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On the "Total installation" of Ilya Kabakov - The dream of avantgarde art and the art of Soviet everyday life

이지연 1

1한양대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

This article investigates an ambivalent post-Soviet consciousness in the total installation works of Ilya Kabakov - his vector to the Russian Avant-garde culture and coexisting with it nostalgia for the memory of Soviet everyday life. First of all in this article the author surveys the evolutionary process of his works from his early period album genre to the total installations of recent times and highlights the mechanism of signification, in the course of which things from the Soviet everyday life are converted to meaningful artistic signs. In the first chapter of this article along with biography of the artist there is introduced the interrelation of Avant-garde aesthetics and Soviet official aesthetic policies. Especially it is analysed based on the understanding of continuity from Russian Avant-garde culture to the Socialist realism and Soviet underground unofficial culture. In the second chapter the semiotic aspects of his installation works are investigated and they are analyses in the context of Moscow Conceptualism. At this time the narrativeness, the most prominent characteristics of Kabakov is also highlighted through the problem of new paradigm of representation and his philosophy of presence. In the third chapter of this article the paradox of two isomorphic and at the same time confronting utopias - Soviet idealism and repressed by it aesthetic utopism of avant-garde artist - is revealed through the analysis of the contents and structure of his representative work 10 Characters. In the last fourth chapter one of the main themes for Kabakov's work, the motif of garbages and ruins are investigated. The garbages, which are not usual artistic object at all in the Kabakov's works obtain new important meanings, For Kabakov the ruin and garbages, not only becoming the sign of the culture of contemporary Russia, but also alluding his nostalgia for the disappeared Soviet Empire, reveal the immanent in his own works ontological poetics and the problem of presence within the Art space.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.