Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern : Some Tweets

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern : Some Tweets

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

4 November

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov at Tate Modern : Some Tweets about
Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future

At @Tate Modern yesterday (because it was open past 6.00), the ‘only show in town’ was Ilya and Emilia Kabakov :https://t.co/tuLmInRVG4

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 5, 2017

As in the #CamFF-screened documentary The Desert of Forbidden Art (2010) [at Cambridge Film Festival in 2010 (?)], those who made and / or concealed non-Soviet-Realist art in the USSR de facto 'got away with' it, and so tend to underplay telling how it was done : it largely seems to take the form of avoiding activity in the metropolitan centres. (At the time of first viewing the exhibition, many of one's fellow visitors clearly had Eastern European accents, and could be heard, seeming to question what they were being told about the USSR by the exhibits and / or its curation.)

We are told by the exhibition¹ that Ilya Kabakov drove for an hour to get to his studio, and is that all that it took (and sharing only with friends – in an era of denunciations) ? As in Barbara (2012) (set in East Germany – or, likewise, The Lives of Others (2006)), do authorities such as the Stasi then either seem too trusting to have been as harsh and cruel as we know that they were, or the subterfuges adopted to deceive them too naive to work ? [Actually, one must correct oneself, on having re-visited the exhibition (on 25 November 2017) : that element of driving an hour to an attic is from the fictional (wholly so ?) biographical narrative that is part of Objects of His Life (2005), but, in works that patently transmute and translate real and fictional stories, who cannot be forgiven, if the artist succeeds in implanting something, as if it were so, from the imagined creator of what is exhibited² in Objects of His Life... ?]

Whereas Ilya Kabakov's Labyrinth (My Mother's Album) (1990) - even if Mike Nelson was inspired - is yet more text :https://t.co/PyzLAgZyyH

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 5, 2017

Detail of one part of The Coral Reef (2000)

One of Ilya Kabakov's maquettes evoked the former, at @Tate M., in The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s America (1994) :https://t.co/Wsxilmvu9d

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 5, 2017

An accreting list of useful reading (by order of title) :

* Asya ~ Michael Ignatieff

* Bricks to Babel ~ Arthur Koestler

* Darkness at Noon ~ Arthur Koestler

* Der Verschollene (Amerika) ~ Franz Kafka

* Martin Kippenberger ~ ed. Doris Krystof and Jessica Morgan (with Susanne Kippenberger and Gregory Williams) (Tate Modern, London : Exhibition Catalogues)

* Mira Schendel ~ Tanya Barson (Tate Modern, London : Exhibition Catalogues)

Unfortunately, when I went back there, the room with the clandestine illustrated books (one of the most interesting parts of the #Kabakov show) had been restricted, because they hadn't proved durable. :( pic.twitter.com/niB8BxAfNp

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 28, 2017

Versus a film of 135 mins, is this show at Tate M. nigh impossibly dense with text - even for Russian speakers ? :https://t.co/P3gwNURB1P

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 4, 2017

Of course, a show 'organised [...] in collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow'

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 4, 2017

End-notes :

¹ The life that was the real Franz Kafka's springs to mind, as against what the mental combination of a text such as 'The Judgment' ('Das Urteil') with a perhaps never-delivered 'Letter to my Father' ('Brief an den Vater') might make one believe about the father-and-son relationship (and then there is Alan Bennett, with Kafka's Dick...)

² Loosely exhibited, in that everything that is strung from the ceiling in this installation has a label attached that (at goodness knows what effort³) is parallel to the plane of the viewer : except that the inaccessible inner space that has been realized extends back seven or more feet, and so few captions can be read at the distances involved (which are not, anyway, descriptions of 'the object' - e.g. a piece of polystyrene wrapping, or the lid of a disposable coffee-cup ?). Yet, unlike the work (seen in other Tate exhibitions) of Francis Alÿs, or of Alighiero Boetti, Kabakov often seems quite serious, and not trying to play with several layers of meaning multiply and simultaneously.

³ As with Labyrinth (My Mother's Album), one dare not imagine the work involved. (Then again, with fourteen rooms of works by Paul Klee, the transport, insurance and other costs must be huge.)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Fahrelnissa Zeid at Tate Modern ~ 13 June to 8 October 2017

Fahrelnissa Zeid in four key works - and #UCFF comments on three...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 September

Fahrelnissa Zeid in four key works - and #UCFF comments on three...

Tate has chosen to present one of its current exhibitions in this way : Fahrelnissa Zeid in four key works.

Coincidentally, #UCFF had this to comment about the show, which included three of these works :

There is subtle delineation, as if by the use of leading in a stained-glass window, in Abstract Parrot (c. 1948-1949), and the fiery terror of Alice in Wonderland* (1952) and Ubu Bird ('The Phoenix') (1952).

Planes open into planes in Break of the Atom and Vegetal Life (1962), and we see the tensions of the picture-plane in both My Hell (1951) and in 'Untitled' (c. 1950s). All of this was inherent in the (relatively) understated Resolved Problems (1948).

Another interesting room follows, with London ('The Firework') (before 1972) and Puncta Imperator ('Sea Cave') (1963), before the exhibition ends spectacularly** with Someone from the Past (1980).


End-notes :

* Outdoing Tim Burton's visions.

** As if in allusion to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) [about whose scenes with James Stewart and Kim Novak, in the art gallery at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, one can read here] ?

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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The last days of Yayoi Kusama's Tate show

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 June

I need another hour to finish looking at this exhibition, as I am not in the league of two ladies who once, in this very members' room at Tate Modern, declared that they had 'done' one in an hour and a half, because they had graduated from a course in history of art - and I think that they intended to polish off the other one in a similar span. I have no notion of what they did or not absorb or how quickly, but thirteen or so rooms is too much for me, so I work within my limits, and skulk off for a coffee - or something stronger, maybe even food at London prices - when I need to, and, if I have time to go back and want to, I do.

My viewing, then, is incomplete, but I am already sure of two things: that Yayoi Kusama sometimes has a distinctive voice (and then tends to demonstrate her extremely great capacity for creativity), but sometimes does not, and that work, to me, then seems pretentious, and not imbued with the same sure artistic sense. Her friendship with Joseph Cornell, for example, clearly brought out a prodigious talent for collage, which is visible in the pieces exhibited in the corridor that is room 9 (and we are lucky enough that Kusama has allowed three of Cornell's works that she owns to be shown).

I am also insufficiently convinced that what are eagerly called phalli are any more than potatoes or their tubers (as the appearance of the Phallic Shoes of room 8 amply testify), and someone has therefore not been entirely trustworthy, given the scope for Freudian and other interpretation, in applying this deliberate description. Yes, there may be a generative principle (there had been an organic, yet cosmic, quality to Kusama's works in watercolour and gouache in room 2), and the Yellow Trees of room 11, for example, writhe with an energy that, my own psychoanalytic profile apart, is a burgeoning, even threatening (as the coils of serpents have the power to crush), power of nature. Other canvases in that room and from the same period, such as the triptych of Weeds, have a more benign quality of reproducing and filling space.

At some point, we will be faced by the question (and some curatorial interpretation) What does all this filling mean? We are told that it is Kusama's obsessional side (which came out in the series of Infinity Nets), but, although it doesn't prove that she hasn't got one, is it different from or more or less creative than Damien Hirst's Medicine Cabinets (1997), with its ten bought cabinets (each named after a track from Never Mind the Bollocks...) filled with empty medicine packaging, which is supposedly arranged according to some medical curatorship or taxonomy.


Is Kusama's filling of a canvas, whether in the mid-1950s or since, really ridden with angst? Somehow, I doubt it any more than there is really any collecting in procuring the preservation (or, more likely, arranging for others to procure it) of empty tubs and packets of medication:

If one did question that proposition on my part, then, with the display-cabinets full of stainless-steel (assumed) surgical implements (some surely are not!), can one believe that Hirst did much more than get a rep to bring around a good range of samples, which, with no real regard to anything other than entertainingly (and aestehtically) fitting multiples of them in the cabinet in question, he tried on the shelves and then ordered as many as he needed. (A task probably best delegated to an assistant, even, whose judgement would be sufficiently good, as would the willingness of the rep to supply on a sale-or-return basis, that minimal rearrangement would be necessary to perfect the work.)


'You can't sell art like hot dogs or ice cream cones at the Venice Biennale', they said. But I believe them to be wrong. I think that art should be within the price range for the masses rather than a few wealthy individuals.

This comment, made (I think) contemporaneously, refers to what appeared to be the constituent elements, akin (as far as I can tell) in appearance to Magritte's alleged stylized cow-bells, from the arrangement of which Kusama's installation had been made. She was selling them off for two dollars apiece, which would have been a real bargain (until she was stopped). Compare this with Hirst's going directly to the market with the huge auction of his works a few years back...

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A survey / summary

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

22 December

Whether it really means that they were of interest (or someone just told someone else to look), I have no idea, but the list of postings with the most page-views (since the blog's inception) is:


No. Posting

90 Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time? (2)

75 Unlimited dimensions

57 Nicola Malet at The Tavern Gallery (Meldreth)

41 The man who believed in flicker-drive

9 The Physics of Poetry

6 A tribute to times past

6 An appreciation of L'enfance du Christ

6 New dimensions on Dimensions

5 Blogging at the Tate (from 4 September)

5 Dimensions to-night


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