Kabakov Ilya & Emilia

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Twenty ways to get an apple listening to the music of Mozart, 1997
Installation

Like most works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart focuses on the meaning of representation. This is restricted to the territory of art, since the meaning of ideals and utopias can degenerate when they are transplanted into the real world. In an interview with Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov thus described his installation in the Russian Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale: "The basic ideological standpoint is that socialism is good. Even more than that: it is a celebration of life, but we must not touch it. It's 'untouchable', like the view from the balcony of the Russian Pavilion. Socialism is wonderful, but it should stay in Iofan's and Mayakovsky's utopias, and not be put into practice. It is beautiful, but from a distance. It will shine above us as an eternal utopia, evading us like the carrot dangled in front of the donkey. The experiences of the 20th century have made it manifest that it is better not to come too close to utopias. We cannot give them up, but we had better not even try to realize them. In this sense, Odysseus' experience is ideal: he had himself tied to the mast as they sailed past the island of the Sirens. He could hear the Sirens' song and stay alive. His men, who had tied him, could not understand what pulled him to the shore with such force..."(1)
James Joyce dedicated the chapter "Sirens" of his novel Ulysses to music, with regard to which he said on one occasion that he'd stopped caring for music after he'd explored its devices and artifices to use them in that chapter; that, although a great music lover, he could no longer listen to it; and that having seen through its tricks, he could no longer enjoy it. (2)

The job of modern art is precisely to deconstruct the tricks which make us enjoy illusions. The installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart consists of twenty drawings and stories explaining the various tricks by which one can reach an apple in the middle of an enormous table, two or three arm's lengths away. Kabakov does not deal with the illusion in the way a modernist work would, that is to say, by trying to shatter it by any means. Kabakov relativizes the illusion, by first duplicating it: the apple in the middle of the table is a symbol of our imagination, and as such can only be approached if we devise in our imagination an additional system of ways to reach it. Kabakov explains some possible tricks for obtaining this essentially biblical object of desire, the fulfillment of which means, as we know, expulsion from paradise. Thus he draws the apple closer only optically with the aid of two small mirrors that he places on an empty plate before him in one of the twenty stories. He does a similar thing in the accompanying drawing: he draws nearer the children who've refused to play with him by lifting his hand and stretching his forefinger and then peering over it at the children, who now seem to be walking along his index finger.
The hero of the installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart is not very successful in real life. Everything he accomplishes he accomplishes in his imagination. But his is not the kind of failure we are familiar with from everyday life; rather, it is a certain tension between the attainable and the non-attainable, between reality and illusion, that can never be resolved.

What installations such as Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart tell us is that utopian worlds are always somewhere nearby, close at hand; we generally only fail to see the way to them. Most frequently, there is a door leading into the installations of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a door easily overlooked in an exhibition space. It is so hard to notice because it does not indicate in any way that there is a work of art behind it; it looks like a door leading into a storeroom or a broom closet.
Like most of Kabakovs' installations, also Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart is accessible through a specially made, inconspicuous door. Many people must have overlooked it on many occasions, to be reminded of it only afterwards. Often too late, at a time when they could return into the museum space only in their minds and attempt to retrace their steps in viewing the works to where they'd missed the mysterious, nigh-invisible door. Kabakov mentioned once that he'd decided that at great international exhibitions with many eminent artists he would play with invisibility, with emptiness. And it makes no difference whether this was a carefully planned strategic decision or a reflection of his fear of confronting the international arena.

Ilya Kabakov won international acclaim as a Russian artist. The toilet he put up in the backyard of the Fridericianum for the 1992 documenta was exactly what was expected of an artist from the poor East at that time. In the years of his successful career, which he continued in the West with Emilia Kabakov, his recognizable Russianness, based on socialist grayness, poor materials, and stories about communal life, gradually disappeared. What remained as a permanent trait of their art, and what can still only be understood in the context of Soviet society, is a strong narrative structure, in which individual utopian worlds take shape.

Every artist is in a way an Odysseus, forever returning home. Not only the narrative structure of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's installations, also their aspiration toward invisibility can be understood only in the context of isolation and communist equalization. Art is thus only possible as a private utopia, carefully concealed behind an invisible door. To be invisible means also to be empty like a blank canvas, ready for all manner of projections. The whiteness of the installation Twenty Ways to Get an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart is essentially the emptiness that represents the beginning and end of every journey Ilya and Emilia Kabakov take.

Zdenka Badovinac

(1) Boris Groys, Teorija sodobne umetnosti: izbrani eseji (Ljubljana: Študentska založba, zbirka Koda, 2002) 177.
(2) James Joyce, Ulikses II. (Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, Zbirka XX. stoletja, 1993) 417.

(from the catalogue of the exhibition at TR3 in Ljubljana in 2007)

Ilya Kabakov
Born: 1933, Dnepropetrovsk, Russia
Education: VA Surikov Art Academy, Moscow

Emilia Kabakov
Born: 1945, Dnepropetrovsk, Russia
Education: Moscow University (Spanish language and literature), Music College, Irkutsk

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