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Milos Match Boxes
by Dubravka Ugresic
Ilya Kabakov, the former Soviet alternative artist lives in America
today. There he works obsessively at building installations: he is
reconstructing his former life. He builds Soviet communal apartments,
Soviet bathrooms, and in a small town in Texas he has built a Soviet
elementary school of the sort he recalls from his childhood. When
writing about Kabakovís obsession, Pavel Peperstejn, himself a newly
forged American citizen, says that this ties in with homelessness,
because the installation is an imitation of home, an interior space...
When we no longer have our own space, our own room, this is something
all of us begin to do. For all of us the installation is a form of
compensation, once we have lost our own rooms. Here, in the West, we
are, in a way, homeless, but we are homeless back in Russia, too, for
our rooms are our memories, our past. Since so many of those real rooms
are gone now, Ilya creates them artificially. He wants to make them
last, to put them outside the dangerous process of history where things
are re-built and torn down.
The trauma of loss of home gives birth to an obsession with
home-building, the trauma of destruction gives rise to an obsession
with creativity, the trauma of oblivion produces an obsession with
memory. Milos Bobic, an architect who chose self-exile in 1992 from
his own home in Belgrade, lives today in Amsterdam. It took Milos Bobic
a few years to settle down; today he owns several thousand match boxes.
Milos tosses out the cover, keeping only the lower, indifferent part.
Milos Bobic does, indeed, smoke cigars, cigarettes and pipes.
On the white back of the match box Milos Bobic, the architect and
excellent draughtsman, has been keeping an unusual diary for several
years now: he draws the faces of friends, acquaintances, unknown
passersby, he sketches windows, houses, real ones and dreamed ones,
stairways, telephone numbers, quotes, words (particularly Dutch words),
Belgrade sometimes, his sons, Uros, Relja and Igor, dreams, visions,
bicycles, fragments of various cities, events, commentaries...
Sometimes, hoping to impose order, he cuts slits in large cardboard
backing, to the precise dimensions of the match boxes, and then he
lodges the match boxes
in these slits. Arranged this way the boxes create a larger picture
made of a lot of smaller pictures. The match boxes, of course, can be
re-arranged, they can be set out by specific theme, bicycle next to
bicycle, window by window. They can be arranged in chronological order,
September before October, October before November. But the pull of
chaos wins out over the violence of order.
Milos match boxes express in the most precise way possible something of
which many people, particularlÍy refugees, people in exile, people
without passports, the stateless, the dispossessed, emigr s - are only
vaguely aware. These boxes are a touchingly ironic response to a loss
of home, which, whether you mean to or not, you are invariably
rebuilding one way or another (the match boxes are empty rooms in need
of furnishing!). Milos s match boxes are tangible evidence of the way
human memory works: we remember the unnecessary fragment, the pointless
detail, an unimportant phone number, never the whole. The match boxes
are tangible evidence of human loss, the inability to make oneís own
life over into a smooth, integral, chronologically narrated story. The
match boxes are painfully tangible evidence of the fragility of our
attempts to leave behind some proof of our existence. All it takes is a
match and the boxes will all burn up in less than the time it takes to
smoke a cigarette.
Milos Bobic who knows, of course, the meaning of what we call fine art,
refuses to participate in any sort of conversation about a possible
'artistic' value for his match boxes. They are a profoundly personal
act, they are an alternative to an 'artistic' vision of life, one which
is left to 'ordinary people'. That is why as he puts the magnificent
heap of match boxes back into a plastic garbage bag, the most natural
place to keep them, he remarks...'Those were years when I was smoking
too much...'
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