There’s a train leaving the station. On it is every talented, special person you know, off to fulfil their potential and rise to greatness. Left behind is you, doomed to be forgotten, abandoned to rot in your own mediocrity. In Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s massive, life-size installation, part of this sprawling show, you’re faced with the rear of a departing train, left frozen between the need to escape and the fear of being abandoned. It’s an emotional hell that most of their work forces on the viewer. These two pioneering Russian conceptual artists don’t deal in sunshine and lollipops.
Ilya started out as a painter who refused to conform to Soviet expectations and, as a result, was forced to create his art outside the margins of accepted society. The early paintings here, made before he married and began collaborating with Emilia in 1989, attack the state’s domination over the individual. One work apes the propaganda aesthetics of socialist realism but spins the intention around, showing a woman being celebrated for betraying the party. Another equates the lowly individual with a dog.
But it’s the installations that make the show worth visiting. ‘The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment’ is a series of rooms belonging to a fictional man: the pots from the communal kitchen hang suspended in mid-air, objects nicked from neighbours are stacked on a table, and a hole in the roof shows where he’s finally managed to burst away from the tyranny of his life. Finally: escape, freedom.
But it doesn’t last. Another installation is an endless winding corridor: grey, brown and miserable. An interminable, inescapable apartment block. It’s oppressive, suffocating.
There are paintings on show too, a high-concept mixture of socialist realism and pointillism with aspects obscured by snow, or with whole segments erased. They’re nice and conceptually knotty, but feel unworthy of the space they’re given. Maybe that’s because they’re a bit unspectacular, or maybe because their impact is dwarfed by the claustrophobic power of the installations. Once you’ve been forced to exist within the fear and discomfort they create, it’s hard to appreciate it from the outside.
The Kabakovs’ art isn’t easy. They unspool the strands of utopia, exposing the fleshy dystopia beneath. This is the struggle of the individual, lost in an abyss of bureaucracy and repression. This is a fight for survival. If it makes you uncomfortable, good: that means you’re still alive, and you still have a chance.
@eddyfrankel