The Illogic of Kassel (16 page)

The occurrence of smudges in the air had possibly saved the day and perhaps I could feel rather smug. But my happiness didn’t last long. While Pim was talking to Chus about what a lovely morning it was—yes, that’s what they talked about—I began to slip dangerously toward that torment reserved for anxious minds that the French call l’esprit de l’escalier (staircase wit), which consists of thinking of the right thing to say too late: going through the moment when you find the perfect response, but it’s no longer any use to you because you’re already on your way down the stairs and should have given the ingenious reply sooner, when you were at the top. And so, reviewing the brief conversation with Chus, reconstructing it piece by piece, word by word, I began to see what I could have said but didn’t, and ended up wondering whether, when I went back to Barcelona on Saturday and told people about my trip to Kassel, I’d realize what I should have said or done in the city but didn’t. . . . And, well, if I wrote the story of this journey one day, I went on thinking, I’d no doubt work with that staircase wit. I should be so lucky . . .

Minutes later, Pim pointed out a mound in the distance that seemed part of the park but was actually a strange garden in the shape of a hill:
Doing Nothing Garden,
the work of Song Dong, almost the only Chinese artist—apart from Yan Lei—invited to Documenta.

The most logical thing for our walk would have been to pass alongside that hill-turned-garden before we got to the Orangerie, but very soon afterward, something unexpected took us out of our way.

I am going to digress here a moment, just briefly, to skip ahead to something that happened later that night in my cabin, when I changed my name and started to call myself Piniowsky.

Yes, Piniowsky.

That happened at night, when Autre lost his provisional surname and started to call himself Piniowsky too, a minor character in a story by Joseph Roth called
The Bust of the Emperor
.

All I’m going to say in advance is that after the sudden change, I began to feel relieved, happy too, because my own name that I’d had for so many years had come to feel like a dead weight and was really nothing more than something from a youth I’d spun out too long, in my opinion. In fact, my own name, in my mouth, always gave me a funny feeling.

I will also say that during that night, now as Piniowsky, I thought deeply about Huyghe and his installation
Untilled.
It seemed obvious to me that only art at the margins, distanced from galleries and museums, could be truly innovative. Huyghe showed discreet wisdom by taking the last route that appeared open to the avant-garde, as well as foresight in seeking out a tucked-away place in the Karlsaue for his pessimistic landscape of humus and a pink-legged Spanish dog; perhaps it was a tribute to a hypothetical art of the outskirts of the outskirts.

Maybe, I thought that night in my room,
Untilled
created an idea of a return to a time before art. In an age as uncertain as the current one in which everything was changing at incredible speed, it spoke of the necessity of no longer making art as we’d understood it up to now, of the need to learn to
stand apart
, perhaps to be like Tino Sehgal (Sehgal didn’t wish to be visible and seemed to propose returning to the mortal dark room that’s always been there). It was as if Huyghe were telling us: when all’s said and done, hasn’t the avant-garde fundamentally always sprung from a need to sweep everything away, to get back to the obscurity of the beginning?

And might not that flight from a dead art be an attempt by Huyghe to go beyond simply sweeping everything aside: to head toward the outskirts of the outskirts and then on toward nothing, literally toward nothing? Was the most innovative art of my day going toward nothing? Or was it going toward something I still hadn’t found and that it would perhaps do me a lot of good to discover?

But let’s get back to the morning of that same day, when Autre and I were still in one piece and Piniowsky hadn’t yet even raised his head. My mind hadn’t become so tangled in so many questions as it had that night in the “attempted thinking cabin” of my room.

Let’s get back to that fine morning when I still allowed myself to be carried along by my passion for walking around and glancing at things like a profound idler, like a passerby who might be happy. Everything was going quite well, and even though I was dying of thirst, I was catching the smile (possibly false at times) that hardly seemed to leave Pim’s lips. I ended up in such a great mood, I was even able to laugh thinking of the anguish that assaulted me almost punctually in the evenings. It was easy to do that early in the day, by which I mean that the very easy, heartfelt mockery of my melancholy tribulations wasn’t so commendable.

How did I get on such a high? There are always means. I made use of a McGuffin—let’s call it an intimate, secret one—a McGuffin that parodied the most horrendous kitsch language and consisted—I held back a giggling fit—of telling myself that there would be no shadows if the sun were not shining. It was enough to make a person laugh his head off, shedding four pounds of solemnity all at once.

32

In
Doing Nothing Garden
, Pim said, plants had been grown on a mound of organic waste. If I understood correctly, Song Dong had found the rubbish piled up in her mother’s house in northern China and had it transported to Kassel, where she planted seeds and left it so that, over time, it turned into a little landscaped hill. A not very well-informed viewer might see it from a distance as he headed for the Orangerie—someone very thirsty, like me, for example—and have no idea that in under two months, that very peculiar little hill had taken on the deceptive appearance of having been part of the park for years.

This is where we were when the distant rumble of a bombardment interrupted our walk toward the Orangerie (where, according to Pim, there was a bar and also an astronomy museum with collections of clocks and antique stargazing instruments).

I was thirsty, more thirsty than anything, and even now I distinctly remember that terrible thirst. The bombing noise, Pim said, is from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers. And she said no more. A bit later on, she conceded the installation had the enveloping sound of the tumult of battle, mixed with a symphony orchestra and rustlings from the forest, and in some manner it re-created the bombing raids Karlsaue Park and the city of Kassel had suffered during the Second World War.

For the first time that whole morning, I saw not a trace of Pim’s constant cloying smile, because what she’d just told me really didn’t allow for joy, either genuine or false. Until a minute ago, she’d been the epitome of joy. And I remembered that meditating on joy in my German cabin had been, since the beginning, one of the objectives of my trip: to reflect on the possibility that in joy could be found the central nucleus of all creation.

A pity, I said to myself, that at the last minute I’d packed
Journey to the Alcarria
instead of the book on joy I was going to bring. Nevertheless, just thinking of that “book about walking and seeing,” as the author himself called it, reminded me that my stay in Kassel had the structure of a stroll, during which I was contemplating the natural as well as human landscape, while not neglecting to also study the landscape’s theoretical heft, something that, by the way, was conspicuously absent in Cela’s book.

Art about walking and seeing, I thought, while we continued strolling toward the cheerful terrace of the Orangerie bar. We were heading that way, but hearing what was coming from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers, we ended up acceding to their demands and taking a path that led us to an area with a large lake. (This was where the bombardment seemed to originate.) It was a beautiful place, this lake with a small romantic temple, surely the finest part of Karlsaue Park, with a vibrant nature reserve full of birds on one side. On the other, I was at last able to see what looked most like a forest, most like the leafy area that in Barcelona I had imagined I’d see all the time I was in Kassel.

For me, there’s nothing as German as this forest, I said to Pim, who didn’t answer, or preferred to refrain from making any reply. Even better, she pointed to a water fountain at a bend in the path. I must have had a sign on my forehead saying I was dreadfully thirsty and that was why I said crazy things, revealing what felt like a hairy bear living inside me. In any event, I drank water like never before, feeling, in addition, that the fountain was a perfect miracle on our way. I drank for a long time, like someone who has been hypnotized by water.

Then we resumed our walk somewhat uncertainly toward the clamor of war. Little by little, the sounds issuing from the loudspeakers grew louder, and you were better able to appreciate that they were re-creating the din of an immense battle: it sounded like shells were dropping all through the forest. The birds in the nature reserve were going crazy. Pim ended up explaining to me—she seemed to have been there before with other writers and it bored her to have to say it again—that we were heading toward
FOREST
(
for a thousand years . . .)
. The title, she said, referred to the thousand years that Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich would endure and perhaps also to the thousand years of age the city of Kassel had reached when it was almost entirely destroyed by British firepower.

I remembered Janet Cardiff was part of the holy trinity in Alicia Framis’s email (“Make sure you see the work of . . .”), but I didn’t expect that any installation would shake me up the way that one did. I was struck—hard to forget it—by the discovery of a group of about forty people in the middle of the forest. They were sitting on tree stumps—forty mute, emotional people—terrified but secretly conspiratorial at the same time, as if a subversive, invisible thread passed through them, an immaterial impulse, an infinite breeze reminiscent of Ryan Gander’s: forty people sitting in the great shade of the trees, listening to the brutal sound of an aerial bombardment that, thanks to the speakers installed in the tops of the oaks, created the compelling sensation that it was all happening right there exactly where we stood.

That was, without doubt, the most impressive thing. You ended up believing yourself the target of the bombs because you felt them approaching by an auditory sleight of hand; you felt the very real sensation of being in the middle of a battlefield. You heard everything as if it were actually taking place beside you: the hair-raising yells of men in hand-to-hand combat, the overflying airplanes, the breathing, the shouts, the footsteps through dry leaves, the nervous laughter, the wind, petals blown on the rain and squall, the enigmatic rustling in the forest, thunderstorms moving off, the din of ancient battles, bayonets tearing through the air, shots, explosions, shrapnel . . .

And then, suddenly, came the heavy blow of silence, and with it the reflection on the rediscovery of music: a classical symphony issued from the loudspeakers and allowed for pondering and recuperation. After the intellectual impact of the bombardment, there followed minutes of meditation and powerful recovery after the great collapse; during these minutes I was able to think things over and put an end to any further questions I might still ask myself about the possible, or impossible, relationship between innovative art and a bottle of perfume belonging to a Nazi woman, about the possible relationship between innovative art and our historical past and present. I seemed to guess that I wouldn’t revisit the matter for a long time to come. It had become clear to me that art and historical memory were inseparable.

Any activity connected to the avant-garde—assuming the avant-garde still existed (which I doubted more with each passing hour)—must never lose sight of the
political dimension
: one that required us to bear in mind that perhaps nothing would do us poor mortals more good than for the avant-garde to disappear, not because it was worn out, but because, through an invisible current, it had turned into a source of pure energy, transforming itself into our own fascinating life.

33

For a moment, I thought I saw the invisible impulse cross the area and flow through that community of strangers seated in the middle of the forest. I remember thinking of the efforts of popular revolutions trying to make a name for themselves, while secret groups like this one in the woods in Kassel, or those formed during sporadic bursts of fighting, had, by contrast, never tended to be photographed or to leave a trace. I recalled Sebastià Jovani, a writer from Barcelona, who said that revolutions spawned postcards and all sorts of souvenirs, while guerrilla warfare and spontaneous groups involved in clandestine struggles—volatile groups,
situationists
if you looked at them that way—generated emotions, common feelings that didn’t require a picture framed up on the wall. Jovani also said, if I remember rightly, that it was worth asking if anyone would really want a signed urinal in their living room. Perhaps, in that question, the difference between art exhibited in museums and art without a fixed home—art that is out in the open, so visible in Kassel, in more than one installation—couldn’t be better summed up. Art of the outskirts. Or of the outskirts of the outskirts. Like Huyghe’s work, with his humus and pink-legged dog, with his remote quagmire, where there was no organization, no representation, no exhibition—although I suspected things were more interconnected there than they appeared to be.

And while I was thinking about all this, I realized how that silent revolt of the spirit was making a move at that precise instant and letting itself be seen, too: the almost imperceptible was making everyone suddenly
get younger on the spot
.