In 1988 visitors to the Ron Feldman gallery in New York were introduced to The Man Who Describes His Life Through Other Characters. Living with nine others, one to a room, in a faithfully recreated, grimly grey Soviet apartment, the character was the most autobiographical of many guises adopted by the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who has died aged 89.
The visitor did not actually meet Kabakov’s alter ego, but could determine his personality, and that of his neighbours, ranging from The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away to The Man Who Collects the Opinions of Others, through their personal possessions and a series of short introductory texts. The first character “looked in the mirror and saw himself”, a plaque told the visitor. “On the other hand, thinking about something, he saw in himself not one but many. He made a decision: to unite this diversity into a kind of artistic whole.”
