The Warsaw Summit of Archivists. Ilʹia and Emilia Kabakov’s Meeting with Joseph Kosuth on the Borderline between Soviet and Western Banality

In 1994, the joint exhibition Corridor of Two Banalities by distinguished conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Ilʹia and Emilia Kabakov took place in the Center of Contemporary Art of the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. It is from this Corridor… that I try to reassess the main installations dedicated to the Kabakov archive (The Big Archive (Bolʹshoi arkhiv), 1993 and The Arriving Archive (Pribyvaiushchii arkhiv), 1998) alongside the notion of a “total” installation as a kind of archive. I argue that the concepts of “horizon” and “hierarchy” are central to both the construction of the Warsaw installation and to Kabakov’s collecting and archiving throughout his career, starting in the 1970s. Furthermore, I show that The Corridor of Two Banalities can be read as a statement about the complex nature of global conceptualism, and I offer a broader interpretation of the Soviet Russian side of the table, while pointing out features of demarcation and concealment. While perennial to art, the powers of showing and concealing (by establishing the borderline and the hierarchy) become politicized to an unprecedented degree in the global and predominantly in the Soviet contexts, where they evoke and provoke activities of the secret police as the supervisor of the archive. Accordingly, denunciation (revealing what is concealed) becomes the central motif of the post-Soviet side of the corridor. In the second part of the article, I show how borderline—the gesture of drawing a border—dominates in the Kabakovs’ The Big Archive (1993) and The Arriving Archive (1998). In the context of conceptualism and the archive, the line stands for horizon, partition, and partiality, which characterizes and (at least partially) upholds the power of the archive. The third part focuses on the practice of staging in the framework of “total installations” as a new kind of “linear” or “horizontal” or “schizoid” order which renounces all imposition, specifically all hierarchies, while renewing the notion of “aura”; this horizontal aura obstructs all and any aesthetization of power and politicization of aesthetics.