Joseph Kosuth, Ilya Kabakov
The Corridor of Two Banalities
The very fact of cooperation on one project by two such famous artists was unique: Kabakov, one of the pioneers of the conceptual movement in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, and later, after emigrating to the USA, the author of touching installations showing the contrast between the world of ideology and the everyday life of people, and Kosuth, an American theoretician and artist, one of the main creators of conceptualism, setting new horizons for art with subsequent essays.
Kosuth compiled statements of politicians, scientists, writers and artists from Marx, Lenin, Hitler to Confucius, Wilde, Wałęsa and Chaplin. The texts selected by Kabakov are authentic denunciations and complaints against fellow residents, written by tenants of overcrowded public housing in Moscow in the 1960s, supplemented with Soviet propaganda iconography.
The publication contains, in addition to photographs of the exhibition, a complete collection of texts presented therein; the texts used by Kabakov are in Polish, Russian and English; quotes chosen by Kosuth: in Polish and English.
