There couldn't be a better place for this exhibit. Ilya Kabakov,
who lives now in New York, is the leading figure of the soz-art
movement in the former Soviet Union. Back in the 1970s he started
to toy around with the forms of Soviet visual propaganda that
surrounded everybody in every public place: poster boards, party
campaign ads, sculptures of mythological workers and soldiers,
symbols of Soviet heroism, and quotidian artifacts such as name
boards from huge tenement blocks. Soz-art stands for "socialist
art," the take is entirely ironic. In the context of
international art history you would find some relations to the
works of conceptual artists in the Western world. Ever since the
invention of this deconstructionist dance with the symbols of
Soviet superpower in a drab reality, Kabakov has developed the
form of the installation. It is best to assemble different things
which appear to be real and represent objects from the life of
the homo sovieticus. And, as Kabakov's idea of the total
installation goes, you can walk in and see. In Marfa, TX, he
erected a complete Soviet school on the grounds of Donald Judd's
land art museum. For the 1992 documenta in Kassel, Germany, he
built public restrooms Russian style. Inside one found real
toilets in a surreal combination with an untidy and shabby living
room. Soviet life in the toilet, one might be tempted to
oversimplify. But Kabakov likes to take you far out and down: How
the hell is life organized when private space is defined by
culture, when surrounding objects take over to define you?
Needless to say that context is crucial in Kabakov's total
installations.
Now he got a chance to present one of his more recent works in a
very special context. The 50 feet long "Boat of my Life" is being
shown in the meeting hall of the former Soviet barracks in
Hellerau, a quiet Dresden suburb. Soviet troops occupied the
place for their own needs when they came in as victors over Nazi-
Germany in 1945. After 1989 they left, going home for good, when
the Cold War was over. The signatures of their barracks culture
can be seen everywhere - as if Kabakov had made the place for his
audience. But there is more to the "Festspielhaus" (festival
hall) as it has been renamed again. During the 1910s the European
avant-garde went on a pilgrimage to see experimental dance
theater productions on the first open stage in Germany (in terms
of theater architecture). Rilke, Kafka, Reinhardt, everybody came
up to the Festspielhaus on the hills over Dresden. Hellerau was
put on the map by European modernism - before it disappeared in
the catastrophies of our century. Kabakov's boat puts it back on
the map - in the style of the Moscow conceptualists, taking up the
contexts of his individual and Eastern European nightmares, post
modern. On the boat you find display cases with autobiographical
pieces and little objects (buttons, pebbles and the like) which
Kabakov has collected over the years of his now 62-year-old life.
A sailing boat stranded on the cliffy shores of history.
NOTE: Try to find essays - if available in English - by Boris
Groys, who has written extensively about Kabakov from intimate
knowledge about the Moscow underground scene and within the
theoretical frameworks of the international debate on
postmodernism.
Until 6 August in Hellerau, the boat will be shown in Hamburg
afterwards; for information fax +49 351 88 077 97
