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"The installation medium continues to make many people nervous. Sometimes it is perceived as an ultimatum: 'Give yourself up and come out to face the firing squad.' Installation is a three-dimensional invention, and one of its features is a claim to totality, to a connection with universals, to certain models that, in the general view, no longer exist. Such claims take us back o the epic genre, to literature, to something immobile and yet worrisome, like a corn on one's foot. An attempt is being made to encompass all the levels of the world all of its corners, to describe everything that happens in it...Of special interest to me is the type of installation that transforms the room down to the smallest detail, so that it is reconstructed, painted over, and so on. All the parameters of the space are re-created anew; a cosmos of sorts is brought to life." Ilya Kabakov, Art Journal 58, no. 4 (Winter 1999) Main (Installation) Page Text
The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment, 1981-88
The "total installation" for Kabakov is more than an aesthetic idea; it is an entire program based on a complex narrative presentation. The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment is one installation generated by Kabakov's narrative, Ten Characters of 1988. This narrative is a fantastic tale that negotiates a profound sense of the absurd with a level of spirituality.
According to the text that Kabakov wrote to accompany this installation, the resident of this apartment did not feel himself to be an inhabitant of Earth. He longed to jump from the orbit of the earth onto a powerful stream of energy, which he believed to permeate the entire universe. The catapult in the middle of this room is an apparatus devised to help the inhabitant break through the ceiling and attic of this apartment.
In the museum this room can only be viewed from the outside; the visitor becomes a spectator of an event that seems to have taken place just before his or her arrival. This installation recreates the fright and the bewilderment of the communal apartment's other inhabitants in Kabakov's narrative in real space.
The Boat of My Life, 1993
The Boat of My Life features a 58-foot-long wooden boat with stairways at both ends and twenty-five boxes on its deck. Boxes stuffed with clothes, photos, and other memorabilia that Kabakov accumulated over the years are spread out on the boat's deck, creating a space that could be either the half-abandoned or half-inhabited place of its occupant, someone who could be moving in or moving out.
This installation addresses the conditions of life in the former Soviet Union, and in particular, the realities of ordinary people who had to cope with the ideological restraints of the communism. The work is based on the nomadic experience of constant moving, in both a geographical sense and in a physiological sense.
The Boat of My Life is also an autobiographical piece. All the boxes are accompanied by a text written on paper labels; each text refers to an episodes in Kabakov's life. About the installation, Kabakov explained: " In essence, this is the idea of presenting my life, the story of my life, in the form of an installation."
The Toilets, 1992
The installation The Toilets was presented at the 1992 Documenta show in Kassel, Germany. They were placed behind the main building of the exhibition, just where outside toilets would normally be found.
The exterior structure of the building replicates the provincial Soviet toilets that one might encounter in a bus or train station. Kabakov described them as "sad structures with walls of white lime turned dirty and shabby, covered by obscene graffiti that one cannot look at without being overcome with nausea and despair."
Visitors stood in line to enter this building. Inside, they found a modestly decorated, Soviet two-room apartment. There is a table with a tablecloth, a glass cabinet, bookshelves, a sofa, and a decorative Dutch painting. There are even children's toys framing the actual hole of one toilet.
The arrangement of the space gives a sense of a captured presence, of an arrested moment. The dishes have yet to be washed after the meal, a jacket has been casually dropped onto a chair.