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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern : Some Tweets

Jeni Temmuz 02, 2021

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 November

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern : Some Tweets about
Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future



As in the #CamFF-screened documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art (2010) [at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010 (?)], those who made and / or concealed non-Soviet-Realist art in the USSR de facto 'got away with' it, and so tend to underplay telling how it was done : it largely seems to take the form of avoiding activity in the metropolitan centres. (At the time of first viewing the exhibition, many of one's fellow visitors clearly had Eastern European accents, and could be heard, seeming to question what they were being told about the USSR by the exhibits and / or its curation.)


We are told by the exhibition¹ that Ilya Kabakov drove for an hour to get to his studio, and is that all that it took (and sharing only with friends – in an era of denunciations) ? As in Barbara (2012) (set in East Germany – or, likewise, The Lives of Others (2006)), do authorities such as the Stasi then either seem too trusting to have been as harsh and cruel as we know that they were, or the subterfuges adopted to deceive them too naive to work ? [Actually, one must correct oneself, on having re-visited the exhibition (on 25 November 2017) : that element of driving an hour to an attic is from the fictional (wholly so ?) biographical narrative that is part of Objects of His Life (2005), but, in works that patently transmute and translate real and fictional stories, who cannot be forgiven, if the artist succeeds in implanting something, as if it were so, from the imagined creator of what is exhibited² in Objects of His Life... ?]





Detail of one part of The Coral Reef (2000)





An accreting list of useful reading (by order of title) :

* Asya ~ Michael Ignatieff

* Bricks to Babel ~ Arthur Koestler

* Darkness at Noon ~ Arthur Koestler

* Der Verschollene (Amerika) ~ Franz Kafka

* Martin Kippenberger ~ ed. Doris Krystof and Jessica Morgan (with Susanne Kippenberger and Gregory Williams) (Tate Modern, London : Exhibition Catalogues)

* Mira Schendel ~ Tanya Barson (Tate Modern, London : Exhibition Catalogues)








 End-notes :

¹ The life that was the real Franz Kafka's springs to mind, as against what the mental combination of a text such as 'The Judgment' ('Das Urteil') with a perhaps never-delivered 'Letter to my Father' ('Brief an den Vater') might make one believe about the father-and-son relationship (and then there is Alan Bennett, with Kafka's Dick...)

 ² Loosely exhibited, in that everything that is strung from the ceiling in this installation has a label attached that (at goodness knows what effort³) is parallel to the plane of the viewer : except that the inaccessible inner space that has been realized extends back seven or more feet, and so few captions can be read at the distances involved (which are not, anyway, descriptions of 'the object' - e.g. a piece of polystyrene wrapping, or the lid of a disposable coffee-cup ?). Yet, unlike the work (seen in other Tate exhibitions) of Francis Alÿs, or of Alighiero Boetti, Kabakov often seems quite serious, and not trying to play with several layers of meaning multiply and simultaneously.

 ³ As with Labyrinth (My Mother's Album), one dare not imagine the work involved. (Then again, with fourteen rooms of works by Paul Klee, the transport, insurance and other costs must be huge.)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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