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• 1 2024-05-01T13:27:03-07:00 The Illegitimate Cosmonaut 9 plain 2024-05-01T17:48:33-07:00 Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union, in 1933. He studied at the VA Surikov Art Academy in Moscow, and began his career as a children's book illustrator during the 1950's. He was part of a group of Conceptual artists in Moscow who worked outside the official Soviet art system. In 1985 he received his first solo show exhibition at Dina Vierny Gallery, Paris, and he moved to the West two years later. In 1988 Kabakov began working with his future wife Emilia (they were to be married in 1992). From this point onwards, all their work was collaborative, in different proportions according to the specific project involved. In 1992, he was heavily criticized for an exhibition where he reconstructed Soviet toilets. After this scandal, Kabakov decided to be not return to his homeland, and resided in Long Island until his death in May 2023 at 89 years old.
  
  I chose this art piece because the idea of a total installation is so interesting to me. The first time I experienced this was in Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery of Contemporary Art. Art that you could explore in depth was something I hadn't experienced before. Kabakov's total installation exceeded my prior experiences and told a story in a unique way. This of course is what he has become famous for, the creation of these narratives through art.
  
  This piece is part of a larger installation, entitled *Ten Characters*, which is created using two large communal apartments, including hallways and kitchens. Ten tenants that live here, each having their own room, and each room creating a narrative for these characters. His most famous room is _The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment. Before reading anything about this room or who Kabakov was, I envisioned a very different story than what Boris Groys, a very famous art critic and friend to Kabakov, wrote about. 
  
  The first thing I noticed about this piece, besides the massive hole in the ceiling and the slingshot, was the posters on the walls. The walls are lined with soviet propaganda posters, from the floor to the ceiling. My immediate thought was that the posters on the walls were in celebration of the Soviet cosmonaut or the Soviet Union in general. It seemed to me like a story of success, some super fan of the program and the Soviet Union who drew inspiration from the posters and its meaning. This really didn’t seem any different than any diehard American sports fan or it even made me think of a stereotypical Trump supporter outfitted with Trump everything.
  
  At the time I was considering this to be my final project, I was also reading Anne Applebaum's *Gulag*. Here she explains that Zeks, prisoners in gulags, were no longer considered full citizens of the Soviet Union. She says, after 1937, no guard would use the term tovarishch with a prisoner and any prisoner caught using this term would be beaten. (Applebaum 103). The Zeks were required to address the guards as grazhdanin instead. Photographs of Stalin and other leaders never appeared on the walls within the camps or in prisons. Applebaum explains that this was a relatively common sight of the mid-1930s. A train carrying prisoners, its wagons bedecked with portraits of Stalin and banners declaring the occupants to be Stakhanovites— became unthinkable after 1937. Even the celebrations of the workers' holiday on the First of May were no longer allowed.
  
  So much was stripped from these prisoners and she says this excommunication from soviet society had a powerful effect on them. I even learned that the Sergei Korolev was in the gulags before being pulled out to work for the Soviet space program, which he would later be called the father of.
  Applebaum’s book changed the way I saw this room and hero of this story. The pride I initially imagined in a super fan, is now turning into fear. This hero is surrounding himself in everything he fears to lose, he wants to remain a soviet person and prove himself worthy by creating this apparatus, launching him into soviet infamy, but this is not the narrative Boris Groys sees.
  
  Groys compares this hero of the story, who he calls the illegitimate cosmonaut, to that of Kabakov himself, which he has called the unofficial artist. The idea that this cosmonaut is illegitimate is because he was not chosen by the people, he did not go through the training required to represent the soviets in space, but instead was self-selected for such a role. This parallels Kabakov’s own journey in his representation of Soviet life. Part of how Kabakov became internationally known is through his idea of total installations using everyday Soviet life. Kabakov was the first to break through the iron curtain and to show the world what it was like; although, he was not selected to do so. Kabakov even admits that all the characters in the installation are extensions of himself when he said "perhaps they represent different sides of myself". This extends to the idea that Kabakov was able to escape the Soviet Union, similar to how our hero escaped his Soviet surroundings. Groys obviously sees this as a critique of Soviet culture, a failed utopia. In the middle of a red room, engulfed with Soviet ideology, is a crime scene. The juxtaposition of the image of this utopia with a massive hole in the middle leaves one feeling like something is broken and it’s not just the ceiling. I think Groys is obviously right in his reading, I mean who can go against Boris Groys on these matters? Kabakov has been a long-time critic the Soviet Union and Modern Russia until his death in 2023.
  
  I feel this entire installation is an act of protest because he was a registered Soviet artist, who was showing the world something that was not "state approved". Kabakov was also one of the few artists allowed to travel abroad unaccompanied, without any KGB affiliates to escort him and prevent anything embarrassing for the Soviet Union. I think his installations would be considered overidentification. Which is maybe why he was able to create art like this for a few years before deciding to not return fearing retributions. I find this example of overidentification directly parallels the aesthetic of Trump supporters or American sports fans. In Kabakov’s installation, we read it as a subtle ridicule, but I have been to people’s housing who think this is a form of decorating. We saw this similar line with Sergei Kurekhin befriending Aleksandr Dugin.