Journey as a Philosophical Project

Journey as a communal project

Another experience of the entelechy journey around the room, surpassing the immanence of chosisme, is the socially oriented collective project of the circle of Moscow con- ceptualists of the 1970-1990's - Ilya Kabakov, Joseph Backstein, Andrei Monastyrskii and others, which is called "Rooms" (1986). In the preamble of the collection the authors of the project emphasize that their work is devoted to housing problems of the world avant-garde in the mid-80's.

It is noteworthy that the conceptualists themselves call their association a "geographic club," and themselves - travellers and discoverers of terra incognito - the Soviet housing reality in particular, and the Soviet everyday tradition in general, for the world outside the Soviet Union. Reflection on the space of "socialist everyday life" is at the centre of the con- ceptualists' creative work.

The realities of the Soviet existence need to be explained for everyone who is unfamiliar with them from their own everyday experience, otherwise it is impossible to understand the meaning of the creative work of these artists. The works of conceptualists presuppose the "involvement" of the life and cultural situation of their authors. The sad paradox is that the most powerful understatement of the concep- tualists' works is understandable only to people close to them by the type of everyday culture, and the interpretation and explanation of their works for an external viewer requires such clarification that inexorably destroys the meaning of their works. For the artists of this circle, it was important that their work did not get lost, did not disappear overnight along with the Soviet era, so that their works would sound and remain in Russian culture, would be involved in the common European artistic tradition. After all, works of art live only when they give a creative impulse to the audience, remaining a necessary link in the continuity of the creative process.

The "Rooms" project was created as a meta-journey of conceptualists into Soviet everyday life. The communal apartment in this context acquires the status of the most important component of Soviet life, expressing its essence. The Soviet reality in "Rooms" appears not only as a politicized, ideologized form of everyday life, but is also an existential object of the emotional attitude of artists.

At the centre of the project there is Ilya Kabakov's installation "A Room. (The man who flew to space from his room)" (1985), considered by his colleagues as a problematization of the ordinary by the author, an attempt at aesthetic sublimation of the element of life.

Kabakov's "Room" is one of the rooms in a large, overcrowded communal apartment. Inside this room, objects are in extreme disarray: sticks, jars, belts, newspapers, papers are lying interspersed... The furnishings of the dwelling are wretched: instead of a bed there is a cot with an old pillow and a blanket, there is no table at all, instead of wallpapers the walls are pasted over with all kinds of posters placed in the most ridiculous way, so that together they form an unthinkable absurdity and a mess. In the midst of all this, a mysterious machine hangs in the air. It consists of a saddle for a chair, a spring and rubber bands. The lonely inhabitant of this room, as it becomes clear from the story of his neighbour, was overwhelmed by the dream of traveling into space, and he did realize this dream - his "great project." One night, the neighbours in the communal apartment were awakened by a terrible crash. The local police officer recorded the disappearance of the resident and a through hole of unknown origin in the ceiling of his home.

Considering the centuries-old history of the Russian dream of space flight and the space migration of mankind from the overpopulated Earth to the nearest planets, it is not difficult to include the "Room" installation in a number of similar projects, among which there are the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov and Konstantin Tsi- olkovskii.

The existential layer of Kabakov's work was generated by the fact that the author identified himself with a character who reveals his essence, existence. The main impulse of the author-hero is a sincere desire to get out, fly out of the situation of the Soviet everyday life.

In my opinion, the "apartment myth" of Moscow conceptualists can be viewed as a special genre of a journey, an attempt to move from the plane of a "picture" to a three-dimensional, open, dynamic reality. Entering the "room," the viewer finds himself entirely within the work. The structure of perception and experience of the artist's idea, the semantic features of his work are determined by the correlation between the rhythm of the image and the viewer's journey through it, by the change in the position of his body. There is no traditional exhibition distance between the viewer and the work. The possibility of free movement-travel in the exhibition space determines both the freedom of perception of the author's work and freedom from its influence. The activity of spectator behaviour, its subjectivity is not dulled by the author's logic, which allows the spectator-wanderer to remain independent, to generate aesthetic meanings himself.

The "Rooms" project also includes a visual journey along fifteen routes - the real interiors of rooms of the representatives of the elite of the Soviet underground art of the "developed socialism" era. This voyage through the rooms is intended to testify to the lifestyle and mental structure of their inhabitants, artists. Now, not the "author" of the room himself acts as a commentator-guide, but the conceptual artist Georgy Kiesewalter, who wrote the text "Fifteen Rooms" - a detailed commentary on the photo gallery.

Moving from photograph to photograph and reading text after text, we seem to move from room to room in a huge communal apartment that has sheltered the colour of the Russian avant-garde. Here is a room - a"public thoroughfare,"where amid chaos and glaring poverty we suddenly notice a Swiss saxophone on a bed, in the corner near the window there is a fashionable and expensive sound amplifier "Yamaha;" and a modest, carefully tidied room characterized by the absence of everyday excesses bordering with asceticism, and a gloomy closet of a beatnik or a hippie. There is also a room here, the main difference of which is tightness. This is just an example of the very "universal" room, which combines a bedroom, living room and workshop. In installation it is indicated that the artist himself, his wife and children, a cat, a rather large dog, a couple of budgerigars also live in this room, and on the top of all that, there is a goat in the bathroom (combined), which is unusual for the city, but children always have milk...

In the classical cultural context, the completeness of the dwelling does not act as a sacred space: the kitchen or hallway are ordinary places, but the bedroom or study are sacred. In the situation of communality and overcrowding of the Soviet everyday life, where the kitchen smoothly turns into the bedroom and into the study, due to the absence of a sacred room with a clear boundary, a curious phenomenon - a "sacred point" emerges. Thus, the sacred appears in the form of the very dynamic, it fights for its existence. We are witnessing the mystical transformation of the profane into the sacred.

Journey as an experience of self-discovery

The peak of his enthusiasm for philosophical journeys in his own room fell on the first half of the past century. Among the classics of this literary genre, I would point out the story of Somerset Maugham "Honolulu" and Hermann Hesse's essay "A Walk in the Room."

Somerset Maugham, it seems to me, has revealed the secret of most "room travellers": "An old Frenchman wrote a book called Voyage autour de ma chamber. I have not read this book and do not even know what it is about, but its title excites my imagination. In a similar way, I could travel around the world..."Maugham, S. (1990). Honolulu. Catalina: stories. Kiev, ^{Politizdat of Ukraine, p. 44.} Maugham's story "Honolulu" (1921) is an experience of such a trip around the world.

Having noticed at the very beginning of his story that truly wise travellers wander only in their imagination, and "the most beautiful journeys are those that you make sitting by a fireplace, because thus you do not lose your illusions," the writer sets off on a long journey.

The wandering narrator considers the regions traditionally surrounded by a halo of romance to be the most attractive places for the pilgrimage. A traveller usually expects to see something beautiful there, but the impression he has formed is immeasurably more complex than that which a simple contemplation of beauty can give. The pilgrim is doomed to inevitable disappointment, which, however, gives these places a special attraction. Maugham likens this feature to the weaknesses of great people, making them less wonderful, but more interesting.

Maugham considers Russia to be one of the "mysterious places;" and an icon hanging on the wall of his room serves as a window into this country. Another such a place is China symbolized by a porcelain trinket on a bookshelf. And Honolulu - a city of primitive superstitions, one of which is the plot of the story.

Another experience of such a journey is Hermann Hesse's "A Walk in the Room" (1928) - a virtuoso confession of the writer taking the route of finding inner supports in a time of fading youth, when the time comes for forced reconciliation with the coming "winter of life." At this stage, the present and the future are woven from the past, and are built mainly from memories and reflection on what once happened. "A new time is coming, a different life - life in a room, by the light of a lamp, with books and sometimes with music, a life in which there is also a lot of beauty and depth, but the transition to it is difficult and unpleasant, it begins with chills, sadness and internal rebellion... More recently, my room was a haven for hours of rest and work, a refuge with open doors and windows... I was in this room only as a guest, life was not here, but outside, in the forest, by the lake... And now suddenly the room has become important again, it has become a home - or a prison, a permanent abode..."¹⁵

The author gazes intently at the new abode - his old room, trying to "get closer and make friends" with it. Here are his main assistants - the objects of the familiar interior: old books, a large writing table, chairs, paints, watercolours, which Hesse calls tangible pieces of his memory. These are things that he has gained confidence in over the years, watching them gradually age. There is an extraordinary plush animal - "half deer, half giraffe, with a bewildered fabulous look," which for a long time served as his only pet, replacing a dog or a cat; and a Ceylon sacred relic made of bronze - a boar (a scapegoat in the Old Testament): "For me, a boar is not a rare thing, but rather a symbol, he is my brother among us marked with a sign, clairvoyants, jesters and poets, with their souls covered with stigmas, bearing the curses of the era, while their contemporaries dance and read newspapers..."Ibid, p. 332. And only when an inner reconciliation with a new way of life has occurred, the habit of living locked up in a room comes to Hesse. In the end, such a life seems to the writer quite bearable.