Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
Arndt & Partner, Berlin, Germany
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, 'The Monument to the Man Climbing the Wall', installation view. Arndt & Partner, 2008
A sheet of paper lies on the floor, having slipped from the stand it was mounted on. Bearing the legend ‘The Strong Breath’, the sheet instructs visitors to climb one of the ladders placed by a large white wooden cube. You wait for another gallery visitor to climb the other ladder, before engaging in a blowing contest, each contestant aiming to propel a small sailboat floating in a circular pond on the top of the cube to the other person’s perimeter.
Except that there is no sailboat – either at some point it has sunk, or else there never was one in the first place. It is hard to tell with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a pair who often deploy absurdist strategies in the course of their general enquiry into the problem of utopia. Was utopia once a concrete possibility, or was the idea always a signposted fiction? I ask the gallery attendant: he confirms that a sailboat once existed.
The Kabakovs are having a busy autumn. In Moscow, the artists currently enjoy a city-wide retrospective, centred on the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum and embracing Daria Zhukova’s new contemporary art space, The Garage. In Berlin, Arndt & Partner have responded by running a smaller selection of the artists’ work parallel to the Russian show.
Taking up four rooms on the first floor of their Mitte gallery, the exhibition includes, in addition to the installation (The White Cube, 2005), six supporting pencil and ink drawings and three intricately patterned carpets from 2005 and 2006, respectively entitled The Flying, The Flying #3 and The Flying #4.
The carpets are good. Embroidering images of flight and levitation (#2 depicts a family drawing room suspended over a city; The Flying depicts boys and girls clutching the wing of a soaring plane and #4 shows a flying man, likely Kabakov himself, dressed in a business suit) the pieces are basically well-crafted fantasy scenes that extend Kabakovian motifs that first began to appear in his work in the early 1970s. But these motifs are particularly well-suited to this new choice of medium, which allows them to stage both an illustrative retreat into the romance of fantasy, and a modern refashioning of an everyday object habitually unused to such imagery. Equally, in their status as floor-based objects, patterned after the sky, yet hung on a gallery wall, the rugs stage a thought-provoking dialectic of surfaces. Are the images they depict intended as grounds to be walked on, or pictures on walls to be gazed at?
The exhibition’s centrepiece is a 2005 model sculpture named The Eternal Emigrant which the Kabakovs one day hope to place near the Reichstag building as a permanent public art project. Depicting a man splayed in two over a cut-away section of the Berlin Wall, his torso hanging down one side, his legs dangling limp down the other, there is something both anguished and comic about it, like a man struggling vainly, yet heroically, with an umbrella in a hurricane. Although the proposal appears as eccentric at first, on deeper reflection it seems an appropriate metaphor for the course of human history.
Daniel Miller
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