Outside "The White Cube" - Space, staging and fiction in the installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Towards the end of the 1980s, the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov (born 1933) developed a special form of installation that he termed the "total" installation. A member of the Moscow Conceptualists, he transformed the prints and paintings he had produced in the 1960s and 70s into three-dimensional space. In the early 90s, he also began producing this special form of installation both inside and outside of the museum context in collaboration with his wife and fellow artist Emilia Kabakov (born 1945). The key element of a "total" installation, which Kabakov defines as an "entirely transformed space," is the specific way in which the exhibition room is transformed and presented in the form of an open stage. The visitors, who play a central role in these installations, often find themselves confronted with a strong narrative structure.

In the installation "The White Cube" (1993), for example, a white, regular cube, its sides measuring 2.8 meters, occupies most of the exhibition room. The sides of the cube are diagonal to the walls, and no opportunity is provided to look into the cube, whose surface gleams with high-gloss paint. Two ladders are set up in front of two opposite walls of the cube. The ladder, a real, functional item, which forms a triangle when free-standing, contrasts with the strict vertical and horizontal lines of the abstract cube. Objet trouvé versus minimalist cube? The installation "The White Cube" plays with visitor expectations. The ladder in front of the cube initially casts doubt on whether the installation is still in the process of construction, or if the ladder is part of the installation proper. Is the ladder there to be used? Visitors who climb up the ladder are surprised by what they see and experience a moment of deception typical of the "total" installation.

In a lecture in 1993, Kabakov described the dramaturgical effect of his installations as follows: In the "total" installation "the viewer, who so far has felt rather free, like he does when viewing paintings or sculpture, finds himself controlled by the installation when he is near one, in a certain sense, he is its victim. But he is simultaneously both a victim and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him, he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total installation."

Narrative structures, moments of deception and subversive interpretations of the museum space are also characteristic of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's installation "Life and Creativity of Charles Rosenthal" (1999). A retrospective of drawings and paintings by the Russian painter Charles Rosenthal, who initially adopted a Suprematist style of painting, the installation sprawls over five rooms. Born in 1898 as Sholem Rosenthal "the eighth child of a poor Jewish family from Kherson, Ukraine," the artist is, in fact, an entirely fictional character. The biography of the invented painter reads like a typical life of an undiscovered genius of the avant-garde: "In 1918, under the influence of new artistic trends and opportunities that had emerged immediately following the proletarian revolution, Rosenthal left for Vitebsk and entered the art school there organaized by Marc Chagall (this school was later directed by K. Malevich who had been invited there for that purpose). Having become aquainted and enthused with the theory of suprematism, nevertheless, he did not agree with it entirely, and when the teacher left for Petrograd in 1922 with his loyal students, Rosenthal [...] decided to leave for Paris."

Emilia and Ilya Kabakov: The Flying #3, 2006

wool, 200 x 281 cm, 78.74 x 110.63 inch

Click on image to enlarge.

The monumental painting "Whose Wings are these?", displayed in the first room of the "Rosenthal" retrospective, is a vast white canvas with a grass-green, evenly shaded triangle in each of the top corners. Looking closer at the canvas, we can make out two very small wings, placed to the left and right of a vertical line that divides the canvas into two halves. The work, which is here presented as a piece by Rosenthal from 1919 exemplifying the artist's transition between abstract and figurative painting, was actually painted by Ilya Kabakov in 1999. It refers to the themes of flight and disappearance that characterized much of his early work. An example from Ilya Kabakov's albums (1972-75) is "The Flying Komarov". Looking out from his balcony at dawn, Komarov sees people flying through the air, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups. Finally, he joins them. These early motifs have been taken up in the current work: a single flying figure; a group of people who are holding onto the wings of an airplane; or a family drinking tea while floating in the air (see the tapestries "The Flying", 2005-2006).

The subject of flight can be interpreted in a metaphysical sense. Flight can also be understood, in the context of the artist's emigration to the West in the late 1980s, as an expression of his physical distance to and personal memories of the Soviet system.

Another monumental painting, "Twelve Commentaries on Suprematism" (1926/99), which is also part of the Rosenthal show, is largely a blank white field. But in the top left corner we see a realistic portrait of two young women in a library. An edge of this picture-within-a-picture has been painted over with three diagonal strips of pastel color. This work by Rosenthal is painted in a style that could be described as figurative Suprematism. In the Rosenthal show Kabakov playfully reflects on the art of the early decades of the 20th century.

Considering the artist couple's Soviet background, the paintings of Charles Rosenthal can also be read as a retrospective view on the dichotomy between the Russian avant-garde and the state-sponsored Socialist Realism.

Text by Regine Rapp