10.13125/2039-6597/4046
This article examines the evolution of Soviet non-conformist artist Ilya Kabakov’s work to consider questions of influence and reception from within the U.S.S.R as well as in Europe and beyond. Komaromi compares Kabakov’s use of poor-quality objects (plokhie veshchi) and trash (musor) with the practices of Italian artists associated with Arte Povera to determine in what sense Kabakov produces a Soviet poor art. She further juxtaposes his approach to trash with the techniques of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines. While Rauschenberg’s combines present the resistant materiality of discrete objects, Kabakov’s trash ultimately invites consideration of the material context according to what Komaromi calls a syntax of reception. Audience responses to Kabakov’s works, including his famous installations with trash, speak to western and post-Soviet perceptions of Soviet and Russian identity, with implications also for how those audiences understand themselves.
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Ann Komaromi
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Between
Toward a Soviet Poor Art: Ilya Kabakov’s Use of Trash
Text.Serial.Journal
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Essay
2020-05-30
2020-03-09
2020-05-30
2020-05-30
189-222
1
Ann Komaromi
2020/05/30
10.13125/2039-6597/4046
189
2039-6597
19
en
222
Toward a Soviet Poor Art: Ilya Kabakov’s Use of Trash
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/4046/3726
10
                        Soviet Trash:
                      The Reception of
                     Ilya Kabakov’s Art
                      Beyond the USSR

                              Ann Komaromi



Abstract
      This article examines Moscow Conceptualist artist Ilya Kabakov’s
work with trash, as well as the meanings ascribed to it by the artist and
his audiences. Komaromi compares Kabakov’s artistic use of poor-
quality objects (plokhie veshchi) and trash (musor) with other
contemporary practices in “poor art” (Arte Povera) and Pop Art to
clarify the distinctive features of his practice. The analysis draws on
statements and writing by Kabakov and by his critics. They show that
trash implies a complex dialogue with Soviet reality and the utopian
art of the early Soviet avant-garde. Juxtaposing Kabakov’s works with
Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” helps clarify the way materiality
signifies: while Rauschenberg highlighted the resistant materiality of
discrete objects, Kabakov’s serial staging of works fosters what
Komaromi calls a syntax of reception. Audience responses to Kabakov’s
works with trash, reveal changing attitudes to history and evolving
notions of Russian and western identities.

Keywords Ilya Kabakov; Soviet Union; Trash; Robert Rauschenberg

Between, vol. IX, n. 20 (Maggio/May 2020)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/4046
                   Soviet Trash:
                 The Reception of
                Ilya Kabakov’s Art
             Beyond the Soviet Union1

                            Ann Komaromi


                              “[W]hy does the dump and its image attract
                              my imagination over and over again, why
                              do I always return to it?” – The Garbage
                              Man2



     One of the most original Soviet nonconformist artists, Ilya
Kabakov has enjoyed great success with audiences at home and
abroad. Beginning with his first exhibition in Italy in 1965, Kabakov’s
work appeared in a series of international venues. By the 1980s he
began receiving serious critical attention and renown for his work


     1
        The author wishes to thank Claudia Pieralli, Teresa Spignoli and the
editors of Between for helpful feedback on this article. It benefited also from
the opinions of audiences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison; Maca-
laster College; the University of Missouri, Columbia; and the Jordan Center
at New York University. Gaia Malnati provided valuable research assistance
with Italian and other sources.
      2 From the text written by “The Man Who Never Threw Anything

Away (The Garbage man)” in the installation of the same name (Kabakov
2003, 179).

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individually, and in partnership with Emilia Kabakov.3 This article
looks at the evolution of Ilya Kabakov’s distinctive use of poor-quality
objects (plokhie veshchi) and trash (musor) in comparison with some
cognate post-war art movements to help clarify the distinctive features
of his practice. The materials Kabakov uses become part of a complex
reflection on Soviet life and consciousness, art history and humanity.
Kabakov’s statements and writings and those of his critics and
interlocutors form an integral part of works staged in a series of
locations spanning Soviet and post-Soviet eras and various national
contexts. Kabakov has used “trash” to provoke responses that relate to
western and post-Soviet perceptions of Soviet and Russian identity,
with implications also for the changing ways those audiences
understand history and themselves.

          Empty Space and “Poor-Quality Objects”
       Having graduated from the Surikov State Art Institute in
Moscow in 1957, Kabakov worked officially as a book illustrator.
However, the beginning of his original nonconformist (unofficial)4
artistic work dates to the “Shower” series of drawings begun in
1962.[Fig. 1] Italian Communist Party official Antonello Trombadori
visited the Soviet Union in the early 1960s and was struck by

     3
        Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933) emigrated from the USSR in 1987 and began
working with Emilia, who became his wife, in the late 1980s. The Kabakovs’
retrospective exhibition was on display between 2017-2019 at the Tate Mod-
ern, and then at The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and finally
at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (Kabakov 2017).
      4 For Kabakov, “unofficial” applied to the uncensored art of the 1960s,

the positive alternative to everything official in the USSR. In the 1970s, as
Kabakov said, the artists who would become known as Conceptualists aban-
doned their uncritical faith in everything “unofficial” and made their own
practice the object of critical reflection (Kabakov 1993: 29). While the term
“unofficial” remains widely used, the term “nonconformist” seems less de-
pendent on binary evaluation and more capacious to cover all types of un-
censored Soviet art.


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Kabakov’s work. He arranged for a series of fourteen of these drawings
to be included in a show in L’Aquila in 1965, which critics hailed as the
first appearance of Soviet avant-garde art in the west since Stalin
(Crispolti 1966: 19-22). Enrico Crispolti seized immediately upon the
humour and ambivalence of Kabakov’s work, which he described in
terms of a demystifying approach to Soviet reality that seemed at the
same time fully complicit with that reality (Crispolti 1965: n.p.).
Kabakov’s “Shower” series presented the figure of a regular Soviet
man, standing and waiting under a shower that persistently fails to
work as it should to deliver a purifying wash. Reflecting on the series
decades later, scholar Matthew Jesse Jackson drew attention to the
man’s blocky rectangular legs and his folded arms forming the bottom
of a square set up on a downward pointing triangular torso. The
geometrical figures recall in deliberately impure form the geometry of
Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and his obsession with the
purity of fields and shapes (Jackson 2010: 39-41).
       Based on Kabakov’s writings, we know that his relationship to
the Soviet avant-garde legacy was crucial and complex.5 In the 1960s,
that legacy was just being recovered. Kabakov would have known
about Malevich from an exhibition at the Maiakovskii Museum in
Moscow.6 The white expanses and other solid color fields in Kabakov’s
drawings and albums recalled the pure monochrome backgrounds of

     5
         Kabakov’s short, ironic essay on Malevich begins, «You don’t even
know what to say about Malevich. A great artist. An inspirer of terror. A
great boss (velikii nachal’nik)» (Kabakov 1983: 34-35). Kabakov used the essay
title for an installation featured in the Tate retrospective exhibition (Kabakov
2017: 186).
       6 In 1964, Kabakov and Iulo Sooster moved to a studio across the street

from the Maiakovskii museum (Kabakov 2008: 27). The Malevich show that
year was part of a series of exhibitions of otherwise mostly inaccessible
avant-garde works by El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Pavel
Filonov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Natal’ia Goncharova, and
others, presented as «illustrators of Maiakovskii» (Aigi 2002: 43-44). Kaba-
kov could also have seen avant-garde works in the Moscow apartment of col-
lector George Costakis.


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Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings, or the infinite space of El
Lissitzky’s Prouns.7 Kabakov wrote about the energy of light (svet)
pouring out of the white page or white painted canvas onto him
during his work in the mid-1960s (Kabakov 2008: 28-29). However, in
contrast to the purely metaphysical interests developed by other
unofficial Soviet artists and writers in the late 1960s and the 1970s,8
Kabakov described the effect of white “light” in his paintings as
ambivalent. His paintings presented a choice: the viewer could choose
to go deep into the painting toward the source of this metaphysical
light, or resist being lost in “emptiness” and focus instead on the
surface «badly tinted with whitewash, the broken board with nails,
with badly painted, absurd and pathetic representations, in short, a
senseless, pointless object» (Kabakov 2008: 45).9 As opposed to
Malevich’s imperiously abstract and utopian vision, Kabakov’s work
gave the viewer options and the freedom to decide. This orientation to
the undetermined engagement of the audience distinguishes
Kabakov’s approach from both avant-garde utopian art and the
didactic Socialist Realism of official Soviet culture. Such ambivalence in
his art is programmatic.
       Kabakov as artist showed more flexible attention to the audience
and environment of his works than Soviet avant-garde artists. In this
way, his art resembled other innovative trends in the post-war era,
including, in a limited way, the contemporaneous trend in Italy that
acquired the name Arte Povera in 1967. Art critic Germano Celant, who
named the movement, referred to experimental Polish theatre director


     7
        Kabakov might have read Nikolai Khardzhiev’s 1957 article associat-
ing El Lissitzky’s Prouns with «breaking away from the earth», and his ideas
about an impending «new birth in the cosmos» associated with the revolu-
tion and new scientific and technical possibilities (Khardzhiev 1997: 238).
      8 Kabakov mentioned Eduard Shteinberg’s abstract paintings as exem-

plary of this “metaphysical” trend (Kabakov 2008: 44).
      9 On Kabakov’s attitude to Malevich’s «misguided utopianism» and the

white that represents for him both «ontological depth and existential empti-
ness , see Amei Wallach (1996: 44).


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Jerzy Grotowski, whose 1965 article “Towards a Poor Theatre” was
widely reprinted and much talked about at the time. 10 Grotowski made
the relative poverty of his theatre company, which could not afford
elaborate stage sets, costuming, lighting or music, an advantage that
allowed them to focus on the technique of the actor (Grotowski 2002:
15). The artists associated with Arte Povera aimed in their way to free
the consciousness «from layers of ideological and theoretical
preconceptions as well as from the norms and rules of the language of
representation and fiction» in order to stage, by means of basic organic
and man made materials, an open and process-oriented encounter with
the audience (Christov-Bakargiev 1999: 25).
       Kabakov’s work was not seen by Italian audiences as an example
of “poor art.” However, like them, he resisted the conventions of fine
art. He sought to strip away the metaphysical pretensions of painting.
Moreover, like Arte Povera artists, Kabakov began to embrace a more
materially pronounced theatricality. Like them, he began to make his
work project out of the canvas and off the wall, into the space of the
spectator. At the same time, Kabakov’s use of poor quality materials
and slapdash or unrefined techniques distinguished his art from theirs,
and reflected, in part, the deficits of a strained socialist economy and
the lack of support for nonconformist art. Kabakov’s Cubes (1962),[Fig.
2] for example, appears to have been knocked together from scavenged
wood pieces covered with planes of uninspiring paint.11 That work,

     10
         Germano Celant coined the term “Arte Povera” for a 1967 exhibition
in Genoa: «The insignificant has begun to exist – indeed, it has imposed it-
self. Physical presence and behaviour have become art […] Cinema, theatre
and the visual arts assert their authority as anti-pretence […] They eliminate
from their inquiry all which may seem mimetic reflection and representation
or linguistic custom in order to attain a new kind of art, which, to borrow a
term from the theatre of Grotowski, one may call ‘poor’» (Celant 1981: 31).
      11 Jackson quoted Kabakov on the problem of «Moscow’s widespread

lack (defitsit) of usable plywood (fanera), Masonite (orgalit), and white enamel
paint» (Jackson 2010: 70). Instead of trying to compensate or conceal the ma-
terial poverty, Kabakov learned to embrace it. Jackson compared Kabakov’s
works to Arte Povera’s objects and Grotowski’s “Poor Theater,” in the sense


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with its sculptural rows of cubes protruding to various degrees from
the picture plane parodies Constructivist works by means of its planes
of «unaesthetic colors: red, green, yellow, blue» (Wallach 1996: 39), as
well as the unexpected appearance of two completely incongruous
miniature landscapes painted on the final bottom right cubes.12 This
poverty was no simple reflection of material conditions – it can also be
understood as Kabakov’s response to the utopian art of revolutionary
avant-garde artists, those who could not really imagine what it would
be like to live in late Soviet society.
       Mario Merz, to whose installations Kabakov later referred,13
demonstrated something about the attitude of Italian artists and
intellectuals to the Soviet Union in his piece Che fare? (What is to be
done? 1967). Evoking Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet and Nikolai
Chernyshevsky’s novel of the same name, Merz created a series of
works with the words “Che fare?” rendered by neon tubes and
embedded in a pot of beeswax, such that the slight heat of the tubes
softened the wax it emitted a faint smell.[Fig. 3] The question “What is
to be Done?” resonated with the energy of social unrest culminating in
May, 1968, the time of widespread Italian and international protests.14
Merz reflected the energy coursing through Italian society at that time,
while using the question to imply openness about where the process
might be headed. As their interest in Soviet nonconformist artists
showed, some Italian intellectuals understood themselves to be part of
a European left with a role to play in helping to lay bare the

that they all exemplified the ”aesthetics of empty” in opposition to Pop Art’s
“aesthetics of plenty” (Ibid.: 70).
      12 Amei Wallach quoted Kabakov saying, «‘I made these things with

great conviction that this is not art. My enthusiasm was that I made some-
thing that is not art.’ Or at least, not the language of any art that he had ever
heard spoken» (Wallach 1996: 39).
      13 Kabakov cited Mario Merz’s installations as one significant type pre-

ceding his own development of the “total” installation (Kabakov 1995: 243).
      14 A fuller account of the range of potential intertexts for Merz’s Che

fare? was provided by Elizabeth Mangini, “Mario Merz’s Autonomous Art-
ist,” Art Journal 75. 3 (Fall 2016): 21-23.


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contradictions of late socialism in order to facilitate its evolution
toward more democratic values.15

       Kabakov’s “poor-quality things” (plokhie veshchi) cannot be
treated as a critical reflection on a deficit economy. They do something
else. These objects show up in works of the late 1960s: in Pipe, Stick, Ball
and Fly (Truba, palka, miach, mukha, 1966),[Fig. 4] three-dimensional
objects project out of the plane of the painting, engaging the tactile
imagination of the viewer.16 The items seem to be partly found objects
– a piece of pipe cut in half is stuck onto the canvas in cross-section,
and the stick looks like it was sawed off lengthwise and painted grey
before being stuck onto the white canvas to give the appearance of
being embedded in it. The ball is a geometrically painted protruding
hemisphere with deformed triangles in unattractive green and red
colours. The fly appears most obviously artificial, oddly oversized,
with a dark-blue painted body rising in slight relief out of the surface
of the painting, with painted grey wings on either side.17 The



     15  Enrico Crispolti noted the opposition of the Soviet Embassy in Rome
to the so-called Dissident Biennale in Venice in 1977, a high-profile event fea-
turing Soviet nonconformist art. Citing the official Soviet press denunciation
of Soviet nonconformist art as works “to be trashed” (da spazzatura) he never-
theless defended their exhibition in terms of an engagement with the dialec-
tical reality they reflect. Crispolti saw dissent as an issue not confined to
Eastern Europe, characterizing it more broadly in terms of a reality that is
«close too, anywhere the arrogance of cultural and political power imposes
itself» (Crispolti 1977: 20).
      16 The retrospective exhibition presented Pipe, Stick, Ball and Fly as a

work that «complements the aesthetic and conceptual experiments under-
taken concurrently in American pop art and Italian arte povera, both of
which Kabakov came to know second-hand through critics and collectors
who had seen such works overseas» (Kabakov 2017: 105).
      17 Flies appeared in drawings, paintings and installations by Kabakov.

The fly connects the lowest material reality with the theme of flight and thus
the heavens (as a sort of debased angel). In the installations featuring flies,


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materiality and conventions of representation are thus inconsistent
among the four items, and they have no relationship to one another.
The combination was deliberately “absurd,” a term much used in
western (absurdnaia) and Russian (nelepaia) forms by unofficial Soviet
artists and poets at the time. While evoking international existentialist
and theatrical discourse, Kabakov wrote of absurdity as a defining
feature of Soviet life. People were shoved together in the collective
Soviet project via communal living and working spaces, but this
experience tended to isolate individuals and foster essentially a-social
communication.18 In this composition, the unrelated objects emerge out
of the white background without quite taking on their own existence
and without being justified by clear symbolism, narrative significance,
or utility. As Kabakov said, they embody a ‘flickering’ (mertsaiushchaia)
ambivalent quality (Kabakov 2008: 55) almost arresting our eyes as
worthy of attention, while repelling them with their lack of aesthetic
value, the senselessness of their juxtaposition and execution. Kabakov
saw these features in the things of the world around him:

        All the things (veshchi) that surround us, as I conceive of them,
     are “bad” (plokhie) […] they only partly possess the look and
     function of cups, televisions, chairs, trams, houses and so on, but


Kabakov plays with the space of the museum and notions of order and hier-
archy (Kabakov 2003: 60, 278, 366).
      18 Consider Kabakov’s painting Answers of the Experimental Group (1970-

71), which balanced another absurd assemblage of multi-media objects (stick,
hanger, nail, toy train) scattered on a white background with a grid of re-
sponses to them: «Nikolai Pavlovich Malyshev: I will hang my new raincoat
here», «Volodya Malyshev: This nail can easily be pulled out», «Ivan Ana-
tol’evich Sisakian: These are symbols: a threat, the absence of something,
pseudo-motion and fictitious effort», etc. (Kabakov 2017: 116-17). The people,
like the objects, do not communicate with one another. Ekaterina Degot’
glossed the representations of things and people in Kabakov’s installations
based on communal Soviet life this way: «This is a world of ground-down
sociality: steamed cabbage soup and eggplant caviar stand forth here as
symbols of communal life, an eternal human puree» ( Degot’ 2002: 16).


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     most of all they belong to that sightless, wordless and formless
     “nothingness” (nichto), to that chaos that penetrates and soaks into
     everything that surrounds us. (Kabakov 2008: 54)

     The white background of the painting, associated in the historical
avant-garde with positive associations of divinity and infinity, here
signifies the chaos, nothingness and emptiness threatening the things
(and, by implication, people) of his world with insignificance and
annihilation. 19
       Kabakov complicated his ambivalent references to avant-garde
art by “contaminating” the abstract color fields and geometric shapes
with poor-quality objects or primitive drawings and banal verbal
elements. A significant precedent for Kabakov’s explorations in this
regard, too, was served by El Lissitzky, who worked, like Kabakov, as
a book artist and whose brilliant constructivist designs in painting,
theatre, book and journal design and exhibition installation made him
a valuable ambassador of Soviet art in western Europe. Lissitzky’s
famous propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (Klinom
krasnym bei belykh, 1919-20) combined verbal and geometric verbal
elements for efficient and impactful communication.20 By contrast,
Kabakov’s use of words in his albums, where color planes evoke the
abstract elements of Suprematism and Constructivism, takes away
from the utopian potentials. The aspirations of characters such as

     19
         Kabakov worked out this idea at length for a 1982 essay, “On Empti-
ness,” a reflection on the perspective he gained on his Soviet home by travel-
ing as far west as he could at the time, to Czechoslovakia. He perceived the
“vampirism of energy” in the all-encompassing void at home that isolated
people into islands swimming in a sea of emptiness (Kabakov 2018: 38-39).
      20 In a letter of September 12, 1919 to Malevich, Lissitzky wrote about

the semantic function of elements of visual language designed to activate the
content of a book, drawing attention to the way letters, punctuation and lines
of text should be printed for visual impact and a stimulus to construction.
Khardzhiev compared the realization of these principles in Lissitzky’s book
About Two Squares (Pro dva kvadrata), which he compared to Beat the Whites
with the Red Wedge (Khardzhiev 1997: 242-43).


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Sitting-in-the-Closet Primakov (Vshkafusidiashchii Primakov, 1972,
Album),[Fig. 5] whose story begins with the black rectangle of the
closed closet and ending with the white expanse of the space into
which he has flown, seem naïve and individualized. While in
Primakov’s eccentric dream he flies out and above his everyday reality
and into space, Kabakov calls into question the purity and
generalizability of his story by employing narrative elements (the
character and the seriality of his story). His mundane illustration of a
Soviet apartment interior and buildings and the hand-written labels in
the lower right corners of the panels further compromise the
suggestions of utopia. Kabakov’s albums, which he began performing
for audiences in his apartment in 1974-75, marked an interim stage
between his book illustrations, drawings and paintings, and the
installations he would mount beginning in the 1980s. 21 If this
theatricality in Kabakov’s practice resonates with the work of Arte
Povera artists, the intensified literary character of Kabakov’s work as
seen in these albums also distinguishes his work from theirs.
       Kabakov progressed from “poor-quality things” and a degraded
or trashy version of avant-garde art to an engagement with trash as
such in his painting Taking Out the Garbage Bucket (Raspisanie vynosa
pomoinogo vedra, 1980).[Fig. 6] This painting utilizes the pure white
background and hand-written verbal elements with a nearly all-over
grid structure that represents something of a culmination of his
polemical engagement with modernist painting. The grid, as Rosalind
Krauss puts it, is «emblematic of the modernist ambition within the
visual arts».22 Kabakov, characteristically, sought to deflate those



     21
         Boris Groys dated the beginnings of the distinctive Moscow Concep-
tualist approach to text in the space of the visual work to Kabakov’s album
Ten Characters, created in 1972 – Primakov was one of those characters (Groys
2000: 36). Jackson talked about Kabakov doing (unofficial) readings of his al-
bums for invited audiences beginning in 1974-75 (Jackson 2010: 120).
      22 Krauss wrote, “the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions

of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In


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artistic emblems by juxtaposing them to banal reality. The handwritten
names and schedule mimic the do-it-yourself character of the typical
Soviet housing office (ZhEK), which organized communal duties and
cultural life for a housing unit but typically lacked the means for
printing posters, announcements or cultural projects.23 The density of
information presented resists reading and pushes the viewer to
contemplate the eccentric use of receding perspective for the slogan
“For Cleanliness!” (Za chistotu!) leading back towards the white depths
of the painting. Next to it a realistically rendered image of a garbage
bucket appears incongruous and arrests the eye in the foreground of
the painted surface.
       Kabakov used “poor-quality objects” (plokhie veshchi) and
deliberately jarring juxtaposition of painterly cues from different
regimes of representation and painterly systems to forge a style that
expressed his historical time and place. Kabakov’s art was self-
consciously belated and disillusioned with respect to early avant-garde
utopian aspirations: it insistently drew attention to the banal material
and social reality of Soviet life. His works expressed the paradoxes of
isolation and the lack of communication among people within Soviet
communal society. By doing so, Kabakov aimed to break through to an
international audience with an artistic language that would be both
recognizable (in its references to the avant-garde and Soviet realia) and
defamiliarized in its use of jarring cues and registers. As we will see in
the next section, the theme of “trash” came to be a means of working
out various potentials of these artistic principles.




the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but
of aesthetic decree” (Krauss 1985: 9).
      23 Kabakov wrote about the documents collected in the Soviet housing

office, the ZhEK (zhilishchno-ekspluatatsionnaia kontora), related to cultural
work and the running of life in the building, as a sort of archive of the uni-
versal “totality” of “our” life, the life he and other Soviet citizens of the time
shared (Kabakov 2011: n.p).


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                            Soviet Pop Art?
       “Soviet Pop Art” is how early reviewers and collectors described
Kabakov’s work, well before Soviet or Moscow Conceptualism became
the label of choice.24 Enrico Crispolti noted the resonance of Kabakov’s
works with “Pop,” but distinguished his artworks from American Pop
thanks to its “ironic touches” (Crispolti 1966: 420).25 While people
regularly compared Soviet nonconformist art with Pop Art,
particularly in the early reception of it abroad in the 1960s, Kabakov’s
work seems much less like it in retrospect than so-called “Sots Art,”
with its instantly recognizable visual clichés. Soviet Sots-Artists such as
the duo Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who signed Soviet
propaganda banners, or Aleksandr Kosolapov, who juxtaposed Lenin’s
profile and the Coca Cola logo on a red background,[Fig. 7] made
clever use of Soviet iconography and style for subversive jokes
designed to be comprehended at a glance. As we have seen, the objects
used by Kabakov, like those of Arte Povera artists, were much less
image-based and self-contained. This is particularly true of Kabakov’s
trash objects, which in many cases defy any visual consumption of
them as discrete objects.
     We might, however, find it useful to pursue a limited analogy
between Kabakov’s trash and the heterogeneous found objects in
Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages known as “combines.” Critics also
talked about Rauschenberg as a Pop artist: while that label is debatable,


     24
        Boris Groys first applied the term “Conceptualist” to artists including
Ilya Kabakov in his article “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” which ap-
peared initially in the Leningrad Samizdat journal 37 no. 15 (1978) (37
[Tridtsat’ sem’, Thirty-Seven] 2015), and was reprinted under another title,
“Nulevoe reshenie” (The Zero Solution) for a book accompanying Kabakov’s
installation NOMA or the Moscow Conceptualist Circle (Kabakov 1993: 42-59).
      25 The collector Dina Vierny called Kabakov’s art “Russian Pop art”

(Kabakov 2008: 21). Paul Jolles said: «I recognized Ilya because of [Roy] Lich-
tenstein. I was fascinated by Pop art. How does Pop art emerge in the closed
system of the Soviet Union?» (Quoted by Wallach 1996: 70).


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he was an inspiration to the movement. 26 Unlike the at-a-glance works
created by Pop giants such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both
Rauschenberg and Kabakov produced works that invite and
problematize the act of reading. Leo Steinberg wrote: «it seemed at
times that Rauschenberg’s work surface stood for the mind itself –
dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete references
freely associated as in an internal monologue – the outward symbol of
the mind as a running transformer of the external world, constantly
ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged
field» (Steinberg 2000: 42-43).27 Rosalind Krauss characterized
Rauschenberg’s canvases in terms of the “space of memory” (Krauss
2002: 51). She argued that an “entirely original” aspect of
Rauschenberg’s practice consisted of the fact that, unlike in a Cubist
collage or a collage by Kurt Schwitters, objects in Rauschenberg’s
compositions retain their materiality – they are never entirely
absorbed.28
       We can find these features in Rauschenberg’s combine Charlene
(1954), [Fig. 8] which presents a heterogeneous collection of found

     26
          Lucy Lippard wrote, «Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had
significant one-man shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery, providing the links
[…] to Pop Art. Neither of these men is a Pop Artist in style or subject matter,
though they are still considered to be such in Europe and by the mass media,
and they have influenced and sympathized with Pop» (Lippard 1966: 22).
      27 Steinberg 2000: 42-43. Steinberg’s essay “Reflections on the State of

Criticism” originally appeared in Artforum 10.7 (1972).
      28 In Rauschenberg’s practice, «an object is taken out of the space of the

world and embedded into the surface of a painting, never at the sacrifice of
its density as material». Even the images he used had density (Krauss 2002:
50). She emphasized the duration of the viewing experience: «by giving to
images the property of actual physical resistance that objects or actions have
in our ordinary experience, Rauschenberg endows them with a sense of hav-
ing to be encountered through time. In this way they are returned to an expe-
rience that is fully durational, an experience which we said in the beginning
was like memory, reflection, narration, proposition» (Ibid.: 52). Krauss’s essay
was reprinted from Artforum 13.4 (1974).


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objects and images, including a broken and flattened umbrella, a man’s
undershirt, various fabrics (scarf with images, lace), newspaper, a
plastic mirror and an electric light. The items are to varying degrees
covered or dripped with paint and thus partially incorporated into the
composition, although they do not entirely lose the materiality that
points to their origins outside the painting. The protruding, reflective,
light-generating or otherwise idiosyncratic character of individual
items emphasize this independent materiality. While we may posit
formal relations among, say, the various circular elements, the
sequence of vertically positioned rectangular units, as between the
colors and textures of different fabrics employed, we cannot escape
seeing them also as discrete and more or less enigmatic items. In
another well-known Rauschenberg combine, Canyon (1959), themes of
beauty and flight, as well as classical references (e.g. the myth of
Ganymede), resonate with similar themes and allusions in other
Rauschenberg works. Nevertheless, they fail to absorb entirely the
striking corporeality of the stuffed bald eagle coming out of the
composition or the surprising puffiness of the suspended pillow
hanging below it.
       The gritty urban landscape – of New York for Rauschenberg and
Moscow for Kabakov –informed the works of both artists.
Rauschenberg’s technique echoed the «rough surfaces with splattered
paint» (Mattison 2003: 46) common to the buildings of lower
Manhattan, where he lived as he began his art career. It may be that the
protruding elements and rectilinear grids of Rauschenberg’s
composition also echoed the cluttered building facades, marked by
signs and fire escapes. In addition, «the discarded and worn-out
materials and objects that were often thrown into alleys and left at
curbsides for disposal» (ibid.: 47) furnished items for art: Rauschenberg
talked about his use of car tires as an expression of their ubiquity as
discarded items on the streets.
       Kabakov may have been familiar with Rauschenberg’s works
from early in his career. Wallach talked about an exhibition of prints by
Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and others in the Soviet Union in 1963
(Wallach 1996: 39). An official Soviet collection of essays on


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“Modernism,” while critical, was relatively comprehensive, covering
movements from Dada to Rauschenberg’s combines.29 In any case,
Kabakov, like Rauschenberg, picked up materials for his works off the
streets. His use of “laboriously refashioned discarded rubbish and
construction materials” including wooden crates, plywood, nails, etc.,
was programmatic as well as pragmatic – there was a chronic shortage
of good art materials, and Kabakov worked on the side, during the
hours left over after his official commissions on pieces not authorized
by the State (Jackson 2010: 70). At the same time, such rubbish
materials functioned to resist the impulse to apprehend art as an
autonomous window onto a beautiful and transcendent sphere.
Kabakov also intended the trash to convey something about the world
he inhabited. He spoke of the impulse for his works with garbage,
which he began early in the 1980s. They were connected, he said, with:

        the special sensation, physical and mental, that everything
     which surrounded us living in the Soviet Union represented an
     enormous littered space […]. This image of a cluttered, dusty,
     half-abandoned, ownerless existence is firmly connected for me
     with the feeling of my Homeland and with the hopeless feeling
     that it is impossible to get rid of the situation, that it is here forever
     and that garbage and dirt are the very unique ‘genius’ of our
     place, having taken up residence in it forever.30

     This feeling was both personal – connected to his impression of
being a person abandoned in this littered place – and metaphysical.
      The philosophical and personal aspects of trash in Kabakov’s art
works can be related to the principle of heterogeneity, which is
characteristic of the collection of items, rather than their individual
material qualities. Boris Groys wrote about the endless heterogeneity

     29
        Modernizm: Analiz i kritika osnovnykh napravlenii, (Ed. Viktor Vanslov
and Iurii Kolpinskii, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969). The book was known to all
nonconformist artists in Moscow at the time (Jackson 2010: 109).
     30 From Kabakov’s commentary to the “Works with Garbage” (Wallach

1996: 171).


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of trash and its challenge to philosophical attempts to order the world.
The idea of “the just, the beautiful, and the good” implies an operation
of “taking out the trash” that alienates life and reality (Groys 2016: 24-
25).31 Thus, there is something philosophically insurgent about the dirt
and trash that resist ideal metaphysics and grand narratives.
        Kabakov spoke in more personal terms in his dialogue with
Groys about “Trash” (Musor). In addition to being shorthand for Soviet
reality as Kabakov saw it, trash comprised an archive of memories
(Kabakov and Grois 2010: 73).32 Moreover, Kabakov identified himself
with his surrounding Soviet reality and for that reason understood
rubbish to be his artistic vernacular. He talked about the important
moment of “hesitation” (kolebanie) associated with trash: «It happens
that a person is standing near a rubbish pail and holding something in
his hands and he thinks, he hesitates: should I throw it away or keep
it?» (Ibid.: 73) Kabakov related this hesitation to the conceptualist
principle of “flickering” (mertsanie): at that moment, the thing hovers
between existence and non-existence. It “flickers,” as does the
consciousness of the person holding it. That person – who is like the
artist, but also like an imagined character (personazh) in the situation –
stands at that moment like a demiurge (polubog), deciding whether the
thing will exist or be consigned to oblivion. However, in that moment
the person also decides something about his own fate, whether that bit
of himself, a used transportation ticket, an old receipt or bottle cap,
associated with an experience and a memory, will be retained or

     31
         Groys discussed Plato’s Parmenides, in which Socrates denies that
hair, dirt and rubbish have any ideal form – their only existence lies in the
contingent material reality that meets the eye (Groys 2016: 23).
      32 Nostalgia has been an important concept for Kabakov criticism, alt-

hough, as Svetlana Boym acknowledged, “The object of Kabakov’s nostalgia
is difficult to fix,” she acknowledged (Boym 2001: 325). Marchesini drew at-
tention to the objects of everyday life that evoke longing “because this past is
intertwined with dimensions of memory, childhood, and youth” (Marchesini
2015: 156). Marchesini addressed Kabakov’s installation Monument to a Lost
Civilization (1999). Many of the objects in the installations discussed here are
less identifiable.


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thrown away (Ibid.). Kabakov is perfectly aware of the improbability of
layering all these deep considerations onto insignificant trash objects.
As in his other writings, the overly long and digressive reflection,
careening from highly abstruse to grotesquely emotional
considerations, reflects the particular irony of Moscow conceptualism.
Setting up the architectonics of “flickering” – of the ideas and the pose
– appears to mean more for Kabakov than the individual material
texture or implied memory of trash items.33
       Found items, as we saw, helped both Rauschenberg and
Kabakov bring art works off the wall and into three-dimensional space.
The “combines” were a signature genre for Rauschenberg in the 1950s
and early 1960s. Kabakov began to grow into his signature genre, the
installation, in the 1980s. A relatively simple installation, the Box with
Garbage (first realized in 1986 in Kabakov’s Moscow studio),[Fig. 9]
illustrates the indistinct materiality of the rubbish items. Items are
jumbled together and not specified in the description – photos from the
installation show an old shoe, empty bottles and paint cans, rags and
pieces of cardboard or paper in or around a nondescript box (Kabakov
2003: 120-125). The text associated with it describes the irritability of an
unnamed character who is tired of being constantly surrounded by
people and feigning good social behavior. The objects have labels with
rude interjections, for example, “Fuck off! Go fuck yourself,” and
“Why are you staring, pig?” Kabakov wrote about his use of text
labels affixed to objects in his installation with garbage: the
fragmentary text «has a lot in common with the garbage itself – it is
anonymous everyday speech, belonging to ‘each and every person.’»


     33
         Kabakov took the term “flickering” (mertsanie) from fellow conceptu-
alist artist Dmitrii Prigov who used it to indicate the way the author seems
both to identify with the voice and character (usually eccentric or dubious,
often mouthing Soviet values or fixed speech patterns) in a work and to be
distanced from it. The artfulness of the works consists of provoking an im-
pression that these incompatible positions are both possible at once, so they
“flicker” in the perception of the audience. “Flickering” (mertsatel’nost’) was a
key conceptualist term (Monastyrskii: 1999, 58-59).


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(Wallach 1996: 179) Although the only thing we know about the
incompletely realized character is that he desperately wants to avoid
being submerged in the crowd among which he lives, the objects and
interjections that express him plunge him, ironically, back into
anonymity.
       The installation The Rope of Life (1985) more directly suggests that
the objects connect to memory and experience. [Fig. 10] However, the
description of the installation is tellingly imprecise: «All kinds of small
pieces of garbage are attached to the middle section of the rope by thin
strings: a broken toothbrush, empty bottles, buttons, papers, etc.»
(Kabakov 2003: 83) Each item here, too, has a small label, but the labels
do not explain the items, as one would expect, and they do not cohere
into a life story. Sample labels read: «Autumn 1935: Running through
the grey gates along the cobblestones pavement until the next block»
and «1940: The cover on the table» (Ibid.). Incorporated later into the
large installation Ten Characters, the rope was linked to the character
Parfenov, who, a text tells us, had moved out but left the rope. The
children played with the rope, the cat played with it, and then the
other residents notice the rope with its objects and labels and try to
decipher it. Most of the speculation concerned the two empty ends
with no objects – what did they signify? The children found a note left
by Parfenov in which he discusses the project: «I decided to describe
my life in the form of a rope and to arrange on it all of the events of my
life in the order in which I remember them, not distinguishing the
important from the unimportant, since, for me, they were all equally
important and significant. Isn’t that so?» (Kabakov 2003: 85) These
items themselves are too small and banal to signify much. They are
barely specified, and they struggle to impress themselves upon our
perception in any meaningful way. The labels, too, though supposedly
related to the life of the character, seem isolated and incoherent: the
objects, like the events, surface as we contemplate them only to slip
back almost at the same time into the meaningless void, like the poor-
quality objects of earlier paintings.
       One view of the installation The Rope of Life [Fig. 11] shows the
rope lying in the corner with dirt. In the dialogue about “Trash,”


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Kabakov suggested: «I am that dirt that they didn’t sweep away»
(Kabakov and Grois 2010: 81). It is possible to interpret this as a
comment about being marginalized as a nonconformist artist, though it
seems to apply more widely: «All of us in the Soviet Union live in
trash, in the broken pieces of an alien civilization» (Ibid.). Kabakov
went on, «Our civilization does not function, and it is not beautiful. All
the things brought in from abroad don’t work here. Everything is sure
to be broken or to be lacking something» (Ibid.). He sees himself as like
those things, or even less interesting than them: «If I were a good
writer, they would have arrested me and thrown me out. If I were a
good thing, they would have broken me and, again, thrown me out»
(Ibid.). Trash is overdetermined in Kabakov’s art and thought. The
ramified possibilities for what it symbolizes – memory, the person, the
artist, the whole society – proliferate such that the trash cannot be
absorbed or transformed into any coherent message or meaning.
        Kabakov spun out the possibilities of trash further. In the
installation 16 Ropes (1984),[Fig. 12] the ropes are hung at eye level, 168
cm apart, so that they form a horizontal surface filling the whole room.
Spectators wander among the ropes and examine the pieces of trash
suspended vertically from the rope at regular intervals of 12-15 cm: «a
cork, the top of a can, an empty match box, etc.» (Kabakov 2003: 67).
Viewers, as if submerged in a sea of trash, will likely examine discrete
labels, which in this case contain fragments of everyday speech:
«Viten’ka, come over this evening, I’ll make crepes»; «Which, short
ones, three rubles?»; «Let’s not wait for the bus… Let’s walk a little
bit.» (Ibid.: 68-69). Trash in this installation appears more neutral and
de-individualized: trash is the stuff of everyday Soviet life (byt). This
installation adds the aspect of ordering, separation and labelling of
meaningless everyday items. Kabakov described such a mania as the
product «of our Russian imperial consciousness, to think that every
separate thing is just trash and rubbish (drian’), but that all this rubbish
should be accounted for and labeled. Everything, including a person, is
given a number, like in a warehouse. Chaos is given order. Unending
chaos and trash and at the same time unbroken order coincide»
(Kabakov and Grois 2010: 74). Kabakov spoke here of something


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specific about the Russian (or Soviet) imperial consciousness, which
despises the life and territory within which it operates (although it is
its own), and which relentlessly tries to corral it into something
valuable – without, it would seem, really thinking that is possible.
        Sven Spieker analyzed the installation in terms of the archive. In
16 Ropes, wrote Spieker: «such ‘stringing up’ of objects was one of the
most ancient forms of filing, and the English word ‘file,’ which is
derived from the French fil (string), originally meant ‘to line something
up on a piece of string’» (Spieker 2008: ix). The question posed by 16
Ropes, as Spieker saw it, is «whether its strings can deliver what
archives promise us, a sense of (and in) time» (Ibid.: x). Kabakov’s
installation makes literal the function of the archive, Spieker said:
«archives contain paperwork that no longer circulates in the
bureaucracy, paperwork that has lapsed and become garbage [or a
record, a trace]. The crux of Sixteen Ropes is the way in which it
provides garbage in a literal sense – from cigarette butts to wrappers,
scraps of paper, and railway tickets – with the archive’s formal
trappings, such as strings, labels, ropes, knots, and written words, all
functioning to tame the trash by turning it into documents of culture
and history» (Ibid.: ix-x). In Spieker’s reading, the installation is not
specifically Russian or Soviet – it represents a more basic modern,
archival impulse, the urge to tame life itself, in time.
        Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away
(a.k.a. The Garbage Man, 1988) [Fig. 13] concentrates the potentials of
the trash theme. The “Garbage Man” (he has no other name) is another
absent character we know through his room filled with trash and his
writings. One day, men arrive to read the water meter (vodomer), which
is supposed to be in the man’s room. Since the man is out, Uncle
Misha, the senior tenant of the apartment, breaks down the door to let
them in. The tenants and the workmen stand amazed: the entire room
is filled with neatly sorted trash: flat things, containers and jars, piles of
paper and manuscripts, and small items strung up in bundles are all
arranged according to their form. There are papers and folders,
including a series of “Trash Novels” in many volumes, which seem to
be something like memory books of the man’s life and experiences.


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While notes in the book and labels on the items record the moments of
collection, in this case, too, they yield no coherent narrative or profile
of the man (Kabakov 2003: 174-177).
       Uncle Misha bends down to read one of the man’s manuscripts,
which contains ruminations that echo many of Kabakov’s own: in the
piece labelled “Dump” (Svalka), the man writes, «The whole world,
everything which surrounds me here, appears to me a boundless
dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible diverse sea of
garbage». The essay swerves into bathos as the man ponders the
endless array of trash items produced by the city which «cry out about
a past life, they preserve it». Is the dump a feature of socialist life? he
wonders. A visit to relatives in Czechoslovakia produced the
impression of such “cleanliness”: «Why, why is it so clean there?» he
wonders, «and what about this land which belongs to no one behind
our house and has become a dump? […] doesn’t it loom threateningly
beyond our walls, like an enemy surrounding a fortress, returning over
and over again to our building, submerging it?» What if, he thinks, it’s
even worse than that: «our entire place, all of our enormous territory is
a dumping ground for the garbage from all the rest of the world?»
(Kabakov 2003: 178-181) This is, among other things, the anxious
rumination of the global provincial, the person who knows he inhabits
a country outside of the global center, and who fears that the mental
(and physical) processes of sweeping out the trash on a global scale
will simply bury him in the dump of the unseen and the insignificant.
       In another way, the man’s quixotic project to collect and sort all
the detritus of life around him overshadows the person. The work of
collecting and labelling can seem mindless, reducing the human figure
supposedly represented by it to a grotesque caricature. Like Nikolai
Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich, from “The Overcoat” (Shinel’, 1842),
Kabakov’s Soviet “little man” (malen’kii chelovek) voluntarily,
enthusiastically copies the Soviet imperial project to colonize life and
reality in a pathetically absurd attempt to archive his life and the life
around him. The literary heritage is meaningful here. As reviewer
Jamey Gambrell commented, “it seems that Kabakov’s installations



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emerged full-blown from the tattered folds of Gogol’s overcoat”
(Gambrell 1995: 172).34
       Contrary to the effect in Rauschenberg’s combines, where things
resist absorption thanks to their distinctive materiality, trash in
Kabakov’s installations resists becoming valuable or meaningful as
part of a story or a metaphor even as the trash compels us to look at it –
this effect is realized with objects and characters so non-descript and
banal they almost defy description.
       The verbal and literary elements in Kabakov’s works, like images
in Rauschenberg’s combines, possess status roughly equal to that of the
objects and other physical elements of the composition or installation
space. Yet, in the case of Kabakov, that status is always precariously
placed on the boundary between existence and non-existence, barely
rising to level of discrete significance and always potentially lapsing
into the void. The characters never quite feel like human people. Their
stories are not exactly stories – something happened, but it is hard to
say what, or what it means. The viewer is invited, indeed, compelled
by the installation space to engage with the process of reading the
elements of the installation. However, there is ultimately nothing that
entirely captures the viewer’s eye, mind or heart. The work engenders
a “flickering” state of engagement that arrests the attention but also
systematically repels it, leaving the viewer free to decide whether the
elements add up to something (and what that something is), or to leave
the installation altogether.




     34
       An epigraph from Gogl’s story “The Nose” (“Pick it up, you dropped
something there…”) opened the section on “The Man Who Never Threw
Anything Away,” in the catalogue Ten Characters (Kabakov 1989: 42). Boris
Eikhenbaum’s classic analysis of Gogol’s story outlined the alternation be-
tween bathos and grotesque comedy that seems to be a meaningful intertext
for Kabakov’s character (Eichenbaum 1974: 269-91).


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                       A Syntax of Reception
       Kabakov’s work has long been established as part of
international art culture. His works on the genre of the “total”
installation are particularly well known. Influential art scholar Claire
Bishop opened chapter one of her book on installation art in recent
decades with Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space from His
Apartment (1985).[Fig. 14] This is another one in Kabakov’s Ten
Characters series, whose room, with its red walls, the hole in the ceiling,
and the slightly terrifying catapult seat hanging from the ceiling,
certainly arrests viewers’ attention. Bishop described Kabakov’s work
as exemplary of one type of installation art experience, which is like
dreaming. According to her, works like Kabakov’s demand that we
«imaginatively project ourselves into an immersive ‘scene’ that
requires creative free-association in order to articulate its meaning»
(Bishop 2005: 16). In this way, she wrote, we may read the elements of
the installation symbolically, as metonymic parts of a narrative. We
might take note, however, of the distinction Kabakov drew between
objects and space for different audiences: western art is oriented to the
object, while objects hardly matter for the Soviet or Russian mentality,
he argued – the latter consciousness was much more attuned to the
demands of a space, whether of a communal apartment, school,
bureaucratic office, or other environment.35
      Kabakov’s comments on the differences between audiences seems
particularly significant. I have argued that trash in Kabakov’s art
resists absorption into any stable interpretation, and that the discrete
trash objects impinge with difficulty on our perception. Kabakov’s
comments about the obviously constructed nature of the installation
space – which he says should turn attention to the “ideal” nature of the
project or event they enclose – implies a different type of reflection and

     35
       Kabakov contrasted audiences in “the West,” for whom objects matter
more than they do to audiences “in the East, or more precisely in Russia,” for
whom the objects are always wretched and insignificant, and for whom the
space determines the situation (Kabakov 1995: 244).


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association, one which the space partially dictates, but which also
leaves viewers free to pursue that reflection in any direction available
to them.
        Claire Bishop’s claims about absorption and her suggestion of a
psychoanalytic framework for processing a “dream” sequence seem
rather too uniform to accommodate the varied potentials of Kabakov’s
installations. Bishop referred to the “conscious and unconscious
associations in the beholder” of the installation (Bishop 2005: 16). These
“unconscious” associations hearken back for Bishop to the Surrealist
predecessors she sees as significant for this type of installation art
(Ibid.). However, the associations, cultural or everyday analogies and
personal memories are not, for Kabakov, part of a Freudian
subconscious, where powerful impulses capable of exploding or
transforming the bourgeois world are buried: the eccentric attempts of
Kabakov’s odd characters to achieve utopian escape or dreams of order
are staged right in front of us, and they seem less opposed to the
reigning order than weirdly reflective of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the
installation of a Soviet communal apartment might recall personal
memories for a former Soviet person familiar with that lived
environment, it evokes different associations for westerners, who have
an ethnographic interest in life from behind the Iron Curtain and
politicized ideas about it. The Soviet specificity of Kabakov’s
installations brings out a difference in viewers’ perspectives depending
on what they know or think they know about Soviet and Russian life.
        Krauss wrote about the “syntax” of items (objects and images) in
a Rauschenberg combine, which encourages a modality of discourse
and a sense of durée that evokes the extended temporality of memory
and narration, even if it does so in no recognizable language (Krauss
2002: 40-41). Bishop talked about something like a syntax of elements
(verbal, visual, physical) in Kabakov’s works and installations, but
those elements are not resistantly material in the same way. We need to
think again about the way materiality matters. The Kabakovs’ serial re-
staging of works, elaborating them over and over again in new
installations, anthologies and retrospectives suggests another sort of
materiality associated with the context of staging, including the


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historical moment (from late Soviet to early post-Soviet, to recent
times) and the economic and political contexts, in Italy, in Germany, in
America, Israel, the U.K. or Russia. Kabakov’s installations comprise a
sort of screen for projection within these contexts – in this way they are
rather like Rauschenberg’s early White paintings, that catch the
shadows of passersby. Kabakov’s works elicit and catch the projections
of meaning by different audiences. In this way they support, I suggest,
a syntax of reception.
       The initial audience viewing Kabakov’s works in the USSR was a
tight circle of fellow artists and friends who created their own “space
of reception” through a complex set of oral and written texts, featuring
their own slang terms and ways of speaking.36 This early and limited
reception facilitated the “flickering” of roles – people working as artists
adopted the perspective of audience members for their friends’ works
and portrayed themselves as characters in their own art (Kabakov
1993: 24). The artist’s identification with the social context and
characters represented in the work was something Enrico Crispolti
perceived already in Kabakov’s early “Shower” drawings. Such
ambivalence in the work made it less susceptible to the label
“dissident” and the reductive politicization that could entail. Crispolti
recalled trying to navigate the turbulent politics on the left around the
1977 Venice Biennale, the so-called “Dissident” Biennale, where
uncensored art from Eastern Europe, including three of Kabakov’s
paintings (The Answers of the Experimental Group was one of them), were
shown. Crispolti favored “un-official” over “dissident” although this
did not neutralize the scandal (Crispolti 2007; Crispolti 1977).
       Despite some shows abroad, Kabakov’s group of conceptual
artists and friends in the USSR remained a relatively closed circle with
no interest in irritating Soviet authorities. Kabakov recalled showing
the installation The Man Who Flew Into Space in his Moscow studio. He

     36
        Pavel Peppershtein described the group, later dubbed “NOMA,” this
way in “Rapport ‘NOMA – NOMA’” (Kabakov 1993: 9). The installation enti-
tled NOMA, or The Moscow Conceptual Circle was shown in Hamburg in 1993-
1994 (see also Kabakov 2003 486-91).


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set it up only when Groys or another friend was coming over, after
which he “quickly rolled everything up, and shaking from fear, carried
it off to various corners,” since officials coming by to give him
commissions would have disapproved of his nonconformist work and
perhaps cut off his means of earning a living (Kabakov 1999: 86).
Shown in the west years after the fall of the Soviet Union, such
installations cannot function the same way, Kabakov remarked, since
their esthetic qualities can be read only “in contrast to that culture in
which they are being exhibited” (Ibid.).
       Western audiences read his works in terms of such a contrast
during Perestroika. The Sotheby’s auction in Moscow in 1988 brought a
new level of scrutiny from the international art market to Soviet
nonconformist art. Westerners saw an exotic art scene and the potential
for exploiting works seen during their “art safari” to the Soviet Union
(Gambrell 1989: 26). As Kabakov’s work became better known also
through the Ten Characters show in New York and London, American
observers described it in terms of an allegory of “personal freedom”
crushed by the “social order” (Gookin 1988: 136). One critic marveled
that art from the Soviet Union could express the “confidence in the
authenticity of the individual” that western artists seemed to have lost
(Heartney 1990: 63). It seems reasonable to think that the Anglo-
American ideology of the individual, perceived in opposition to Soviet
suppression of individual rights, influenced these Perestroika-era
interpretations.
       Kabakov remained concerned during the Perestroika and early
post-Soviet years about journalists and critics understanding his art
works in “merely political” terms, as they did his installation The Red
Wagon (1991)[Fig. 10] when it was first shown in Dusseldorf. In fact,
Kabakov said, his polemic was with the Soviet avant-garde artists of
the 1920s and their utopian aspirations, instead of with the (soon to be
defunct) Soviet regime (Kabakov 1999: 51). The Red Wagon portrayed
the totality of Soviet history in art historical terms, from the
constructivist design of the front-end ladders, to the Socialist Realist
portrayal of a happy life inside the red wagon, to the heap of trash
outside the back door of the wagon, symbolizing the era in which


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Kabakov and his friends worked after Stalin. Kabakov portrayed both
the Moscow Conceptualist Circle (NOMA) and Soviet history in
retrospect as “total” environments, subject to mythologization and
nostalgia, but never without the destabilizing effect of the “flickering”
that came from shifting between the perspectives of artist, audience
member, and character or environment represented.
       After being shown in Dusseldorf, The Red Wagon was supposed
to be shown in Jerusalem and Moscow. Apparently, damage to the
work in transport and inadequate space made it impossible to mount
the installation as planned in those two cities. The circumstance
provided an opportunity for Jurgen Harten to meditate on the way the
work responded to its context and acted as a catalyst for that context,
even – or maybe especially – when it was materially absent (Kabakov
1999: 130-32). Kabakov joked with an interviewer in Israel that he
himself started to doubt the existence of the installation after it failed to
arrive. Perhaps, he speculated, the reasons were metaphysical – the
Biblical allusions to Ya’akov’s staircase and Jonah and the whale
(allusions obvious in Israel but hardly remarked elsewhere) – were too
straightforward and vulgar. Perhaps the big and heterogeneous object
(18 m. long) was “rejected by the local atmosphere” as being too
aggressive (Kabakov 1999: 140).
       In recent years, the retrospective exhibition of the Kabakovs’
work travelled from the Tate to Russian museums, evoking new echoes
of the “ethnographic” interest in a history now far enough removed
one might wonder whether it even existed. For Russian viewers, the
exhibition evoked a range of feelings. A reviewer of the show in St.
Petersburg recalled in the early post-Soviet years, around 1992, the
ironic conceptualist analyses of late Soviet style, everyday life, symbols
and sign systems taken to absurd extremes seemed to have little to do
with Russian audiences: people were ready to shake off that old
communal life in search of a bright individual future. However, by the
time of this 2018-19 retrospective, Kabakov’s works suddenly evoked
“chaotic and fearsome” feelings. The albums in particular struck a
nerve: «[T]he mothballs of Kabakov’s closet are impossibly active still.
We are all ready to hide in that closet, and the only place to fly out of it,


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it would seem, is into the cosmos» (Dolinina 2018: 12). Perhaps albums
such as Sitting-in-the-Closet Primakov tapped into the disappointments
of post-socialism, evoking a sense of nostalgia combined with a new
desire for impossible escape.
       British reviews revived some old clichés about the horror of the
totalitarian State: the header on a review for the Tate show for The
Guardian said: «With its harrowing echoes of repression, deprivation
and murder, the Kabakovs’ art is a magnificent, moving monument to
the millions crushed by communism» (Jones 2017). Such emotional
language suggests that a new context for recycling Cold War fear has
emerged. A photograph of the installation Not Everyone Will Be Taken
Into the Future [Fig. 15], accented by red light and patches of darkness
illustrates reviews, suggesting a sense of danger now recoded in the
context of new mutual western and Russian suspicions.37 Jackson, who
spent much time studying Kabakov’s art, identified the main theme of
the retrospective as “failed utopias.” And yet, the Kabakovs said, the
elimination of utopianism is “another form of utopianism” (Kabakov
2017: 27). Above all, wrote Jackson, the Kabakovs’ art, «allows us to see
more clearly all of the things that we have lost over the course of those
years, as well as all of the things that we never could have had». He
concluded, «[L]earning to discern the difference between the two may
be the ultimate instruction to be discovered within the art of Ilya and
Emilia Kabakov» (Ibid.: 33).
       A syntax of reception means that the materiality of these works is
realized by their interaction with different audiences in varying
historical moments and contexts. There is an irreducible materiality to
encounters with these works that Kabakov invites us to consider
through the repeated staging he and Emilia continue to do. That meta-
series of staged works and installations entails the passage from the
Soviet era to post-Soviet times, as well as the passage from Russia to


     37
       Such a reading is by no means necessary: Emilia Kabakov described a
creeping darkness as characteristic of a late stage of Ilya Kabakov’s art (Wal-
lach 2014).



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the west, but it does not yield to any grand narrative about what has
happened or what the Soviet experience meant. Most of all, it reminds
us that the lived Soviet experience was real, and that its reality resists
our attempts to wrangle and organize it with narratives about a lost
utopia or a triumphant liberal order. It shows us that the memory of
the Soviet Union is part of our shared collective imagination, even if
we may not agree on its historical significance.




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                             The Author
Ann Komaromi

Ann Komaromi is Associate Professor and Acting Director of the
Centre for Comparative Literature with a cross-appointment in the
Slavic Department at the University of Toronto. She created the Project
for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat at University of Toronto
Libraries, and authored the book Uncensored: The Quest for Autonomy in
Samizdat Novels (Northwestern University Press, 2015). Komaromi’s
research of Ilya Kabakov is part of a comparative study of the use of
trash and discarded objects in art.

Email: a.komaromi@utoronto.ca



                             The Article
Date sent: 29/02/2020
Data accepted: 20/04/2020
Data published: 30/05/2020



                      How to cite this article
Komaromi, Ann, “Soviet Trash. The Reception of Ilya Kabakov’s Art
Beyond the USSR”, Le culture del dissenso in Europa nella seconda metà del


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Novecento, Eds. T. Spignoli – C. Pieralli, Between, X.19 (2020),
www.betweenjournal.it




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