The Illogic of Kassel (31 page)

Swayed by that old friend and the cheerful force of its invisible pull, I told Boston that in Sehgal’s room, that same afternoon, someone had whispered
Last bear
twice in my ear. It didn’t seem to surprise her too much. More than that, it gave her an idea to take me to a white room in the Fridericianum where Ceal Floyer’s sound installation
’Til I Get It Right
was
.

I asked her for the best possible translation of
Last bear
—
I was sure it was very simple—but there was no way to get her to tell me, because she insisted on talking to me about an old work by Ceal Floyer that she’d liked very much; she’d seen it three years ago in Berlin and it was called, if she remembered correctly,
Overgrowth
. It was a bonsai photographed from below and projected on a slide that increased the image to the size of a normal tree, as if situating the spectator beneath, or rather the bonsai above, or both. It seemed, said Boston, a marvelous way to take apart the stupid act of manipulating a tree to dwarf it. Ceal Floyer’s work restored its proper size at the same time as alerting us to the number of sinister people we come across in life who try to pulverize our aspirations, whatever they might be . . .

My only aspiration at that moment was still for her to translate
Last bear
into Spanish for me, but she didn’t seem to be up for that task and preferred we talk about
’Til I Get It Right
, another phrase, she said, that seemed like a slogan. In
’Til I Get It Right
, you could hear the American country singer Tammy Wynette repeating continuously:
I’ll just keep on / ’til I get it right
.

I asked Boston why we hadn’t gone to see and hear this on the first day. And I saw that Alka was laughing, as if she knew what I was talking about. You can’t do everything at once, said an ironic Boston.

In Ceal Floyer’s white room, the artist’s need to always search out the difficult was exposed, which reminded me of the afternoon at a talk when a woman in the back row asked me when I planned to stop sinking my poor, lonely characters in the fog. When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it, I told her. And then I informed her that fog and solitude were not my principal obsessions, I’d simply started a series of books that always prowled around that image of the solitary man in the mist and I felt I had to conclude the series. The woman then reproached me for the darkness of my texts. Señora, please, I said angrily, don’t you see how dark and complex the world is? But a little while later I noticed the daylight, which was soft and beautiful. And I thought: If one could only see everything with such clarity.

67

After a long search through the Fridericianum we came upon Salvador Dalí’s
Le grand paranoï
aque
. I seemed to observe that the voice singing
I’ll just keep o
n/
’til I get it right
was continuing at my side and seemed to form part of the painting, the same way that in Kentridge’s drawings, there was always a trace of the previous drawing.

The voice only disappeared when we arrived at a room with paintings of apples that Korbinian Aigner had grown and painted when he was a prisoner in Dachau. Within that huge insanity he managed to create four new varieties of apples, designating them KZ 1 to 4 (KZ is the German abbreviation for concentration camp).

Once more, the horrors of the Nazi delirium showed up in a Documenta piece, on this occasion in a very special way. Those admirable, simple little paintings of apples left one impressed by the human capacity for resistance in the midst of difficulties; even in extremely adverse circumstances, to create art is the one thing that actually intensifies the feeling of being alive.

I looked at those apples, noticing that fragments of
Le grand paranoïaque
seemed to have lodged in them as if the apples too needed the trace of a previous work of art to feel more complete. I reflected on human courage, thinking of the case of a young woman from Moscow, a specialist in English romantic literature, who I’d been told had been sent to a prison in the Brezhnev era to a cell with no light, no paper or pen, because of a stupid and completely false denunciation; that young woman knew Byron’s
Don Juan
by heart (seventeen thousand lines or more) and in the darkness she translated it mentally into Russian verse. When she got out of prison having lost her sight, she dictated the translation to a friend, and it is now the canonical Russian version of Byron.

I thought about the totally indestructible human mind and that we should meditate on everything better and be happier. And while I was thinking this, I felt the air of the breeze, which seemed to turn the corners of the galleries of the Fridericianum, catch up to me fully. It was exactly at that instant when I saw the young blonde woman who’d announced the death of Europe walking past, serene and silent, in her elegant mourning. I was shocked to see her this time so calm, so appeased, without her lost look. I observed her closely in case I was mistaken. But yes, it was her. She realized she was being observed and flashed me a slightly complicit smile, as if saying, It’s me, you’re right, I’m the one who believes that Europe has been dead for centuries.

I was about to carry on walking when I stopped and asked Boston whether she’d noticed that we’d just crossed paths with the madwoman in mourning whom we’d first seen at
Untilled
, and then later, on another occasion, at the door of
Artaud’s Cave
. It’s true, said Boston, without attaching any importance to it, she seems calmer now, we could invite her to your lecture, I think she goes to all of them.

She said it with a smile, possibly as a joke. Just ask what her name is, I said, I’d just like to know what she’s called. Boston assigned Alka that mission, which she carried out immediately without any problem: she went over to where the madwoman in mourning was, asked her name, received a reply, and came back. The blonde had told her she was called Kassel. Are you sure, Alka? She nodded, she was sure, she said, the blonde’s name was Kassel, she’d repeated it three times.

A little while later, when Alka—maybe this was also part of her job—told us it was ten to six, we left the Fridericianum almost at a run. It felt like the last straw that I should have the feeling—there in Kassel, where I’d always had more than enough time for everything—that I was going to be late for something.

We were rushing, but as we passed the Documenta-Halle, we lost a few seconds stopping to see Kristina Buch’s
The Lover
, an enclosure full of plants that Boston wanted to show me. If not for her, I would never have noticed that apparently anodyne enclosure, which turned out to be a whole Documenta installation. I confirmed that often what moves us tends to arise in the most insignificant-seeming circumstances: in what looked like merely a big container full of weeds, Kristina Buch had grafted plants that attracted butterflies who lost their characteristic liberty and went on to spend the sad lives of hostages, trapped by the plants that so loved and nourished them and, therefore, also tyrannized them with their overwhelming love.

68

Kassel was lucid, mad, obtuse, clairvoyant, calm, desperate. Who knows anything about Kassel with any certainty? Blonde, mourning, shrieking, young German, spreading the news of the death of Europe in all directions.

Kassel. There were so many ways to define her. Kassel was also a city. According to the old encyclopedia I sometimes used to escape from Wikipedia to feel that I was still living in another era, Kassel—surface area 106.77 km², with 196,345 inhabitants—is a small city on the banks of the Fulda River (one of the headstreams of the Weser) in the region of Hesse. Industries include lignite mines, car manufacture, precision engineering, optical and photographic instrument making, leather tanning, and textile production (cotton and artificial fibers). In the 1930s, there was the manufacture of military hardware, especially tanks.

Kassel’s Ständehaus was for the most part destroyed during the last war. Originally the old Parliament Chamber of Hesse, it is once again today a solid and imposing three-story building, architecturally influenced by the Italian Renaissance. Every five years, when Documenta comes to town, its main hall is fitted out as a venue for many lectures related to contemporary art. Mine was announced for six o’clock in the evening on Friday, September 14. On a discreet sign at the entrance, you could still read “Lecture to Nobody,” a title now totally out of context, for I had previously believed that the talk would be given in a place beyond the farthest forest, bordering the edge of Karlsaue Park.

When I arrived with Boston and Alka at the Ständehaus, they took me to an office near the entrance hall, and there I signed a few documents I assumed were to do with the lecture fee. I chatted in French about the Brothers Grimm with some people I didn’t know from Adam. Then I escaped from the office for a few moments and went to spy on the hall where I would have to speak, wanting to know whether the lecture had attracted a little bit of expectation, or none at all. There was none, as was to be expected. But ten innocent people were sitting there, waiting for my lecture to begin. Since the hall was huge, it looked very empty. Perhaps worst of all was that the ten audience members showed not the slightest sign of knowing what they’d gotten themselves into.

“Here before you, Piniowsky,” I imagined telling them.

Given the circumstances, I would have been content with a single spectator knowing something about me, about my books. And, while I was telling myself this, I ran into Chus Martínez, who told me that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was thinking of coming to my talk and was apparently very interested in what I might say there.

“Why?”

“You intrigue her,” she said.

Accompanied by Chus, I returned to the office by the entrance hall, where I was surprised to see Alka sitting there with her legs crossed, leafing through
Journey to the Alcarria
. That was my copy of Cela’s book, which I’d brought with me in case I was caught empty of ideas mid-lecture and had to resort to reading someone else’s text. I was sure I wouldn’t require it, but I needed it as a nearby object that I could touch; I needed to know that something as concrete as a book by another writer could save me if I got into a tight spot. I was really very surprised to find Alka leafing through the book, but even more so by the casual conjunction of Alka and Cela. I remembered at that moment that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev had said that everything the Documenta participants set out to do “did not necessarily have to be art.” This wasn’t a bad idea, it took away the absurd pressure of having to do something artistic. That said, the image composed by Alka with Cela’s book was pure art, actually a good stab at what I’d once imagined a great aesthetic instant to be like.

In that same office, Boston handed me a second document, which I also signed, without knowing this time what it was. And a few minutes later, escorted by Boston and Alka, I headed for the hall, which I found slightly fuller than I’d left it. My uncertainty with respect to the kind of audience I’d have for that atypical lecture made me experience a moment of fear. I wanted to convince myself that my talk was just a formality I had to go through, but when I saw Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev arrive, accompanied by a large retinue, I confirmed what I always knew: there is no such thing as a talk in public that is just a formality, and if anyone takes it that way—I’m going to exaggerate somewhat, but not much—he runs the risk of losing in a single hour all the prestige he may have accumulated over decades.

By way of introduction, I improvised lightly on the little bit I’d written (I’m reconstructing here quite faithfully because I still have what I wrote for the beginning of that lecture, nor have I forgotten, the changes I made to it as I went along):

I came to this city, via Frankfurt, in search of the mystery of the universe and to be initiated into the poetry of an unknown algebra. I also came to Kassel to try to find an oblique clock and Chinese restaurant, and, of course, though I believed it might be an impossible task, I also came to try to find my home somewhere within displacement. I did find it. It’s not far from here. In fact, I’d say that I am in it, because I believe this evening I’m speaking to you from my homey scaffold in the Dschingis Khan.

Then, thinking of the place from which I was theoretically speaking (it’s well-known that to situate yourself in the world, you have to do as much as possible to seem already situated), I quoted Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

From my scaffold, in this case, sprang the lecture. Surging from that charming Chinese gallows, the talk reflected the roughness of living in a world that was not mine and was sometimes tough, though Kassel had given me blazoned days, infecting me with enthusiasm and creativity and categorically refuting that contemporary art was finished. Finished? I had seen only splendor, and certain great changes that were finally bringing this art toward life. Had I not learned from Tino Sehgal, Ryan Gander, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that art
is what happens to us
, that art goes by like life and life goes by like art?

I tried to transmit this in some way to the audience, but they were so glib and restless, there was nothing to be done. I’d barely been speaking for three minutes and already more than half the people—seeing that I was addressing them in neither English nor German—had gone to look for their simultaneous translation devices, or had simply left. With so much movement on the part of the public (I had never had so many people coming and going at the beginning of a lecture), it was difficult to concentrate. It wasn’t until ten minutes had passed that I had the feeling of being able to count on a stable audience of about thirty people, Carolyn and Chus among them, in the front row.