The Art Couple
John Perreault
does this mean? Does the work change? Why is it always the wife who gets added
on to the famous husband’s career, and when there’s not one husband appended to
a woman’s? The Soviet/post-Soviet "conceptual" artist Ilya Kabakov
and his wife Emilia are now publicly a husband-and-wife team. They join the
illustrious ranks of the late Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz; Claes
Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen; Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Although it might be an interesting study, we are not
considering Newton and Helen Harrison, who have always been a team, as have
Gilbert and George. The latter are British, and as far as we know are rather
like Gilbert and Sullivan, only more so: not married to each other in any sense
of the word. Furthermore, we can’t put those other Soviet/post-Soviet
conceptualists, Kolmar and Melamid, in any matrimonial boat. I also know two
brothers, Einar and Jamex de la Torre, working in glass-based assemblage,
who function as a team but, unlike the others mentioned, also make art under
separate signatures.
In the case of the Kabakovs, the Oldenburgs, the Christos,
and, before them, the Kienholzs, the partnership came well on into the
husband’s career, probably to acknowledge the ongoing contributions of the wife
and, I would venture to guess, to make ownership, copyright and possession of
artworks airtight. But who knows what darkness or devotion lurks in the
congruently beating hearts of couples – of any persuasion. As far as I am
concerned, anything that contests the hegemony of single-person authorship and
gives someone his or her fair due is a step in the right direction.
Furthermore, I have observed that artworks may change when
studio assistants change, and that often the artist is more like the
auteur/movie director than the sole agent. Perhaps every artwork should have
the label equivalent of a movie crawl. Carpentry, welding, prep-work,
lighting, color mixing, photography, and the writing of didactic
statements should all be credited. Preliminary drawings or digital work also
require some acknowledgement. And how about a nod to the hidden world of
secretaries, bookkeepers, and just plain gofers? In any case, here’s an
assignment for some future graduate student: in all four cases of the married
art couples cited above, did the work change after the double byline emerged?
As a start, we now know Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have been
working together since 1989. She too endured life in the U.S.S.R. A graduate of
the Moscow Music Conservatory, she later made her way to the West. The Kabakovs
have lived in New York since 1992. Ilya made installations before as well as
after 1989. Looking through the documentation in Amei Wallach’s Ilya
Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away
(Abrams, 1996), I can see a sort of zigzag progression from language-laden and
intentionally cluttered works to this year’s The Empty Museum
style=’font-style:normal’> at the SculptureCenter.
This oddly spectacular new installation can be classed with,
and may be an outgrowth of, Kabakov’s Incident at the Museum, or Water Music
(1992) or The Life of Flies
style=’font-style:normal’> of the same year, which represented "a series
of halls in a scholarly provincial Soviet museum that receives few
visitors." Incident at the Museum, which was at the Feldman Gallery in New York, displayed fake
paintings by a "re-discovered" Russian modernist by the name of
Stepan Yakovlevich Koshelev and looked extremely convincing. The flash-point
however is that there were buckets and tarps everywhere and water dripping from
the ceiling. In The Empty Museum,
there is no water. In fact, there are no paintings, only spotlights on the deep
red walls.
If Kabakov’s wife has influenced him to move beyond
the somewhat cluttered and "literary" installations of the
past, she surely should be applauded. It is not that I have anything
against smudging the border between art and literature. I just don’t like it
when there’s so much narrative that I yearn for a book rather than an
exhibition. You might say that Kabakov has – rather, the Kabakovs have –
stopped being a novelist (a mixture of Dostoyevsky and Kafka) and become a
poet. This grammatical awkwardness through which we have just passed is another
reason why art coupledom is resisted. Language balks.
The Empty Museum
takes up nearly the entirety of the SculptureCenter space. You see the metal
studs and wallboard construction all around the outside of the built room. I
find this satisfying in a sculptural way, just as I have always preferred the
photos of Glen Seator’s 1999 Check Cashing Store
style=’font-style:normal’> that show the gallery side rather than the street
side of that jolting replica. From the street, the work looked so real that
some people tried to get inside to cash checks, whereas from the gallery it was
all beams and wallboard. I like seeing how things are made, which is my
traditional, pro-sculpture side. Of course, installations are usually lumped
with sculpture, prompting me to define sculpture as anything that is not
painting.
Actually, the first thing you see of The Empty Museum
style=’font-style:normal’> is a door ajar. It doesn’t open beyond a certain
point, so you have to edge your way in, where, embraced by Bach’s Passacaglia
style=’font-style:normal’>, you can rest on the Victorian seating in the middle
of the room and contemplate … nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. You can
meditate upon the spotlights. You can gaze upon moldings or on the two sealed
exit doors. You contemplate the absence of paintings and what that might mean.
The Kabakovs finally let you make up your own story and your own meanings. Here
are some of mine:
The paintings have been removed because they are on loan to
some casino in Las Vegas; because they were recently discovered as fakes;
because war has broken out and they are in storage for safe-keeping. They have
been removed because suddenly it has been discovered paintings are not art. Or,
to the contrary, they were too controversial and excited the museum-goers to
weird sexual acts, revolution, sabotage, and sudden bouts of lethargy.
Or – and this is my favorite – the paintings were not
removed: they merely steadily diminished in size. The huge numbers of
people looking at them day after day robbed them of their auras and they shrank
to nothing. Or maybe they disappeared because not enough people were
looking at them. People make auras, infuse objects with mana.
So, after all, The Empty Museum
style=’font-style:normal’> is not really like Yves Klein’s notorious empty
gallery of 1958 (Le Vide/The Void).
That great French mystic was trying to exhibit the Void or Nothingness, rather
than nothing. The Kabakovs are a bit more down to earth. They offer a
"Total Installation," meaning an artwork you step inside of and
thereby enter another world. This new world is one where paintings simply – or
not so simply – disappear, have disappeared. I smell a kind of nostalgia.
Or is The Empty Museum
antinostalgia? A certain very powerful wing of the art world has an
overwhelming nostalgia for painting, so overwhelming that really bad painting
is embraced just for the sake of upholding painting. Then too I also like that The
Empty Museum, a work about painting as it
is institutionalized, is in a sculpture space. Is there a painting space that
can return the favor?
