On diasporic intimacy: Ilya Kabakov's installations and immigrant homes

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 498-523

  Boym, Svetlana ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 5444261560     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448882     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley (New York, 1991), p. 338. Historically, the term emigre has referred to political exiles. Hence, it would apply to Berberova and the Soviet exiles who came to the United States as refugees and until glasnost could never go back. However, my discussion of diasporic intimacy has broader implications and in this context I use the terms immigrants, exiles, and emigres interchangeably. It is not within the scope of my paper to discuss the social, political, and economic differences among them (which are often far from obvious: not all émigrés belonged to the upper or middle class, and not all immigrants are poor). It should be noted however that exiles and émigrés usually cannot go back "home." Diasporic intimacy is an inclusive rather than an exclusive category. For further inspiring discussion of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, homeland, and immigrant poetics, see the journal Diaspora, and Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York, 1990)
2. Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, p. 338
3. See Philippe Aries, introduction to Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Roger Charlier, vol. 3 of A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 3:1-7
4. and Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," in A History of Private Life, 3:207-63
5. See Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," trans. Clara and Richard Winston, Men in Dark Times (New York, 1968), pp. 15-16
6. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1977), pp. 337-40
7. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 169
8. Georg Simmel, "Sociability," On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, 1971), p. 130.I am grateful to Gabriella Turnaturi for bringing it to my attention
9. See Gabriella Turnaturi, Flirt, seduzione, amore: Simmel e le emozioni (1994)
10. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1978), pp. 224, 225
11. See Italo Calvino, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 3-31
12. For a further discussion of the campaign against domestic trash, the communal apartment as a cultural site, and the conception of public and private, the aesthetic and the everyday in Russian and Soviet contexts, see my "The Archeology of Banality: The Soviet Home," Public Culture 6 (Winter 1994): 263-92 and my Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994)
13. Ilya Kabakov, Installations 1983-1995 (Paris, 1995), p. 162; hereafter abbreviated /
14. Quoted in Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duclwmp: Art in Transit (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 124, 125; see also pp. 124-35
15. See Vladimir Dal, Tolkovyi slovar' zhivago velikorusskogo iazyka, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1882), 4:275
16. Jean-François Lyotard, " Domus and the Megalopolis," The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif., 1991), p. 199. Andreas Huyssen in his new book Twilight Memories claims that the current memory boom is not a result of further kitschification of the past, but "a potentially healthy sign of contestation; a contestation of the informational hyperspace and an expression of the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality, however they may be organized.... In that dystopian vision of a high-tech future, amnesia would no longer be part of the dialectic of memory and forgetting. It will be its radical other. It will have sealed the very forgetting of memory itself: nothing to remember, nothing to forget"
17. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia [New York, 1995], p. 35)
18. Kabakov, "On Emptiness," trans. Clark Troy, in Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (exhibition catalog, Tacoma Art Museum, 15 June-9 Sept. 1990
19. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1 Nov. 1990-6 Jan. 1991), p. 59
20. Most, but not all, of this "third wave" of emigration from the Soviet Union was of Jewish extraction. Before departure the emigrants were told that they would never be able to return, even if they were leaving behind aging relatives and parents. Joseph Brodsky speaks about this in his essay "In a Room and a Half," dedicated to the memory of his parents who died in Leningrad in 1985 and whose funerals the poet wasn't allowed to attend. See Joseph Brodsky, "In a Room and a Half," Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York, 1986), pp. 447-501
21. Larisa E., interview with author, Queens, N.Y., May 1995. Kabakov and Brodsky, among others, have commented on the depressive homogeneity of Soviet interiors. They speak not so much about white walls as about the familiar blue line that was painted on all the walls of Soviet establishments-what Kabakov calls the unifying blue line of the Soviet horizon. Kabakov nostalgically repaints this blue line in each of his installations, a reminder of Sovietness. Even when the installation is collectively executed, he takes the task of drawing the blue line of the Soviet horizon upon himself
22. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York, 1984), p. 278
23. My understanding of the aesthetic function in popular culture is very different from Pierre Bourdieu's, as discussed in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). I have benefited greatly from Elaine Scarry's work on artifacts and from Susan Stewart's discussion of souvenirs, but I believe it is very important to contextualize the practices of souvenir collecting, to make them more culture-specific. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985)
24. and Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N. C., 1993). This is discussed in detail in my Common Places, pp. 157-60
25. Larisa E, interview with author
26. Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978), p. 155