online: 12 jume 2013 modified: 2, 3, 4, 10 april, 7 may, 11 june 2013 2 april 2013 the great illusion*
of work and play in the 20th century
written while experiencing The Happiest Man...
a cinematic installation by Ilya and Emilia Kabako
at the Ambika P3 Gallery
University of Westminster, London
27 march to 21 april 2013
[*i did not realise that the great illusion is the title of a book written by Norman Angell in 1909 and a film (La Grande Illusion) made by Jean Renoir in 1937... both book and film were exposures of the folly of world war (what we now call global war) and both were greatly admired... and i think were banned by some governments...]
...we're at the cinema of the 1930s... everyone is singing throughout existing time on the collective farms in the socialised vastness of the endless wheatlands... the cloudless skies... no private land nor hedges or other local boundaries... just the joyous soprano choirs (with men's voices only in the background) and occasional musical instruments... and now guitars playing to individual male voices on a river boat with several decks and now a well fed blond soprano is supposedly driving a horse-drawn carriage roofless under the sky...
...all this goes on without end on trucks and boats and massed ploughs and other mechanised instruments of the settled utopia of unlimited supply... always to the never-ending sopranos (or mezzo-sopranos or both) now in indoor clothing at musical events including a dance solo to a grand piano player with finger close-up unsynchronised with the music... and contented people sitting on a barge that is drawn by a steam tugboat with singers in sailor's caps and women in their best dresses and now and then exchanging smiles and glances as the tractors plough the unlimited land from one horizon to another...
...and now massed tractors drawing seed-planting machines (i know not the name of) and buxom women with shouldered rakes all singing as they work while shovelling small hills of grain into mechanical conveyors.... (where is the criticism of all this unquestioned satisfaction and perhaps the actual joy)...
...and all this time no one seems to be visiting the simulated bedsitting room with dining table set for a meal from where you can see the film that fills the glassless window as if the realised fiction of all this is the outside world and which closes off the actual world of troubles so that the happiest man in the room can live in a sealed-off utopia of official approval and mechanised politics and no one saying no...
...and where is literature... it's there too in the room capsule in the presence of bound novels of Herman Hesse and other writers whom i do not know in French and in Italian or is it Spanish... along with unremarkable paintings on the actual walls... and a family photograph pinned to the wallpaper and a drawing of eighteenth century people beside a glass cupboard that seems to be locked...
...so now i join whoever else is visiting this room of happiness...
...'hello comrade' i say to a man who is already half lying on a sofabed in the room from where we can see nothing but the endless film of centrally imposed happiness (which makes me think that Hollywood or any other cinewood is just the same as this... constructed propaganda for the illusion of success and universal joy (and also fascinating horror)... but where is philosophy as well as dialectic materialism and the cinematic thought of Sergei Eisenstein and D W Griffith and the existing thousand films already made (perhaps many thousands?) ... and how many collective farm workers now unemployed beneath the common sky...
...inside the inner room are now three people as well as me... and one in trilby hat has open notebook with pen or pencil at the ready... and all this time i hear sopranos and their indoor recordings replayed as if outdoors beneath the sky and over the earth we share with everyone...
...and still inside the room we are immobilised by the chairs and folding bed and bed-settee and chests of drawers and pictures even plates and knives and forks on tassled table cloth the primary illusions of civilised life or so it seems... there is even a shirt or other garment left on a chair as well as two china horses prancing on the bedside cupboard beneath a standard lamp with shade decorated with lace that might otherwise adorn a neck and throat.. while out of the window are smiling people emerging from a car to join a walking choir of happy singers of the good that is in everything...
...by now excess is evident as this tired writing finger pauses while this body reads what it has written... and having read decides to visit again this endless myth of plenty...
...on the way out he notices a woman's coat that is hanging on the wall beside the door...
...outside the room we're in a simulated cinema perhaps the primary arena of the 20th century life... the cardboard dreamland of the studios transformed by cinematographic illusion into an endless time machine of spouting images and heaving bosoms and smiles and tears and appetites fulfilled or simulated... (and many on the dark side)...
...and from inside the simulated cinema (which is the outside of the simulated room) i'm reminded of the box or space capsule in which a group of people stayed and endured to live locked-up as if to Mars and back but actually inside a container inside a warehouse (is that our greatest reality... where spirit's absent... or else is simulated day-by-day... as if this life with our mechanical extensions is the whole story but it's not)...
...those army trucks diverted to carrying singers over the wheat fields to music music so compulsive...
...and now after two hours writing this in the cinematic darkness i pause not wishing to leave the illusion of illusions in which it's possible to see thanks to the reality of human mind... despite... because... in fact... we are the ones who see ourselves... in mirrors artificial... in the basement of our concrete dreams... detached from as it is... full stop... or other words to such effect... and loss of reason...
...and these are far from all the words that can be said... or even written with one finger
...yes it's sad... and it's very moving... (wrote two actual people... in the visitor's book)... well it may be sad but also it's revealing of what we are and what we think and do... and the illusions we need... in east and west and anywhere the same... magnificent or terrible... yet not... not as real if we think we think we think apart from the books or films or tv and like illusions that we both make and inhabit... (and thank goodness for the Kabakovs!)...
...much longer than any of the hundreds of entries in this digital diary... but the theme is also vast... and universal... so no apologies...
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