Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment"

[Werner Presber]

http://momentc.blogspot.com/2011/03/ilya-kabakov-man-who-flew-into-space.html

Ilya Kabakov creates installations that tell stories from the lives of  
fictional characters. "The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment"  
consists of two rooms: The hallway in a communal Soviet apartment, and  
the room from which the story's protagonist has taken off into space  
through the ceiling and the roof, using the catapult he has made by  
attaching a seat to bed springs and rubber bands.

The walls in his very simple room have propaganda posters plastered  
all over. There are also sketches of his contraption and his expected  
orbit, and he has made a model of his town and apartment building,  
from which a metal string indicates his flight into space.

In the grimly lit hallway outside his room, yellowing pages tell the  
following story:

The lovely inhabitant of this room, as becomes clear from the story  
his neighbors tells, was obsessed by a dream of a lonely flight into  
space, and in all probability, he realized this dream of his, his  
"grand project".

The entire cosmos, according to the thoughts of the inhabitant of this  
room, was permeated by streams of energy leading upward somewhere. His  
project was conceived in an effort to hook up with these streams and  
fly away with them.
A catapult, hung from the corners of the room, would give this new  
"astronaut", who was sealed in a plastic sac, his initial velocity and  
further up, at a height of 40-50 meters, he would land in a stream of  
energy through which the Earth was passing at that moment as it moved  
along its orbit.
[...]
Everything takes place late at night, when all the other inhabitants  
of the communal apartment are sound asleep. One can imagine their  
horror, fright, bewilderment. The local police are summoned, an  
investigation begins, and the tenants search everywhere, in the yard,  
on the street, but he is nowhere to be found.
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http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10789&ttype=2

 From Afterall Books:
Ilya Kabakov: The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment
Boris Groys

The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who  
develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this  
dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet  
project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having  
built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the  
ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room  
and the primitive slingshot suggest the reality behind the Soviet  
utopia, in which where cosmic vision and the political project of the  
Communist revolution are seen as indissoluble.

The Man who Flew into Space from His Apartment also raises questions  
of authorship in modernity. All of Kabakov's work is made in the name  
of other, fictitious artists. This reveals a hidden rule of the modern  
art system: only an artist who doesn't want to be an artist or who  
doesn't even know that he is an artist is a real artist—just as only  
an artwork that does not look like an artwork is a real artwork. The  
installation is a narrative, the documentation of a fictitious event.
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Fliegen und Engel
Ilya & Emilia Kabakov und die Kunst der totalen Installation
Dokumentarfilm von Kerstin Stutterheim und Niels Bolbrinker,
Deutschland 2009
Länge: 92 Minuten
Erstausstrahlung