On the Peculiarity of Art Cultures
Ilya Kabakov on being an underground artist in the Soviet Union
I just read a fascinating piece of writing by Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023) called "An Apologia for Personalism in Art of the 1960s:An Impassioned Monologue on 23 June 1986.” What being an artist meant was very different in the Soviet Union than in the West. Kabakov wrote, “Tachism invented in a cultural milieu is not the same as Tachism executed in a milieu devoid of culture.” In a way, he is telling us that in looking at the world of underground Soviet art, “You had to be there.” But even though this essay is not structured like a history, or even like an ordinary essay—it is much looser and more personal than that—Kabakov does manage to describe the position of the unofficial artist very convincingly from the unofficial point-of-view.
Official and unofficial worldviews are based on totally different psychological mindsets. Most of all, it is a different relationship to the viewer. Official artistic life is oriented towards an abstract viewer who does not exist in real life. It appeals to a viewer who does not exist, who has no flesh, no psychology, an abstract, synthetic paper character addressed by the artist, poet, or musician. This viewer and listener was not invented in the 1960s. There was a supposition that it isn’t an individual person who reads a book or looks at a painting, but that everyone all at once is doing it. Some sort of mass, perhaps a million people. are standing in front of a painting and looking at it. You know, the way you have fifty people watching TV together in a rest home.
Addressing the general crowd instead of an individual person is very vividly expressed by Mayakovsky. He alone speaks tp a faceless mass of people, filling up all the space, expressing delight, as they await his every word. He believed in that reality and ‘saw’ that homogenous sea of heads extending to the horizon before him.
In the 1960s a comparable abstract mass, a crowd, became a taken-for-granted reality; it became the ‘viewer,’ and all official culture was now addressed to it.
Unofficial culture always addresses an individual, concrete person. The viewer and listener lost to official culture becomes the addressee, the object of interest, and subject of perception in unofficial culture. It was that way from the start and remains today. Who is this subject? It is first of all a creature who has a capacity for self-reflection and an ability to appreciate a work of art personally, through his own experience. This is not a person who stands like a baby chick with an open beak, delightedly swallowing whatever he is told, but rather a person who calmly, attentively, and probably coolly, listens to what you tell him, [. . .]
Unofficial art. then, is addressed to a person who can enter into a dialogue of equals with you rather than participate in the game of leader-crowd. teacher-pupil, prophet-adept, doctor-patient, and so on.
Kabakov spends a lot of time on this topic, in part because he was both official and unofficial. He was a member of the artist’s union and had a “day job” as a children’s book illustrator. (When you look at the famous albums he produced, you can see the children’s book illustrator techniques whenever he draws figures.) The unofficial part of your life didn’t pay your rent (although Kabakov does relate one unofficial artist who was able to make a meager living off of commissions). He contemplates the calculus an unofficial artist would make for his or her official job. The best day job was a job that paid well for as little labor as possible, obviously, and it turned out that being a children’s book illustrator was just such a job. He weighed doing the work well against doing as much as possible in the shortest time possible. He settled on the latter strategy. You would think out of pride in his work, he might try to make the best official children’s book illustrations as possible. But as an unofficial artist, he was influenced by unofficial poet Igor Kholin. Kholin, according to Kabakov, believed that “everything that can be published is official art, and it’s all crap. Naturally, this does not mean that everything that remains unpublished is not crap. but that which is published is definitely crap.” By churning out official crap, Kabakov was subsidizing his real art.
Soviet art began in 1917, and while there were modernist experiments early on, this was stamped out by the time Stalin took over. Then for artists of Kabakov’s generation, there were three key events. First would be death of Stalin in 1953, which was followed by the “thaw”, a period of cultural relaxation under Khrushchev. Khrushchev was unsophisticated about art and culture, but he recognized that he really didn’t know shit about it and mostly let it happen. In 1962, at a large exhibition hall off Red Square called the Manezh, a large exhibit of artworks entitled "Thirty Years of Moscow Art" was put up. It included a small section of modernist works, and Khrushchev visited the exhibit and exploded in anger at the pieces. So for underground visual artists, the “Manezh” show has as much importance as, say, the Armory Show in 1913 had on art in America.
Then in 1974, a group of unofficial artists (including Oscar Rabin, who was the artist that Kabakov identified as making a living off his unofficial paintings), organized an outdoor exhibit of unofficial artwork in a park, only to have it destroyed by bulldozers sent by the government. This has become known to history as the “bulldozer show,” but Kabakov often identifies it as just “the bulldozer.”
From Kabakov’s point of view, Menazh and the Bulldozer are the two most important events in the history of contemporary Soviet art. He describes a feeling of “unconquerable, all-pervasive Fear with a capital F.” But he adds that during the thaw, from 1953 until the Manezh, the “amplitude” of fear, its “voltage,” would vary, with periods of such decreased fear that “soon it won’t be scary at all”. But with Menazh and the anger of Khrushchev, the fear returns. (Although none of the artists whose work offended Khrishchev were sent to the gulag, as might have happened under Stalin.) The underground goes back underground—no more public art exhibits of unofficial art.
But, “after the Bulldozer, somehow the tension dropped.” It seems strange that this crime against art would make the artists feel less fear, but according to Kabakov, it did. So by the time he was writing this, more than a decade after the Bulldozer show, he felt fairly relaxed—he figured he had a system that would allow him to live his life as an unofficial artist.
And he had concluded that being unofficial didn’t mean obscurity forever. By the 80s, many of the modernist writers, artists and composers from earlier times were getting rehabilitated by the Soviet government. “We even know the rhythm of rehabilitation: approximately 60 years after the death, destruction, and murder of an ‘unofficial’ artist, his name starts appearing on the stage of Soviet official culture, that is, his work can be studied.” So he concluded that 60 years in the future, the Soviet government might recognize him, Erik Bulatov, Komar & Melamid, the Experimental Group, etc. Of course, when Kabakov wrote this essay, he wasn’t aware that the Soviet Union would collapse in three years. It felt like a permanent fact of life.
Kabakov didn’t know his own future nor the future of the Soviet Union. He would leave Russia in 1988, moving first to Austria. And by 1993, “unofficial” artists no longer existed, and he was doing official-ish art for the Venice Biennale, the Red Pavilion above. Kabakov died in Long Island on May 27 of this year.
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