HART2222 Contemporary Art Unit Coordinator: Dr Darren Jorgensen
BRINDY DONOVAN
‘Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment and the Significance of Emptiness’ Introduction A lone cosmonaut propels himself into the unknown through a hole in the ceiling of his apartment. In the small room he leaves behind a makeshift propulsion device, a bed, his shoes and Soviet memorabilia plastered across the walls. Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1984) provides these remnants of a seemingly impossible event for our imagination to piece together what could have taken place. Using Gardner’s advice to understand the work “on its own terms”,1 this paper provides a philosophical interpretation of the artwork. I am opting for this approach over providing commentary on the artwork’s potential political significance, as such an analysis would rest on contestable assumptions and positivist claims about politics and history that would require more justification than what the scope of this paper could provide. The approach I am taking reflects Kabakov’s own desire for “the work of art to be unnamed and undefined as a playful, yet total withdrawal from representational space”2. As such, I will discuss the influence of the philosophy of Russian Cosmism, the concept and use of emptiness, and the role of the viewer in the making of the artwork and its meaning. Moscow Conceptualism and APTART Moscow Conceptualism can be seen as a response to the predominant Soviet Realism of the early 20th century. The unique socio-political context of the later period of the Cold War and increasing globalisation 98
Ilya Kabakov, The Man who Flew into Space from his Apartment (1984), installation view.
provided artists with the intellectual material with which to produce new conceptual works. Yet, as both Samman3 and Gardner4 warn, it can become too easy to revert back to a reductionist reading through the lens of the Cold War or through a socialism/capitalism false dichotomy. For this reason, I turn to other contextual elements that appear to have informed the practices of these artists. Particularly, how Moscow
