4. Ilya Kabakov
Ilya Kabakov offers an interesting counterpart to the artist duo Komar and Melamid. In comparison to Komar and Melamid who applied to emigrate twice in 1977, Kabakov was reluctant to leave his country, admitting that he would have remained in the Soviet Union “forever if perestroika hadn 't come”. Nonetheless, this was not due to any deep patriotism to the Soviet Union. Though he still retained his official position as a children’s book illustrator, he was seen as an unofficial artist and continued to quietly produce his own work in his spare time. Additionally, Kabakov emigrated at the close of the Cold War in 1987, almost a decade after Komar and Melamid. Subsequently, he also endured a longer period of aesthetic isolation as an older artist, and makes multiple references to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in his artworks. Moreover, though Kabakov continued to dabble in paintings and illustrations, he generally expressed his views on the Soviet Union with three-dimensional media, in a genre termed ‘total installations’ which he first embraced in Moscow in 1985, and then revisited in the United States after emigrating. …show more content…
It is actually a painting of a painting Kabokov first created in 1981 – Tested! – that was itself based on an original work by an unknown Soviet artist made in 1936, which shows a woman getting her Communist Party card back after surviving a typical 1930s purge. The movement from one internal frame to the other plays on the role of an unreliable narrator or artist, in addition to the referencing himself and a propaganda poster (perhaps implying a sense of revisionist history?) echoes many themes used by Komar and Melamid.Moreover, the title itself with the possessive “my” may point to a trend towards authorial ownership by Kabakov, who has often created fictional artist personas, complete with heavily detailed
Ilya Kabakov offers an interesting counterpart to the artist duo Komar and Melamid. In comparison to Komar and Melamid who applied to emigrate twice in 1977, Kabakov was reluctant to leave his country, admitting that he would have remained in the Soviet Union “forever if perestroika hadn 't come”. Nonetheless, this was not due to any deep patriotism to the Soviet Union. Though he still retained his official position as a children’s book illustrator, he was seen as an unofficial artist and continued to quietly produce his own work in his spare time. Additionally, Kabakov emigrated at the close of the Cold War in 1987, almost a decade after Komar and Melamid. Subsequently, he also endured a longer period of aesthetic isolation as an older artist, and makes multiple references to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in his artworks. Moreover, though Kabakov continued to dabble in paintings and illustrations, he generally expressed his views on the Soviet Union with three-dimensional media, in a genre termed ‘total installations’ which he first embraced in Moscow in 1985, and then revisited in the United States after emigrating. …show more content…
It is actually a painting of a painting Kabokov first created in 1981 – Tested! – that was itself based on an original work by an unknown Soviet artist made in 1936, which shows a woman getting her Communist Party card back after surviving a typical 1930s purge. The movement from one internal frame to the other plays on the role of an unreliable narrator or artist, in addition to the referencing himself and a propaganda poster (perhaps implying a sense of revisionist history?) echoes many themes used by Komar and Melamid.Moreover, the title itself with the possessive “my” may point to a trend towards authorial ownership by Kabakov, who has often created fictional artist personas, complete with heavily detailed