In Conversation with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

Tomasz Załuski: For more than a dozen years you have exhibited works under the joint name ‘Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’. When exactly did this dual authorship begin? How should it be interpreted? Does it indicate Emilia’s active involvement in the creative process and shared responsibility for the outcome? Are you now an artistic couple, two collaborating artists who make joint works? Or is it rather a symbolic act, indicating the inspiring role that Emilia Kabakov plays in Ilya Kabakov’s art—and life?

Emilia Kabakov: We have worked together since 1989. My name does not co-sign Ilya’s earlier works because, although I had visited his studio before, I had nothing to do with the works themselves. Both our names appear only in the title of the present presentation of the 10 Albums, since the presentation as such is one manifestation of our collaboration. Ilya Kabakov alone, however, is the author of the works themselves.

Ilya Kabakov: Nor will we reveal the nature or degree of our collaboration. It is our secret, and we want it to remain so.
TZ: I would like to ask about the reception in the West of your earlier works and of the works you now make together. What interpretation did you hope your work would receive in Western countries, and what kind of response did you seek to produce? To what extent have you succeeded?

I&EK: First, we must emphasise that the viewer is always very important to us. On the other hand, our hopes and expectations are the same as those of other artists. As for the actual reception of our works, we cannot answer on behalf of Western viewers—our answer would merely reflect our ideas and fantasies about them.

TZ: Would you agree that for people in Western countries who cannot situate your earlier works in the context of life in a Soviet communal apartment, those works remain unclear, if not entirely illegible?
IK: Nine years ago the answer would have been: yes, they are unable to understand these works, but they will understand them once they learn the context of life in the USSR. Today, however, the answer is different: this way of life can be related only to life in Russia, a life full of madness and delirium, which—like any other madness—requires no explanation.

TZ: Did you try somehow to make the context of life in the USSR itself accessible, to inscribe it into your works in some way?

IK: I do not think I depict any actual conditions or factual reality in my works. I use only certain images, fantasies and ideas, and these do not directly reflect reality.
TZ: Can viewers for whom the Soviet context remains inaccessible interpret your works on another, more universal, ‘generally human’ level? In one interview I read that since you began exhibiting throughout the world, you have tried to activate their more general—or, as you put it, ‘sentimental’—level or aspect…

IK: In principle, yes. But the final outcome and reception of my work do not depend on my wishes.
TZ: What do you think about the possible reception of your work in Poland? How might it be received here, given, for example, our history and geopolitical situation?

I&EK: Our works would be received more positively in Poland if there were more negativity in them, if it amounted to ninety per cent. We believe, however, that their positive and negative elements are balanced—fifty per cent to fifty per cent.
TZ: How should that be understood? Are you suggesting in general that Poles somehow like negative aspects of life and reality, and consequently seek them in art as well?
I&EK: No, we mean the critical attitude of Poles—entirely justified—towards Russia. We certainly did not mean a general negativity regarding life or art in Poland. On the other hand, criticism and negativity are widespread in every country today and must be present in contemporary art.
TZ: How might the reception of your works in Russia itself over the last ten years be characterised?
I&EK: As a natural adaptation of the past.
TZ: The process of such adaptation may, however, proceed in different directions, assume different forms and acquire different meanings. Are you not concerned that another, sociopolitical ‘adaptation of the past’, observable in Russia for some time, will make certain aspects of your art—connected with a critical presentation of imaginatively transformed conditions of life in the USSR—relevant once again? The actual ‘adaptation of the past’ I have in mind seems full of nostalgia and mythologisation. Its symbol might be the attempts—successful in some cases, as far as I know—to restore monuments of Soviet ‘public art’ to their former sites…
I&EK: This long question is already an answer in itself.
TZ: I shall therefore take the answer to be ‘yes’. Let us change the subject slightly: I would like to ask about the concept and practice of the total installation. What is a total installation, and how might it be defined?
I&EK: A total installation ‘absorbs’ the viewer and turns an indifferent passer-by into an active participant in the creative act. This means that by using assorted images and technical means—objects, colours, lighting, sounds or voices—we try to affect the viewer’s imagination so that they begin to use the ‘deep strata’ of their personal, emotional, cultural, social or historical memory. Ideally, viewers would be unable to distinguish internal images from external ones.
TZ: A great deal of emphasis therefore falls on the viewer’s role. Who is the viewer for whom you create your works?
IK: The question is whether this is a ‘naïve’ or ‘specialised’ viewer, or perhaps an undefined conglomerate of both types. I must say, however, that the viewer I had in mind when making my work took shape for me while I lived in Moscow within an ideal circle of friends. That viewer was connected with three ideal figures: Andrei Monastyrsky, Boris Groys and Pavel Pepperstein. I was fortunate that these figures were not fictional but exceptionally real.
TZ: In one text you write that the total installation opposes the modernist idea and practice of the so-called autonomous work of art—one that disregards its context and the place where it is made and exhibited, while seeking to dominate and subordinate its surroundings. This would mean that the total installation must be the idea of an in situ work, one adapted each time to its place of exhibition. Indeed, you indicate that a total installation should be ‘tuned’ to the multiplicity of diverse contexts, traditions and voices that define a place’s character and identity in its present state. How do you prepare to reveal the specificity of an individual place in your work? How do you determine the contexts to be reactivated in an installation as a site-specific work?

I&EK: We try to work with the material provided by the cultural contexts of a given place. This means that our works refer to the ‘cultural library’ which we assume viewers carry in their heads, in their memory. More precisely, we refer to storytelling and narrativity understood as elements of the European cultural tradition. What is becoming particularly important today is the size of the ‘cultural library’ possessed by the contemporary viewer.

TZ: Narrativity as such remains a rather general context of reference. What would you say to critics of your work who argue that it does not really take the given place into account? They point out that you attempt to transform completely the place where your works are installed and that, consequently, the works absorb the exhibition site while remaining non-relational, self-contained and isolated from the rest of the world—‘microcosmic’ entities. In other words, they argue that the total installation does not expose the individuality of a given place but treats it as material to be shaped into a total work of art that recreates its entire surroundings and absorbs the viewer.

I&EK: That is a very unclear question. We can answer, however, that autonomous, self-contained spaces constitute only one part of our artistic practice. Our remaining works rely entirely on the local context—this can be said of almost all our public projects. Unfortunately, in the art world every artist is ‘labelled’ with only one of the many artistic practices upon which their work is based. It is highly economical, and nothing can be done about it.

TZ: Has there been a decisive change in the kind of themes you address in your work over the last dozen or so years?
IK: Yes, of course, the themes have changed. For several years my works concerned the wounds that life in the Soviet Union left in me. Then, at some point, this subject was exhausted, and Emilia and I began working with the material of images and ideas inscribed in European culture. This tendency is visible above all in our public projects. The theme of utopia and ‘utopianism’ then appeared in our minds, resulting in modules for various utopian projects—including projects for large cities. Finally, one can mention the theme of the artist as an imagined figure, always present but particularly intense in recent years. For example, we made a gigantic ‘retrospective’ exhibition, consisting mainly of paintings, devoted to three fictional artists: Ch. Rosenthal, I. Kabakov and I. Spivak.

TZ: Where does this need to address ‘utopian’ projects and the very idea of utopia come from? What function is utopia supposed to perform in art and life in the so-called ‘post-utopian’ age? Can anything be retained from the tradition of utopian-messianic thought by subjecting it to a more radical transformation?

I&EK: The word ‘need’ is inappropriate here—we do nothing out of necessity, but because at a particular moment something comes into our heads; perhaps later something else will occur to us and the themes of our works will change again. As for transforming and preserving something from utopian-messianic thought, who knows whether it is possible—or impossible?

TZ: Do you agree with interpretations of your work as ‘postmodernist’ and with viewing your practice as one of the factors in the development of installation understood as a postmodernist practice?
I&EK: Everything said about our works is justified and accurate. So that too.

TZ: Does this mean that as a rule you accept every interpretation of your art? Is an interpretation to which you would object possible at all?
I&EK: No, we will agree with every interpretation provided that interpretations are diverse and numerous.

TZ: Should the development of your artistic practice in its earlier stages be situated in a specifically Russian—or perhaps rather Soviet—context and related to local sources of inspiration, or in the broader European context of twentieth-century transformations in art? I am particularly interested here in the origins of narrativity in your work. Moreover, can the same categories used to describe certain manifestations of Western art also be applied to your work? For example, when you worked with Joseph Kosuth on The Corridor of Two Banalities, now in the collection of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, did you feel that both of you could be called ‘conceptualists’ in the same sense?

IK: It seems to me that the European, local and perhaps some other context all come into play. They cannot be separated from one another or even distinguished. I turned to storytelling and narrativity because they best express Russian culture. As for ‘conceptualism’, the situation is analogous to that of ‘postmodernism’.

TZ: Let us discuss the albums as a distinctive artistic ‘genre’ based on narrativity. Where did the idea of making albums come from, and how did the genre evolve? Can a presentation of the albums be called a ‘total installation’? What kind of attitude and mode of perception do these works presuppose on the viewer’s part?

IK: I began making albums in the early 1970s, when I was very interested in the relationship between images and so-called ‘voices’ (‘spoken’ texts). I was especially interested in the difference between what we see and what we say. For me, the visual image was always surrounded by voices-commentaries, both my own and those of other people. At that time, an image in itself, ‘ending in itself’, did not exist for me at all. I perceived images as if ‘in a row’: every image—a painting, drawing or image of any kind—was preceded by another and followed by the next, with small changes. Moreover, an image always covered a white sheet or white canvas, and so the white sheet is always first and primary, while the image is secondary. Finally, the most important thing: for me, the empty white sheet was a source of life and energy, whereas the image contained neither. All this culminated in the album genre, in which the narrative dynamic develops in two directions. First, there is a description of the author’s illness—understood, of course, as a metaphor. Second, there is a more formal narrative line, the story of freeing the white sheet from all pictures and images. Generally speaking, a presentation of the albums cannot be called a true ‘total installation’. It was, of course, desirable for viewers to be absorbed by their narrative and visual evolution.

TZ: What relations exist between word and image in the albums? What is the function of the verbal commentary accompanying the works—not only the albums, but other works too, including those made today?
IK: The most interesting function was, and remains, that of coincidence and non-coincidence, and the mutual provocation of image and word—the text is always the spoken word.

TZ: There always seems to be more than one ‘voice’, more than one ‘speech’, in the albums. What is the meaning of this ‘polyphonic’ multiplicity of voices? In connection with it, does something happen in these works to narrative understood as an artistic-literary-vocal technique?

IK: The more voices there are, the clearer it becomes that no single, ‘last’—or ‘final’—voice exists. Whatever happens to narrative in these works, what matters is that it happens at all.
TZ: To what extent can the albums be treated as a distinctive form or strategy for creating a multifaceted self-portrait dispersed across numerous stories about individual fictional figures?

IK: Whatever we do, consciously or unconsciously, eventually proves to be a self-portrait. When speaking about others, in reality we are still speaking ‘about ourselves’.
TZ: In one of the 10 Albums, entitled Primakov Sitting in His Closet, a motif of a black rectangle is repeated several times. Boris Groys argues that it can be read as an allusion to Malevich’s Black Square. Is this a critical allusion, a critical dialogue you were then conducting with modernist art? Can you say what Malevich, Suprematism and Black Square meant to you around the turn of the 1960s and 1970s?

IK: I was not influenced at the time by Suprematism or Malevich’s Black Square, because in the 1960s and 1970s we did not know very much about any of it. Nevertheless, cultural codes may sometimes operate not only consciously but unconsciously. If I myself used the image of a black box.

TZ: And now that you know Malevich’s art and ideas, what does his Suprematist project—and Black Square as the beginning of his Suprematist practice—mean to you? Was Suprematism not an idea for a ‘total installation’ on a cosmological scale, a ‘total installation’ intended to transform and recreate the entirety of reality down to its smallest details and become an all-encompassing place for everyone to live? This reminds me of a quotation: ‘one day the time will come when only installations will exist and […] everyone will live in an installation’—did you not once say something like that?

IK: I am very flattered by the question, but find it difficult to answer because it appears to be an interpretation and, as we said earlier, every interpretation is correct and accurate.

TZ: During the period when you created the albums, you used them for a kind of performance: you would slowly read the text aloud and show the images one after another to a gathered group of friends. Which form of presentation is better—the performance or the present quasi-installation—given the albums’ specificity as a genre?

IK: The albums can be presented in different forms: as books on a table, as an installation in the form of a kind of labyrinth, and finally as a video—the Japanese version. The ideal presentation, however, would allow the viewer—or reader—to see or read the albums ‘in solitude’. Yet because of today’s widespread lack of ‘free time’, that is a ‘utopian idea’, since at the very beginning of such a ‘solitary journey’ a mobile phone would undoubtedly ring…

TZ: Each album tells what seems to be a poetic or contemplative story about a lonely and desperate ‘little’ person acting under the influence of ‘otherworldly’ ideas, fantastic, visionary, even morbid emotions, manias or visions, and capable of performing utopian, imaginary acts that are impossible in their absurdity. Yet each of these figures is condemned in advance to disappear into the white of the album’s final page. What is your attitude towards these truly tragic figures? To what extent do you identify with them? I must say that there is a certain undeniable, sentimental ‘beauty’—if the word can still be used today—in the way you employ this somewhat worn, catastrophic and tragic narrative scheme of an individual whose attempt to break free from an unbearably restricted life is doomed in advance and leads to the figure’s disappearance, dematerialisation or death…
IK: Your short essay already provides a magnificent answer.