Wednesday 8 November 2017

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV - NOT EVERYONE WILL BE TAKEN INTO THE FUTURE




If the American space age dream was one of sleek, shiny automation, silver suits and intergalactic supremacy, it's fitting that Russian artist Ilya Kabakov's 'science-fiction' should be a whole lot more grim. Staring into his installation, The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985) I was struck by several things, not least the shabby mess left behind by the DIY Soviet cosmonaut. Propaganda posters are plastered all over the walls, an obvious reference to State-authorised utopia... 


...abandoned shoes, the crude 'bed'...and that hole in the ceiling, his supposed point of departure, defies logic, depicting as it does the force of something dropping into, rather than being thrust out of, the room. In case you're wondering how he also got through the roof of the apartment block, it was wired up to explode upon lift-off. Here's the whole story...




To view the installation is an ambiguous experience, light glimpsed through the boarded up door being inviting, like cosy living-rooms glimpsed from streets at dusk, yet there are warnings in the form of drab overcoats on pegs outside in semi-darkness. Warnings of what? The dark heart of the story? I presume it's intended as an optimistic tale of escape, yet looking into the room it struck me as tragi-comic. This is no fairy-tale grotto. The catapult is a joke. 



Yet how else would a poor Russian travel into space? This is not a result of HG Wells-style grand late-Victorian adventure, a magnificent machine built through ingenuity and empire-emboldened confidence. It is a catapult and as such represents only the most basic device an oppressed citizen could build. It's both insanely optimistic (like the Russian revolution) and a foolish dream (if considered in the cold light of reality). But the poor of Russia knew that reality all too well and who is to say that in their minds some did not dream of a better place Out There, far from Cold War rhetoric and communist reality?

Elsewhere in the exhibition there are paintings such as these (covered in sweet wrappers)...


...and I Catch the Little White Men, which really caught my eye...




...along with Model for Where Is Our Place?...



The other stunning installation is Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future...



...which instantly reminded me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, if for no other reason than it's overriding atmosphere of desolation and the site of rail transport. Whilst Ilya Kabakov's vision is not the incredibly detailed poetic griminess of Tarkovsky's, it carries equal weight in terms of a sinister prophecy of things to come. Here, though, along with the possibility of applying the slogan to all Russian citizens grounded in the bitter reality of contemporary society, it refers explicitly to artists neglected by mainstream authority and the artist's legacy in general. It contemplates the future of everything made by artists whose works will not be given retrospectives by galleries. Perhaps even the fate of the relatively well-known who cannot predict the place their art will take in the future.


I've only scratched the surface of what's on offer in this exhibition (there are many more paintings, artist's books, sculptures and the intensely personal installation, Labyrinth (My Mother's Album) which, I must say, like so much work here, suggests a duality; in this case, the womb-like comfort of close family memories with the claustrophobic potential of such memories). If you can get to Tate Modern before this show ends I urge you to do so. 



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