Ilya Kabakov, Russian Илья Иосифович
Кабаков (1933) is an American conceptual artist of Russian-Jewish origin,
born in
Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from
the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island. He
was named by Art News as one of the "ten greatest living artists" in 2000.
Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has
produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and
theoretical texts — not to mention extensive memoirs that track his life
from his childhood to the early 1980s. In recent years, he has created
installations that evoked the visual culture of the Soviet Union, though
this theme has never been the exclusive focus of his work. Unlike some
underground Soviet artists, Kabakov joined the Union of Soviet Artists in
1959, and became a full-member in 1965. This was a prestigious position in
the USSR and it brought with it substantial material benefits. In general,
Kabakov illustrated children's books for 3–6 months each year and then
spent the remainder of his time on his own projects.
By using fictional biographies, many inspired by
his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death
of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first modern society to
disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovers elements common to every
modern society, and in doing so he examines the rift between capitalism
and communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist
project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov describes it as one utopian
project among many, capitalism included. By reexamining historical
narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every
project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the
potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power.
