Exhibitions
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Palace of Projects (The Roundhouse, Camden Town, till 3 May)
Behind the black curtains
John Spurling
The Palace of Projects is a kind of one- man — or, rather, one man and his wife's — Millennium Dome. But whereas the Dome seems, at present, to be an expen- sive architectural envelope with only a few dismally jejune ideas to go inside it, Mr and Mrs Kabakov's Palace, commissioned by Artangel, is a wild profusion of ideas con- tained in a relatively flimsy structure at a fraction of the cost. A white circular pavil- idn made of wood and semi-transparent plastic fabric, spiralling inwards and upwards like a snail's shell and lit mainly from outside, the Palace celebrates and satirises not so much the millennium as millenarianism, the never failing well- spring of human hope for a better life and a better world. Here are no fewer than 65 utopian concepts, psychological, political, artistic, domestic, technological, pseudo- scientific or plain lunatic, contributed — or so the Kabakovs would have us believe by a random assortment of ordinary peo- ple, mostly Russian, in the form of written projects with accompanying drawings and models.
Thus N. Solomatkin, a chauffeur from Kishinev, asks 'How Can One Change Oneself?' and suggests making a large pair of white tulle wings with leather straps for attaching to one's back, after which 'you should put on the wings, and sit completely without anything to do and in silence for five to ten minutes', repeating the treat- ment at intervals. The wings, with their straps, hang enticingly on the wall, but one can't help feeling they are redundant. Sure- ly the poor chauffeur, accustomed to sitting in traffic jams or waiting for his passengers, could just as well imagine himself sprouting wings? B. Rimanov, `Military Personnel, Vitebsk', recommends getting rid of frus- trations and bad feelings by 'Punishment of Household Objects'. You hang a pair of long black curtains in a corner of the room and put the 'guilty' objects behind it. If there are too many things that have annoyed you, you simply form them into a queue in front of the curtains and make them wait their turn. There is a pitiful little group of saucepan, teapot and jug in front of the curtains in the Palace. I look forward to trying this out on my typewriter, the telephone and the cat as soon as I finish this article.
These are comparatively simple domestic projects, but there are large-scale ones too. Cities or whole regions are to be lit by arcs of rocket-fire. Countries can be divided not geographically but historically, so that `you can choose without coercion where to live', with a patriarchal, a communal or a capital- ist structure. A system of 'Cloud Manage- ment' sucks clouds downward into a huge pipe. Vibrators on the walls of buildings (another military mind at work here) are intended to affect people's algorithms, bring out their collective instincts and extinguish 'for a long time (for 12 hours per treatment) the individualistic tenden- cies of a person; moreover, there will be no deleterious effects on his health'. The sinis- ter dark grey vibrators in silver frames hang on the wall in the Palace but do not, fortu- nately, seem to be switched on. In any case, the layout of the exhibits — several to a room — each accompanied by a wooden chair and small square table with a copy of the relevant text and working drawings tends to have the opposite effect, turning every visitor into an individual student.
Much of all this, of course, comes from the demented realms of our own Heath Robinson, Glen Baxter or Ireland's Myles na Gopaleen, but Kabakov's Soviet back- ground contributes a dark edge to the fun and games, a bitter flavour to the chocolate optimism. Born in Ukraine in 1933, educat- ed at Moscow Art School and officially employed, through his membership of the Artist's Union, as an illustrator of chil- dren's books, he began to be known in the West as one of Russia's leading 'Unofficial Artists' only in the Eighties. Since the Sovi- et Union broke up he has been based in New York, but his spate of recent exhibi- tions in Washington, Cologne, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna have all harked back to 'Soviet man' since, as he says, `I am Soviet man myself — only different in that I can watch myself from outside'.
Nevertheless, his sudden emergence from behind the black curtains of the Sovi- et Union into the spotlit spaces of the international art world is clearly having its effect. Many of the `projects' in the Round- house are concerned less with political or social absurdities than aesthetic ones. A particularly ugly piece of black felt stuck on an old weather-beaten board is `A Device for the Arrival of Guests' suggested by a housewife from Chkalovsk. The horrible thing, looking like something straight out of the Tate, hangs there in very truth, while the drawing depicts the housewife's unlucky guests sprawled on her three-piece suite, which has been turned away from the fireplace to face the talking-point on the wall. Then there is a set of music stands in the street to take people's minds off shop- ping and materialism and get them joining `the fine, bright chorus'. Even Kabakov's own 'Book of Projects', in a glass case, becomes one of the projects, just as model villages contain a miniature version of the model. Most satirical of all is a stray red glove on the floor in front of a row of stands, where passers-by are urged to com- pose their own poems, such as:
The most diverse kind of junk, Metal scraps that can be found in any of our homes,
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov's The Palace of Projects, exterior, The Roundhouse
Fill museum collections today ...
It is only the museum walls that impart value to them, But what if beyond the walls there is junk, like this glove, Lying near the entrance? The problem is entirely solvable: You merely have to calculate subtly: just how close is it to the door?
The 'projects' are sad as well as satirical, disturbing as well as funny, touching as well as childish. Unlike most conceptual artists, Kabakov knows as much about people as he does about art. The hook which accompa- nies this exhibition and consists of the texts translated into English together with repro- ductions of the drawings and their hand- written Russian texts (Artangel, £27.95) is a kind of novel which, although it purports to project so many airy futures in a cosily clini- cal way, actually conjures up, only too vivid- ly, the mud and blood and madness of this murderously utopian century.
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