Kabakov with
his Belt Ripped

llya & Emilia Kabakov: The Dream City
Power Station of Art, Shanghai
08.08.15 – 06.12.15

Joint Second Prize
Entry in Chinese

Translated by: Daniel Szehin Ho

When Americans embrace Solzhenitsyn, they have to cover their ears to his ruthless vilification of the United States. Likewise, Kabakov is a weird character who has been misread endlessly by contemporary art history. Certainly, what is different here is that the nationalism Kabakov manifests is slyer and more profound than that of Solzhenitsyn. The tinges of idealism and transcendentalism that jump out of his works defy simplistic ideological categorization, making an American-style categorically politicized [ fanzhengzhi-hua 泛政治化 ] reading onto it even more difficult. Thus, critics and curators are intent on ripping apart Kabakov’s belt – forcing the presentation of those issues the artist never intended to address in front of the viewers’ eyes, and misleading the audience’s understanding of the great ideas that Kabakov conveys.

It is high time to discard the ideological dummy we have been sucking on for years; how to go beyond the simplistic and antithetical clichés while continuing the artistic tradition of Chinese socialism has become a pressing issue. This Kabakov exhibition at PSA lays the groundwork for our reexamination of the differences between Marx’s Communism and Lenin’s Socialism with regard to art history, and offers the possibility of responding to a deeper understanding of the birth of conceptual art in the 20th century.

Two Kabakovs

In the contemporary art world’s interpretation of Kabakov, there are two images of the Kabakovs – one Kabakov being an ‘exile’ of Soviet socialism who endeavours to disclose the abominations of the former Soviet Union and the hideousness of Bolshevism, and the other Kabakov being ‘the pioneering maestro in contemporary installation art’ who constantly explores the forms of art and presents multiple ideal homelands and utopias filled with sensibility and imagination. Thus, between these two mixed interpretations, critics have been entertaining permutation and combination – that Bolshevism’s hideousness gave rise to Kabakov’s pure utopianism, or that his study of utopian forms hastened his escape from the abominable Soviet.

Correspondingly, Kabakov’s works have also been split in two – one, represented by The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment, is perceived as the expression of the artist’s escape from the former Soviet Union; the other,represented by The Ideal City featured at this exhibition, is viewed as his yearning for utopia.

Both these two interpretations are absurd. Emilia Kabakov has clearly opposed such misinterpretations: ‘Upon hearing the name Kabakov, people will think of The Toilet or Commune Dormitories… which they assume are all associated with Soviet Russia. Actually they are not;culture, philosophy, literature, art history, all these are also an integral part.’ Therefore, misinterpretations derive not from the Kabakovs’ works of art, but from those who look at ‘Utopia’ and the Kabakovs’ work through ideologically-tinged spectacles. The writing of art history since Modernism, which is steeped in the norms of American ideology, has from the onset emphasized ‘free creation’ as the characteristic of art; the problem is that the ‘freedomof creation’ inherent in art is reduced to the ‘individual freedom’ of artists in this logic of art history. This distortion and misreading of the concept of freedom has led to a new type of unfreedom – a ‘predicament within the freedom of thought’ as hijacked by political correctness.

In Kabakov’s own interpretation of his work The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment, he mentioned he was at one time disturbed by his dream, when he had always dreamed of himself flying alone towards the sky. He was determined to try every possible means to realize this dream, a grand project of his. As envisioned by the dweller of this room, the universe is filled with various upward-moving streams of energy. His plan is to capture these streams of energy in order to fly out.

Therefore, this grand project is in fact an ‘Icarian’ feat that resorts to wings glued together with wax. This plan can be traced back to the artist’s profession as an illustrator of children’s books in the former Soviet Union, but more than that it is an expression of his dream of human beings flying towards the sky and towards the universe. Its delicacy lies in the fact that he did not rely on what is external to his life to help him transcend humanity’s confinement, which made him even more heroic, and also doomed him to an eventual fall to Earth, like Icarus did.

The Ideal City is in fact not a utopia that designs its inner world through artistic means, but rather a post-utopian exploration of humanity’s destiny. But, due to the ‘predicament within the freedom of thought’ in the field of contemporary art, the ideological distortion of utopia itself not only exacerbates the weakening of the artwork’s original impact, but also conversely aggrandises the kind of simplistic and antithetical judgment of the ‘politics of right and wrong’ [ i.e. a black and white dichotomous logic ] – once aligned with the correct camp, the works of art seem to immediately take on certain values. Hence the criteria for evaluating art slide from the hipbone down to the knee, which one barely has the will to look straight at.

Utopian Kabakov

Of course, if we insist on believing that Kabakov has never explored Soviet daily life, it would be a most idiotic statement. Concerning this, Kabakov’s own response is that he is creating art based on reality: mundane reality, our partial reality, Soviet reality. If some people think he creates art based on reality through which he still conveys reality, then they merely regard Kabakov as a Soviet documentary filmmaker. Ideological simplification forces us to be properly aligned in politically correct positions while chanting slogans of freedom. There is nothing wrong to be politically correct; yet it is precisely the cowardly act of curling up, especially forcing others to curl up in an ideological safety net, that causes us to miss out on the most wonderful parts of everyday life.

The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away actually points to a crystal-clear theme – the relationship between human survival and objects. This theme is one of the key considerations of Marxism, that is, the possibility for humanity to utterly lose the possibility for self-existence after being dissociated with objects – upon Engels also constructed a set of grand historical materialistic theories of historical evolution. The concept of the proletarian movement was precisely the response to such an awkward situation – the production of materials is a struggle concerning human essence; material expansion and dispersal is the philosophy concerning human extension in the world.This is the source of the logic for all communist movements, and is also the origin of the Chinese socialist revolution.

But this work is by no means a simple statement about some socialist slogan. What the bits of paper in the work illustrate are all everyday quarrels and frolics. What they seek to convey is the same as his 1982 painting Nikolai Ivanovich Kovin: The Kettle is All Dirty. Due to cramped living conditions, people have to put labels on their personal belongings to avoid them being misplaced or misused. Anyone who has had experience of Chinese communal dormitories or ‘tube-shaped apartments’ [ tongzilou ] would knowingly smile at such humour. In other words, when objects become important indexes of human extension, the crowdedness between objects becomes the crowdedness between people; the depletion and waste of materials, and the utilisation and abandonment of materials are the manifestation of human survival and abandonment.

There is an ‘intentional misreading’ of Kabakov in the contemporary art world. Since the end of World War II, McCarthyism in the US has been constantly clearing out socialists. This cleansing has coincided with the silencing of European leftist intellectuals and artists in the US, as well as contemporary art forms such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Minimalist art and conceptual art taking shape within the core of the American spirit. The writing of contemporary art history intentionally erases the early socialist inclinations of the Surrealists, the American Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Pollock, and converts them to some ‘internationalist style’ born from the activity of European intellectuals led by an American spirit of freedom.

Therefore, Russian conceptual artists, represented by Kabakov, who entered the  US in the 1980s, are given a dual mandate for interpretations such as this – on the one hand, they are expected to be exiles who oppose Soviet Communist ideology; on the other hand, they are expected to admit that the mantle of US conceptual art falls on them. Regarding the former, apparently Kabakov was a member of the official Soviet artists’ association; as for the latter, Kabakov acknowledges himself to be Malevich’s spiritual heir.

It is exactly under such a thematic context that Kabakov has repeatedly studied the imagery of the gate. The gate, as a symbol of opening and passing through, always leads people from one space to another. But the sacred gate in The Ideal City does not symbolize the ‘gate of freedom’ connecting Russia and the US. It is only the kernel that exists alone in the space. After people pass from one end to the other, nothing changes. The sacredness lies in the act of passing through itself; people are passing thro-ugh in a poetic atmosphere, and are surpassing themselves.

Post-Utopian Kabakov

In one interview in 1987, Kabakov clearly told the interviewer that his work is ‘to reflect the post-utopian humanity, world and state of our inner world – which is our task.’

Post-utopian is not utopia or anti-utopia. It is a temporal reference; it can refer to the state of affairs after utopia, or it can refer to the latter stage in the evolution of utopia. This is a neutral remark. It does not reveal to us the beauty or evil of utopia with sentiment, nor does it unveil to us how utopia forms and organizes itself. What sets post-utopia apart from these notions is that it denotes a certain transcending, which refers to the circumstances that human beings enter into after undergoing various sufferings and ordeals.

In fact, Kabakov’s works have certain theatrical effects – this is directly associated with what he self-defines as ‘Total Art’. As demonstrated in The Boat of My Life, the work first creates a theatre for the viewers. But this theatre is not like his best-known work, The Toilet, where viewers experience the dirty and the filthy. On the contrary, the cramped everyday life is here depicted as a journey, a perpetual journey. People live here, float here, know not what course to take, and never get off the boat.

If The Toilet marks the distortion of the theme of ‘eating and excretion’ that Kabakov discussed in an attack on Soviet politics at the 1992 Kassel ʻdocumentaʼ, then The Boat of My Life is a response to such simplistic and crude interpretations of ideology. When talking about this work, Kabakov stressed that, ‘In essence, this work is to present my life and my story through the means of installation art.’ In this story, the boat does not end up travelling to the gulag archipelago; instead, it tells, reflects, and stages the artist’s life and human lives at large.

Kabakov’s The Ideal City, however, continues his ‘monumental’ exploration of Western art. Although many of his works seem to use the Tower of Babel as the prototype, this design eventually gets verification from The Ideal City: The Empty Museum. The monumental character of museums does not come from within the work, but is brought about by man-made light beams. Perpetuity lies in the space, the colours and the other space created by the halo – this is what the ‘post’ in ‘post-utopian’ connotes.

In other words, this is precisely the signal that what Kabakov claims as total art attempts to convey. What it concerns is not really a cultural relativism contingent upon the specific time and space, but the conditions of survival shared by all of humanity. When the artist fully utilises all media in one specific site and space, and when all media form a theatre, at the moment when many voices break out, what falls is not infatuation or loss but a sigh in the wilderness.

Flying and passing through, commemorating and looking up, discarding and reviving – these few motifs of art, as well as applying design and engineering to the realisation of these motifs, have run through Kabakov’s work. At the same time, these social motifs were also the core ideals of early Soviet socialism and even the world Communist movement – and have eventually become the destiny of the Soviet socialist revolution and even contemporary Russian politics. More importantly, it is these ideals that gave rise to contemporary art. It is only when integrated with the thinking of the Russian philosopher Fyodorov that Kabakov’s works make total sense, of which a glimpse can be gained only in its echo of early socialist ideals.

被扯断腰带的卡巴科夫

《伊利亚和艾米莉亚·卡巴科夫:理想之城》
上海,当代艺术博物馆
2015年8月8日至12月6日

并列二等奖
中文投稿

就好像美国人在拥抱索尔仁尼琴时,只能在他对美国无情的辱骂声中掩住自己的耳朵一样,卡巴科夫也是一个被当代艺术史无限误读的怪物。当然,不一样的是,卡巴科夫比索尔仁尼琴所显露的民族主义更狡黠、也更加深刻。他的作品扑面而来的理想与超验主义的气息都超越了简单的意识形态归类法则,从而使得当下美式的泛政治化的解读变得越发困难。于是,评论家与策展人们就必须扯断卡巴科夫的腰带,让艺术家原本就不打算谈论的那些问题,强行的呈现在人们眼前,误导着观众来理解卡巴科夫所表达的伟大理念。

是时候扔掉我们长年叼着的意识形态奶嘴了—如何超越简单对立的陈词滥调,并接续中国社会主义自己的艺术传统,已经成为一个亟待解决的问题。卡巴科夫在上海艺术博物馆( PSA )的本次展览,正好为我们在艺术史中重新梳理马克思的共产主义与列宁的社会主义之间的差别做出了重要铺垫,也为更深入的理解20世纪观念艺术的诞生史提供了做出回应的可能。

两个卡巴科夫

在当前国际当代艺术界对卡巴科夫的解释中,存在着两个卡巴科夫的形象—一个是作为苏联社会主义“流亡者”的卡巴科夫,努力的在作品中揭示苏联的恶劣,揭示布尔什维克的丑恶嘴脸;一个则是作为“当代装置艺术鼻祖大师”的卡巴科夫,不断探索着艺术的形式,充满感性和幻想的在作品之中呈现了一个个理想家园与乌托邦。于是,在这两种混搭的解释之中,评论者们开始玩起了排列组合—要么是布尔什维克的丑陋催生了卡巴耶夫纯净的乌托邦理想,要么是他对乌托邦形式的研究让他急于逃离苏俄的恶劣环境。卡巴科夫的作品也因此被分为了两半,一半以《一个从宿舍飞向天空的人》为代表,被认为是艺术家对逃离苏维埃的表达;另一半则以本次来展的《理想之城》为代表,被认为是艺术家对理想国的眷恋。

这两种解释都是荒诞不经的。伊米莉亚?卡巴科夫曾经十分明确的反对这些误解:“人们一听见‘卡巴科夫’这个名字就会联想到‘厕所’或者‘公社宿舍’……他们以为全都是跟苏维埃俄罗斯有关的。其实不是,文化、哲学、文学、艺术史,这些也都是脱不开的”。因此,误读的问题并未出于卡巴科夫的创作,而是出自那些带着意识形态有色眼镜来观看“乌托邦”,观看卡巴科夫作品的人。以美国意识形态为标准的现代主义以来的艺术史写作,始终在强调艺术的自由特征,但问题是,艺术内在的“自由创作”在这种艺术史逻辑中被简单化、被贬低为艺术家的“人身自由”。这种对自由概念的歪曲与误读,重新导致了一种新的不自由—被政治正确绑架的“思想自由的困境”。

在卡巴科夫曾对《一个从宿舍飞向天空的人》自己解释道,他曾是一个被梦境所困扰的人,总是梦见自己孤独地飞向天空。他要以其所有的可能去实现这个梦境—这是他的“宏伟计划”。根据房间中这个居住者的想法,天际间充满了各种一直向上的能量流。他的计划就是要去捕捉这些能量流,并利用它们飞出去。

因此,这个“宏伟计划”事实上是一次用蜡粘起翅膀般的“伊卡洛斯式”伟大壮举。对这一计划的追溯,可以从艺术家在苏联从事儿童绘画工作谈起,但更多的是艺术家对人类奔向天空之梦,奔向宇宙之梦的表达。其精致之处在于,他并未使用那些外在于他生活的事物来帮助自己超越人类的限制,因而更加壮烈,也注定了他最终如伊卡洛斯一般坠入大地。

《理想之城》事实上并非是一次用艺术手段来设计其内心的乌托邦,而是对全人类的命运进行一种后乌托邦式的探讨。但由于当代艺术领域内“思想自由的困境”,对乌托邦本身的意识形态歪曲,不但加重的削弱艺术作品原有力量,还反过来捧出了那种简单对立的“是非政治”判断—只要站好了队伍,作品似乎就具有了某种价值。艺术的评判标准由此从胯骨滑落到了膝盖,让人不忍直视。

乌托邦的卡巴科夫

当然,如果我们强行的认为卡巴科夫并未探讨苏联的日常生活,那也是极其愚蠢的说法。对于这一点,卡巴科夫自己的回应是,他在用现实进行创作,“最平凡无华的现实,用我们的局部现实,用苏联的现实”。如果有人认为他用现实进行创作而表达的依旧是现实的话,那只是将卡巴科夫视为苏联的纪录片拍摄者而已。意识形态的简单化处理,让我们不得不站好队伍,高喊着自由的口号,让自己处在政治正确的位置上。政治正确并没有错,但蜷缩在,尤其是强行让别人蜷缩在意识形态安全网之中的懦弱行为,恰恰让我们忽视了日常生活中极为精彩的部分。《绝不抛弃任何东西的男人》事实上指向的是一个十分清晰的主题,那就是关于人的生存与物之间的关系。这个主题是马克思主义重要的思考之一,就是关于人在脱离了物之后就彻底的丧失了自我存在的可能性—恩格斯也就此构筑了一套宏大的唯物主义历史进化论。无产阶级运动这一概念,恰恰是对这种尴尬境地的回应—物质的生产就是关于人的本质的斗争,物质的延伸与弥散就是关于人在世界之中蔓延的哲学。这是一切共产主义运动逻辑的起源,也同时是苏联,并同时是中国社会主义革命的发源。

但是,这个作品绝不是关于某种社会主义口号的简单陈述。作品中的纸片上所描述的,都是关于某物的日常争吵、嬉闹。这与他在1982年的绘画《尼古拉斯·伊凡诺维奇·柯文:壶全脏了》之中所试图表达的一样。由于居住环境的逼仄,人们不得不将自己所有的物品都贴上标签,以免误拿或乱用。任何一个拥有中国集体宿舍或筒子楼经验的人都会对这种幽默会心一笑。换而言之,当物成为人之延伸的重要事物,那么物与物的拥挤就是人与人的拥挤;物的耗尽与浪费,物的利用与废弃,都是关于人的生存及其废弃的表现。

当代艺术界对卡巴科夫的“误读是刻意的”。美国麦卡锡主义自二战结束开始就持续的对社会主义者进行清理。这种清理不仅伴随着欧洲一批左派知识分子与艺术家在美国失声,还伴随着以抽象表现主义、波普艺术、极简艺术、观念艺术为核心的当代艺术在美国精神内部的成型。当代艺术史的书写有意的将超现实主义者、美国包豪斯、黑山学院与波洛克早年的社会主义倾向抹去,将其扭转为欧洲知识分子在美国自由精神的引导下所诞生的某种“国际主义风格”。

因而以卡巴科夫为代表的由80年代进入美国的俄罗斯观念艺术家,在这种解读之中都被赋予了双重任务—一方面他们需要成为反对苏共意识形态的流亡者,另一方面则要让他们承认自己是美国观念艺术在俄罗斯的传人。关于前者,显而易见的是,卡巴科夫在苏联是官方艺术家协会的会员;关于后者,卡巴科夫则将自己陈述为马列维奇的传人。正是在这样的主题下,卡巴科夫才反复探讨着“门”的意象。门,作为开启与穿越的象征,始终引导着人们从一个空间到另一个空间。但在《理想之城》中的这个神圣之门,并非象征连接着俄国与美国的“自由之门”。它仅仅孤独的存在于空间的核心。从一端穿越到另一端,什么都没有改变。具有神圣意义仅仅是穿越本身,人在诗意之中穿越着、超越着自身。

后乌托邦的卡巴科夫

在1987年的一次访谈中,卡巴科夫清晰地告诉来访者,他的作品是在“反映后乌托邦世界的人类、世界和我们内心的生存状态是我们的任务”。

后乌托邦,它既不是乌托邦,亦不是反乌托邦。它指涉了一种时间的特征,可以表示乌托邦之后的状态,亦可以表示在乌托邦的演化过程中进入了后段。这是一个十分中性的评价。它既未曾带有情绪的向我们昭示乌托邦的美丽或邪恶,也未曾向我们指明乌托邦的组成方式。恰恰与这些想法不同的是,后乌托邦意味着超越性,意味着在经历了诸多苦难与考验之后,人类所走入的某种境地。

卡巴科夫的作品事实上具有一种剧场式的效果—这和他所自我定义的“总体艺术”是直接相关的。如同在《我的生活之舟》所表现的那样,作品首先为观看者搭建了一座剧场,但这座剧场并非与他最出名的作品《厕所》一样,让人生活在肮脏与污秽之中。而是恰恰相反,逼仄的日常生活在这里被描述为一次航行,一次永久的航行。人们在这里生活,在这里漂泊,无所适从,永不下船。

如果说《厕所》是1992年卡塞尔文献展将卡巴科夫所谈论的“进食与排泄”主题扭曲成攻击苏俄政治的话,那么《我的生活之舟》就是对这种意识形态简单粗暴的解读的一次回应。卡巴科夫谈到这件作品时强调“在本质上,这件作品是以装置形式来呈现我的生活以及我的故事”。在这个故事中,船并未驶向古拉格群岛,而是在讲述、表现、上演着艺术家乃至人类的生活。

卡巴科夫的《理想之城》则延续了对西方艺术“纪念碑性”的探讨。尽管大量作品都看似是以巴别塔的形式未原型而设计的,但这一设计最终在《理想之城:空的美术馆》之中得到了进一步的印证。美术馆的纪念碑性,并非是由作品本身带来的,而是由一个个人为制造的光束而生成。永恒的只有空间、色彩,以及由光晕所制造而成的另一个空间—这便是后乌托邦之为“后”的含义。

换而言之,这恰恰是卡巴科夫声称的总体艺术所试图传达的信号。它所关注的恰恰不是一时一地的相对主义文化,而是人类所共有的生存状态。当艺术家在一个场域与空间之中调用起所有的媒介,当所有媒介形成一个剧场,就在众声喧哗的那一刻,陡然降临不是沉迷或迷失,而是一声旷野中的叹息。

飞翔与穿越、纪念与仰望、废弃与复活,这几个艺术的母题,并用工程设计的方法来实现这些母题,都始终贯穿在卡巴科夫的创作之中。但同时,这些社会命题也是俄国早期社会主义、乃至世界共产主义运动的核心理想,也最终成为了苏俄社会主义革命乃至当前俄国政治的宿命。而更重要的是,正是这些理想创造了当代艺术。在俄国哲学家费奥多罗夫那里,卡巴科夫的作品才拥有了完整的意义,而这一意义,也只能在早期社会主义理想的回声中,才能一窥其中的究竟。