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Ilya Kabakov
Description
- Ilya Kabakov
- The Complete Album FLYING KOMAROV containing 32 original drawings, 1978
each signed in Cyrillic and numbered (on the reverse); ten also signed in Cyrillic and dated 74 (lower right)
- ink, watercolor, colored pencil and collage on paper
- each: 17 by 14 in.
- 43 by 35.5 cm
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1978
Literature
Ilya Kabakov Five Albums, Helsinki and Oslo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, 1994
Robert Storr and Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, New York, Henry N. Abrams Inc Publishers, 1996
Boris Groys, David A. Ross, and Iwona Blazwich, Ilya Kabakov, London, Phaidon Press, 1998
Catalogue Note
Ilya Kabakov was a leader of the Moscow Conceptualist School in the Soviet unofficial art movement. In his interviews and writings, he has often described how his interest in combining word and image in his works resulted from his many years of experience as an illustrator of children's books.
Kabakov began his experimentation with word/image art in his albums. The album genre, which he started developing in the spring of 1972, allowed him to introduce the "fourth dimension"—time—into his work. The artist showed his albums, composed of similar-sized sheets housed in folders, to groups of four to ten people at a time. The viewer was to turn the pages one by one—an action that, as Kabakov envisioned, was to result in an experience comparable to that of viewing a theatrical performance.
Kabakov's albums, which present a fictionalized "typical" Soviet citizen who is a "small man" fully subordinate to the collective social mindset, feature seemingly unrelated statements and comments issued by a range of "voices." For this reason, the text in Kabakov's albums takes on a sense of anonymity, even group identity, in which the artist's individuality is lost amid the plethora of voices. This quality is heightened by the artist's use of the language of "anonymous street production"—that of the billboards, posters, and Soviet official documents that exerted a fatal control over the life of every Soviet citizen. The text in Kabakov's albums is not a personalized handwriting; rather, it is a parody of the stylized handwriting found on official Soviet documents. This deliberate banishment of the notion of individual authorship constitutes the main principle of writing in his albums.
Kabakov has created a total of fifty albums. The first ten—considered the most significant—were produced in the early 1970s under the collective title Ten Characters. The Flying Komarov is album six of Ten Characters.
Having had long and excruciating discussions with his wife, the fictional Komarov is in total despair. He opens the balcony door and steps outside to get some fresh air, but suddenly sees people flying with objects of their everyday existence—tables, couches, and mugs—hovering in between them. Wishing to be airborne as well, Komarov waves his arms and tries to take off after them.