Section: Book, Reader

The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment

Boris Groys

Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment presents an isolated dreamer who develops an impossible project – to fly alone in outer space. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently catapults through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space.

For Boris Groys, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment presents an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it – where cosmic vision and the political project of the communist revolution are seen as indissoluble.

References

Boris Groys is professor of Philosophy and Art Theory at the Academy for Design in Karlsruhe, Germany and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He has written and edited a number of books, including The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 1992) and Dreamfactory Communism (ed. with Max Hollein, Frankfurt a.M.: Hatje Cantz, 2003)