Ilya Kabakov: On Art

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov was a galvanizing figure in Moscow's underground art community, ultimately gaining international prominence as the “leader” of a band of artists known as the Moscow Conceptual Circle. Throughout this time, he created texts that he would distribute among his friends, and by the late 1990s his written production amounted to hundreds of pages.
Devoted to themes that range from the “cosmism” of pre-Revolutionary Russian modernism to the philosophical implications of Moscow’s garbage, Kabakov’s handmade booklets were typed out on paper, then stapled or sewn together using rough butcher paper for their covers. Among these writings are faux Socialist Realist verses, theoretical explorations, art historical analyses, accompaniments to installation projects, and transcripts of dialogues between the artist and literary theorists, critics, journalists, and other artists.
This volume offers for the first time in English the most significant texts written by Kabakov. The writings have been expressly selected for this English-language volume and there exists no equivalent work in any language.


List of Figures
Preface
Introduction, by Matthew Jesse Jackson

Culture, “I,” “It,” and Favorsky’s Light (“Rhombus”) (1980)
Nozdrev and Pliushkin (1981)
. . . Everything Is in the Turning of the Pages (1981)
On Emptiness (1982)
The Creator Looks at His Work Twice (1982)
Dust, Dirt, and Garbage (Dust as an Object of Contemplation) (1982)
Discourse on the Perception of the Three Layers, Three Levels, into Which an Ordinary, Anonymous Written Product—Notices, Slips, Menus, Bills, Tickets, etc.—May Be Broken Down (1982)
Epistemological Thirst (1982)
Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future (1983)
New Rhombus (1983)
Without Culture (1983)
Park of Culture (1984)
From The 1960s and the 1970s: Notes on Unofficial Life in Moscow (1982–1984)
The Artist-Character (1985)
From An Apologia for Personalism in the Art of the 1960s: An Impassioned Monologue on 23 June 1986 (1986)
Conceptualism in Russia (1986)
Edge, Border, Crack (1986)
Art Has No Unloved Children (1987)
How I Became a Character Myself (1989)
A Story about a “Culturally Relocated” Individual (1994)
From On “Total” Installation (1995)
Text as the Foundation of Visual Expression (1995)
On Risk (1997)
On Cézannism (1997)
The Spirit of Music (1997)
Public Projects, or the Spirit of a Place (2001)
Why Was It Necessary to Use the “Character” Device for the Exhibition Rather Than Signing My Own Name? (2004)
Nikolai Petrovich (Commentary) (2008)
From Catalog (2009)

Translation Credits
Bibliography
Index