The other day, in Paris, the sixty-eight-year-old Russian artist Emilia Kabakov was standing in front of a giant tilted cupola glowing red, blue, and green. Dressed in dark gray and black, she cast a diminutive figure against the structure, which is about the same size as the nose cone of an Airbus A380. She stayed silent, and then turned to me. Light streamed in through the glass roof of the Grand Palais above us, muting the colors. “It’s not quite right,” she said. “They tell me it looks wonderful at night, but when it will be open at night? Maybe three times.” In front of us, a long-haired technician fiddled away, and the dome shone. Better.
The show is called “L’Étrange Cité”—“The Strange City”—and opens later this month. Along with the cupola, “The Strange City” is made up of seven buildings that hold installations designed by Kabakov and her husband, Ilya. Five of the buildings are clustered in the middle, and contain sanctuaries focussed on models for better living—in one, a plan and architectural models for a “Centre for Cosmic Energy” are laid out. In another, we see the artists’ interpretation of “How to Meet an Angel.” As Emilia Kabakov said, “The idea is that you have to be desperate. You build a ladder, then you go up and meet an angel.” The Kabakovs are Russia’s most famous living artists and, after the oligarch Roman Abramovich bought one of Ilya’s works for $5.8 million, in 2008, the most expensive.
At just over four thousand square feet, the nave at the Grand Palais is awe-inspiring. (For the first half of the twentieth century, it housed the occasional horse show.) The Kabakovs, undaunted by its enormity, have used most of the space available. “You go into each building like museum spaces, like a city with streets. You can walk on the streets. Some of them have paintings, some have models, and some are empty,” Emilia said.
At one point, I lost myself in the labyrinth of buildings. Outside, they are bleached like houses on a Greek island, and it’s difficult to work out where you’re going. I bumped into Jean-Hubert Martin, the curator, who was showing a group of French journalists around. The largest of the structures are two “chapels,” one dark, one lighter. Martin was wandering around the smaller, dark chapel, quietly inspecting a set of large paintings, punctuated by portraits, self-portraits, and images of Emilia. The walls of the white chapel are a grid of white spaces, sometimes filled in with snatches of Ilya’s paintings. They convey, as Martin put it, “how memory keeps certain images in mind, and the rest is like a white infinite.”
On a Saturday afternoon in March, just before they left for Paris, the Kabakovs were sitting down to lunch in their dining room, on the North Fork of Long Island. They ate a stew of chicken, mayonnaise, berries, and nuts that Emilia had cooked. Ilya, who has snowy hair and was wearing a frayed brown shirt, with sleeves flecked with crimson paint, had been working that morning. He explained the strongest influence that growing up in the Soviet Union had on his work: “Ya boyus”—“I fear.”
“In Soviet Union, life was preordained. It was like a theatre—everyone had their own role,” he said. “Art is a different thing. It belongs to the reality of culture. Either you enrich culture or you put it down. You either elevate people to the upper level of culture or you do the opposite.” Seventeen years ago, the couple moved from New York City to a sprawling Dutch Colonial in Mattituck, and filled it with art and keepsakes—a Maid-Rite washboard given to them by Donald Judd; Ilya’s postbox from his days in Moscow; paintings of them back in the U.S.S.R. They also added a gallery space.
After lunch, Ilya went back to work and Emilia opened up the gallery. The room is airy and whitewashed; light comes through large skylights in the wood-beamed ceiling. This isn’t a commercial space, Emilia explained: “Sometimes, when you make painting in studio, it doesn’t work. This is like museum space—it gives you room to correct.” At the end of the room were three of Ilya’s paintings. “They’re memories, fantasies, dark comments. And you think it’s darkness, then you’re trying to position this darkness, then maybe it’s not so dark, then there are the memories of dark.”
Next door was a building that contained a museum of models. All of them are of works that the Kabakovs have made or want to make. Stopping in front of a miniaturized version of the Red Wagon, an allegorical installation about the Soviet Union that’s now in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage museum, Emilia pointed through the glass: “You can’t enter from front because, in Soviet Union, front door was always shut.” Inside, she said, is a gallery of Ilya’s artwork: “These paintings don’t have any people in them. Future, in Soviet Union, was not built for people, but for somebody else; we are not human beings, and we do not belong to the future.”
Stopping at a glass case with a miniature silver satellite inside, she asked, “How to make retrospective of artists who work in every media? You put Sputnik up and beam it down.” Another stop was made at a model of the interior of the Guggenheim, with a multilayered carousel in the middle. “We want to turn Guggenheim into history of Russia,” she said. “Here is Soviet time, perestroika, after perestroika.” So would it happen? “Frankly, I don’t think so,” she said.
In all their art, “the goal is to create a metaphor that will provoke people to have differences of opinions,” she explained. Speaking of the Grand Palais exhibition, she said, “It’s a little bit like being in a theatre, but a theatre is in front of you. In installation, it’s in front of you. It’s like the viewer is an actor. You participate, in a way, in creation.”
Back in the house, the subject of the conversation returned to fear. Emilia said, “Me, no, I don’t have any fears. I can do anything. If it’s necessary, I go and do it. I’m good at finding a solution to everything.” Ilya was silent. He stared out at gray waves rolling across Peconic Bay, and then spoke: “It’s like we are one person. It’s an unusual union, in a way, because it’s not about reality. It’s about dreams.”
Photograph of “The Strange City” by Ian Langsdon/EPA.
