***** Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias
by Svetlana Boym
Kabakov has a strange sense of timing. His art works seem to come after the millenium, not right before it. Kabakov's total installations look like the artist's Noah's arks, only we are never sure if the artist escaped from hell or from paradise . While conversant in the language of contemporary art, Kabakov's projects tease the Western interpreter and evade "isms." Is his art of homemaking modern, anti-modern, post-modern, or outmoded? On the one hand, it might appear that his art has little to do with modernism and post-modernism. In a way, the installations hark back to the origins of secular art and resemble an undecipherable baroque allegory. Or maybe they go back even further, to primitive creativity as a survivalist instinct - a way of fleeing from panic and fear, of hunting and gathering transient beauties in the wilderness of ordinary life. On the other hand, his project is belatedly modern,; it explores the sideroads of modernity, the aspirations of the little men and amateur artists and the ruins of modern utopias.
In the 1970s-1980s Ilya Kabakov was associated with the unofficial movement of Moscow "Romantic Conceptualism," known also as NOMA. It was not so much an artistic school, but a subculture and a way of life. (3) In the time after Khrushchev's thaw, the trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, cultural life in the official publications and museums became more restricted. A group of artists, writers, and intellectuals created a kind of parallel existence in a gray zone, in a "stolen space" carved out between Soviet institutions. Stylistically, the work of the conceptualists was seen as a Soviet parallel to pop art, only instead of the advertisement culture they used the trivial and drab rituals of Soviet everyday life - too banal and insignificant to be recorded anywhere else, and made taboo not because of their potential political explosiveness, but because of their sheer ordinariness, their all-too-human scale. The conceptualists "quoted" both the Russian avant-garde and Socialist realism, as well as amateur crafts, "bad art," and ordinary people's collections of useless objects. Their artistic language consisted of Soviet symbols and emblems, as well as trivial, found objects, unoriginal quotes, slogans, and domestic trash. The word and the image collaborated in their work to create a rebus-like idiom of Soviet culture. (4)
Yet the situation of these artists was quite different. Kabakov observed that in Russia, since the nineteenth century, "art" played the role of religion, philosophy, and a guide to life. "We always dreamed of making the projects that would say everything about everything," says the artist, laughing. "In the 1970s we lived like Robinsons, discovering the world through our art." What was the hybrid metaphysical-epic novel in the nineteenth century became a conceptual installation in the 1970s. The conceptualists also continued the twentieth-century tradition of art-making as a lifestyle and a form of resistance, as in the artist communes of the 1920s (like the "flying ship," the House of Arts which existed in Petrograd in 1918-1921), and as in the unofficial literary life of the 1930s, when the last surviving avant-garde group, OBERIU, engaged in the "domestic life of literature," writing album poetry, putting on house performances, and reading poems to one's best friends. The art of the conceptualists was fragmentary, but what made it significant was the context of kitchen conversations, discoveries, and dialogues in a private or semi-private, unofficial community. The conceptualists preferred collective action to written manifestoes, and did not mold themselves, like the avant-gardists, into small exclusive parties which frequently practiced excommunication. This was not a cult with a leader, but a group of eccentric individuals who partook in the same dangers of everyday life, shared a common conversation, and derived from it their sense of identity.
Now the artist has to carry with him his own memory museum and nostalgically reproduce it in each of his installations. If in the Soviet Union Kabakov's work took the form of albums and fragmentary collections of Soviet found objects, in exile Kabakov embraced the genre of the "total installation." Paradoxically, with the end of the Soviet Union, Ilya Kabakov's work has become more unified and total. In it Kabakov documents many endangered species - from the household fly to the ordinary survivor, homo-sovieticus, from lost civilizations to modern utopias. What is the artist nostalgic for? How can one make a home through art at a time when the role of art in society dwindles dramatically? Is his work about a particular ethnography of memory or about global longing? What gives makes an installation "total" is not a unified interpretation, but the totality is the environment. The total installation turns into a refuge from exile. Kabakov describes being overcome by a feeling of utter fear during his first residence "in the West" when he realized that his work, taken out of the context, could become completely unreadable and meaningless, could disintegrate into chaos, or dissolve in the sheer overabundance of art objects. While acknowledging the connection to Western conceptual art, Kabakov insists on the existence of fundamental differences in the perception of artistic space in Russia and the West. In the West, conceptual art originated with a ready-made. What mattered was an individual artistic object sanctioned by the space of the Museum of Modern Art. In the absence of such an institution in the "East," objects alone had no significance, whether they were drab or unique. It was the environment, the atmosphere, and the context that imbued them with meaning. What the artist missed most was the context of the kitchen conversation and the brotherhood of the NOMA artists, where all of his works made sense. Thus at the height of the information age, the artist tries to be a storyteller in the Benjaminian sense. He shares the warmth of experience, only his community is dispersed and exiled. So he shares his stories not with his own friends and compatriots, but with all those strangers nostalgic for lost human habitats and the slow pace of time.
Kabakov's total installations have several features that concern the issues of authorship, narrative dramatization, space and time. In the total installation Kabakov is at once artist and curator, criminal litterer and trash collector, author and multivoiced ventriloquist, the "leader" of the ceremony and his "little people." For a few years following the break up of the Soviet Union, Kabakov, who was already living abroad, persisted in calling himself a Soviet artist. This was an ironic self-definition. The end of the Soviet Union has put an end to the myth of the Soviet dissident artist. Sovietness, in this case, does not refer to politics, but to common culture. Kabakov embraces the idea of collective art. His installations offer an interactive narrative which could not exist without the viewer. Moreover, he turns himself into a kind of ideal communist collective, made up of his own embarrassed alter-egos - the characters from whose points of view he tells his many stories and to whom he ascribes their authorship. Among them are untalented artists, amateur collectors, and the "little men" of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Gogolian characters with a Kafkaesque shadow. Recently, Kabakov has discreetly dropped the adjective "Soviet" and now considers himself an artist, with two white space around the word.
While the artist builds his own total museum, changing walls, ceiling, floors, and lighting, the totality of the installation is always precarious; there is always something about to break or to leak, there is always something incomplete. And there is always an empty space, a white wall where artist and visitor can find their escape. Kabakov's installations are never site-specific; they are, rather, about transient homes. (5) Kabakov writes that his total installations have more to do with narrative and the temporal arts than with plastic and spatial ones, like sculpture and painting. Kabakov insists that his installations are not based on a model of a picture, but on the world as a picture. In other words, the visitor "walks into" the installation and inhabits a picture which offers him a complete universe. The "fourth dimension" is provided by the texts. The temporal arts allow for many narrative potentialities. The installations incorporate other temporalities, and cheat linear time and the fast pace of contemporary life. Past and future have their specific places in the installation. The past is embodied in small objects, fragments, ruins, trash, and vessels of all sorts - chests of drawers, cupboards, rugs, and worn out clothes. Mechanisms and mechanical devices, usually dysfunctional and non-utilitarian by the time they appear in the installation, are also creatures of the past. The future is embodied in texts, frames, white walls and specially lit sheets of paper, and strange objects with cavities, cracks, and openings. There are no symbols here, nothing "personifies" time á la Dali. Time hides in the configurations of objects, in their special positioning - against an empty wall, on a pedestal, on the floor. As for the present, it remains a mystery in the making. Kabakov has compared his installations to a theater during intermission. They are about life caught unawares by the artist, and about the reenchantment of the world through art at any cost. (6)
The Toilets: Obscene Homes
The word "obscene" has an obscure etymology. It can be related to the Latin ob (on account of) plus caenum (pollution, dirt, filth, vulgarity). But it can also be related to ob (tension) plus scena (scene, space of communal ritual enactment, sacred space). In this sense, obscene doesn't suggest anything vulgar, sexually explicit or dirty, but simply something eccentric, off-stage, unfashionable or anti-social. It is similar to profane (outside, but in proximity of the temple). The Toilet is Kabakov's most obscene installation so far, responsible for a cultural scandal, but it is difficult to figure out what exactly is "off" about it. In 1992 Kabakov constructed an exact replica of provincial Soviet toilet - the kind that one encounters in bus and train stations - for the Documenta show in Kassel, Germany. The installation struck the visitors as at once affectionate and and repulsive, confessional and conceptual. It is after the execution of the toilets that Kabakov made the final decision not to return to Russia.
The toilets were placed behind the main building of the exhibition, Friedrizeanum, just the right place for such an establishment. Kabakov describes them as "sad structures with walls of white lime turned dirty and shabby, covered by obscene graffiti that one cannot look at without being overcome with nausea and despair." (7) The original toilets did not have stall doors. Everyone could see everyone else "answering the call of nature" in what in Russian was called "the eagle position," perched over "the black hole." Toilets were communal, as were ordinary people's residences. Voyeurism became nearly obsolete; one developed, rather, the opposite tendency, that of retention of sight. One was less tempted to steal glances than to close one's eyes. Every toilet-goer accepted the conditions of total visibility.
To go to the toilet, visitors had to stand in a long line. Expecting to find a functional place to take care of one's bodily needs, or an artfully profane exhibit where one could flash a black outfit, visitors were inevitably surprised by the toilet's interior design. Inside, there was an ordinary, Soviet two-room apartment inhabited by "some respectable and quiet people." Here, side by side with the "black hole," everyday life continues uninterrupted. There is a table with a tablecloth, a glass cabinet, bookshelves, a sofa with a pillow, and even a reproduction of an anonymous Dutch painting, the ultimate in homey art. There is a sense of a captured presence, of an arrested moment: the dishes have not yet been cleared, a jacket has been dropped on a chair. Children's toys frame the black hole of the toilet, which has lost its smell with the passage of time. Everything is proper here, nothing appears obscene.
The toilet, of course, is an important stopping point for the discussion of Russia and the West. Travelers to Russia and Eastern Europe, from the Enlightenment to our day, have commented on the changing quality of personal hygiene as a marker of the stage of the civilizing process. The "threshold of civilization" was often defined by the quality of toilets. Perestroika started, in many cases, with perestroika of public and private toilets. Even Prince Charles pledged to donate a public toilet to the Pushkin Institute in Petersburg. In the major cities, paid toilets decorated by American advertisements and Chinese pin-up girls replaced public toilets like the ones reproduced by Kabakov, and the new rich prided themselves on their "europrepairs," which included toilet and bath. In the cultural imagination, the toilet stands right on the border between public and private, Russia and the West, sacred and profane, high and low culture....
Another origin of Kabakov's toilet is to be found in the Western Avant-Garde tradition. There is a clear "toiletic intertextuality" between this project and Marcel Duchamp's "The Fountain" (La Fontaine). Duchamp purchased a mass produced porcelain urinary, placed it on a pedestal, signed the object with the pseudonym R. MUTT, and proposed to exhibit at the American Society for Independent Artists. The hang jury rejected the project, saying that while the urinary is a useful object, it is "by no definition, a work of art." In twentieth-century art history this rejection has been seen as the birth of conceptual art and of an artistic revolution, which happened to take place in 1917, a few months before the Russian Revolution....
In comparison with Kabakov's toilet, Duchamp's urinary really does look like a fountain; it is very clean, "Western," and individualistic. Besides, scatological profanity itself became a kind of avant-garde convention - part of early twentieth-century culture as represented by Bataille, Leiris, etc. Kabakov's installation is not merely about radical defamiliarization and recontextualization, but also, more strikingly, about inhabiting the most uninhabitable space - in this case, the toilet. Instead of Duchamp's sculpture-like ready-made, we have here an intimate environment that invites walking through, storytelling, and touching. (The visitors are usually allowed to touch objects in Kabakov's installations.) The artist's own artistic touch is visible throughout. Kabakov took great care in arranging the objects in the inhabited rooms around the toilet, those metonymical memory-triggers of Soviet everyday life....
In the Russian press, Kabakov was reviewed very negatively. In spite of the political differences among his reviewers, they all seemed to agree that the toilets were an insult to the Russian people and to Russian national pride. Many reviewers evoked a curious Russian proverb: "Do not take your trash out of your hut" (ne vynosi sor iz izby), meaning do not criticize your own people in front of strangers and foreigners. The proverb dates back to an ancient peasant custom of sweeping trash into a corner behind a bench, and burying it inside instead of taking it outside. There was a common superstition that evil people could use your trash for casting magic spells. (11) This is a peculiar superstition against metonymic memory, especially when exhibited in an ambiguous foreign context. Kabakov's evocative domestic trash of the Soviet era was regarded by the Russian reviewers as a profanation of Russia. (12)
...Russian critics expropriated the artist's toilets and reconstructed them as symbols of national shame. National mythology had no place for ironic nostalgia.
In the "West," as Kabakov observed, there was also a curious tendency to see the toilet as a representation of Russia, only this time, a literal one. The ethnographic "other" is not supposed to be complex, ambivalent, and similar to oneself. The museum guard in Kassel told the artist how much he liked the exhibit and asked him what percentage of the Russian population lived in toilets after perestroika. The guard was actually right on the mark. Kabakov teases his viewer with almost ethnographic literalism. His art does not follow the modernist prescription of examining material and medium as such, nor does it employ the postmodern device of placing everything in quotation marks. The objects have an aura not because of their artistic status, but because of their awkward materiality, outmodedness, and otherworldliness - not in any metaphysical sense, but merely in the sense of being fragments of a vanished (Soviet) civilization.
Kabakov is an archeologist and a collector of banal memorabilia. The black hole of the toilet is surrounded by found objects from the Soviet children's world. This appears to be an inverse framing: objects frame the black hole, but the black hole gives them their uncanny allure. When another passionate collector of modern memorabilia, Walter Benjamin, visited Moscow in 1927 he abstained from direct ideological metaphors and theoretical conclusions, and instead offered a detailed and seemingly literal description of everyday things. In a letter from Moscow he wrote, "factuality is already theory." In other words, a narrative collage of material objects tells an allegory of Soviet reality. The same principle is at work in Kabakov's installations, where objects are on the verge of becoming allegories, but never symbols....
...In the choice of subject matter, Kabakov clearly appealed to scatological sensationalism as well as to Russian and Soviet exoticism, even if in
the end he does not "deliver."...
Yet what is obscene in Kabakov is neither the vulgar nor the sexual, but rather the ordinary, the all too human. "There is a taboo on humanness in contemporary art," Kabakov said in one of our conversations, sounding a bit like a disgruntled Russian writer of the nineteenth century, complaining about the coldness of the West. At the same time, one is struck by this insight. Humanness is not really a subject of contemporary art, which prefers body, ideology, or technology to the outmodedness of affect. Roland Barthes has observed the paradoxical nature of contemporary obscenity. He says that in high culture sentimentality has become more obscene than transgressive; the story of affections, frustrations, and sympathies is more obscene than Georges Bataille's shocking tale of the "pope sodimizing the turkey": "Sentimentality and surprise have become outmoded even in the lover's discourse. [..] As a (modern) divinity, History is repressive, History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tolerate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing; we reduce this past to no more than its signature. The lover's sentiment is old-fashioned, but this antiquation cannot even be recuperated as a spectacle." (13) Kabakov's nostalgic obscenity does not simply refer back in time, but rather sideways. In his artistic quest, Kabakov moves away from the much explored verticality of high and low toward the horizontality of the banal and its many invisible dimensions.
The toilet is embarrassing, not shocking. It does not contain the excrement of the artist, but his emotion....
Kabakov's work is about the selectivity of memory. His fragmented "total installations" become a cautious reminder of gaps, compromises, embarrassments, and black holes in the foundation of any utopian and nostalgic edifice. Ambiguous nostalgic longing is linked to the individual experience of history. Through the combination of empathy and estrangement, ironic nostalgia invites us to reflect on the ethics of remembering....
NOTES
[4] The artists of the last unofficial and occasionally underground Soviet group, the Moscow conceptualists, became known in the 1970s through a series of apartment art exhibits (called aptart), samizdat editions, and events, some of which resulted in direct confrontation with the Soviet police and arrests. (One of their outdoor exhibits was destroyed by bulldozers.) Kabakov, however, never engaged in explicit anti-government activities.
[5] Ilya Kabakov, On the "Total Installation" (Cantz: 1992).
[6] Ilya Kabakov, On the "Total Installation" (Cantz: 1992), p. 168.
[7] Ilya Kabakov, Installations 1983-1995 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1995), p. 162 and Ilya Kabakov, "The Toilet" (Kassel: Documenta IX, 1992). Special edition of the artist's books, courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.
[8] Ibid., pp. 162-163. Translation mine.
[9] Ibid., p. 163. Then Kabakov proceeds to argue with Dante Alighieri that it is not love that inspires art but fear and panic.
[10] For an insightful discussion of Duchamp see Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1996), pp. 124-135.
[11] Vladimir Dal', Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (St. Petersburg, 1882), Vol. IV, p. 275.
[12] It is hard to imagine Duchamp's urinary being interpreted as an insult to French culture, in spite of its provocative title "La fontaine." On the other hand, the insults that Kabakov endured [received] are part of being a "Soviet artist" - a role that Kabakov chose for himself not without inner irony and nostalgic sadomasochism.
[13] Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse, pp. 177-178. See Svetlana Boym, "Obscenity of Theory," Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1991, pp. 105-128.
©ARTMARGINS 1999
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It saddens me to think that the artistic avant-garde -- once collective subjects of revolutionary hope for freedom, for all their antics & illusions -- now have nothing to look forward to except the vanished everyday lives of the lost civilization.
Yoshie