The Illogic of Kassel (21 page)

Tacita Dean was the only participant in Documenta whose work I knew something about, because two years earlier I’d seen
The Friar’s Doodle
in Madrid, an exhibition centered on motifs she’d photographed that were engraved onto the colonnade at the cloister of the Abbey de Silos.

I’d been to see
The Friar’s Doodle
on Dominique González-Foerster’s recommendation and discovered an exhibition that interested me very much, focused on the strange traces of carvings a few unknown men had made in the stone of the pillars there over the centuries. Marks had been made by individual artisans in order to work out the price of their labor; there were rudimentary boards for playing games on, probably the work of stonemasons to amuse themselves while waiting for the newly carved columns to be set into the fabric of the building. There were also rough sketches of ornamental designs for the cloister.

While thinking about those carvings at Silos, I saw that a lot of people were forming a line to see Tacita Dean’s Afghan chalkboards. Once again, María Boston resorted to those passes that got us in fast. As the line was in a narrow passageway, everyone was keeping a strict eye on everyone else, and it didn’t seem okay to simply jump ahead of people who’d been waiting their turn for a couple of hours. I adopted a serious official demeanor, as if I were secretary to officer Boston on her routine inspection of the site.

I did everything I could to show secretarial nonchalance and convince them all that I belonged to Documenta’s imaginary board of supervisors, but of course all that was only my conjecture and what everyone saw was a young woman with a seductive voice and an old man both brazenly flourishing bits of paper and getting straight in without any trouble. The protests were loud and even caused me a certain amount of reasonable panic, as the passage was narrow. In addition, I was becoming increasingly sensitive, no doubt as a result of having slept so little.

But once inside the old and antipoetic bank building, all was well. Tacita Dean’s chalkboard murals had a blindingly green background and were an evocation of time suspended in the snowy Afghan mountains, although the truth is I was slow to realize that those perfect drawings—among the most elegant I’ve seen in my life—had been done in chalk in situ, in that very place with a long commercial history where, according to Boston, many artists had previously refused to show their work but which, on the contrary, Tacita Dean had liked from the outset.

The artist had spent several weeks in Kassel drawing that very lovely series of images for
Fatigues
, in which she depicted, with originality and great precision, the Hindu Kush mountains, and the glacial source of the Kabul River. The drawings showed the melting and annual descent of snow-water on the capital of Afghanistan, a phenomenon that seemed to be both welcomed and feared. But in that series, which Boston told me constituted Tacita Dean’s return to drawing on boards (she hadn’t touched chalks for ten years), the artist was also giving a nod toward Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Ford o’ Kabul River” (a moving piece about British soldiers who drowned in the second Anglo-Afghan War), as well as to the forces of nature and the Kabul River’s terrible power.

María Boston said Tacita Dean’s show was among the most visited at Documenta, which didn’t surprise me, given the sober and impeccable, classical elegance of the drawings. It did seem strange that in an exhibition of the avant-garde, the closest thing to what could be considered orthodox should make such an impression.

While we were walking around what used to be the offices of the old savings bank, we ran into Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the head commissioner or curator of Documenta and one of those people you see right away, as soon as you meet them, who need no kind of push, not even of the invisible sort; she was someone whose gaze seemed to carry a certain brilliance, and you could tell she enjoyed stirring things up verbally. She was accompanied by Chus’s assistant, Ada Ara, a woman from Zaragoza who lived in Berlin. Her name seemed made up or a pseudonym, all the more so if you knew that in Catalan
ara
means
now
.

“Ada Now,” I said. “That sounds like a stage name.”

No sooner had I let drop this remark—none too fortuitous, it goes without saying—than I blundered into what might be described as a brief and unfortunate loop of clumsiness. It all started when Carolyn asked me in English (which I understood perfectly) what I thought of Documenta. No doubt it was a routine question, but I wasn’t ready for the artistic director, the one responsible for the whole show—it’s always impressed me greatly to meet the person in charge—to ask me such a thing, and I became absurdly tongue-tied, as if the power of speech had been snatched from me.

“Carolyn’s asking how the work you’ve seen in Documenta has made you feel,” Ada Ara clarified for me.

“That . . . well, um . . . that there is no world.”

Ada Ara translated my answer with a smile that sought to minimize the possible contradiction in what I’d just said. Carolyn, giving me what seemed a look of disappointment, wanted to know what there was if, as I maintained, there was no world. It was one of the most challenging questions of the day, but at that moment an invisible impulse—or perhaps it was just nervousness due to my extreme fatigue—pushed my energy level up another notch, as if it wanted to come to my aid.

“There’s a corollary,” I said.

But asserting this—possibly a bad move, influenced by the excessive energy I sometimes suspected flowed from that invisible inner current—was even worse. I bowed my head, conscious that what I’d said didn’t make the grade as a McGuffin
and also aware that I wasn’t even altogether sure why I’d expressed it that way. I never liked taking exams and I had the feeling I was taking one there in front of Carolyn; maybe that’s what had made me nervous and gotten me lost in the deranged muddle of my answers.

Ada Ara asked what a corollary was. It’s an outcome, a conclusion, Boston said. They amused themselves arguing over what a corollary was, and in the end Carolyn, getting impatient, asked me again what on earth there was if there wasn’t a world. There’s a conclusion, Boston said, speaking for me. Carolyn pierced me with a terrifying look that made everything infinitely more difficult. She seemed to be saying: But, really, is this the writer they recommended to me, the one they told me we should select? Then she asked me, What conclusion? I was paralyzed, utterly mute. None, I ended up saying. I saw Carolyn was very upset and angry. Suddenly, she let fly: “So what do we do now? Accept it all calmly, implode with panic, or what?”

I remained impassive, thinking of those linguistic short circuits that are inevitably part of the most mundane conversations. “Nice day today, ma’am.” “Don’t even go there, sir.” “Did you see that amazing light?” And the lady doesn’t answer. Brusque interruptions, the breakdown of language in the most pointless exchanges. Of course, people contribute to the short circuit sometimes without even wanting to.

43

Toward evening we arrived at the Hauptbahnhof to see
Artaud’s Cave
, a film installation made for Documenta by the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. It was showing in a strange space inside the old station.

On the way over, Ada Ara, Boston, and I talked about my ridiculous mix-up with Carolyn. The only thing that might have been worse, said Boston, is if you’d told her the world is kept spinning by two tsetse flies.

In that space in the Hauptbahnhof—designed as a cinema but looking like a grotto—Téllez looped his single-channel film. This was what Boston and Ada told me, thinking that since Artaud was involved the work would surely interest me. The installation showed a performance of
The Conquest of Mexico
, an Artaud text that I recalled sought to bludgeon the viewer, to create the harsh effect of an ax-blow on the frozen sea lying within us all. It was all very much in line with theories forming the foundation of the Theater of Cruelty, established by Artaud himself in his bid to make an aggressive impression on the spectator: “For that reason, actions, nearly always violent, come before words, thus freeing the subconscious to fight against reason and logic.”

The video by Téllez was extraordinarily interesting and subconscious-freeing: it was acted out by mentally ill patients from the Bernardino Álvarez hospital in Mexico City. The video took place in two parallel time frames, alternating daily life in the psychiatric institution with the historical events of the conquest of Mexico as told by Artaud, which made the patients of the Bernardino Álvarez duplicate themselves ingeniously: playing themselves as patients and at the same time identifying with Moctezuma and other historical characters.

I didn’t say anything, and it seemed as if I wasn’t interested in the cave, or the video, or the conquest of Mexico. But that wasn’t the case; it was that I’d just seen the young blonde German approaching, the woman in strict mourning I’d seen before at
Untilled
, enlightening people about the death of Europe. It was unmistakably her, still in the same dark clothing and once more shouting at people as she came toward us. Arriving where we were, she handed us a sort of pamphlet she had written and was distributing to inform us that Antonin Artaud was one of the first to condemn the Enlightenment for destroying the West. In fact, it was nothing very different from what she’d said previously from up on a pile of rubble.

I went so far as to think the vociferous young woman had reason on her side. Was she reasonably mad? Nothing was further from the spirit than rationality, and for that very reason, rationality was the peak of madness. The young blonde woman in unrelenting mourning was, moreover, quite right to remind us that Artaud was a pioneer when it came to identifying Europeans as the living dead.

Artaud screamed, too. Or was I thinking of Humboldt, that Saul Bellow character who used to reminisce about the day Artaud invited the most brilliant Parisian intellectuals to a conference and when he had them all gathered there, he read nothing, but went up on stage, simply yelping at them like a wild animal? It seemed Artaud went on letting out deafening shrieks, while the Parisian intellectuals remained sitting there, petrified. Yet, for them, it was an exquisite act. And why? Humboldt said that in some way Artaud had understood that the only art that interested intellectuals was one that celebrated the primacy of ideas. Artists had to interest intellectuals, the new class. That’s why the position of culture and of the history of culture had become the main theme of art. And that’s why a refined French audience respectfully listened to Artaud while he screamed. For them the sole objective of art was to suggest or inspire ideas . . .

If I thought hard about it, hadn’t I acted that way too, since arriving in Kassel? From the word go, I’d been pleased by the prospect that theories running through Documenta might inspire me with ideas for my own work. In fact, I suspected that some of those ideas had already permeated my personality and, like a powerful drug, had left me in such a pleasant condition that my habitual despondency at that hour didn’t even dare to put in an appearance. That was one of the things that was happening: despite it being close to dusk, anguish didn’t arrive punctually for its usual appointment with me. It was without a doubt totally unusual; maybe anguish was just running a little late.

What was happening was that anguish appeared to have vanished and been secretly replaced by a great admiration for the complexity of what I’d seen in Kassel. That complexity had become part of my new personality. It was as if what was happening to me there had a direct link with those words of Mallarmé to Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” The effect on me of some of the work at Documenta was altering my way of being.

That stunning complexity, that Alcarria of art, was truly a marvel, and I was seeing it with the eyes of Raymond Roussel.

So I was sorry to have to wreck the gloomy predictions so many friends were making about the end of art, which they unfortunately confused with the end of the world, an entirely different matter. It seemed to me that art was still holding up perfectly well, and it was only the world, with its two dizzying tsetse flies, that had crumbled.

44

It was there in Artaud’s cave that I remembered my old conviction—still holding true from what I could tell—that anyone who dedicated himself to literature had not renounced the world; the world had simply evicted him, or never admitted him as a tenant. Nothing serious, then; in the end, a poet was someone for whom the world didn’t even exist, because, for him, there was only the radiance of the eternal outside.

I was thinking all this, and it was as if the cries of the radical young German woman fundamentally appealed to me. I had to really force myself to move away from that unhinged ranter. I was helped by my tremendous accumulated fatigue as much as by the invisible breeze: for a moment they both seemed to have joined forces to try to hold my interest in everything except the shouting. And so I soon managed to dodge the young madwoman in mourning—with a slight twinge, because underneath it all I liked her madness—and I was able to concentrate on the video being shown in that artificial cave.

I noticed I continued to be interested in everything. Not long before, I’d even been interested in the soothing, ruddy sunset, which, going into the cave, we’d left behind and which plenty of people had been paying too much attention to, as though it were part of Documenta. My reaction to the anodyne sunset had been very emotional, as it reminded me of my father who, before going off to his daily labor year after year (which began at sunset), always sang “Pace non trovo,” and his voice in the shower rang out with a succession of squeaks caused by excessive sorrow (perhaps at not having dedicated himself to opera). It resounded with excessive volume and excessive despair.