- 222
Ilya Kabakov, b. 1933
Description
- Ilya Kabakov
- Vshkafusidyashii Primakov [sitting-in-the-cupboard Primakov]
- number 7 of 8 copies printed by the artist; comprising 46 colour and 1 black and white photocopied prints mounted on cardboard and paper, each print signed in Cyrillic l.r. in the plate and dated 74; also signed on the mount in Cyrillic and dated 87 and isncribed copy 7/8; the title page further dedicated in Cyrillic t.r.
Held in original fitted canvas-covered folding box - sheet size: 530 by 370mm.; 21 by 14½in.
Provenance
Catalogue Note
Kabakov initially made his living as an illustrator of children’s books, traditionally one of the very few official niches where the remnants of the avant garde could survive.
From 1972-75 he produced a series of 10 albums each centred around one character, recounting through text and drawings a fictitious story about artists on the margins of society whose work is misunderstood. The final page closes with a statement about their death and includes the commentaries of other fictional characters.
Their design is typical of Soviet children’s literature, conventions which had remained unchanged since the nineteenth century, and gives the albums a harmless, naive appearance which is at odds with the rather more unsettling issues they raise.
Kabakov experiments with ‘personazhnost’, the use of fictional personae allowing the artist to assume different attitudes, and assess the circumstances in which art is created, for example the artist’s hopes, self-deception, disappointment. The ‘death of the author’ parallels the shift in focus from the production of art to its context which was occurring in West during the mid twentieth century.
The albums themselves aestheticise the incapacity and failure of their unfortunate protagonists and, with the accompanying commentaries, Kabakov creates an imaginary audience for this unofficial art, compensating for the lack of a real one. The characters recall the heroes of 19th century Russian literature, the Little Man of Gogol and Dostoyevsky’s novels, who are literally consumed by their own obsessions.
Sitting-in-the-cupboard Primakov
(Literature: B.Groys et al, Ilya Kabakov, Oxford: Phaidon, 1998, p43)
deals with the theme of invisibility. At first Primakov refuses to come out, then slowly emerges, sees his life from an increasingly wide perspective: his apartment, the city, the region, the world, further and further away until objects and language begins to desintegrate until the final page informs us Primakov has disappeared from the closet