The Illogic of Kassel (23 page)

I want to reach old age, she insisted, and have trouble sleeping. I want to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake until dawn drooling and become senile and stupid. Her voice had curiously recovered all the charm of the first time I’d heard it. It was sounding immensely warm and so human. It even seemed
too
human. It was a voice that, despite what it said, managed to increase the power of its spell moment by moment. I would have stayed there in Die Büste Bar listening to her for the rest of the day, or the rest of my days, until she started to grow old. I don’t know how I came to imagine that some of the grandfathers in the bar were practically on top of us and that they wanted to touch us, that their breath enlivened the red of the little dresses of the girls running around, the way oxygen enlivens fire. I believe it can be said that, in the company of old lady Boston, among the flames and little red dresses, I fully lived for a few moments in the tough hell of old age.

48

On my walk back to the Hessenland, I was tearing along at such a pace that I walked right past my hotel without seeing it; I kept on going, maybe because I was concentrating too hard on my old folks’ experience in Die Büste Bar and going over and over my two quick farewell kisses to Boston.

Without noticing, I stumbled into unknown territory, in the unfamiliar area of Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, and as I passed in front of the Trattoría Sackturm, I felt someone touch my shoulder. For a second or two, I thought I’d returned to Sehgal’s salon. I looked around rather cautiously and saw it was Nené. (I call her that because I don’t think the actual person would like me to give her real name.)

The moment has been engraved in my memory, not only because I was momentarily startled, but also because the person who’d grabbed me was Nené, an old girlfriend of my friend Vladimir (an ex-girlfriend from a very long time ago—to tell the truth, from the early seventies). I was quite shocked. I thought, if such things were happening to me—meeting a woman like her here—it meant when I got home I’d have to write about what had happened to me on this trip. Who could have expected things might still happen to me?

Nené was alone in the truest sense of the word. She was about to have dinner on her own when she saw me coming up the street. She was, she said, enormously thrilled. She was as high-strung as ever, though older, with a slightly crooked nose and shiny, bouncy auburn hair. She had just been left by her husband, a famous German artist. When? An hour ago. Horrible, she said. Her husband? No, that she’d been dumped again; my friend Vladimir had done the same thing, didn’t I remember? I didn’t remember that Vladimir had left her, was all I could say, and I thought this really took the cake; all I needed now was to have to justify decisions my friends had made in the seventies.

You’ve aged, she said maliciously. I’m not surprised, I thought. Was I not coming from experiencing a scene in Die Büste Bar with a decidedly elderly atmosphere? You’re gaga yourself, I was about to answer, but I was bursting with such well-being that it was unthinkable I could hurt a recently separated old dame. She kept insisting I come have dinner with her. I don’t know how many times I told her I had dinner plans with the co-curator of Documenta at the Osteria and couldn’t have two dinners in one night, but the fact is, I didn’t put up too much resistance going into the Sackturm, since I was really quite hungry and had been for hours.

I hadn’t heard that you’d participated in Documenta, Nené said after ordering a salad to share, once we’d been seated at a table inside the Sackturm. I hid from her the fact that I was still participating; I didn’t want to have to see her the next day in the Chinese restaurant or at my lecture. Nené was just as intellectual as she’d been in those distant days when I’d seen her often in Barcelona. I told her I had never seen anything like
This Variation
, but she made a gesture of absolute disdain. I would swear she hadn’t heard of the installation, but there remained that gesture. While she was making it, I suddenly felt the beneficial stealthy company of toil, that concept so familiar to me since coming across it in a line by Yeats: “In luck or out the toil has left its mark.”

I talked to Nené about this, and she half understood me.

“You can’t live without art?” she said. “Well, I’ve had it up to here with my German husband, my artist husband. Germans are a pain and so are artists. Art is too, let me tell you, art is a complete bore, a big fat nothing.”

Luckily, I was still in good spirits, which enabled me to survive all that.

Then I told her that in general a work of art—as in Sehgal’s dark room—went by like life, and life went by like art.

It was very odd, she almost slapped me across the face.

Minutes later, when the irreproachable polipetti al pesto arrived, my enthusiasm for everything I’d seen in Kassel had reached such a height that even Nené seemed uncomfortable at my unstoppable praise, my long commentaries on all I’d seen. She told me I was “going way overboard with my enthusiasm.”

It’s not that I exactly believe in contemporary art, I told her, but every once in a while I’m able to see extraordinary details in it, and, besides, I don’t think we’re doing everything so badly in comparison with the ancient Greeks or the Renaissance. What do you want me to say?

She threw me a look of hatred. Maybe she’d guessed that I was thinking of leaving soon, without ordering dessert. I then started to tell her I wasn’t praising what I’d seen in Documenta just for the sake of it, but that since I’d arrived in the city, I felt that an invisible force had taken hold of me, making me find everything exciting, as if Kassel had presented me with an unexpected shift of gears, an unforeseen impetus that would help me have more optimism in the future toward art and life, though not toward the world, which I’d already given up for lost.

I almost choked saying all this all at once, almost without a pause. And, to top it off, I felt her look of unbridled hatred on me again.

“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” I said. “And that’s altered my behavior, my mood, both of which were always very regular until now, arriving in an orderly fashion and on time. In the mornings, I experience happiness and the idea that everything’s possible. In the evenings, I experience fatigue and darkness. Suddenly—perhaps it’s due to the Kassel climate—everything has changed. I’ve gone mad. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.”

I said this and managed to get away from her much more easily than I’d expected. We agreed to meet at midnight in the foyer of the Gloria Cinema, but I had the impression neither of us would show up. I certainly wouldn’t, because I didn’t even know where that cinema was, even though a year earlier I’d downloaded a photo of it when I came across it on the Internet and it had reminded me of the neighborhood cinemas of my childhood.

49

I reached the street, finally heading in the right direction toward the Hessenland, and as I was walking, I started imagining that I had left the city and come back once Documenta had closed, and I went into the abandoned salon of
This Variation
to see what the place was like when it wasn’t dark, with dancers lying in ambush. It didn’t take long to discover that it was an uninteresting, rundown space. But there was someone there that I hadn’t expected: an old Indian man, who asked me if I was aware that the soul survived in a “suprasensitive” world. I didn’t know that, I said in fright. The soul survives, he told me, in coexistence with forces that those initiates of the ancient world understood very well, even their most mysterious aspects. I didn’t know that either, sir, I explained, and almost felt the need to apologize for not knowing. A shame, he said, because you won’t be able to connect with the superior beings of the celestial hierarchy. A long silence. Here in this room there was avant-garde art, I tried telling the Indian man. And to my surprise my words affected him the way a stake would have affected a vampire. So much so that I watched him leave completely horrified. It seemed clear to me that the term “avant-garde” caused serious problems for the densely populated, cosmopolitan colony of ghosts in Kassel.

50

Thinking about
art itself
, I thought that it was definitely right there, in the air, suspended in that moment, suspended in life that went by as I’d seen the breeze go by.

I was in my room now. Moments before, I’d waved to
This Variation
from the balcony, as had become my ritual. I sat down at my computer and googled the word
impulso
(which is how I thought of, or how I’d translated, the word
pull
in Ryan Gander’s title). I discovered that it wasn’t necessarily what I’d thought it was, because in physics, “impulse” is the “physical magnitude (usually denoted as
p
) defined as the variation in the lineal moment of an object within a closed system.” The term is different from how we habitually think of it: it was coined by Isaac Newton in his second law of motion, in which he called it the
vis motrix
, referring to this force of movement.

In any case, I was enjoying a
vis motrix
, I’m almost sure of it. Then I looked up my next day’s activity on Google: “The Lecture to Nobody,” which I soon saw they’d programed for six in the evening. Would anyone attend? I expected to go along, propelled by my own
vis motrix
, but I hoped not a soul would show up. What was I planning to talk about, anyway? I kept looking for more information about Documenta 13 and found a feature article in which Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev praised the confusion one might encounter walking around there. I remembered Boston telling me to bear in mind, when judging
The Brain
, that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was of the opinion that in art, confusion is a truly marvelous thing. “At the risk of unsettling people,” Christov-Bakargiev said, “this Documenta does not have a single guiding concept. Due to the fact that there are many valid truths, one is constantly confronted with unsolvable questions; thus it has become a choice between
not
making a choice, not having a concept, acting from a position of withdrawal; or making a choice that one knows will also be partially or inevitably ‘wrong.’ What these participants do, what they ‘exhibit,’ may or may not be art.”

I also found Carolyn’s
Letter to a Friend
, in which she suggested that Documenta 13 was more than a big exhibition; it was actually a state of mind. I was on the verge of believing she had said that for me, since, after all, in a few hours I’d changed into someone enormously enthusiastic about everything he’d seen in Documenta, that great garden of contemporary marvels.

There were emails to answer in my inbox. In one of them, someone wrote to me from Neuchâtel to ask how I was getting on in Kassel and whether I was planning to write about it all when I got home. “If you do decide to, if I were you, I’d forget about genres and remember that every art, every science, operates by means of discourse; if it is practiced for its own sake as art, and if it achieves the highest summit, it is poetry.”

As I read this, I thought that there are some friends who would like for you, not them, to take on great challenges. Still, I couldn’t agree more with the idea of doing without genres. My favorite author was Nietzsche; I could never put his books down when I read him, so when I traveled I preferred to bring books in which he appeared only indirectly, such as
Romanticism
. To me, W. G. Sebald seemed to be just Nietzsche’s distinguished disciple, though I had to admit he’d managed to give a poetic touch to his romantic pilgrimages. And, thinking of Sebald, I could never forget that lovely text of his on Robert Walser about how Walser seemed truly freed from the burden of himself the night he undertook a journey in a hot air balloon, from Bitterfeld—the artificial lights of whose factories were just beginning to glimmer—to the Baltic coast. A trip over a sleeping nocturnal Germany. “Three people, the captain, a gentleman and a young girl, climb into the basket, the anchoring chords are loosed, and the strange house flies, slowly, as if it had first to ponder something, upward,” wrote Walser, the perfect rambler. For Sebald, that wanderer was born for this hushed journey through the air: “In all his prose works, he always seeks to rise above the heaviness of earthly existence, wanting to float away softly and silently into a higher, freer realm.”

Another more prosaic email contained for the umpteenth time—I’d received no end of emails about this matter—directions to my dinner with Chus, including a detailed map of the neighborhood showing my hotel and the Osteria restaurant, separated by barely three hundred meters. It seemed like a simple trajectory, even though all the street names were in German. I felt insecure, perhaps because—for some reason that escaped me—the sensation of being just another citizen of Kassel had begun to fade. But I wouldn’t say I’d gone back to feeling I was from Barcelona either; rather, I simply felt lost, lost in the center of Europe. In fact, it seemed increasingly obvious to me—as in the old song—that to get out of Europe I would have to get out of the forest, but to get out of the forest I’d have to get out of Europe.

Sometimes, when I noticed a change of light in my frustrated “thinking cabin,” I felt lost, and that lost feeling led me to see myself as one more dead European.

51

I stopped to think about
One Page of Babaouo
, António Jobim’s strange installation, and the more my imagination started to spin around it, the more interesting it seemed. An experience from the past helped: my visit to Salvador Dalí in May of 1978, an incursion into his house on the occasion of the publication of a Spanish translation of his book
Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet
. In light of what Dalí told me on that visit,
One Page of Babaouo
started to acquire greater intensity, which led me to recall that there are scenes from our past that with time—as we come across information we didn’t have access to before—unexpectedly take on greater depth. One of those past scenes took place in 1963, at 87 Paseo de Gracia, in Barcelona’s long-gone Libreria Francesa. Some classmates had taken me there, and to my absolute surprise, after an exchange of passwords, a sales clerk in blue overalls with a pencil behind his ear brought out from under the counter books by Sartre and Camus banned by Franco’s censors.