Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov:
ENTER HERE
A DOCUMENTARY BY AMEI WALLACH
In cooperation with the State Hermitage Museum
Palace of Projects, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, 69th Regiment Armory, New York, 2000. Photo: Gil Amiaga
Presented by Festival “DIAGHILEV. P.S.” and JTI
FILMMAKERS
Director and Producer
Amei Wallach
Editor
Ken Kobland
Co-Producer
Kipjaz Savoie
THE FILM
With unparalleled access to the artists and to a
global community of their friends and observers
by acclaimed director Amei Wallach, who was
Ilya Kabakov’s first biographer, Ilya and Emilia
Kabakov: ENTER HERE explores the ways in
which art can outwit oppression, illuminate what
comes next, and transcend its time, resonating
with repressed societies today.
THE ARTISTS
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: ENTER HERE is a
double portrait in film of the lives and work of
Russia’s most celebrated international artists,
now American citizens, as they come to terms
with their global lives and the new Russia. Two
decades after he fled the Soviet Union, Ilya
Kabakov overcomes his fears to install six walkthrough installations in venues, including the
Pushkin Museum, throughout Moscow, where
he was once forbidden to exhibit his art. Amidst
the cacophony of a city and a country in
dizzying transition, he comes face to face with
the memories that have made him who he is.
Through the eyes, work, and lives of artists who
experienced Stalin’s tyranny, through the rich
underground art life during Brezhnev’s
stagnation and the rootlessness of immigration,
the film bridges much of the 20th century and
the beginning of the 21st.
Its emotional heart is a letter which Ilya
Kabakov’s mother wrote him when she was 80,
detailing the everyday horrors of her life in the
Russia of revolution and after. The letter
emerges in the art, in archival footage, and in
voice-over.
A decade ago, ARTnews named Ilya Kabakov
one of the world’s 10 greatest artists. Working
as a team, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov are widely
recognized today as major figures on the
international art scene and as the premier
artists to emerge from the Soviet Union.
Audiences and critics habitually hail their
exhibitions in leading museums around the
world. In 2008, they were awarded the
Praemium Imperiale, a global art prize
established by the Emperor of Japan to honor
fields that the Nobel Prize does not cover.
The Kabakovs have gone far to redefine the
thrust and meaning of art in the 20th and 21st
centuries. A larger understanding of where we
have been and where we are going would be
impossible without them.
Ilya Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933,
in Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine, at a time
when starvation was rampant there under the
official policy of collectivization. Already
language had been corrupted, and “famine”
was a forbidden word. His mother’s parents
were learned in Yiddish, her first language.
Growing up, Kabakov experienced Stalin and
his outrages as a kind of weather, like a
downpour less important to him, he says in the
film, than the sadist who beat him up in the
Moscow Academy of Art dormitory, where he
lived during the hard times of the 1940s. As an
artist in Moscow during the 1960s, ‘70s, and
‘80s, it was the despotism of bureaucracy under
which he lived falling like a steady rain,
dampening the hopes and routines of the
everyday. The only kind of art that was officially
recognized was Socialist Realism, a Pollyanna
vision of a utopia that everyone who lived it
knew was botched and ugly.
the Soviet period, Moscow Conceptualists are
now honored as the second great Soviet avantgarde, worthy successors to the Suprematists
and Constructivists of the first avant-garde in
the second decade of the 20th century.
Beginning, in the 1960s, however, new groups
of artists emerged, unofficial artists known only
to each other and a widening circle of friends.
Away from official entanglements, in the privacy
of their own studios and apartments, unofficial
artists made art “for themselves,” out of their
own integrity, and they argued in intense
kitchen-table debates.
Kabakov’s achievement was to find a way to
make art out of the materials at hand: the
ubiquitous language of bureaucracy, which
spilled over into the most intimate corners of
life; the shabby shoddiness of private and
public spaces; the prevalence of garbage and
despair. First he made drawings that explored
the disconnect between bureaucratic absurdity
and everyday reality. These became paintings
that turned the language of Soviet placards and
proclamations into deadpan rows of columns or
empty voids on which words and images made
nonsense of one another. Very often, the words
became an inane form of dialogue, but dialogue
nevertheless.
In his day job, Kabakov was an official artist – a
highly successful, even famous, illustrator of
children’s books. In every other way, he was an
unofficial artist “for myself.” His quest to
reconcile the two put him at the center of three
generations of what came to be called “Moscow
Conceptualists.” Harassed by the KGB during
Kabakov has always been a teller of tales in the
tradition of the great Russian novelists. By the
early 1970s, he was collecting his drawings into
albums, each of which comprised the tale of a
crackpot visionary, an artist on the edges who
saw a skewed world from an incongruous
perspective. The album called Sitting-In-The-
Closet Primakov is a send-up of the Black
Square by Malevich, an icon of the first Russian
avant-garde who championed the Revolution, in
whose wreckage Kabakov lived. Generous
Barmin is infected by an obsession with the
meaningless lists and bar charts that Soviet
society produced in such abundance. The
Flying Kamarov flaunts the style of a
preposterously ebullient May celebration, as
everything from carrots to bureaus to people
takes to the sky and flies off into the
unattainable beyond.
Kabakov had built himself a studio on the roof
of a once-grand building that now housed floor
after floor of communal apartments. Before the
Revolution, these had been one-family
dwellings. Afterwards, they were sliced and
diced to house as many as 12 extended
families, all of whom shared a noisome
bathroom and a kitchen that was the site of epic
battles. Friends, artists, composers, poets,
writers, and fellow artists would climb the filthy
steps, smelling of cabbage, to the studio where
Kabakov “performed” his albums by turning the
in which the audience became the actors as
they walked through the artworks, investigating
the leavings of the characters the artist had
created. Leaning against the walls of his studio
that autumn day was the skeleton of what
would become the 10 Characters installation,
with which he burst upon the New York art
scene at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1988.
Kabakov was 55, filled with pent-up ideas and
heretofore-unrealizable projects. The 10
Characters project was a massive undertaking,
a virtual communal apartment. In separate
rooms, each of the 10 characters had left
behind the detritus of dreary daily lives and
soured dreams. Viewers entered these rooms
by roaming dirty communal corridors, dimly lit
by bare light bulbs. With irony, precision, and
mysticism, Kabakov had constructed a magical
space in which Western viewers could
approach the world from the point of view of
denizens of the failed Soviet experiment. With
the communal apartment as his metaphor,
Kabakov was able to present a complex,
layered experience that drew on the memories
and emotions of his new audience to present a
psychological portrait of Soviet daily life that
raised deeper, more universal questions about
the human condition.
It immediately hit a nerve with audiences. Very
soon that installation had traveled to the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in
Washington, DC, and the Whitechapel Gallery
in London; the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris acquired the most theatrical of the rooms,
The Man Who Flew Into Space.
pages and reading them aloud. That studio,
Kabakov’s artist friend Igor Makarevich says in
the film, was a kind of heaven, in which ideas
could be freely exchanged.
By the time Amei Wallach found her way to that
studio in the fall of 1987, Kabakov’s impulse
towards storytelling had turned threedimensional. He had begun to construct spaces
By then, Kabakov had reunited with Emilia
Kanevsky, whom he had known since she was
a child in the Soviet Union. They had grown up
in the same town of Dnepropetrovsk, though 12
years apart. Emilia, born in 1945, had studied
piano at the Music College in Irkutsk and
Spanish language and literature at the Moscow
University.
In Moscow, she was a frequent visitor to
Kabakov and his studio, and when she
immigrated to Israel in 1973, she begged him to
come with her. However, he had a family and
would not be ready to leave the Soviet Union
for another 14 years. By the time they reencountered one another in Europe, she was a
curator and art dealer living in New York. They
were married in 1992.
Ilya Kabakov has always lived within his art.
The actual details of getting through a day often
escape him. Emilia Kabakov has the
organizational gifts of a Fortune 500 CEO and
an ability to get what she wants. With her there
to make things happen, the Kabakovs began to
realize larger and larger installations in
museums around the world. Her role of
collaborator and producer has been
acknowledged since 1996, when the Kabakovs
began to sign the installations as by Ilya and
Emilia Kabakov.
Between 1988 and 2012, more than 260
Kabakov exhibitions and installations were
mounted in more than 30 countries.
Outstanding among them was Life of Flies,
1992, an unsettling parallel universe in which
flies were posited as the explanation of
everything malevolent that had occurred in
Russia; School No. 6, 1993, a deserted
schoolhouse built around an empty yard just at
the moment when the Soviet Union was
disintegrating; and The Palace of Projects,
1998, a glowing white tower filled with do-ityourself utopian projects. In haunting parables
the Kabakovs traced a universal trajectory of
failed dreams, collapsed civilizations, and the
unquenchable lure of illusion in every society.
While the language of garbage and the
everyday remains at the heart of the art, the
Kabakovs have increasingly subsumed into
their installations and permanent public
sculptures a sense of the meaning of place.
The ironic language learned in Soviet Moscow
is as apt a tool for deciphering our time and
place as any other.
Ilya Kabakov had found himself a home amidst
the traveling tribe of artists in the international
art world. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the
utopia that Kabakov critiqued was the one
about which he could once only dream – the
great river of art history, which each successive
generation of contemporary artists aspires to
sail.
Starting in the late 1990s, he invented a
Russian painter named Charles Rosenthal and
painted more than 60 paintings in
Rosenthal’s name, all of which questioned the
doctrinaire reading of 20th century art as a
progression from realism to abstraction.
Kabakov’s Rosenthal, born into the generation
of the Revolution, died in 1933, the year Ilya
Kabakov was born. So the next painter he
invented to paint his paintings was Ilya
Kabakov, heir to the failures of Rosenthal’s
optimism. And then he invented Igor Spivak,
whose entire career took place after the fall of
the Soviet Union, which the callow painter
looked back upon with nostalgia.
Characteristically, Kabakov’s description of the
three stages of utopian history they represented
is in dialogue:
Rosenthal: It will be paradise.
Kabakov: This is hell.
Spivak: It was paradise.
Through it all, however, Ilya Kabakov avoided a
return to Moscow. The closest he came was to
become the first living Russian artist to exhibit
at the State Hermitage Museum in St.
Petersburg in 2005. Even that was too close.
Once he arrived in St, Petersburg, he locked
himself in his hotel room for days, unable to
venture into the streets, and then did so only
with anxiety and trepidation. On his return to his
studio on Long Island, he was still so distressed
that he fell and broke his wrist.
But in 2008, Dasha (Daria) Zhukova, an
international entrepreneur and philanthropist,
invited the Kabakovs to inaugurate the Garage,
a huge art space in a former Moscow bus
garage designed by the Constructivist architect
Konstantin Melnikov in 1927.
Once the Kabakovs had agreed, they enlarged
the project to six installations in five venues,
including the Pushkin Museum. The
centerpiece of the exhibition was Alternative
History of Art: Rosenthal, Kabakov, Spivak at
the Garage. For this installation, the Kabakovs
built a mini version of the interior of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a kind of
instruction to Muscovites of what a great
museum could be.
The framework of the film is their massive effort
to realize the Moscow projects and the historic
event that their homecoming visit became.
THE STORY
Like the work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, this
feature-length documentary conveys the sweep
of a Russian novel and the intimacy of
someone singing alone in the dark. With Ken
Kobland as editor and Kipjaz Savoie as coproducer, this film is the work of the same team
that created the highly acclaimed film Louise
Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and
The Tangerine. As with the Bourgeois film,
scene by stirring scene, Ilya and Emilia
Kabakov: ENTER HERE delves deep into the
meaning of the artists’ lives and their work,
which the camera beautifully reveals. The film’s
dynamic style, mixing the personal with the
historical, art with storytelling, illuminates the
Kabakovs’ art.
By focusing so closely on artists who have
made it a life’s work to probe the most
individual implications of the society in which
they were born and the one to which they
immigrated, the film journeys from Stalin’s
Soviet Union to the shores of Long Island, to
the Ukraine of their childhood, and back to
Putin’s Russia. Their artwork was filmed in such
places as Moscow; Marfa, Texas; Vienna;
Singen, Germany; and Strasbourg, France. The
Kabakovs’ lives and work provide a unique
opportunity for a close-up, personal, and
nuanced view of a cataclysmic history, touched
by irony, wit, and a master’s gift for storytelling.
As Ilya Kabakov says,
My mentality is Soviet, but it is irony.
Irony. The Soviet mentality is also the
old European. It is like a sandwich,
because the education in the Soviet is
beautiful. And the mentality is like a
sandwich of the classical European
education, reflections of Soviet ideas,
and dreams of Western art. What I say
is ironical. It is not possible for me to
talk real. The real for me is idiotic. I’m
Soviet, I’m Russian, and it is not
possible to talk simply. That is stupid.
Irony is a reflection about life. You can
never talk in a real way about this. If
you talk simple, it is not a sandwich, but
bread. That is a catastrophe.
The framing narrative follows the Kabakovs as
they prepare for what will be the first real
exhibition in Moscow for Ilya Kabakov, who was
not permitted to show there in Soviet times. On
sites in far-flung sections of the city that are
reachable only in the new Moscow’s bumper-tobumper traffic, the Kabakovs work against great
odds to construct six installations in two months
for their massive event in five venues, including
the Pushkin Museum. The filmmakers were
given unparalleled access to the artists. The
couples relationship emerges as he measures,
climbs, paints, and worries; and she charms,
exhorts, and deals with crises face-to-face and
on her BlackBerry.
But it is a letter that Ilya Kabakov’s mother,
Bertha Ulievna Solodukhina, wrote when she
was 80 that is most revealing of the ways in
which the art emerges out of Kabakov’s
memories and his life.
The camera tours the dingy corridors of his
installation Labyrinth, My Mother’s Album, as in
voice-over we hear the details of his mother’s
homelessness in the Soviet system. Then Ilya
Kabakov faces the camera with a searing
recollection of how the banal horrors of his
mother’s life continue to affect him.
Emilia Kabakov takes us to the town in the
Ukraine where both she and Ilya Kabakov spent
their childhoods. There she discovers a journal
in which some spy in the house had been
secretly recording for the authorities everyone’s
comings and goings and identifying her each
time as “Jew.”
His friends, the artists Oleg Vassiliev, Igor
Makarevich, and Andrei Monastyrsky, recount
the story of their and his development.
Commentators such as Robert Storr, dean of
the Yale School of Art, and Dr. Mikhail
Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage
Museum, give insights into Kabakov’s art and
life. Matthew Jesse Jackson, scholar of
Kabakov and his circle, describes the ways in
which the characters that Ilya Kabakov has
invented tell his ironic stories of alienation and
catastrophe so that the everyday deprivations
of Soviet life are exposed. As the camera tours
his magical labyrinthine installations, these
characters are given voice and form, and the
Kabakovs and their friends chime in.
that the Kabakovs stage,
absorbed in one’s own
memories, hopes, and the
universal inevitability of
disappointment. This is as true
of the haunting parables of
Soviet subjects as of more
recent works, which trace the
lure of illusion in every society.
Then frenzy breaks loose. It is
the madness of the Moscow
opening, pronounced on the
spot a historic event, with
government officials,
paparazzi, jostling throngs, and
the white mop of Kabakov’s
head spotlighted for the
television cameras as he and
Emilia move through the crowd.
Photo: Jacques De Melo
The film illuminates what it is like to meditate on
his paintings or to walk through those
installations; to become an actor in the dramas
By the time the camera glides
through Alternative History of
Art, the most ambitious of the
completed works at Moscow’s
new contemporary art space,
the Garage, there is an urgent
sense of what it means to have
this exhibition at this moment in
this place.
Back in his Long Island studio,
Ilya Kabakov advances a tragic
vision of the Russia they have just left and
questions his identity. Already he is working on
a painting even more challenging, elaborate,
and profound than those he showed in Moscow.
FILMOGRAPHY
Amei Wallach, director and producer, Ken Kobland, editor, and Kipjaz Savoie, co-producer, are the creative
team behind Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: ENTER HERE, with cinematography by Mead Hunt and Ken
Kobland. All four worked together to make the widely praised film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The
Mistress and The Tangerine.
Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine
Press Coverage for the U.S. Release
“The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait...reveals much about this haunting and haunted master
while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered about art: the thing
you cannot explain.”
The New York Times
“A work of art in itself”; included on “best of 2008" list
Artforum
“A remarkable achievement! As intimate a portrayal of a living artist as one could ask for.”
The Houston Chronicle
“A fascinating documentary...pulls you into a world that is not soon forgotten.”
Chicago Sun Times
“A deeply affecting and compelling portrait of the artist.”
The Art Newspaper
“Yes, yes, yes. That’s the answer you should give yourself if you are wondering: ‘Should I go see that new
Louise Bourgeois documentary?’”
The Seattle Times
Shortlist
Time Magazine
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
AMEI WALLACH, DIRECTOR and PRODUCER
Amei Wallach was co-director and co-producer, with Marion Cajori, of Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The
Mistress and The Tangerine. Cajori died in 2006, before editing could begin, and it became Wallach’s task
to shape the film as a journey into the art and the psyche of an icon of American art. Wallach herself is an
award-winning art critic, journalist, and curator. In 1987, she journeyed to the Soviet Union to produce a fivepart series on the effects of perestroika on the arts. There she encountered Ilya Kabakov and recognized his
stature immediately. In 1995, she published the first artistic biography of the artist, Ilya Kabakov: The Man
Who Never Threw Anything Away (New York: Abrams). Her articles have appeared in such publications
as The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Smithsonian, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
Architectural Digest, Art in America, and ARTnews. She was chief art critic for New York Newsday and onair arts commentator for the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. She has written or contributed to 11 books. She won
a 2006 Best Show award from the International Art Critics Association/USA for her exhibition Neo-Sincerity:
The Difference Between the Comic and the Cosmic Is a Single Letter.
KEN KOBLAND, EDITOR and CINEMATOGRAPHER
Ken Kobland was editor of Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine. Since 1975,
he has produced independent film, video and media art works, including a number of performance/media
pieces for theatrical presentation in collaboration with The Wooster Group, the New York-based
experimental theater. His work has been included in numerous film and video festivals such as Ann Arbor,
CinemaTexas, Bellevue, Sinking Creek, Athens (Ohio), Atlanta Film Festival, American Film Festival (Filmas-Art), San Francisco Film Festival (Golden Gate Awards), Black Maria Film/Video Festival, Montreal,
Oberhausen (West Germany), Hyeres (France), Melbourne (Australia), Montbeliard (France), Rotterdam,
Video Week (Geneva), World-Wide (Holland), Lucarno (Switzerland), VideoKunst (Karlsruhe), the New York
Video and Film Festival, and the Berlin Film Festival - International Forum. He was fine cut editor and postproduction producer for Marion Cajori’s film Chuck Close.
KIPJAZ SAVOIE, CO-PRODUCER
Kipjaz Savoie was line producer for Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine. He
has worked in nearly all aspects of documentary production since leaving pastoral New England for New
York City over a decade ago. In recent years, he has acted primarily as a producer and cinematographer,
with additional credits as a multimedia creative director. While focusing on documentary film, his work has
taken him from Panama to Pakistan and has been featured on PBS, HBO, Discovery, Bravo, A&E, and the
BBC, among others.
MEAD HUNT, CINEMATOGRAPHER
Mead Hunt was cinematographer on Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine.
He has been working as a cinematographer in the documentary field for over 25 years. Primarily shooting
documentaries on cultural subjects, he has worked on many award-winning programs including “Toth,” the
Academy Award–winning short, and the Emmy-winning series Broadway: The American Musical.
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Press Contact:
Nicole Straus Public Relations
Nicole Straus, 631-369-2188, 917-744-1040, nicole@nicolestrauspr.com
Margery Newman, 212-475-0252, MargeryNewman@aol.com