Ilya Kabakov – The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away) (1983–95)
In the National Museum of Norway’s permanent installation of Ukraine born Ilya Kabakov’s “The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away)”, the viewer is inside something that resembles a state-owned communal apartment from the former Soviet Union. The installation consists of three rooms where garbage has been accumulating over many years, carefully catalogued and archived. Small insignificant objects are glued onto charts or catalogued in cupboards with precise references to date and an “event”. The objects are a mix of things the artist took with him from the old communist state and things he has found since he moved to the West.
http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collections_and_re…
From wikipedia: By using fictional biographies, many inspired by his own experiences, Kabakov has attempted to explain the birth and death of the Soviet Union, which he claims to be the first modern society to disappear. In the Soviet Union, Kabakov discovers elements common to every modern society, and in doing so he examines the rift between capitalism and communism. Rather than depict the Soviet Union as a failed Socialist project defeated by Western economics, Kabakov describes it as one utopian project among many, capitalism included. By reexamining historical narratives and perspectives, Kabakov delivers a message that every project, whether public or private, important or trivial, has the potential to fail due to the potentially authoritarian will to power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Kabakov
In her 2008 essay Ilya Kabakov and the shadows of modernism, Fiona Woods examines Ilya Kabakov’s work in relation to modernism and post-modernism and suggests his work ocupies a more hybrid space, what Bruno Latour calls ‘the amodern’ (We Have Never Been Modern, 1991)
http://www.acw.ie/images/uploads/Ilya_Kabakov_and_…
This week in the Cultural Theory lecture, Prof Alex Coles introduced us to Latour’s work in the context of a post-critical paradigm which he describes as transdisciplinary (as opposed to Kant’s disciplinary critique and Frankfurt School‘s interdisciplinary critique).
