“Ilya Kabakov is perhaps the only Russian artist of the second half of the 20th century to have become a generally acknowledged world great. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov were all but the only people in the Western world to speak out publicly against breaking ties with Russian cultural institutions. In the General Staff building the total installation devoted to Soviet civilization has consonances with the displays devoted to the history of the previous – imperial – Russian civilization. Its protagonist, however, is the little man, the successor to personages from Gogol and Dostoyevsky,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are famous Conceptualist artists who have gone down in history as the creators of a new genre – the total installation. It is an artistic space filled with a specific atmosphere, a separate environment in which everything – not just individual objects, but also their surroundings, the colour and configuration of the walls, lighting, sound and smells – takes on fresh meanings and serves to intensify the image devised by the creators.
The total installation “Monument to a Lost Civilization” became one of the largest in the Kabakovs’ oeuvre. It was produced and first shown by its creators in Palermo in 1999. The total installation takes the form of the design for a utopian museum-city, something of which the artists had dreamed for many years. It was conceived as a memorial to the civilization in which they were born and spent the greater part of their lives – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Like archaeologists, the Kabakovs collected, described and systematized “shards” of that no longer extant civilization in their full-scale installations. Drawing on their personal experience and recollections, they designed their museum in such a way that, wandering through its various installation-rooms, viewers who had never seen that civilization would be able to form their own conception of it.
The installation presented in the exhibition contains detailed blueprints, layouts and pictorial impressions of this unrealized “super-total” museum-installation. In the centre of the hall there are models of it: an inside and outside view. Around those are eight showcases containing a description of the overall structure of the museum and its separate sections. Each installation-room has a corresponding stand hung on the walls of the hall. The artists did indeed construct many of those installations over the years as separate works, and today they can be found in museum collections all around the world. In the General Staff building, for example, visitors can see two installations from the lineup for the utopian “Monument to a Lost Civilization”: Life in the Cupboard and Toilet in the Corner.
Ilya and Emilia Kazakov made a gift of the total installation “Monument to a Lost Civilization” to the Hermitage in 2014, and now, after lengthy restoration, it is being put on public show for the first time.
In their installations Ilya and Emilia Kazakov operate with personal and collective memory, provoking us, the viewers, to also take a backward look. Engaging with some long familiar, yet forgotten object, a snatch of music or some typeface might plunge us into warm and pleasant, but on occasion painful and even traumatic, recollections of our own or our family’s past.
The exhibition curator is Marina Viktorovna Shults, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art.
An illustrated brochure has been produced to accompany the exhibition (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2024) with a foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, and text by Marina Shults.
The exhibition can be visited until 1 June 2025 by holders of entry tickets to the General Staff building.
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Foreword
The Museum and Angels
Ilya Kabakov numbers among the handful of artists from Russia who have attained indisputable global recognition.
The collection of works by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov in the Hermitage is one of the largest in the world thanks to the final gift, which we are today putting on display.
The “Monument to a Lost Civilization” is a plan for a whole complex of installations that remains unrealized, yet already exists in the history of the arts (like Tatlin’s Tower). It is a tale of melded utopias and dreams, of the shortcomings of daily existence and gloom of primitive living conditions in a certain world that is at one and the same time ours and not ours. It is a world of communal flats, back staircases and family albums, for which Kabakov is often accused in Russia of blackening things. Yet this is also a world from which people fly into space, a world to which angels descend and from which people with their help ascend to the heavens.
It is a civilization with some great achievements, but the project, like the excavation of some ancient settlement, tells us more about the daily life than about the grand ceremonies and major wars. It is history seen through the eyes of the little man, at times even an “:underground” one. The artists continue in visual format the great tradition of the Russian literature of Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. The good-naturedness of that tradition is clearly in evidence to the experienced gaze, which finds it pleasing that this world of the Kabakovs contains practically no types like Smerdyakov [a negative character in The Brothers Karamzov]. On the other hand, there are utopian and celestial horizons that make this project also a part and continuation of Russian cosmism, perhaps Russia’s foremost, albeit as yet little appreciated, contribution to world civilization.
“Civilization” is a term that people have started to use very broadly nowadays. It can be a unit of measurement for human history, horizontal and vertical. The exhibition presents a certain “civilization” in the sense that archaeologists and popularizers are fond of using the word. Each time they discover some new culture, they talk of a “civilization” that has been “lost”. The Kabakovs thought to place their project underground and the result would be not unlike a burial mound beneath which traces of the everyday life of our ancestors are preserved. Burial mound is a key term for the Hermitage: burial mounds were the source of many of the museum’s celebrated exhibits; our archaeologists excavate burial mounds. Here, though, it is as if we are collectively creating a new burial mound, so as then to excavate it.
And that image brings out one more characteristic of the Kabakovs’ oeuvre – its museum orientation, their profound understanding of the aesthetics and inner meanings of a museum. That is why many events of their installations take place specifically in museums, while the installations themselves often resemble museum displays or museum catalogues. The past as a criterion of the future is constantly present in this civilization.
The historical-philosophical sense of the word “civilization”, so fashionable today, is also present in the project. At first glance, it tells about Russian Soviet civilization in respect of daily life. In actual fact, it is not so primitively specific, but considerably broader, and in the context of the Hermitage it acquires new dimensions since in the General Staff building it deliberately becomes neighbours with other elements of Russian civilization – the Museum of the Guards, the Carl Fabergé Memorial Rooms, the halls of the Russian Empire style and battle paintings. Added to that is the philosophical Red Wagon. That shows everyone yet again how close the spirit of the museum, one of the chief inventions of European culture, which has proved useful and precious to the whole world, is to the Kabakovs.
This exhibition, like everything that the Hermitage does, will irritate many people – some with its snobbery, others with its apparent simplicity. Not everyone likes this world created “beneath a burial mound”. One does indeed have to get accustomed to it, taking time, just as it is necessary to sit and listen to the music in The Red Wagon.
The Kabakovs were among the artists in the West who at a decisive moment spoke out publicly against cutting ties with Russian cultural institutions. Today, their works are the main representatives of contemporary art in the Hermitage
Mikhail Piotrovsky
General Director of the State Hermitage Museum,
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Arts