the center. The wholeness of the “sandy color, that of soil” is left intact, interrupted in a discrete manner almost secretively or mistakenly. Yet the dominance of the center overpowers the viewer, returning his gaze to the middle and away from the discrepancies in color. Kabakov would repeat this strategy from 1983-1988 with a second series called Three Green Paintings. In this series, rather than depict objects, he placed texts on the upper left and right hand corners of what is otherwise a field of green enamel paint. Kabakov described the colors of paint in The Russian Series and Three Green Paintings as the main characters. The brown sandy soil color of the first series was the same enamel used in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s to paint everything from roofs to hallways, but most often floors. Kabakov points out that the color of the state is red but the color of the country is gray, due to its “humdrum existence”. Kabakov assigns these colors a metaphysical meaning of earth and nature as controlled and depicted by the Soviet state. He then suggests that if you mix these two colors you end up with the brown sandy soil color, which signifies both the floors and the ground that support the feet of the populace of the Soviet Union. The green of the second series is enamel that was used to paint the lower part of the walls up to one meter high in order to protect them from dirt and scuffs. For Kabakov, these colors evoke feelings of unavoidable hopelessness. More pertinent to this argument is what these series of paintings do not address. Political ideology is absent and only impersonal colors exist to dominate minor features, all of which are faceless texts and objects. The Fly The fly motif is so important that it remained in his work until after he moved to the West. The 1992 installation in Cologne, Life of Flies, consists of several halls in which the economy, politics, culture, and an entire civilization, specifically the Soviet Union, are associated with flies. The civilization has an atmosphere so boring that flies die from it. Throughout Kabakov’s oeuvre the flies represent two seemingly different themes: human lives and garbage. The 1970s In the 1970s, Kabakov turned to more conceptual art. The first was the Soviet intelligentsia’s adoption of the structuralist theory from France, which