Ilya Kabakov: Universalsystem zur Darstellung von allem / A Universal System for Depicting Everything

In this album Ilya Kabakov takes up the position of a fictitious artist who has become conscious of the shortcomings of people–s everyday ability to see and recognize normalcy. Artists, especially those of the Russian avant-garde, have always, by means of art, attempted to appropriate divine (in)sight, that is, a simultaneous perception of all moments in time. The artist of this album has made divine insight, or the fourth dimension, his own. He thus sees the same things we do but, contrary to others, in the right perspective. Nonetheless this perception cannot be successfully transmitted or shown. Though, by means of intuition, the inexpressible could be made visible or the unutterable in art made to resound, this would only be an attempt to translate the unknown into familiar forms or images, i.e., something the viewer is used to. Meanwhile the inexpressible is not felt and, in the end, the familiar goes unrecognized. The artist of this album, on the other hand, has just such a feeling for the unknown, the non-portrayable and the inexpressible. Multilingual edition : German, English and Russian