's work progressed during the following two decades towards an increasing concentration on the relation between art and the physical space in which it is presented, and on the realtime continuum in which the viewers (often listeners and readers, as well) interact with that space.
Another aspect of the work of the early 1970s that accelerated the progress towards conceptualism was the introduction of textual elements into the framed space of the picture, a practice that would lead rapidly to the composition of works in which textual material was to occupy all the available space. The earliest exercises in this genre, in which the picture frame delimits an area inscribed with text and encroached on by household objects, were the three works entitled 'Where Are They?' (147 × 350, 1970), 'Answers of the Experimental Group' (147 × 350, 1970) and 'Everything About Him' (370 × 147, 1970). Again, the viewer has to deal with a picture as large as the wall of a Russian apartment, covering an area in which the barrier between art and life, between decoration and function, disappears, and in which text can often have the parodic character of official instruction or information.
Perhaps the most far-reaching of Kabakov's experiments with different methods of presentation in the early 1970s, was his devising of the genre of albums that operate simultaneously as forms of sculpture, illustration, theatre and literature. The seminal albums, 'Ten Characters', which occupied him between 1970 and 1974 provided the germ for several of the installations first projected in the middle of the following decade, although there is no direct connection between these albums and the later installation of the same name. Each of the ten albums encompasses a theme or state of consciousness dramatised with reference to a fictive character whose entire range of concerns, and the narrative of whose life, revolves around the exploration of this dominant theme. These creatures of the artist's imagination seem to acquire a degree of objective reality with the provision of commentaries derived from a number of different voices. The interplay of visual and textual materials resists the idea of narrative closure, since they appear to diverge from each other as often as they converge. None of the commentaries reaches a conclusion, or has a greater degree of authority than the others. Each of the albums is completed-or left incomplete-with the addition of a blank page which the viewer may use as the occasion for his or her own imagined commentary, in a manoeuvre which resembles that of the later 'White Paintings'. The ten albums together amount to 460 loose leaf pages, on which Kabakov employed a combination of water colours and coloured pencils.
Kabakov's work developed according to a logic of its own during the 1970s; but his innovations found a ready response in a milieu that sustained and brought into relation with each other the artistic programmes of figures such as Eric Bulatov, Icvan Chuikov, Pavel Pepperstein, Komar & Melamid and Kabakov himself, as well as the writers Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Vsevolod Nekrasov and Vladimir Sorokin. These artists, with others, became known as the Moscow Circle of Conceptualists. Among other things, it was a forum that provided Kabakov with a medium for performing his albums in the shape of giving voice to the commentaries, in this way enlarging the scope of a project that was susceptible both to individual contemplation and to public realization in a gallery- or theatrerelated context.
The Conceptualists also met frequently to debate the organizing principles of their art, taking it in turns to present topics for discussion. A decisive figure in the shaping of these debates was the writer Boris Groys, whose role as interlocutor in the theoretical Ilya Kabakov: Critical Biography - Page 5 by Rob Menghan elaboration of Kabakov's work has been maintained until the present day.
The invention of characters with their own individual projects was taken a step further by Kabakov in the period 1978- 83, when he began to generate separate bodies of work that could be attributed to pseudonymous artists pursuing stylistic goals identifiably not those of Kabakov himself. These semiautonomous oeuvres have not only remained a part of the total output, they have formed the basis of some of Kabakov's most ambitious undertakings, as with the major installation 'The Life and Work of Charles Rosenthal', shown in Mito in 1999 and in Frankfurt am Main in 2000-2001. This very complex and extended series of paintings, drawings and Maquettes simulates a retrospective review of the entire life's work of a painter whose career manifests all the symptoms of successive artistic fashions in the Russian and Soviet twentieth century.
The first beginnings of this meticulous investigation of the Scope and ambiguity of pastiche are represented by the canvases 'Tested!' (260 × 380, 1981) and 'Supermarket' (260 × 190, 1981) which inhabit the conventions and adopt the recommended subject matter of Soviet socialist realism. While the subject matter of 'Tested!' is the interrogation of Soviet citizens in the matter of Party loyalty, Kabakov's intention with this work is to test the limits of an artistic method so blatantly at the disposal of a ruling ideology. His work as a whole never ceases to reflect on its cultural historical origins, and on the aesthetic conventions with which that history has been articulated; certain phases of his career have concentrated on developing a practice that is determinedly extraneous to these conventions, while others have subverted them from within, but the two alternatives have been held in a constant tension. In many ways the projects that seem most intrinsic to the expression of social relations during the Soviet era are those assemblages which appear to conform to the directives of a committee, and which might have been produced by a hack artist working for one of the Soviet district housing committees (the ZhEKs). These parodies of public service announcements typically resemble, while they distort, the kinds of schedules and information bulletins to be found on noticeboards in the communal apartments that define the everyday life of the period. Examples include 'Taking Out the Garbage' (150 × 210, 1980) and 'Sunday Evening' (150 × 210, 1980). The evocation of communal apartments, with their atmosphere of constant mutual surveillance on the part of the inhabitants, with the feeling that goes with this of ever-decreasing space in which to move and of less and less air to breathe, and with their unremitting noise, has remained a crucial element in the Kabakov oeuvre. During this time at the beginning of the 1980s, however, the issues of communal living pervaded his work and clung to it with a special tenacity, leading him to refer to the period from 1978 to 1983 as his 'ZhEK' years. This immersion in the banal is at its most striking the so-called 'Kitchen Series', in which mundane objects are displayed and made the focus of enquiry, in a process that estranges both the look and the function of these articles. Reversing the order of priorities in a culture whose axis was the process of production, Kabakov began to cultivate an aesthetic in the early 1980s that was organized around waste products, which lavished attention to an obsessive degree on the undervalued, on what was neglected and unwanted. Organizing several of his projects been thrown away, around preparing a taxonomy of what would normally pass as formless, Kabakov began to pose questions about the allocation of value in a system of meanings where artistic judgment is conditioned by an ideological imperative. By giving a value to rubbish, Kabakov opened up the debate around the relation of art to the market and to canonicity.
The next step was to assign value, cultural weight and presence, to an artwork that did not exist. In 1982-3, he devised an installation for the Pushkin Museum in Moscow entitled 'The Fly With Wings'. The installation had not been commissioned by the museum and has, unsurprisingly, never been shown there (although it has since been mounted at the Kunstverein, Hannover). Kabakov projected an arrangement of 132 pages of typed text that would refer conceptually and symmetrically to a single drawing of a fly. The drawing would be technically unexceptionable but artistically negligible, while this neutral representation of something generally held to be despicable would be overwhelmed by a series of cacophanous interpretations, making the basis for the understanding of art genuinely and obviously conflictual rather than hegemonic.
From the middle of the 1980s, Kabakov's work started to gravitate inexorably towards the planning and realization of a series of 'total' installations. To begin with, these had to be relatively restricted in scope, before Kabakov's emigration to the West in 1987 gave him access to the possibilities of large exhibition spaces. Perhaps the earliest complete such project, installed initially in Kabakov's own studio, was 'The Man Who Flew Into Space' (1985). This consisted of the debris of an apparently recently occupied room at the centre of which was a large catapult robust enough to take the weight of a single human being; above the centre of this apparatus in the ceiling, was a large hole apparently made by the exit velocity of the room’s missing inhabitant. This humorous but complex work ridicules the discrepancy between Soviet technological ambition and the impoverished material reality of everyday life in Russia, at the same time as the ideological competitiveness of the space race is transcended by the theories of a character for whom the entire universe is permeated by huge sheets of energy travelling upwards; it is as if choosing precisely the right moment to jump, or be catapulted, upwards allows him to join the stream of energy and be whirled into space by it. This almost impossible amalgam of biting satire and idealism is symptomatic of Kabakov’s mixed response to a Soviet reality which generates both an absurd hypocrisy and a measure of utopian grandeur. Contemporary with 'The Man Who Flew Into Space' was 'The Garbage Man'; which was premised on the discovery of a room in a communal apartment that is completely filled with garbage. The absent resident's habit of retaining everything without attempting to divide what is important from what is unimportant, provides an important metaphor for the politics of memory in a culture prone to constantly revising and rewriting its own history: 'To deprive ourselves of all this means to part with who we were in the past, and in a certain sense, it means to cease to exist.' Kabakov's first exploration of working conditions in the West occurred in 1987, when the Kunstverein, Graz, offered him a six months residency starting in October of that year. After three months, he was forced to return to Russia for the funeral of his mother, who died in January 1988 in Berdyansk. Ilya Kabakov: Critical Biography - Page 7by Rob Menghan
He completed the residency with an installation, in the foyer of the Graz Opera House, entitled 'Before Supper', then returned briefly to Russia before setting off to New York to organize a full-scale installation which remains pivotal in his oeuvre, 'Ten Characters'. 'The Man Who Flew Into Space' and 'The Garbage Man' were included in the array of ten fictional case-studies of residents in a communal apartment. Another was 'The Man Who Flew Into His Picture', which exploited the technique of the white paintings, positioning the viewer in front of a small drawing of the image of the self, set against an expanse of whiteness, of an 'ocean of light', encouraging the viewer to move in imagination 'with all his soul' into an 'infinite depth' while remaining simultaneously, and uncomfortably, aware that he is also sitting alone in front of a poorly painted white board. A fourth character, 'The Composer' projects a similar form of ambivalence in offering his neighbours simultaneously 'the music of the spheres' and an infernal racket they are moved to complain about. A fifth character was 'The Man Who Collects the Opinion of Others', recording the responses provoked in his fellow inmates by the action of throwing a random selection of objects into the corridor; a philologist by training, his model for the diffusion of points of view resembles that of the wave theory of the distribution of language families, with their intersecting ripples of influence travelling out from a central point of origin; Kabakov once again playing on the discrepancy between social reductiveness and theoretical grandeur. A sixth character was the 'Untalented Artist', whose derivative hack-work epitomizes the style of production mirrored by Kabakov in his 'ZhEK' phase. 'The Short Man' also appears to borrow Kabakov’s example in the construction of a kind of album in the form of a labyrinthine screen depicting the full range of activities that take place in the communal kitchen. Although the screen is mounted in the form of an installation filling the entire room, it is successfully ignored by those guests invited to view it, whose familiarity with the short man as a colleague from work prevents them from seeing him in any other light. 'The Collector' pursues a project similar to that of 'The Garbage Man', while the ninth and tenth are 'The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters,' and 'The Man Who Saves Nikolai Viktorovich' The former of these two places the entire installation within the realm of a radical insecurity, about authorship and origin, while the latter hypothesizes the viewer as the only potential saviour referred to in the title. The installation hovers between the knowledge of entrapment and a fantasy of redemption, finding ways of ensuring that the audience is complicit with that ambiguating process. 1988 was an eventful year, with Kabakov exhibiting in New York, in Bern at the Kunstverein ('The Rope') and at the 'Aperto' show as part of the Venice Biennale ('Before Supper').
In 1989, he was particularly active in Paris, at the Galerie de France ('Where Are Those Little Men') and at the Centre Georges Pompidou ('The Man Who Flew Into Space'). In July of 1989, he relocated to the DAAD-Galerie in Berlin to take up a one-year stipend, in time to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall in November; this was an experience that was to feed directly into his installation in Berlin entitled 'Two Memories of Fear' (1990). It was during this period also that he erected a second Exhibition at RFFA in New York ('He Went Crazy, Undressed and Ran Away Naked'). 1989 was pivotal in another respect: it was the year when Kabakov began working with his future wife, Emilia (they were to be married in 1992). From this point onwards, all their work was collaborative, in different proportions according to the specific project involved. With commissions such as 'The Children's Hospital' (1998-9) and 'The Palace of Porjects' (1998), their cooperation was a full partnership.
With other installations, Emilia acted variously as translator, organizer, assistant and initiator of formative ideas. Kabakov had already merged his own creativity with that of various fictional surrofates, now he took the decisive step of entering a genuinely interactive relationship. In 1991, the Kabakovs first exhibited 'The Red Wagon', at the Stadlische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf it has since been moved to a permanent installation at the Museum of Wiesbaden. This project combines elements of three distinct phases and styles of art: the historic avant-garde, Soviet socialist realism, and the conceptualism of unofficial art in the 1970s and 1980s. It also features an extensive use of music, specifically, the socialist songs of the interwar period, which always envelope the audience in a particularly mesmerizing fashion. 'The Red Wagon' is one of the most successfully evocative treatments of the cultural history of twentieth century Russia, which it quite precisely encapsulates, as Kabakov himself has recognized: 'I exported, in essence, a cube of Soviet air'. It both registers and argues for the intimate relationship between an aesthetics and its historical moment. The Red Wagon' was followed by an even more rapid succession of installations, including 'The Bridge' (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992), 'The Life of Flies' (Kunsthalle, Koln,1992) and 'The Toilet' (Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992). This last project had a phenomenal impact on the international audience exposed to it. Situated in a yard at the rear of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, Kabakov's installation consisted of a small white-washed building that looked exactly like a simply constructed public toilet. Almost windowless, turned in on itself, available to any member of the public, but designed to offer a temporary privacy of a highly personal nature, the purpose of this amenity-and of its very public sort of privacy was effectively turned inside out for the visitor who stepped over its threshold. The interior was fitted out not with water closets and basins, but with the conventional furnishings of a small Russian apartment. At a glance, domestic privacy was shattered by the exercise of public access, putting the viewer momentarily in the position of uninvited intruder, of the potential house-breaker who might even urinate over the furniture. The confusing of the categories of public and private space was further complicated by an awareness of the reproducibility of the basic two-room housing unit across Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe, of the extent to which the concept of 'home' may be standardized, deprivatised, rendered anonymous.
After Kassel, the Kabakovs moved directly to New York, to set up their third show for Ronald Feldman, 'Incident at the Museum, or Water Music'. This project was ostensibly a collaboration between Kabakov and one Stepan Koshelev, although Koshelev, like Rosenthal, is one of Kabakov's inventions. As the title suggests, it was also partly a collaboration with an artist in another medium; Kabakov with composers twice in 1992, once with Vladimir Tarasov in the composition of 'Water Music', and once with Alfred Schnittke, whose Opera 'Life with an Idiot' featured costumes and stage design by Kabakov for its premiere with the Koninklijke Nederlandse Opera. Ilya Kabakov: Critical Biography - Page 9 by Rob Menghan
Kabakov rounded off the year delivering a series of lectures on the concept of the total installation at Stadel School of Art in Frankfurt am Main. He had been awarded the Arthur Kopcke Award in Copenhagen in 1992, as well as the Ludwig Prize in Aachen; in 1993 he was to receive the Honorary Diploma of the Biennale di Venezia, after the installation 'The Red Pavilion' at the Biennale, the Max Beckmann Prize from the city of Frankfurt am Main, and the Joseph Beuys Prize from the Joseph Beuys Foundation in Basel. Further honours would include nomination as Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres after the installation of 'We Are Living Here' at the Centre Georges Pompidou, in 1995, the Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar in 1998, an honorary doctorate at the University of Bern in 2000, and, not least, American citizenship in 2000. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the number of commissions the Kabakovs have accepted has grown almost exponentially.
In 1993 there were four major installations, 'We Live Here' (Centre Georges Pompidou), 'The Boat of My Life' (Salzburger Kunstverein), 'School No.6' (Cinnati Foundation, Marfa) and 'The Big Archive' (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). 'We Live Here' functions as an extraordianry parable of the Brezhnev era, when Soviet culture appeared to stagnate, its model of history winding down. The installation grouped together a number of huts designed to accommodate construction workers contracted to build the ideal city, but construction had evidently long since ceased, and the temporary shelters had acquired a depressingly permanent character. 'The Boat of My Life' and 'School No.6' are in some ways the most elegiac and personal works in the oeuvre, particularly in respect of the literary tact with which their texts have been composed. The 'boat' is a large wooden structure whose cargo consists of crates of memorabilia, the symbolic framework for its acts of recall being the journey of Charon's ferry-boat, in which there is only one passenger. 'School No. 6' is a permanent installation in a suite of semi-derelict buildings, the paraphernalia of a deserted school evoking not only the relics of a lost era, but also reflections, often literal reflections, of the viewer's own history: 'The glass in the showcases is placed at an angle so the viewer is seeing not only what is inside, but also his own face looking into the depth of the lost past.' 'The Big Archive' is perhaps the first instance of the extremely large, cellular installations, part retrospective, part remodelling of existing concepts, that the Kabakovs have organized over the last eight years or so; these would culminate in the monumental 'Palace of Projects' (The Roundhouse, London, 1998) and '50 Installations' (Kunstmuseum, Bern, 2000).
In between these summations of the artistic research that has been consolidated over four decades, there has been a regular stream of smaller (not always that much smaller) exhibitions, including: 'Monument to the Lost Glove' (Musee d'Art Contemporain, Lyon, 1996); 'Treatment with Memories' (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997); '16 Small Installations' (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 1998); 'The Children's Hospital'(Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1998-9); 'The Old Bridge' (Hannoversch-Munden, 1998) and 'The Fountain' (Middelburg, 2000). It is perhaps the 'Palace of Projects' which most effectively compresses together the themes, methods and histories of the Kabakovs' extraordinary itinerary through an unfolding series of ideas about the community of art. The Palace shell, built with lightweight woods and plastics, resembled externally other spiraliform structures such as the Tower of Babel and Tatlin's Monument. These emblems of ambition were alluded to in order to ironise the relations of communal and individual, and to question the grounds of cultural unity and disunity. The very title 'Palace of Projects' recalls Soviet usage in reference to institutions such as the Palaces of Culture, designed to relocate power and authority in the culture of the people, or rather to produce the illusion of the people's control over their own history and way of life. Inside the monumental shell, the Kabakovs' installation was composed of a sequence of small rooms, each housing one or more of the total of 65 projects intended to either 'make yourself better' or 'make this world better'. The overwhelming majority of plans stemmed from, and sought to alleviate the conditions of, single lives lived out in extremely cramped quarters. The idea of the palace was made to collide with the claustrophobic habitus of the Moscow apartment block.The stereotype emerging from the viewer's comparison between projects was that of a life lived entirely within doors. A number of projects even sought to make a virtue of confinement by devising means of withdrawal further within the space of the room, identifying recesses, corners, and closets to inhabit or to concentrate on. The palace itself was conceived of as an indoors installation, as a container that should itself be contained 'inside an enormous exhibition hall.' Although a certain number of the projects envisaged life within the family, or some element of communality, a high proportion took for granted a life of solitude. Contact with others outside the apartment would be minimal, including the proverbial lowering of a basket containing money in exchange for food (Project 8). Time and again, the specifications for individual projects would stress the advantage of being able to realize the project's aims 'without leaving the confines of your room'. The counterpointing of private and public spheres took the form more often that not of counterpointing domestic interiors with a scale of operations that was nothing less than global, the latter including plans for the equal distribution of energy across the entire planet, proposals for the resurrection of the dead (of all those who have ever lived) and schemes for the development of a common language that would unite humanity 'with the environment from which we have been torn away'. This oscillating between the individual and the universal left no room-literally no space-for the elaboration of the social. The most important principle of organization across the whole range of projects was verticality. Doors in the ceiling and free-standing ladders typified the desire for upward movement that was a common response to the spatial restrictions of Soviet domestic life. Project 16 envisaged the use of a ladder 1,200 metres high, in a hyperbolical expression of resistance to the reality whereby the space above a Russian apartment was likely to be occupied by another apartment of exactly the same dimensions, and beyond that another, and another, and so on. Project 24 represented a compromise with the reality principle in its siting of paradise just below the ceiling, the paradisial inhering in a collection of objects of devotion placed on a narrow shelf running round the tops of the walls: a down-to-earth paradise, approachable only by ladder. A popular substitute for the ladder was a pair of wings, ideally angel's wings, stored symbolically 'under lock and key in a special soft case in a mirrored Ilya Kabakov: Critical Biography - Page 11 by Rob Menghan closet'- flight and restraint, held together in a perpetual tension. This fantasy of angelic flight came at the tailend of a 1980s preoccupation with transcendence, demonstrated most powerfully in the Wim Wenders film 'Wings of Desire', where the all-seeing, all- knowing eyes and ears of surveillance were transfigured into a benign watchfulness. Kabakov's dreams of winged flight were correlated ultimately with a much more Russiansolution to the problem of dealing imaginatively with architectural forms of discipline. A surprising variety of the projects were captivated by the experience of the cosmonaut; he became an object of contemplation only ever referred to indirectly, but this obliquity of reference allowed the development of an astonishing equation between domestic space and outer space, confined space and infinite space. The cosmonaut's rocket shipspecifically, his capsule-represents the ultimate in restriction: a situation of extreme claustrophobia which is paradoxically the condition of an unparalleled scope of movement. And the cosmonaut is also a rare source of national pride, an heroic figure who functions as the means of glamorising the very principle of enclosure. The imaginative necessity of verticality, of upward movement, was incorporated into the basic design of Kabakov's 'Palace', which required the visitor to progress gradually up and around the spiral structure.
It is this dynamic which one can imagine in respect of the evolution of Kabakov's work until now; it has consisted of a suite of projects always in the process of returning to its own first principles and inflecting them with a sense of new historical directions to follow; both realistic and fabulous, powerfully obligated and irrepressible.

SOURCES
Ilya Kabakov, Ten Characters (Ronald Feldman Fine Art, New York, 1988)
The Fly With Wings (Kunstverein, Hannover, 1991)
The Man Who Flew Into His Picture (ICA, Philadelphia, 1991)
The Bridge (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991)
Life of Flies (Cantz, Bonn, 1992)
The Boat of My Life (Salzburger Kunstverein, 1993)
School No.6 (Cinnati Foundation, Marfa, 1993)
We Live Here (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993)
The Communal Kitchen (La Fondation Dina Vierny, Musee Maillol, Paris, 1994)
On the 'Total' Installation (Cantz, Bonn, 1995)
The Palace of Projects (Artangel, London, 1998)
The Red Wagon (Verlag fur Moderne Kunst, Nurnberg, 1999)
50 Installations (Kunstmuseum, Bern, 2000)
The Text as the Basis of Visual Expression (Oktagon, 2000).
Rod Mengham 'Inner Visions: Kabakov, Bourgeois, Whiteread', in tate (Issue 23, Winter 2000).
Amei Wallach. Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away (Harry N. Adams, New York, 1996).