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Dinesh club

Posted: 29 Dec 2021

Taken: 28 Dec 2021

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Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias

Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias
artmargins.com/ilya-kabakov-the-soviet-toilet-and-the-palace-of-utopias
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
At the end of the millennium, it has become fashionable to speak about the “end of history” and the “end of art,” to say nothing about the end of the world. Boris Groys has commented that Soviet civilization was the first modern civilization whose death we have witnessed, and there are more to come.(1) While the world might end, the art world does not have to. Arthur Danto suggests that we live in the era of the end of art, which is not at all bad for the artists.(2) It is simply the end of the Hegelian narrative of art history, which culminates in the self-reflexivity and diversity of art, liberated from a teleological master narrative. Kabakov’s work fits in well with the eschatological fashions of the end of the millennium. Yet it does not quite represent them. For Kabakov, art remains an inevitable, existential need and a therapy for survival. The artist loves the museum not merely as an institution, but as a personal refuge.

Kabakov has a strange sense of timing. His art works seem to come after the millenium, not right before it. Kabakov’s total installations look like the artist’s Noah’s arks, only we are never sure if the artist escaped from hell or from paradise . While conversant in the language of contemporary art, Kabakov’s projects tease the Western interpreter and evade “isms.” Is his art of homemaking modern, anti-modern, post-modern, or outmoded?

On the one hand, it might appear that his art has little to do with modernism and post-modernism. In a way, the installations hark back to the origins of secular art and resemble an undecipherable baroque allegory. Or maybe they go back even further, to primitive creativity as a survivalist instinct – a way of fleeing from panic and fear, of hunting and gathering transient beauties in the wilderness of ordinary life. On the other hand, his project is belatedly modern; it explores the sideroads of modernity, the aspirations of the little men and amateur artists and the ruins of modern utopias.

(For Complete read, click the link above.)
3 weeks ago.

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