The Return of the Prodigal Forefather

SEE ALSO

KABAKOV AND KABAKOV

A major retrospective in Moscow brings Ilya and Emilia Kabakov back to the city of their artistic origins. What will the new Russia make of their darkly comic visions of the Soviet past?

AND

A CONVERSATION WITH EMILIA KABAKOV

The artist discusses Russia's new exhibition space, its fresh crop of billionaire collectors, and the retrospective that will take them all in.

Ilya Kabakov Emilia Kabakov Erik Bulatov Kasimir Malevich The Kandinsky Prize Visits London Echigo Triennial Brings Japanese Countryside to Life In Moscow, New Homes Planned for Contemporary Art EU to Extinguish Lightbulb Art?

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

MOSCOW—Twenty years ago, Ilya Kabakov left the USSR after the first real and official indication of a loosening of the government-controlled art world — a Sotheby’s sale in Moscow, where his works commanded a nice sum of rubles. Tempted by the opportunities offered abroad, where a taste and market for Russian art were emerging (only to die off in the 1990s recession), the artist went to New York and joined Ronald Feldman’s stable. The decision proved wise: Russia’s ’90s, while giving birth to a sketch of democracy and private enterprise, were unstable and poor. In New York, on the other hand, Kabakov continued to be a productive artist, buoyed by his wife and collaborator since 1988, Emilia. In two decades in exile, Ilya and Emilia have created a number of memorable works, and as the market recovered from the ’90s recession, Ilya once again become a favorite of collectors. At a February 2008 auction at Phillips de Pury & Co., his Beetle (1982) became the highest selling work by a living Russian artist.

This September, the Kabakovs have returned to Russia, quite a different country from the USSR of 20 years ago, with a large multivenue retrospective with staggered openings. It’s a giant event, and one for which the art world here has long held its breath. On September 15, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts opened the show with a series of paintings called “Gates. The Artist’s Last Works” and an installation of the same name — the only work made specifically for the retrospective. The paintings, which show a basic gate-like structure positioned on the horizon, have a Symbolist feel; the installation is an expensive-looking double door on a pedestal.

The next day saw what is widely considered the most important event of Kabakov’s visit. The Center for Contemporary Culture Moscow, a new space more informally known as the “Garage” and run by oligarch Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Daria Zhukova, had its official opening, which featured two installations, the large-scale Alternative History of Art (1997) and the smaller Red Wagon (1991). The former, almost a retrospective within a retrospective, introduces work by three fictional artists: Charles Rosenthal, “Ilya Kabakov,” and Igor Spivak. They are said to have worked in the 1930s, ’70s, and ’90s respectively, though their paintings and objects vary little – each is an amalgam of Socialist Realism and Malevich’s architectons, an attempt to make peace between the good Russian art (avant-garde) and the ugly (the official art of the Stalin era). These works are put in a faux museum with dimmed light.

And to top things off, on September 17, another privately owned contemporary art center, the Winzavod, debuted its selection of Kabakovs. Two large-scale installations, Life of Flies and WC (both 1992), are on view at the center’s White Hall, and a third, Tennis Game (1995) is at the nearby Marat Guelman Gallery, which rents space at Winzavod. Life of Flies is, again, a faux museum, in which the titular insect is simultaneously seen as the lowest form of life in a communal kitchen of the Soviet times and a key to global economy and politics. WC is quite another matter. In a free-standing structure instantly recognizable to many a Russian as a public toilet at a railroad station, Kabakov installs the accessories of the everyman’s private life — chairs, beds, children’s toys, and the like. The urinals are also present. A selection of archive photos of the artist by his longtime friend Yuri Rost accompanies the White Hall exhibition.

The budget for the retrospective was reported to be somewhere close to $3 million (which is quite large, by Russian standards), a number the organizers have neither confirmed nor denied. Sources say that Art Media Group, an emerging media corporation that plans to issue a Russian version of Art+Auction magazine, provided $300,000 for the segment at the CCCM.

Kabakov has long been an important, if remote, fixture of the local art world. Among the nonconformist artists who left the country in the 1970s and ’80s, he was considered the most elusive and the most reluctant to return. While most of his contemporaries from the Soviet underground now split time between Russia and the West, he lives exclusively in New York and doesn’t have an apartment or studio in Moscow. In his absence, his works and quotes have become the stuff of legend: Everyone knew, for example, that he had vowed never to return to his motherland, but nobody could prove it. Everyone also knew that sometime in the 1990s Kabakov was selected as one of the ten greatest living artists by a U.S.-based arts publication; but nearly nobody knew the name of the publication (it was ARTNews) — or the Kabakovs’ exact status in the West.

Although artists and critics have taken pride in Kabakov’s achievements, toward the end of the ’90s dissatisfaction emerged. People started asking questions: Why doesn’t he visit Russia? Have an exhibition? One critic went as far as to say that Kabakov “doesn’t exist.”

Kabakov notoriously hates to talk to the press, and during his long-awaited Moscow return he has sometimes been downright mean. There were rumors he called one interviewer a “fucker” and abruptly stopped the interview on the grounds that the journalist “doesn’t know a thing about art.” Kabakov has effectively shunned the mainstream press, leaving the tabloids and TV to concentrate on Zhukova and Abramovich.

Still, the critical reaction to the Moscow retrospective was pretty . . . uncritical. The sheer number of events necessitated that articles devote a good deal of space to giving basic information; beyond that, most publications also gave an informed analysis of Kabakov’s biography and art, including little or no opinion. In private conversations, writers were far more vicious, with one critic calling the “Gates” installation a “failure” and the project for CCCM a “bore.” Another said: “Kabakov is a great master, but why all the pomp? He has equally great contemporaries, for example, Erik Bulatov.”

The only notable press coverage came at OpenSpace.Ru, a culture site popular with both art professionals and a wider audience. Since the beginning of September, the visual arts section has been turned into a seminar on all things Kabakov: from the cultural significance of WC in contemporary Russia to the future of Zhukova’s Garage. The explanation for this level of interest is simple: OpenSpace.Ru is owned by Art Media Group. It was at the site that one found the only proper interview Kabakov gave. Speaking to editor Ekaterina Degot, who is well known internationally as a curator and critic, the artist was quite critical of the worship of glamour and money that is all too evident in Russia in 2008. “Everything’s ready for the coming of glamour,” he quipped. “Here comes the pink pus.”

In addition to her stature in the international art world and affiliation with OpenSpace, Degot had another thing going for her in winning the exclusive interview: She had taken drawing lessons from Kabakov as a 12-year-old girl when he was still in the USSR. This fact is significant. Twenty years ago, the Moscow art world was an informal system without private galleries and proper collectors that relied heavily on interpersonal connections. Exhibitions were held mostly in apartments and studios; to visit you had to know someone who knew the artist. While a lot of that has changed, one has a feeling that Kabakov has returned not to the Russia of today, but simply to his old friends, to the Russia that he left behind 20 years ago. There’s no better example of this than curator Joseph Backstein, the driving force behind the retrospective, who has known Kabakov since the 1970s and speaks highly of him. Kabakov has shows signs of contempt for the materialism of Russia today, but more than this, the overwhelming impression of his visit has been a sense of indifference toward the country’s current condition.

This reaction may actually go in both directions. For a new audience of critics and viewers alike — those who don’t know just how much authority Kabakov commanded in the 1970s and aren’t part of his “family” — breaking the Kabakov code can be a problem, especially as the art appears much more complex than the hype suggests. Moscow Conceptualism, with which Kabakov is associated, has always been a movement based on ideas, not visual conformity. But today’s Russian collectors and art viewers tend to value beautiful subject matter more than beautiful concepts. Flashy works are omnipresent; ideas are not. The Garage has been promoted as the place to be for the city’s young and curious; but Zhukova’s opening show might have presented a nut too hard to crack. Within a few days of the Garage opening, the stream of visitors to the installations had trickled to a near halt.

Indeed, the whole show has an air of disconnect: Kabakov’s ironic faux Socialist Realism is lost on a new generation ill equipped to engage with his work. Most seem unaware even of the basic concept behind Alternative History: Anecdotal evidence suggests that few viewers understand that the artists are not real. There is a market here for Soviet nostalgia, and Kabakov’s works could possibly enter it, but those who capitalize on that feeling — TV producers, Kremlin pundits — tend to present a clean-cut version of the USSR, one that differs dramatically from the artist’s ironic take. In a country where adolescents don’t know who Lenin was, and don’t really care, Kabakov’s works simply appear cryptic.

But one wonders if the artist finds it such a bad thing to get VIP treatment but still remain controversial and outside the mainstream.