The Illogic of Kassel (11 page)

Back in the days when Rembrandt left me mute, I already loved lofty theories (I didn’t understand any of them, but that was another matter). Above all, I loved the interviews in which the main topic was Theory, in that case with a capital “T.” I’d been fascinated at the beginning of the seventies by some questions that had been put to Alain Robbe-Grillet, which made him writhe against theories like an upside-down cat: “Let’s say I’m old-fashioned. For me, all that counts are the works of art.”

The works of art! These days such ingenuousness would trigger laughter. At Documenta 13, separating work and theory would have been seen as very old-fashioned, because there, according to all the information I had, you saw a great many works under the ambiguous umbrella of innovation presented as theory and vice versa. It was the triumphant and now almost definitive reign of the marriage between practice and theory, to such an extent that if you casually came across a rather classical-looking piece, you’d soon discover it was nothing more than theory camouflaged as a work. Or a work camouflaged as theory.

Was there any artist at Kassel with sufficient courage to just hang a painting on the wall, a straightforward painting? I imagined the great peals of laughter that would ring out if it occurred to some poor brave devil to hang a canvas on a wall in the Fridericianum. It seemed nobody there wanted to be regarded as terribly old-fashioned, so there was no way of seeing a painting anywhere.

I stopped looking sleepily at the photo of Chus Martínez and started to read her interview about whether art had to be innovative or not. My attention was caught by the final sentence—“Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you”—which was possibly just a McGuffin. Perhaps it had been said so that I should read it in my room at the Hessenland and finally understand what I’d been asked to do in Kassel. It was as if those last words ultimately meant this: “Here’s an invitation to a Chinese restaurant, we’re asking you for art, now let’s see what you make of it.”

23

I was now deep in the black hours, but I took refuge in my computer a few minutes longer. I was surfing around lost corners of the web when the memory of the music of Pavel Haas and the Holocaust came back to me. Many times on TV I’d been intrigued by some documentary footage frequently broadcast on all channels, especially Catalan ones, that showed Hitler and his staff soaking up the sun on a terrace—a sort of luxurious look-out in the Alps—in a place called Berghof. There were women in the film, women who posed and laughed, that was what had always struck me the most. Hitler, moreover, was seen taking some children by the hand and stroking some dogs. Everything was spectacularly strange and sinister up there on that terrace of the powerful. The weirdest thing, though, was that due to the elevation of the place, each scene was ringed with a light that virtually bounced off the screen, an exaggerated light, almost like that from the beyond.

The first time I’d seen those images I’d been surprised by the extreme beauty of the alpine landscape and the fact that the Nazi murderers were carrying on a peaceful and ordinary bourgeois Sunday morning at that look-out. I’d asked myself many times what had become of that fabulous terrace with its splendid, white-framed windows, behind which something distinctly dark and unhealthy could be guessed at. And I decided it was now the time to try and find out what could be seen today at that scene so fixed in my mind, in that alpine spot where a handful of criminals were one day placed in a frame.

The route Google took me showed the day in April 1945 when the house was bombed by the British Royal Air Force, and then the day at the beginning of May when some ruddy-cheeked American soldiers took photographs of themselves amid the ruins of the terrace while bragging about drinking “Hitler’s wine.” And finally the search engine led me to eight years later, after that Nazi cellar ran dry: more than a thousand tons of explosives left not a single clue that there had been a house there with a luminous terrace projecting menacingly out over the world.

Where the look-out had been is today an innocuous rectangle of well-cut grass. Nobody would guess there had once been a house there and a lofty terrace and some children who waved their little hands, waving their purity at you, smiling sweetly at the women who posed, also smilingly, beside their beloved murderers.

I looked carefully: the innocuous rectangle of well-cut grass might be a metaphor for this country I found myself in. But perhaps I looked at that rectangle for too long. I ended up so utterly exhausted I kept thinking that, if it were possible, I’d lie down right there on that inconsequential grass deprived of history, right on that computer screen.

Everything happened very fast. In the midst of an anguish that didn’t stop growing and reminding me obsessively of my age, how my time had already been cut irretrievably short, I imagined myself lying like a pariah on the bland rectangle, and ended up falling asleep.

I dreamed of fields of grass where beatniks were grazing, fields that split into more fields and then into killing fields like a sprawling nightmare. And then I dreamed (in the part of the night closest to my waking and, therefore, to my cheerful morning mood) that somebody stole my shoes in those fields and told me that the common, revered model of the “great man” was the opposite of poetry and the irreducible individuality of being unique. This view was the opposite of the poetry of the unique existence (ephemeral, unrepeatable), which did not need to be written, but only—and above all—to be lived. This second part of the dream, with its agreeable observations on the poetry of individuality, must have influenced my excellent mood the following morning, which was indeed the norm.

Collapse and recovery.

In the hotel bar, I had a triple espresso, which gave my energy and joy such a boost I was almost chuckling to myself. I decided to go outside straightaway to calm a certain tension. It was early, very early. There was hardly anyone around. In fact I saw only an old woman leaning in toward a shop window with a finger to her lips. Apart from this odd, potentially disturbing image, there was not much else to be seen on the street.

Feeling extraordinarily humorous, I said to myself: Just as well there’s hardly anyone around, that way nobody will look at me and say, It’s about time you got here, son—we were waiting for you to start giving contemporary art, which is half-asleep, a new direction.

Half-asleep?

I realized I still carried within me the classic fatalistic tics of the intellectuals of my country, especially those of the “lucid intellectuals.” I was still influenced by those determined to find that contemporary art was half-asleep and an absolute disaster.

Wasn’t it? It was not at its peak, you had to admit. But except during my black hours, I was bothered that some of my friends were so radically defeatist about contemporary art. I could see that it found itself in crisis and, in fact, I imagined Documenta 13 might perhaps illustrate this tricky state of affairs very well; even so, contact with some of the works at Kassel had been very stimulating so far. What’s more, I had absorbed much of what I’d seen; it had injected me with an optimistic energy right at the height of my usual dead time.

I looked at the street, which was deserted at that early morning hour, and I told myself that the lucid voices of some of my compatriots, so self-satisfied, weren’t telling the whole truth either. They were articulate and sometimes went all out to dazzle. They did so, but you couldn’t ignore the fact that they reveled in fatalism, some of them simply because they themselves hadn’t been given the gift of creativity, and this pitched them furiously up against other voices and, in passing, against contemporary culture as a whole. In the very end, I thought, so much lucidity leads them to cliché. Some maintain that we find ourselves at a slack moment, that there have been no new ideas since the seventies. Some claim that since the eighties, there have been no worthwhile novels or anything else. But some of these fatalists were already radical defeatists in the seventies, devoting themselves to preventing anyone with ideas from trying to do anything.

I carried on walking, at first with no particular destination in mind. It may be true, I mused, that there are few young people today who draw inspiration for their lives from what contemporary poets are saying, while in the seventies an interesting minority took poetry as the most dependable guide to life. It may also be true that at the end of the eighties something very serious happened, which resulted in the arts, especially poetry, losing its leading role. That might all be correct, but if there was something I had long detested, it was those fatalistic voices gathering to project their own personal catastrophes upon the world. I prefer to enter Tino Sehgal’s dark room to see how some people are rescuing art from such a lamentably sure collapse.

Very soon afterward, I decided to head for that dark room, which was my sinister lighthouse in the night. That morning I began to see it as a place that could also be stimulating by day. And making my way toward it, I started to wonder whether our fatalists’ lucid impression that we’re experiencing a dead time in art meant one had to live through it alarmed, scandalized, distressed, and without humor.

I was reminded of Stanislaw Lem and of his
History of Bitic Literature
, published in Paris in five volumes. In his book about the future (in this case, now our past), Stanislaw Lem said that from the end of the 1980s, from the “fifteenth
bynasty
”
of “talking computers” onward, it was shown to be a technical necessity to give the machines periods of rest during which, free from “programming instructions,” they could fall to “babbling” and “random shuffling,” and, thanks to this erratic activity, regenerate their capacity.

As if Lem’s prediction had come true, it couldn’t be clearer that in the eighties, creators of all sorts were freed from “programming instructions” and entered into paused, dead time. In fact, I’d heard it said to students of “bitic literature” that relaxation was as indispensable for talking machines as an awareness of the danger of losing the power of speech was for the literature of the future.

I was walking down the last stretch of corridor to the garden of the Hessenland annex when I asked myself if it might be the case that, in the creative field, we had found ourselves in a period of repose born out of technical necessity, a period from which—talking machines as we undeniably were—we would all emerge more than revived. So why so much ominous chatter? Was it so infuriating to live in a time of “babble”? Perhaps we were in a moment in which we were recovering speech. Was it really so painful to be “randomly shuffling”?

I seemed to see that underneath it all, this dead time was still a more than positive place, a laboratory in a state of ferment, a perfect space in which to greet the returning poets who had perhaps already started to transform our life. Didn’t we sense them already among us? Hadn’t I detected them on my first visit to that room of Sehgal’s that I was now preparing to visit again? And if they hadn’t come back, that didn’t mean we had to despair. By bringing us such interesting relaxation, this period of repose that was technically necessary might even do us some good.

24

It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that walking cleared my head and allowed me to dare to speculate with an open mind. I was going along so intent on what I was thinking, I bumped into a chair in the corridor leading to Sehgal’s room, and somebody looked at me as if to say: It’s about time you got here, but you blunder around.

Finally, I went into
This Variation
, my second incursion into the place that generated in me so many contradictory feelings. I thought because of the early hour, there would be nobody in there, and I entered too confidently. I marched in blindly, but somehow sure. I chose to go in a straight line, moving forward about two meters and, just when I was about to turn around, I heard some singing issuing faintly from the back of the room; then it started to get a little higher pitched and began to seem like a sort of reedy Hare Krishna chant with a mellow and surprising reggae beat, which eventually transformed into what I thought sounded like a foxtrot.

It started to become clear to me that there were people, or phantoms, in the dark practicing dance steps. Suddenly, two of these people, whom I could only sense, of course, became my escorts. Taking me by both arms, they gently whisked me much farther into the room and left me at what I imagined was its far end. They achieved what usually never happened to me in the morning: my anguish resurfaced bit by bit; it didn’t stay for long, but it brought with it certain consequences.

Standing probably at the far end of the room, in the most absolute darkness, I remembered a day in a village in La Mancha, close to the Ruidera Lakes, when I saw two men in black jackets with silver buttons removing a coffin from a back courtyard; inside the coffin, beneath a floral-patterned cloth, lay what looked by any reckoning to be the body of a man over seventy years of age.

In Sehgal’s room, the singing suddenly stopped. Impenetrable silence. I felt nostalgia for the foxtrot. The dancers, who had been in the dark so long and could possibly see me, seemed to have paused, standing absolutely still, like ghosts. Not wanting to lose the mood, but with a certain amount of trepidation, I said out loud: “You are in Germany.”

And then I tried to touch the wall that might be in front of me with both hands but I didn’t find one. I swiped around, like a poor tiger in the gloom. I decided it made no sense to go any farther, and in the end I laughed in the darkness. Not long after, I felt what one perhaps feels the day it’s all over: completely outside of this world, which at the same time had me thinking I had grasped the internal structure of life, as if a lightning bolt were lighting it up. Nothing more. It was brief, but extremely intense. Now I knew everything I needed to know about my death, although I quickly forgot it. Then I left the dark room and saw that the daylight was like the bolt of lightning that had momentarily illuminated me inside the room.