A Universal System for Depicting Everything

In this album, Ilya Kabakov takes up the position of a fictive artist who has become conscious of the shortcomings of people’s everyday ability to see and recognize normalcy. Artists, especially those of the Russian avant-garde, have always, by means of art, attempted to appropriate divine (in)sight, to effect a simultaneous perception of all moments in time. The artist of this album has made divine insight, or the fourth dimension, his own. He sees the same things we do, but, in contrast to others, he sees them with the right perspective. Unfortunately, this perception is almost never successfully transmitted or shown, since to do so is merely to translate the unknown into familiar forms or images. Meanwhile, the inexpressible is not felt and the familiar goes unrecognized. The artist of this album, on the other hand, has just such a feeling for the unknown, the non-portrayable, and the inexpressible.