When I first heard of Ilya Kabakov. I thought it was cool that an artist forged his identity in opposition to Soviet despotism. But as I learned more about the unofficial artists who arose in the 60s and 70s, I came to realize that Kabakov was not a heroic dissident like, say, Joseph Brodsky. Kabakov and his compatriots, artists like Erik Bulatov, Komar and Melamid, Andrei Monastyrsky, critic Boris Groys, poet Lev Rubinstein, and many others, eked out freedom to work by not poking the Soviet bear. They created art in their apartments or with very temporary actions in obscure public places or with samizdat publications, keeping their heads low enough that the Soviet officialdom didn’t really feel obliged to step in. It helped that in Kabakov’s case that he was a productive member of the artists union and had a job as a children’s book illustrator. His earliest conceptual work drew on those book illustration chops—they are like conceptual comic books. This is what drew me to him initially.
These albums were not comics as we know them. They were instead boxes of drawings, each which told a surreal story, which Kabakov would read aloud to visitors—mostly other unofficial artists. These apartment gatherings were how they disseminated this conceptual art among their community. Tonight, let’s go to Ilya’s and listen to him read “The Mathematical Gorsky” then tomorrow, we go off to our officially approved Soviet jobs. I remember reading that Timothy Leary thought all the hippies could live in the USA as a film floating on the surface of a vast military-industrial state. This was to differentiate his view of how to live life from the heavily political types over in Berkeley. The way that Kabakov and the Moscow Conceptualists viewed their own activities vis-a-vis the Soviet empire reminds me of Leary’s idea. The question is that if you live in a polity or culture that hates the kind of thing you do, what is you strategy for life? Direct political action or just to live your life on the down-low? Kabakov chose the latter. Admittedly not as heroic as, say, Andrei Sakharov, but the Soviet Union nonetheless collapsed and Ilya Kabakov created a lifetime of incredible art
I’ve written about Kabakov several times. Other writers have written about Kabakov in depth. I recommend The Experimental Group by Matthew Jesse Jackson and The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment by Boris Groys. But on my to-read pile is On Art by Ilya Kabakov. I guess now that he’s dead, I should take a crack at it.
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