“... an avant-gardist long after the
days of the avant-garde who dreams the dream of the avant-garde one last time
in the seclusion of his own room.”
Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov: The man who flew into space
from his apartment (London: Afterall, 2006)
The Strange
City
is the title of a current exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, by Russian
conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov and his wife, Emilia. It takes the form of a journey through the ‘strange
city’, comprising related installations which variously suggest notions of
dream, the labyrinth, time-and-space, utopia; reviewing the exhibition, Matilda
Bathurst found it “haunted by whispers of J.G. Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges.” The
Kabakovs’ previous exhibits in the UK include pieces for Star City: The Future Under Communism (2010) at Nottingham
Contemporary, and a recent installation,
‘The Happiest Man’ in London, at the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3
gallery (2013).
Critic Boris Groys traces the connections in the Kabakovs’ work between Soviet revolutionary
propaganda and the subsequent ‘space heroism’ of Yuri Gagarin and his fellow
cosmonauts, summarising that:
“The official Soviet cult of space exploration... [was] a blatant
misuse of the cosmic utopia of unlimited free movement... [with] an ideological
excess of parades, rituals and ceremonies... the Communist project was
originally a global, cosmic project.”
 |
| Image from The Strange City, 2014 |
The
Kabakovs consciously reference a tradition in Russian philosophical and
scientific thought expounded by Nikolai Fedorov (1828/29-1903), author of Philosophy of the Common Task, rocket
pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) and ‘Cosmist’ Aleksandr Chizhevsky
(1897-1964), whose overlapping theories of cosmic conquest, resurrection, space
travel and the perfectibility of man were adapted, sometimes uncomfortably, to
fit an early-Soviet Utopian vision. Philosophy
of the Common Task, posthumously published by friends and
followers of Fedorov, was a key text in this respect, roughly summarised by its
translator Elisabeth Koutaissoff as a
“utopian vision of universal human kinship”, where man’s great ‘task’,
or duty, is “to regulate the forces of nature, to defeat death and bring
ancestors back to life.” The fusion of belief in science and technology to
improve mankind with mystical, even occult, ideas was not outlandish in
pre-Revolutionary Russia; the two were compatible and these historical
precedents of ‘scientific mysticism’ were carried forward into early Communist thinking, and informed the art and theory of Constructivism.
This
latest exhibition makes those links explicit, as the visitor is guided around
the large-scale installations which make up The Strange City, variously titled
‘The Empty Museum’ or ‘The Centre of Cosmic Energy’, where the work of Vladimir
Vernadsky (1863-1945) on the Noosphere[1] –
itself an extension of Fedorov's belief in humanity’s ability to shape “the
course of evolution and the fate of the planet” – and the grand Soviet Utopian
projects such as Tatlin’s Tower are juxtaposed with fragments of propaganda
posters, praising “the courage, labour, and reason of the Soviet people!”. The
grim reality of that illusory dream of earthly paradise and cosmic unity,
evidenced by famine, the GULag, the purges and decades of totalitarian rule,
are unspoken, but undeniably present. This is another strand in what curator Robert
Storr calls “Kabakov’s project of recreating the jerry-rigged workers’
paradise... [recalling] barely remembered nightmares.”
 |
| Model of Tatlin's Tower, 1919 |
A visit to Moscow’s
Space Museum, explored in Part Two, reinforces the disjuncture between the
Utopian vision and the Soviet reality, and provides another example of “the
collapse of socialist dreams.”
No comments:
Post a Comment