This work A Child‘s Play-pen was an aspect, a component, from the installation: Voices From Behind The Door. It was situated in Room 2: The Student‘s Room. The piece consited of a series of rooms which evoked the shared living quarters of a house in the former Soviet Union. The Installation existed for only a short time, during the exhibition; on closing, a few weeks later, everything was dismantled. One presumes that all the furnishings were thrown out onto the street. In those days installations were not deemed worthy of preservation; it sufficed for them to be seen for a brief period, no one bothered to archive them. It is by sheer luck that this Playpen by Kabakov managed to survive at all: someone found it in the streets and took it home.
A Child‘ s Play-pen was not handcrafted by the artist, but produced in a factory. Kabakov may have bought it, or maybe he, too, found it lying discarded in the the street. In the Cabinet the arrangement has been presented as it was in the original installation: in one corner a teddybear huddled; directly opposite him lies the railwaycarriage of a wooden train set. These two toys have very strong associations with their particular time. A white brassiere has been hung over the railings of the playpen.
The question remains whether this fragmentary element from one of the artists installations should be seen as a work of art in its own right or simply as a relic. Personally I doubt whether it is permissible to make it stand for the whole, all by its little self.