Ilya Kabakov

Cleveland, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Teacher and the Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov, 10 September 2004 - 2 January 2005, no 216

I. and E.Kabakov. An Alternative History of Art Rosenthal, Kabakov, Spivak, exhibition catalogue, Bielefeld: Kerber, 2005, illustrated p.175, no.216

The canvas appears sound. There is a thin layer of dirt on the surface of the canvas. There is small surface scratch 8cm long in the middle section of the painting on the black background. Held in a simple slip frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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Kabakov's Total Installation exhibited in Cleveland in 2004 explored the concept of the artist's identity by presenting works by two fictional artists side by side: Charles Rosenthal, an invented student of Kasimir Malevich who resisted his teacher's radicalism and Ilya Kabakov, heir to the failures of Rosenthal's optimism, who 'discovered' the latter's work in 1971. Kabakov created a multi-layer fiction, transforming the museum's entire appearance, and reinforced the illusion by exhibiting one of Rosenthal's canvases alongside the museum's 19^th century paintings.

As with all of Kabakov's work, memory lies at the centre of Landscape with Buildings  and of the entire series of works which 'dates' to the early 1970s and focus on the fictional Kabakov's relationship with his 'teacher', Rosenthal. These monumental paintings seek to 'reconcile the political and aesthetic fragmentation between representational and abstract genres that evolved .. from 1917-1991' ('The Teacher and The Student: Charles Rosenthal and Ilya Kabakov' on www.absolutearts.com ) We are presented with a vista onto an idyllic image of Soviet Russia, executed in a palette of muted hues to anchor it firmly in the melancholic past, which is partially obliterated by a dark shape covering the entire right hand side of the canvas.

Faced by the problem of how to unite what is seen by the naked eye of reality and abstraction, the fictional Kabakov literally offers a comparison between the bright new world which Rosenthal was led to believe in during the 1920s, and the murky gloom he would have experienced had he lived until the 1970s. However the dark half of the composition is not flat and monochrome.

The artist introduces texture and subtleties of pigment to suggest that 'Something is going on in this space, it is rustling about; there is some kind of infinite, unfathomable chaos living beyond the this fine film of visible reality. But our reality attempts to hid what might be seen behind it, and the viewer is left with the impression of a kind of a balancing between these two things.' (I and E.Kabakov, An Alternative History of Art: Rosenthal, Kabakov, Spivak, Cleveland, 2005, p.162)

In his Alternative History of Art, Kabakov forces the viewer to re-examine his own participation in the creation of a work of art. He is treated as a close friend, who needs to be granted the possibility to decipher for themselves exactly what they are seeing.