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Ilya Kabakov | Blickst du hinauf und liest die Worte ... | 1997

Münster; revisited.

Mein Lieber! Du liegst im Gras, den Kopf im Nacken, um dich herum keine Menschenseele, du hörst nur den Wind und schaust hinauf in den offenen Himmel — in das Blau dort oben, wo die Wolken ziehen — das ist vielleicht das Schönste, was du im Leben getan und gesehen hast.

— Ilya Kabakov

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All of [Ilya] 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.

— Boris Groys

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[One] is simultaneously both a victim and a viewer, who on the one hand surveys and evaluates the installation, and on the other, follows those associations, recollections which arise in him; he is overcome by the intense atmosphere of the total illusion.

— Ilya Kabakov; on the Total Installation

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Ilya Kabakov, Münster, 1997

My love! You lie in the grass, your head thrown back; around you: Not a soul. You hear only the wind, and look up into the open sky — into the blue above, where the clouds float by — perhaps that is the loveliest thing that you have ever in your life done, and seen.

Looking up, reading the words ...