The Illogic of Kassel (28 page)

The hound seemed to get bored with our conversation and went for a walk around the territory. I was observing her closely, and at first she actually managed to surprise me with her apparently infinite eagerness for all smells. When she found something that caught her attention—always an enigma for me, because I couldn’t understand what was so alluring in what she was smelling—her snout stuck to it with absolutely amazing obstinacy, with such anxious, frenzied enthusiasm, the rest of the world seemed to have stopped existing for her.

The dog was like a little Piniowsky. Obstinately interested in everything and prisoner of a great enthusiasm for whatever crossed her path, she seemed ready at any moment to ignore the whole damned world. I reached the conclusion that she was enjoying herself and that was all there was to it. She seemed to be living on a permanent high, lost in a nasal nirvana that she couldn’t detach from.

60

The caretaker seemed obsessed with keeping other people’s affections away from his hound.

Suddenly, he came over and started to tell me a story.

“Once,” said the caretaker, “I took a night train from Paris to Milan. I traveled in one of those classic compartments they used to have, those little four-man pigsties. In Paris there were only three of us. One of the passengers was a curly-haired young man with a parrot in a cage that said ‘
Je t’aime, je t’aime
’ to him every once in a while. The little creature seemed to know only this one phrase. When it came time to turn off the light in the compartment, the young man put a pink cover over the cage and told me that he’d had a similar parrot before but had to get rid of it because it refused to say loving words to him, which had led him to discover that he wasn’t loved. What a drama, I commented. I had to do away with him, he said. And while he gave me horrible details of how he’d suffocated the bird, the murdered parrot’s successor—now hidden under the cover—punctuated the story every once in a while by saying ‘
Je t’aime, je t’aime
.’

“In the middle of the night, the train stopped and a fourth passenger boarded who was very careful not to wake the rest of us and politely got undressed quietly in the darkness. All of a sudden, when the fourth traveler had just lain down in his berth, the voice of the enamored parrot rang out again through the whole compartment, from the depths of his hiding place: ‘
Je t’aime, je t’aime
.’

“The next morning, when we arrived in Milan and the young man took the cover off his pet, I asked if I could take a photo of the two of them: the enamored parrot and his owner. I took a Polaroid and later showed it to my girlfriend in Milan, so she’d see I hadn’t invented anything in my story. In spite of having such conclusive photographic proof, my girlfriend refused to believe me. That’s crazy. You’re always making stuff up, she said, sounding very disappointed.”

Once he’d told this story, the ferocious-looking, funny caretaker began to walk away. Had he divulged that story to tell me that he was enamored of his hound and recommend I mustn’t try to come between them?

I let my gaze wander among the hallucinogenic plants and the frog pond and then turned away fearlessly, flippantly, toward the lunacy of the morning light.

All the signs of a great morning were in front of me, by which I mean, it would be ideal not to overlook any of them. However, I ended up confining my grand panoramic view to go to observe some minuscule spyglasses I could see on top of a tower that seemed to be situated even beyond the remotest distance.

61

Was Chus keeping an eye on me from high windows? Was she really spending her time spying on my attempt—my secret, perhaps my only, contribution of real interest to Documenta—at turning time into space? Did I really believe that she had picked up on my desire to spend the night in the territory of putrefaction called
Untilled
because, once immersed in this disconsolate chronicle of universal history (that process of incessant decomposition), I would escape from history and try to restore the timelessness of paradise? Had Chus discovered that I saw
Untilled
as a paradise, which could be something difficult for any sensible person to accept? Had she guessed from the high windows that I was trying to merge my life with the environment? Did she know I believed that in time you could only be yourself, while in space you could become someone else? Did she know that it seemed to me time didn’t give us much of a chance, that it only knew how to send dry, icy breaths on the backs of our necks in fascinating alleyways? Space seemed wide and full of possibilities, where logic, out of pure logic, always lost its footing.

Thinking about all this, I smiled. How could I imagine that from high windows Chus was spying with binoculars on my tranquil frame of mind in that far-flung corner of Karlsaue?

The smile stayed on my face for a long time, until I saw that for the umpteenth time, the hound was going toward the puddle near the statue with a beehive for a head, and I noticed a soft sound that was difficult to locate, a noise that seemed to be trying to give me a clue to help me decipher the intangible, the incomprehensible aspects of that territory.

The intangible? I kept my eye on the dog, who had gone toward the statue as if she’d guessed that I was buzzing with ideas and I desired to disorganize the insufferable order of the bees. I discovered that the slight but insistent sound was coming from the big puddle: from a tiny red toy boat that had been abandoned by some child the previous day. As it rolled on the water, it emitted a sad moan, perhaps mistakenly trying to provide a complete coded key to that mysterious place.

Perhaps that noise formed part of the secret history of
Untilled
’s territory. But I didn’t want to investigate it, preferring to concentrate on Tino Sehgal’s idea that art goes by like life. Did we not yet know how to see that life and art were walking together forming a unity, just as we experienced, for example, in
This Variation
? I was thinking about that when I started wondering where the caretaker of the dogs was at that moment. He was nowhere to be found, he’d disappeared; maybe he’d thrown himself into his work now that he knew I wasn’t planning to run off with his hound.

That pink-legged dog seemed increasingly persistent about the puddle. Helped greatly by the first light of the day, I focused my concentration on the territory (mine again, momentarily) and observed the perfect harmony between the different elements that composed the, let’s say, “very difficult” space called
Untilled
. In a short time I came to the conclusion that Huyghe’s whole intervention was a sort of brilliant synthesis of what was in this Documenta. I remembered something Boston had told me. Huyghe had been a member of Documenta’s “honorary advisory committee,” which took part in preparations for the grand exhibition, and this probably brought him close to the works that would be shown, and possibly everything influenced him, making his participation very special, for in fact, according to Huyghe himself, without realizing it he had absorbed the projects of all the other artists. “Encountering many works being created gives a certain energy to your own; it’s stimulating,” Huyghe had said.

As soon as I knew that Huyghe had said this, I thought with an obvious sense of humor—admitting the unmissable disparity—that something very similar had occurred to me at Documenta. It was beyond doubt that, since I’d arrived in Kassel—surely thanks to the
third
sense of the impulse, the indirect effects of “the push” from Ryan Gander’s invisible breeze—absorbing everything had given me an absolutely unheard-of creative energy and enthusiasm, and had even left me feeling happy at my habitually melancholy time of day.

Kassel had infected me with creativity, enthusiasm, a short-circuiting of rational language. Moments and discontinuities had me searching for meaning where there was no logic in order to create new worlds.

Maybe so much optimism was due to the fact that there in Kassel I’d recovered the best memories from my beginnings as an artist, as well as my admiration for those who had made writing their destiny: Kafka, Mallarmé, Joyce, Michaux, those for whom life was barely conceivable outside of literature, who made literature with their lives.

María Boston had also told me that being on the advisory committee had allowed Huyghe, in his own words, “to understand Documenta as the coexistence of thoughts, not all necessarily subjugated to theory and not all anthropocentric.”

A unique, memorable spot—that Manderley of my spirit would be difficult to forget. While I was saying this to myself and thinking how life and art went by at the same time, the dog, tired of the puddle, came over to where I was, and for a few minutes the poor animal and I became inseparable. We even came to compose, in those first rays of the day’s light, a single lonely, tragic figure, the way a bull and torero sometimes fit together in the most celebrated bullfights. And the curious thing was that the dog seemed to tune in with what I was feeling; her mood also seemed to be in a state of constant expansion. Dogs may not always understand the nuances of thought of the humans they make friends with, but they feel what they feel, and in this case there was no doubt that the pink-legged dog was with me, participating in my discreet but profoundly euphoric mood.

The caretaker reappeared all of a sudden and with him the other dog, and in a few tenths of a second the hound betrayed me and went off with them to where the cement slabs were piled up, as if she was deliberately moving away from where the secret history of
Untilled
emerged.

I decided to leave the territory, but first I had some doubts. I’m going, but I’m staying, I began to say. Then I began to play in my mind: I’m going but I think I’ll stay, because in reality, after my hours spent here, I
am
the place, the place itself, I am
Untilled
, and a place never moves. I’m staying because I have only calm where I’ve been, only calm where nobody tells me who I am or knows who I’ve been. I’ll stay because this dawn is slow and splinters, because all these things are familiar to me: this mist without fog, the warm cloths applied to my injuries in childhood, that winding drive I have to descend if I decide to leave.

After saying this to myself, I left.

And leaving behind those good moments, I thought it would be possible to remember that farewell to
Untilled
territory with the same exactness I remembered a work of art when I desired to: a work like my favorite Édouard Manet painting,
Le serveuse de bocks
(
The Waitress
).

Art, I thought then, is something that is happening to us.

I left aware that just leaving there was art, and knowing that when I had completely gone away, I would occasionally dream I’d returned to that territory, that I was returning to
Untilled
, and the drive leading to the place was winding away before me, twisting and turning to reveal, as I advanced, the silhouette of some kind of imposing space, secretive and silent, where everything—absolutely everything, even what I didn’t notice—had great importance, because actually nothing there had been tilled, nothing there had ever been truly cultivated; deep down—notice I say
deep down—
everything was all still to be done.

62

I returned to one of the places that most intrigued me in Documenta. I went back to
The Last Season of the Avant-Garde
and took another look at the easel with its unfinished battle-scene canvas. There was the tiny press and the wooden board with Martinus von Biberach’s great epitaph. And once again I activated the button Bastian Schneider had installed beneath the word
fröhlich
(happy), which once again spat out a little piece of paper, this time with a different message than the one it threw on the floor the day before: the text warned that at night, when there was no one there, the place was taken over by beings wearing Polynesian masks, singing songs from the future, songs that will be sung six centuries hence in a very different Germany, but one where Lichtenberg will still be read, even if only out of respect for that passage in which he expressed his conviction that, without his writing, such different things would be discussed “between six and seven on a certain German evening in the year 2773.”

Unlike my previous incursion to that spot, there was no one around me this time. I was alone, because it was very early, so early that I understood I’d probably have a longer time to try to see things than I’d been able to on the previous occasion. But I soon had the impression that everything was just the same as the day before, so it was going to be pretty difficult for me to see anything very different from what I’d already seen. Even so, I began to inspect that interior again in case there were other secret springs, like the tiny printing press that produced leaflets. I looked in the drawers of the single piece of furniture in the room and found photographs of the gold hinges that were protected by the fake electric alarm system. But I didn’t find much else. In
The Last Season of the Avant-Garde
, it would be deluded to hope to find surprises or novelties.

I was about to leave, when it occurred to me to go to the green door of the main façade and look through the keyhole. I don’t know what I expected to find. Perhaps that Bastian Schneider might have set up something like
Étant Donnés
, Duchamp’s famous last work (twenty years it took him to make it), where the spectator, looking through a crack in an old Cadaqués door, saw a cryptic scene with a woman stretched out on a bed of twigs, her legs spread, her sex very open and off center, with a gas lamp in her left hand.

I looked through the keyhole of the green door of
The Last Season of the Avant-Garde
but I saw nothing but darkness and more darkness. I tried again. Nothing. I looked again. Darkness. When I turned around, I saw a woman my own age, still beautiful and not too tall, smiling at me. She was a strange blend of the writer Lydia Davis and my Aunt Antonia. The woman was American, though she wasn’t actually Lydia Davis. And I knew the whole time that, in fact, she wasn’t Davis, because I’d once had dinner with her in Brussels. Obviously she wasn’t my Aunt Antonia either, because this woman was American, from somewhere in the States, although she’d spent time in Zaragoza, and also in Girona and in Begur, so she spoke a mix of broken Catalan and Spanish. This woman found my voyeurism immensely funny. We began a conversation, and she immediately declared herself curious about everything, though she didn’t go, she said, to such extremes as I did. Her favorite hobby, she informed me, had been collecting medieval weaponry, but that wasn’t all: she’d studied Hebrew philosophy, written about China and religious leaders in India, and been a friend of numerous painters and writers (she named several but I didn’t know any of them).