MarleneAngeja

2010, University of Chicago Press
In 1989 I traveled to Paris where I saw the exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Magiciens de la Terre. There I ran across Ilya Kabakov’s installation, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment. I was stunned. I had never been taken by surprise in quite this way and it stayed with me. In the following years I made several pieces about the experience including this page from a hand-made book and a small painting bought by novelist Terry McMillan.
In 2003 my son happened to be at the California College of the Arts studying with art historian, Matthew Jesse Jackson while Jackson was working on a book about Kabakov. That book has just been published. I’m reading my son’s copy, which I’ve pilfered. Great stuff: Post-Stalin Russian artists working their way through and away from Modernism. Kabakov’s earnest sincerity in trying to paint The Masterpiece for four years. “Kabakov was passionate about trying to paint this painting and then one day he decided it was shit, and just threw it away.” (Erik Bulatov quoted in the book, p.31) …”Kabakov would not make this mistake again. In the future, his work would dwell long and productively in the regions outside high art.” (p.32)
More later.
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It occurs to me that much of the work I’m drawn to draws me away from the practice of painting. In the studio today (where I am once again making my little paintings) I wrote, “shape, fence-painting, color, landscape,” with a sort-of vague hope that this means something. It seems like I’ve come to the conclusion a million times that my own earnest attempt at making “abstract narrative landscapes” is a rehash of abstract expressionism and basically shit.
And then there is this 24hour thing (red carnations) which scares the hell out of me because of what I don’t know (I wasn’t there for the revolution and the technology is precarious). Still I can picture a completely out of control mass of images all going at the same time and I want to make it.