Digging Around the Ruins of Utopia

This is where we live, Kabakov says, and this statement is obviously more than a matter-of-fact declaration. It is rather an accusation: this is how we live amongst the denuded scenery of dreary barracks, in the shadow of a “radiant future’s” mausoleum.

Ilya Kabakov’s monumental installation, or rather series of installations, built one in the other in the manner of Russian Matryoshka-dolls, has nineteen “units,” each one with its own separate composition and its own story to tell. This is Where We Live consists of two levels, and literally so: it is occupies two floors of the Pompidou Center, one level below the ground, where we have to descend, into a basement or cave, in order to have an overview of the whole life of the building. We arrive at a huge industrial construction site, surrounded by planks on the outside, leaving only one tiny gap for some temporary entrance. Inside we are confronted with the familiar sight of great constructions: wooden planks and sacks of cement all over the floor, scaffolded columns under construction, and in the middle of all this, there stands a colorful panneau illustrating the palace that is being built. It promises to be a splendid, monumental piece of architecture, with towers and a dome, equipped with all possible futuristic ornaments. All around it, barracks (lots of them are standing) are lined up regularly and also irregularly; wagons, as Kabakov calls them, which once served? could serve? will they? to house the workers. Anybody can enter the barracks which, although they come in numerous versions, look shockingly the same: a bed covered with a rough blanket, two or three unmatched chairs, a table, perhaps a little makeshift wardrobe, a chest. On the other side of the “room,” one finds piles of tools, buckets, wires, truck tires, and dismantled machines resting in disarray on plain wooden shelves. These comprise the most basic needs of everyday life and accessories used for work.

The quality and the ensemble of the objects speak for themselves. The exactitude with which Kabakov collects these cast off, trashy, ever-mean objects is indescribable: ugliness and the vain efforts to embellish shabby poverty, carelessness, and neglect exude from each and every detail. Garish prints of kitschy paintings pinned up on the walls stare back at us mockingly. The only dim source of light is a bulb hanging from the ceiling on a wire. Be it a kitchen, a dining room, or chamber music corner, the same atmosphere of disintegration and abandon reigns in them: the sad disorder of slow degradation, a cry of objects wounded by indifference or reluctance. The whole site looks like a pile of waste out of which life has seeped out. And yet, certain signs of communal life warn us that the mechanism is still working, or could be working. Only the willingness, the libido, the attention, and the energy are missing. The open book and the dusty nightstand, the blanket thrown on the bed, all give the indication of some kind of paradoxical presence. Perhaps these things are still in use, or were in use not long ago, but soullessly. In vain the sound of cheerful music in the basement rooms, if nobody listens to it. Stimulating marches and sentimental patriotic songs roar from the scraping loudspeakers, in the shadow of beautiful socialist realist paintings. Three identical assembly rooms with greenish-brown walls and—this time—with glowing lights are waiting for the guests, at least this is what the rows of wooden benches suggest, and yet they too look somewhat superfluous.

What shall we make of this odd place? What catacombs of the past do we see here? And more importantly: what period of time is this? Is it the future in an eggshell or just the opposite: do we witness the present, stranded as it is? For the construction, judging by the plans, seems to be striving hard to realize some utopia. Yet, at...