///ZKMax___ Gotchis
Ilya Kabakov «The Antenna» 1997.
«Always, whenever we look up at the sky, we involuntarily have a presentiment, unconsciously we anticipate some sort of 'communication' from there, it seems to us that something is occuring there, in that cosmos, in its infinite heights.» ~ Ilya Kabakov.
The Antenna, 1997
Sculpture Project, Muenster
Permanent Installation.
In an open place, not far from a river where the slightly hilly shore in the summer is covered with grass and where there are not too many people aroud, a metal construction is erected which is similar in appearance to a radio antenna that gives and receives signals. When the viewer approaches closer to it and looks at it from bottom to top, he notices with surprise how some barely visible letters that combine into words are arranged between the feelers of the antenna, and if you muster your attention, you can read an entire text: 'My Dear One! When you are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back, there is no one around you, and only the sound of the wind can be heard and you look up into the open sky--there, up above, is the blue sky and the clouds floating by, perhaps this is the very best thing that you have ever done or seen in your life.
The entire salt of the installation is acheived by the thickness of the lines which form the letters and the entire written text. The thickness of these lines (the wire is 3mm in diameter) is such that against the background of the sky at a distance of 13 meters from the ground this creates the effect of a unique twinkling: I see - I don't see (a similar effect emerges when looking at a spider web stretched across branches in the forest. That is, given a certain effort of vision, we can read the written text, but without this effort, it couldn't be seen: it doesn't exist at all. The text seems to appear before out of and then dissolve into the background of the sky.
«But it is precisely this twinkling as we try to make out the text that coincides with the ambiguity of the meaning of this text, which can also be perceived as a vision, a mirage arising before us.» ~ Ilya Kabakov.