Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Sculpturecenter/Sean Kelly Gallery

Installation artists may be the last social optimists, for their work be pendents entirely on the willing participation of viewers they haven't met and will not at any time meet. When installations work, it is as a dialogue between artist and viewer that remakes the social.

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lengthy misperceived in the West as a Conceptualist, Ilya Kabakov is, rather, an imagist and a fantasist who raises situations in which the work's greatest in quantity active site is the viewer's imagination. Kabakov has ofttimes said that installation is a young art. Indeed, he has done more than any other living artist to support its growth. When The devoid of contents Museum was first shown in 1993 at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Frankfurt, it was accompanied by the agency of a series of lectures elaborating the theory and poetics of his "Total Installation." In these talks, the artist described of the like kind works as instruments for bringing the viewer to a state in which he or she will recognize the illusion being created in the installation while simultaneously being wholly absorbed into it, that individual will be transported while at the same time watching oneself being transported.

The devoid of contents Museum, re-created at SculptureCenter, is an unusually spare and pointed attempt to induce this sublime state. In the sum of two units installations shown concurrently at Sean Kelly Gallery--20 Ways to come by an Apple Listening to the Music of Mozart, 1997 and sum of two units rooms from The Children's Hospital, 1998--the viewer's experience is more directed: through texts and illustrations in the first and by the agency of a more intimate and more highly determined miseen-scene in the second

Inside SculptureCenter's great expanse an interior has been builded like a box within a chest Entering through a door ajar, individual finds oneself in what appears to be a large, classically appointed gallery of a provincial museum. reaching far down red walls are set not upon by elaborate gold molding above and blue-green wainscot below, and large, two-sided delicate benches bisect the room. The solitary thing missing from this traditional museum setting is the pictures; they have not nevertheless arrived. But everything else necessary for the aesthetic experience is here. Track lights upon the ceiling cast vertical ovals of light onto the four destitute of contents walls. The aura of the missing pictures is invoked through these glowing pools and through the transporting organ strains of Bach's Passacaglia that fill the latitude with baroque variations of of the like kind sustained inventiveness and harmonic intensity that single begins to visualize images in the lights--museum memories, ye on the other hand also new images, made of the jiffy Because of the self-reflectiveness of the situation, single remains at a certain distance from the occurrence but it still takes place. For anyone susceptible, the consequence is palpable. When the trice passes, one might have the impel to flee, before the sad shabbiness of the construction reasserts itself and the elaborate emptiness of the conceit strikes home

In the Kabakovs' view, European and American rationalism dioceses emptiness as a lack, whereas Russian emptiness is an active force--transcendence with a history. "The aura which approachs from our past," Ilya Kabakov has written, "is what stops us from sinking into oblivion, and what we call our agriculture our interior world." It is a measure of our time and place, perhaps, that we experience that tillage alone, in a made-up room

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