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This article was downloaded by: [University of Auckland Library] On: 12 November 2014, At: 16:45 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Third Text Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20 A psychodrome of misreading: Ilya Kabakov and Harold Bloom Victor Tupitsyn a a Philosopher, art critic and a professor , Pace University , Westchester, New York Published online: 19 Jun 2008. To cite this article: Victor Tupitsyn (1995) A psychodrome of misreading: Ilya Kabakov and Harold Bloom, Third Text, 9:33, 25-30, DOI: 10.1080/09528829508576574 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829508576574 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/ terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: A psychodrome of misreading: Ilya Kabakov and Harold Bloom

This article was downloaded by: [University of Auckland Library]On: 12 November 2014, At: 16:45Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third TextPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

A psychodrome of misreading: Ilya Kabakov and HaroldBloomVictor Tupitsyn aa Philosopher, art critic and a professor , Pace University , Westchester, New YorkPublished online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Victor Tupitsyn (1995) A psychodrome of misreading: Ilya Kabakov and Harold Bloom, Third Text, 9:33,25-30, DOI: 10.1080/09528829508576574

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829508576574

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representationsor warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyoneis expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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A Psychodrome of MisreadingIlya Kabakov and Harold Bloom

Victor Tupitsyn

1 There were twoRosemary Trockels onthe screen.

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2 Victor Tupitsyn, 'Fromthe CommunalKitchen, AConversation with IlyaKabakov', ArtsMagazine, New York,October 1991, p 50.

3 Ibid, p 49.4 Terry Eagleton, Walter

Benjamin or Towards aRevolutionary Criticism,Verso, London andNew York, 1981, p 92.

celebrate his achievements. This omnipresence on the stage of European and,to a lesser degree, American visual culture is precisely why thé narrativescommunicated through his installations are 'eligible' for a critical examinationthat concerns not only 'the how', but also 'the what' of Kabakov's art. The latter'shigh visibility requires a great level of answerability, with which it 'rhymes' ina variety of ways, echoing, for example, early Bakhtin 'for whom 'answerability'and 'responsibility' were inseparable from ethical codes of authorship).

Few of Kabakov's western admirers realize that almost all segments of thisartist's oeuvre are essentially representations of the corporeality of Sovietcommunal speech. His 'rooms' and his albums are linguistic mine-fields thatexplode as soon as the viewer comes into contact with them or enters the siteof the installation — limitless as far as the audibility of 'spoken kitsch' is concerned.Communal ghetto — a kommunalka — is Kabakov's central subject just as theflophouse was Maxim Gorky's in The Lower Depths:

The flophouse is an extraordinary successful metaphor — a glimpse, as it were, intoa pit where myriads of souls swarm. There is no action in Gorky's play, only talk.Our Russian life seems exactly the same to me: it gravitates toward zones of speech.Thus the communal apartment turns into Soviet version of The Lower Depths.2

When, following its debut at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York in 1988,Kabakov's installation Ten characters was reconstructed at the Hirshhom Museumin Washington D.C., something unexpected happened. The Museum'spredominantly African-American guards — who, according to Kabakov, areusually more or less indifferent to the exhibits — took an active interest in theinstallation. They enthusiastically promoted it and explained it to visitors "forthe reason that they found it easy to identify with a representation of a communalworld, a world in which they, too, were raised".3 Their reaction attests thatKabakov is not merely the avenging chronicler, but also the bard, the aesthetidzerof the fabric of the ghettocentric Utopia that is ruled by a communal speech ritual.As Terry Eagleton pointed out, "for discourse to refer, even protestingly, is forit to become instantly complicit with what it criticizes".4

Although in Ten Characters Kabakov became engaged in a deconstructive readingof Soviet communal narratives, he would always hide his authorial 'I ' behindleģions of characters, thereby avoiding (in a direct way) what was previouslyreferred to as 'answerability' and 'responsibility.' It would be ridiculous to faulthim for doing that, given the immense (State-imposed) pressure that alternativeartists had to bear before perestroïka. Besides, fear of identifying oneself had apositive (ie 'uplifting') effect in as much as it contributed to what I call MoscowCommunal Conceptualism. This is a multimedia practice that embraces the ideaof the artist as schizo-producer who operates within the framework of anephemeral (conspiratorial) authorship. The term schizo-producer (which hintsat the Benjaminian concept of artist as producer) implies that the schizophrenicdivision of the authorial T can be seen as a prerequisite for the production ofa multitude of personages. This literalizes Deleuze and Guattari's ideas regarding'de-territorialization', as well as their crusade against subjectivity. Thus Kabakov,in Ten Characters and in a number of his other installations or albums, seems tofit the definition of 'schizo-chameleon'. The latter, ie the polyphonic, flexible,and evasive self is, in fact, his ultimate production.

The notion of a schizo-chameleon comes to mind when one recalls Kabakov's1990 show He Lost His Mind, Undressed, Run Away Naked, at Ronald Feldman FineArts in New York. The explanatory wall text told the story of a man who failedto keep up with the schedule for the "Universal Order, Rules and Regulations"

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Cake, Morning, Spring..., 1989, enamel on masonite(w/2 shirts, briefs, & washing), 59 x 73.75 in. From'He Lost His Mind, Undressed, Ran Away Naked'.

5 Tupitsyn, op cit, p 55.

for the ZhEK (housing committee) that he himself had drawn up. Finally, asattested to by 'witnesses', he ran naked from his Red Corner (the 'altar' spotof the ZhEK). This narrative can be traced to the artist's past. In an interviewwith Kabakov after the opening, he said:

As a child I had been beaten first by my father and then by my schoolmates so severelythat one day I felt like a character from one of the Baron Munchausen stories: a foxwho jumped out of its skin and ran away.5

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6 See Francesco Bonami,'Dya Kabakov: Talesfrom the Dark Side',Flash Art, no 171,Summer 1994, p 92.

7 Harold Bloom, Poetryand Repression:Revisionism from Blaketo Stevens, YaleUniversity Press, NewHaven and London,1976, p 18.

8 Ibid, p 4. In part,these notions seem tobe synonymous withwhat Jacques Lacanreferred to as thefunction ofmeconnaissance(misrecognition). SeeEcrits, Editions deSeuil, Paris, 1986,p 99.

9 Tupitsyn, op cit, p 53.10 Bloom, op cit, p 7.11 Tupitsyn, op cit, p 55.12 Bloom employs the

word tessera in its"ancient, mystery-cultmeaning of anantitheticalcompletion".

13 Clinamen or 'swerve' isthe trope-as-misreading, irony asdialectical alternationof images of presenceand absence, or thebeginnings of thedefensive process.

The subsequent journey of a 'naked' man could be viewed as the artist's never-ending struggle to repossess his 'original' skin. Hundreds of appearances anddisguises have been 'tried on' and 'peeled off: their 'retreat and return' is themain intrigue of Kabakov's oeuvre.

To elaborate on 'uplifting effect' as the biproduct of fear, one can recall FrancescoBonami's recent interview with Kabakov where the latter insisted that "creativitycomes from fear and anguish".6 The artist's confession that repression and fear"are part of my life and my mind" reiterates both Kierkegaard's The Concept ofFear and Manfredo Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia. This statement also echoesHarold Bloom's theory of poetic influence as defensive mechanism. In his bookPoetry and Repression, Bloom argues that "as trope, poetic repression tends toappear as an exaggerated representation, the overthrow called hyperbole".7

What it attempts to overthrow is its set of referents: it is a trope's revenge againstan earlier trope, the quarrel of any belated creator (read: Kabakov) with hisprecursor (read: communal speech). In Bloom's opinion,

...art is necessarily an altering, and so at best [an artist] strives for a selection, throughrepression, out of the traces of the language [of art]; that is, he represses some traces,and remembers others. This remembering is a misprision, or creative misreading.8

For Kabakov, repression is comparable with "clothing thrown over the skeletonof words",9 an allegorized image of misprision, conditioned by altering. Bothitalicized terms are primarily applicable to those art works which Kabakov hasbeen producing in the West. Their creator would probably agree with Bloom'sstatement that art "is always at work imagining its own origin, or telling apersuasive lie about itself, to itself".10 Repression is also detectable in Kabakov'svigorous promotion of an 'identity frame', called MUSOR (trash). Refusing

...to grant speech ontological status... [he does] not attribute other, higher meaningto any of the voices. From the utterances of the linguist to the muttering of MariaIvanovna — who took out the garbage — the texts are annihilated. Noise results.Everything is a communal text, and I can treat it exactly as I do garbage.11

Kabakov imagines the latter as the opposite of the Kantian Sublime, since MUSORis the Counter-Sublime.

Kabakov's choice of psychic defence falls upon visual metaphors known asinstallations. He aims to re-install the past that he has subjected to an act of'revisionary misinterpretation'. In his Europa, Europa installation at Kunst-undAusstellungshalle in Bonn in 1994, Kabakov returned to one of his trulyautobiographical characters, a compulsive cataloger or 'metonymizer', the collectorof 'dead souls' and/or broken parts of the communal vessel, an unsuspectingcontributor to what Mallarmé and Lacan invested in the word tessera.12 Thesimilarity with tessera is also apparent in The Boat of Life at the SalzburgKunstverein, 1993; an altered Noah's ark, loaded with boxes of what had beenaccumulated by the artist during his lifetime. Kabakov's irony is settled uponthe Epicurean-Lucretian concept of clinamen,™ which is, according to Bloom,linked to metonymy. Being a cataloger and metonymizer, the artist is eager to(ironically) embrace the numerous metalinguistic ramifications oikommunalka, suchas: communal byt (daily routine) in The Communal Kitchen at the Seiby Museumin Tokyo, 1991; the ZhEK paraphernalia in He Lost his Mind, Undressed, Ran AzoayNaked and in The Red Corner at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm, 1994; the Soviet schooltheme in School # 6 at the Donald Judd Foundation in Martha, Texas, 1993; theMental Institution at the Rooseum, Malmo, 1991. While working in the West,Kabakov (whose prolonged afiering turned him in to a truly 'belated creator') went

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far beyond the aforementioned 'masternarratives' (ie ramifications). As aconsequence, the repression of origins gave way to their 'revisionarymisinterpretation' or nostalgic 'misprision'. This was detectable in suchinstallations as The Red Vagon (Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle, 1992); Water Music (RonaldFeldman Fine Arts, 1992); Red Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 1993); In the Apartmentof Nikolai Victorovich (Jablonka Gallery, Cologne, 1994); and C'est ici nous vivons(Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995).

To a greater degree, creative misreading took place at the Dokumenta IX whereKabakov's partiality towards 'total' installation prompted him to cross a publictoilet with a communal living space. His recollections had turned surreal,psychedelic, phantasmic; the psychic defense mechanism seemed to run out ofeverything that fed it. This can be viewed as the consequence of the artist'sprolonged stay in the West. Evidently, the shortage of 'fresh past' resulted inan urge to inflate the 'origin' beyond recognition. This not only perfectly fitsBloom's definition of poetic repression as exaggerated representation, but alsocontributes to the surplus of anguish and fear, thereby inviting another cycle ofpsychic defense. (At this point, contrary to Bloom's theorizing, his economy ofrepression is no longer at odds with that of Freud).

Kabakov's installation at Jablonka Gallery serves as an example.of what Bloomcalls daemonization, a term based upon the idea that the daemonic is the interveningstage between the human and the divine. The artist contrasts the darkness ofthe communal environment (read: the human) with a brightly lit paintingendowed with extracommunal lucency (read: the divine), a Cézannesque

Corridor of Banalities (Kabakov and Kosuth), 1994,Ujazdovsky Castle, near Warsaw, Poland.

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14 Bloom, op cit, p 26.15 When Kabakov breaks

up his authorial 'I'into a multitude ofcommunal voices, itechoes what PeterSloterdijk calls "self-splitting inrepression". SeeSloterdijk's Critique ofCynical Reason,University ofMinnesota Press,1987, p 218.

16 This was the maintopic of the mostrecent (unpublished)conversation between

Ilya Kabakov,Margarita Tupitsynand this author.

landscape, that suggests the possibility (for one's 'mental eye') of transcendingthe representation. But this suggestion leads to a dead end where the modernSublime is tenants with the Counter-Sublime 'of belated daemonization'. Here —if we read both Bloom and Kabakov closely — "the enigma of [artistic] authoritycan be resolved only in the context of [fear and] repression".14 Curiously, afteringtakes much longer than what it tries to compensate for. Likewise, recollectionsof the communal past seem endless in comparison with the actual time lost inThe Lower Depths.

An act of daemonization was staged in Ujazdovsky Castle near Warsaw, Poland,where a joint exhibition of Kabakov and Joseph Kosuth took place in 1994. Theshow, entitled Corridor of Two Banalities, dealt with the play of differences and/orsimilarities between communal and extracommunal narratives. The installationconsisted of two rows of tables stuck together. On the 'Eastern' side, shabby andcrooked tables represented Russia, on the other side were the sleek and well-kept tables of the West. Texts were written on their tops; on one row, fragmentsof communal speech, on the other, authoritarian words (the maxim's of famousindividuals).

Among the questions frequently discussed in relation to Moscow CommunalConceptualism, the notion of the character occupies a special place. Unlike theso-called Sots Artists (most notably Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid),Kabakov has no interest in carnivalesque rivalry with symbolic 'fathers'. Heusually hides behind the character, breaking up his authorial T into a multitudeof communal voices,13 which Nietzsche identified with the chorus of satyrs. Inancient Greek tragedy, Dionysus, wearing the mask of Apollo, takes a stepforward, in the understanding that to achieve self-realization he must invest hisambitions into 'the Other' (into the god of illusion and simulation). And thatis precisely where Komar and Melamid are leaning when they abolish thedichotomy between the authorial and the authoritarian. The daemonic alternativeto this approach to the nature of character is Kabakov's version of The Birth ofTragedy. This Dionysus takes a step back leaving the heroes of his narratives,ie 'satyrs' who appear to us wearing the mask of Apollo, in the foreground. Onereason for this is fear of retribution: one need only remember Midas and hisdonkey's ears, or the terrible fate of the satyr Marsyas, skinned alive by Apollobecause he dared compete against him in the musical arts.

Kabakov does not deny that the installation medium is rife with orthodoxy,which is similar to what Walter Benjamin once reproached with "parasiticdependence on ritual". In Kabakov's opinion the center of gravity has lately beenshifting from the relationship between art and life, to the relationship betweenculture and ritual. Kabakov finds the installation metaphor highly receptive tothese changes.16 The latter is due to the fact that in the 1990s, idiomatic visualpractices have not only abandoned their critical responsibility and answerability,but have also come to terms with vanguard art's failure to compete with variousforms of metanarrative (such as media, fashion and so forth) for their 'share ofthe pie'. If artists find themselves incapable of redefining their function withinsociety, they will eventually run away from it or — which is one and the samething — turn into an obscure sect, a secret cult performing their modestly pricedrituals in the dark, damp corners of our increasingly expensive culture. Toconclude, I would like to suggest that Kabakov's installation paradigm isundergoing some radical changes: on one hand, it is still Gorky's The lower Depths;on the other, a communal therapy for western individualism, a Russian flophousefor foreigners where art-language, defeated by life, licks its wounds and, perhaps,plans its 'comeback' which (most likely) would bring back to society the artists'will to confront cliché, to be its idiomatic Other, both politically and aesthetically.

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