The Illogic of Kassel (26 page)

I remembered when I was barely twenty, I randomly wanted to be like the cineaste Philippe Garrel, who visited Barcelona for a showing of some of his underground movies at the Filmoteca. Garrel’s “sad young man” appearance and his very radical attitude toward art attracted me. Back then, unknowingly, what so fascinated me about my contemporary’s pained figure was the romanticism emanating from everything that he did and said; in fact, he was—though I didn’t know it at the time—Romanticism itself in its purest and most original form: that of its beginnings, when that movement, that “odyssey of the German spirit,” was the first of all vanguards (though its followers didn’t gather under that emblem since the word had only a military meaning back then). These followers invented Literature as we now know it, also inventing the cult of genius (in which life sprang forth in freedom and developed with creative force), an outrageous cult to the so-called geniuses of vigor, who took the stage to announce what ended up being called
vanguardismo
many years later: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz playing the fool, Friedrich Maximilian Von Klinger showing off by devouring a piece of raw horsemeat, Cristoph Kaufmann sitting down at the duke’s table bare-chested to his belly button, his hair a mess, with a colossal knotty walking stick . . . I was, unknowingly, an heir to Garrel, who in turn, also unknowingly, was an heir to Kaufmann and company. But if someone had spoken to me of Klinger or Kaufmann in those days I wouldn’t have understood, apart from the description “geniuses of vigor.”

When I was most absorbed in German avant-garde inventions of a now -distant century, Chus suddenly asked me if I’d seen anything else in Documenta apart from the dark and brilliant work of Sehgal. Luckily, I reacted in time. Of course I’d seen other things, I said. Essentially I was there to be a wanderer; I considered myself Documenta’s rambler. That’s what I said, and I told her that the invitation to Kassel had reminded me of another that had made me happy years ago, a proposal that came from Yvette Sánchez that I should be—and I was—the official rambler of the Basel Book Fair. In Kassel, as I walked around what seemed to me more and more like a huge estate full of oddities, I felt like the rambler in
Locus Solus
, that profoundly leisurely, erratic, perplexed wanderer, the inexhaustible visitor to the estate where Martial Canterel would show anyone around who wanted to see the strange inventions collected there.

Of course I’d seen other works, I said, I’d seen lots and in all of them I’d found ideas that connected me to an exceptional creative energy. In Huyghe’s impressive
Untilled
, I thought I saw that only art in the margins and distanced from galleries and museums could really be innovative and present something different. I said I was planning to spend the night there in that installation, in the middle of the landscape of humus with an Ibizan hound with one pink leg.

Naturally, hearing my plan, Chus looked up from her plate and stared at me, as if trying to guess whether I was truly insane. I wasn’t at all crazy. In fact, I was thinking of something Chus had said in an interview I’d read on the Internet: Documenta was not a traditional exhibition; it was not just for looking at, it could also
be lived
, something that could be visibly inferred from quite a few of the installations, such as that created by Pierre Huyghe with his surprising intervention.

I’ve observed, she said, that you speak seriously and jokingly at the same time. That’s true, I said, but you’d do well to take it all seriously.

I’d announced I’d be spending the night out in the open, beside the statue with the built-in beehive for a head. I couldn’t back down now. Actually, I’d announced it to her so I’d have no choice but to carry it out. As soon as dinner was over and Chus went to sit with her friends at another table (which she surely must have been eager to do by then), I would try to transfer my “thinking cabin” to the freedom of the open air in a corner of
Untilled
; it would be my way of paying homage to a hypothetical art of the outskirts of the outskirts.

It might be a strange experience to spend the night in an installation I considered very odd and which must be even more so in deep darkness. I saw myself out there at the mercy of the elements, following the pink-legged Spanish dog’s progress. At the same time, I imagined traveling by balloon in those nocturnal hours as Robert Walser once did toward an abyss of frost and stars. Would I be scared? What would I see? Would I be alone or would I discover that at night the place filled with secret conspirators from the world of the outskirts of the outskirts of art? Would I manage to travel a very long way while essentially staying right where I was?

Chus didn’t want to say that spending the night with the pink-legged dog was a bad idea. She simply asked me if I’d seen Scorsese’s film
George Harrison
:
Living in the Material World
. In it, she said, you could see lots of thinking cabins, though in the form of “transcendental meditations.” I hadn’t seen it, I said, but I’d stumbled upon many things in Kassel that had dazzled me. I thought she’d want to know which ones, but she didn’t ask. Like someone downing a shot of vodka without thinking about it, Chus suddenly dropped a question, maybe the question I would have most liked not to be asked, since I didn’t have a suitable answer for her.

“I almost forgot. How’s it going at the Chinese restaurant?”

The color and expression of my face changed. And I was more Piniowsky than ever.

Luckily, when I started to tell her something, I saw that she was not overly interested in my reply. In fact, she’d turned her face away and started exchanging signals with her friends at the nearby table. When she finally turned to look at me, she encountered my absolute Piniowsky face. She must have grasped my immense distress and taken pity on me because she suddenly started talking about hammocks strung between palm trees and the sounds of coconuts falling. She was talking about Gino Paoli songs and bathing suits and deserted beaches, salty breezes and love stories, and what was always, she said, hidden in the middle of the invincible summer.

57

When dinner was over, I said goodbye and went out onto the dark Jordanstrasse. Chus stayed with her friends, but I had the impression that her eyes possessed a strange power and were somehow binoculars, allowing her to see beyond the restaurant. If so, she was surely following me with her long-distance gaze and not planning to stop until she saw that, retracing my earlier steps, I’d turned into the dark alley leading to Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse.

I remembered for a moment that a friend had wondered in his latest novel whether
acting out
life was the only way to live it and if life were less true when it was performed. Those questions came to mind at the very moment I left the Osteria. I think it was because there wasn’t a soul on the street. I observed that I wasn’t going to be seen by a single human eye for a while, so I began to speculate that Chus might be following my steps with her binocular gaze. Then I began to act—literally to act—for Chus, as if I were sure she was observing what I was doing. It was possibly my only way of not feeling so alone. I reaffirmed once more the great truth that we need to feel we are seen by someone, since the opposite is insufferable.

Acting for Chus in the deserted streets, I felt that life was more intense when one put on a performance, for everything seemed to take on more importance, even if I just perceived someone following my steps on the big stage. Just as I approached art to turn my back on the world, it seemed to me that dramatizing my own life, my footsteps in the dark, was a way to intensify the sensation of being alive, that is, one more way of making art.

Initially, my performance leaving the Osteria consisted of simulating being undecided about whether or not to retrace my exact steps, turning again into the shortcut of the dark and lonely alley, or taking the well-lit street in front of the restaurant that also led to Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse.

These doubts I pretended to have didn’t last long, because I quickly chose to take the well-lit street. The other option—retracing my steps—was shameful, because it would be acting like any old Tom Thumb who’d left a trail of crumbs so as not to get lost on his way home.

I went up the slope of the well-lit street and, arriving at Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, turned right expecting to find myself, after a few steps, passing the same places I’d seen before. But instead of finding them, I ran straight into the illuminated foyer of the Gloria Cinema, which disconcerted and unnerved me, making me think I was lost. Hadn’t I been wondering a few hours earlier where that cinema was and why I hadn’t seen it when I’d tramped around practically the whole downtown? Well, there it was. There was the added danger of running into Nené again, for this was where I was meant to meet her at midnight, though most likely she wouldn’t show up.

Probably, somewhere just past the Gloria Cinema, were the shops and businesses of Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse that I’d seen on my way out, so I kept walking, leaving behind the cinema that held within it a certain danger. I kept walking, but I didn’t come to any of those stores and eventually I had the sensation of beginning to travel back to my childhood terrors, as if the story of Tom Thumb (
Daumesdick
) had projected its long shadow over my adult footsteps.

In other words, I was lost. I ended up making the difficult and humiliating decision—humiliating in my eyes at least and probably also to anyone who might be watching me through binoculars—to turn back, to return literally to the front porch of the Osteria and, once back there, this time singing Tom Thumb’s song, begin the walk over again using the shortcut of the alley.

In about four minutes I got back to the porch of the Osteria and, though it was not at all necessary, I peered in the window to see what Chus was doing at that moment. She had sat down, as was to be expected, with her friends, and it looked like she was having another dinner. This is the night of the double dinners, I thought. Chus didn’t see me, but I believe one of her friends did, at least he reacted in a way that made me think I’d been spotted. I was so embarrassed at having been discovered there with my nose pressed up against the window that I shot off the porch, straight to the alley, happy for a moment knowing I was going the right way this time.

It was admirable to observe how, through all that, the
third
sense of impulse hadn’t abandoned me. I overacted as I went down the alley, as if I thought Chus would be interested in watching my second attempt to get back to the hotel through her binoculars. But when I saw two young people suddenly burst out of one of the alley’s doorways in animated conversation, I felt less inclined to care about my own drama and more inclined to protect my own life. Those strangers, with their laughter and exaggerated liveliness, deserved to be looked on with total distrust. But they walked quickly off into the night, both with their hands behind their backs. They were inoffensive, just laughing at their own business. Even so, I was aware of the risk of walking around unprotected and I modified my will to exist as a performer. I stopped playing my solitary role and started concentrating on what I was doing, trying not to get lost anymore.

I reached the end of the alleyway and stepped out again onto Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, walking down it, finally past familiar scenery, toward the hotel. It was somewhat frustrating that no one else could be seen on the streets; I would have preferred to cross paths with someone who would at least look at me. I was very happy in any case. My childhood fears had vanished, and with them the Brothers Grimm’s great Tom Thumb. Though I felt physically exhausted, mentally I kept going, to the point where, when I passed the door of my hotel, I didn’t stop but kept walking in the direction of Friedrichsplatz. I crossed it fifteen minutes later at a serene pace, especially as I passed by Horst Hoheisel’s reproduction of the old fountain funded by the Jewish businessman Sigmund Aschrott. I ambled along, entering Karlsaue Park without the slightest fear. At that hour, the park wasn’t exactly teeming with people, but there were still quite a few strolling around.

I tried to encourage myself as much as possible by thinking I was about to encounter a brand-new experience in my life, but I couldn’t stop wondering if it wasn’t absurd that, despite how much mental energy I felt, I wouldn’t have rather retired to my hotel room.

It was odd to have chosen this pilgrimage to the most sordid spot in the park. Sordid? Perhaps it was, but I sensed that Huyghe’s contribution was one of the high points of that Documenta, since among other things it had the virtue of not wearing thin in a single visit; it was an installation that was open to all sorts of interpretations. After seeing it for the first time, a person was left with the memory of a strange harmony between the animate and the inanimate. Maybe that’s what I had wanted to see there. I was sure that the mystery of that place was endless. It had been accompanying me since María Boston had shown it to me.

I don’t know when I started passing fewer people and walking more and more slowly through the park, as if reluctant to arrive at
Untilled
, reluctant just when I’d decided that all that dug-over land (where an Ibizan hound with one leg painted pink prowled around) was practically my promised land.

After walking for a good stretch and passing near Anri Sala’s oblique
Clocked Perspective
, I approached the big greenhouse where Jimmie Durham had sited
The History of Europe
: a work that, seen from outside, seemed to consist only of two lumps of stone, each deposited in a glass display case in the very center of the immense space of that giant heated greenhouse.

In the middle of the night, unable to enter the warm enclosure, I found it difficult to understand what kind of history those two stones were telling. A metal plaque, found by chance as I was leaving, allowed me to discover that the rocks were in reality Neanderthal remains, indicating that Europeans had identity issues: for ever since they were invaded by the Romans, they’d thought they were Occidentals and Orientals were people in Asia. However, the plaque said, the most ancient finds of Neanderthal remains—like those two sleeping there in the gigantic greenhouse—had been discovered in Georgia, which forced us to rethink everything.