The Illogic of Kassel (9 page)

Minutes later, looking more closely at this man with the unusually deep-set eyes, I saw that I couldn’t have been more mistaken, as it wasn’t the same guy who’d spoken to María Boston earlier; I’d simply been speculating about a complete stranger. We were getting ready to leave the terrace on Theaterstrasse, and María Boston asked me if I’d ever reflected on the fact that walking was almost the only activity not appropriated by people who devoted themselves to the world of business, that is, capitalists. I paused to think. It had been ages since I’d heard that word, so clear-cut and so unambiguous: capitalists. Look, she said, there’s nothing special that’s sold for walking, and yet there’s a whole market around eating, running, sleeping, having sex, reading, even drinking water. . . . Well, I said, I liked walking very much, I loved the idea of going for a stroll. That’s all I said. Just that. I remember it perfectly, because it was from that moment on that things started to go downhill, as if following the same rhythm of decline that daylight does when dusk overtakes it.

Strangely, the more María Boston said there was lots of work waiting for her in the curatorial team office (seeming to indicate to me that she had to leave without further delay), the more she insisted on setting off with me on a new walk. It was as if leaving me or not leaving me, staying or abandoning me, amounted to the same thing; and there was something in that contradiction that reminded me of the idea that I could very well experience collapse and recovery simultaneously.

That was an interesting idea, no doubt, but one which anyone could see didn’t really work when applied to normal life, because it made no sense at all. For example, she must clearly perceive I was tired but still suggested we go on walking; who knew if she meant to the end of the world? I found out later she meant only to the end of a train platform, although it wasn’t one that was exactly around the corner.

I looked at Boston, and she did everything in her power not to return my gaze. “I thought the sad man came from the Aran Isles,” I said, just to try out a bit of mischief. This was a somewhat desperate McGuffin, only to make her feel sorry about how tired and irrational I was and to get her to let me withdraw to the hotel and set up my “thinking cabin.”

As might be expected, Boston said she didn’t know what islands I was talking about, and so it fell to me to explain that they were found on the west coast of Ireland, washed by the Atlantic, in Galway Bay. “I thought that you and he were discussing what was happening on those remote islands,” I said. “Who was I talking to?” she asked. “To that sad man earlier,” I said. In the end, it became clear I was referring to that sorrowful German who’d stopped to speak to her. “But poor Hans and I only philosophized a bit; he explained to me that the idea of ‘trying to survive’ was just for megalomaniacs, and I didn’t know what to say to him. What would you have said?” “That I didn’t understand him,” I replied, “but not to worry because, when all is said and done, life is governed by all sorts of misunderstandings, and the natives of Galway Bay know everything, absolutely everything, there is to know about that.”

If it had been Alka, she would definitely have split her sides laughing at what I’d said, not understanding a thing. But in that whole trip, I never again saw Boston as serious as she was at that moment. To tell the truth, it was an almost terrifying moment. And that was despite the fact that I still couldn’t even imagine the sort of heavy pressure Boston was going to put on me in the ensuing minutes to go to that train platform she considered vital for me to see that very evening.

20

It seemed to me a more than demonstrable fact that every time communication problems arose between the two of us and our relationship collapsed, it recovered immediately. It was as if the acts of ruin and recuperation really could make up a single entity and share the instant perfectly well.

And so, talking of this and that, in reality philosophizing or aspiring to philosophize—possibly the most pivotal activity in contemporary art—darkness was falling over Kassel and extinguishing everything sluggishly, like any old Tuesday on Earth.

Suddenly, Boston showed signs of taking a leap forward, embarking on a surprising new ode to walking, at the same time proposing we go and see a
sound installation
, which, according to her, was not far, but actually required another long stroll. We had to get to the old central station, the end of platform 10.

During the war, she said, that platform had been the main setting for the deportation of Jews; now it was the setting for the resonant sound installation
Study for Strings
, by the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz.

I balked gently at this new initiative, telling her that, as she had work to do, I didn’t want to bother her any longer and, moreover, I had to get to the hotel, because I was beginning to feel my energy running out. She seemed not to have heard me, so I stressed my need to go to my room in the Hessenland and immediately set up a cabin, insulating myself at that early evening hour from any sign of the continuity of life outside.

I didn’t tell her, but among other things I had a terrible fear of her seeing the unpleasant expression I habitually started to have at that hour; I knew if I let a few more minutes go by, my face was going to get gloomy, my personality turn bitter, everything was going to get extremely complicated, and this time I couldn’t rely on the help of Dr. Collado’s tablets.

And while I was insisting, I remembered
The Walk
, by Robert Walser, where, after the more than lengthy description of a happy day’s wandering by the rambler who walks his way through the book, we arrive at a final page as perfect as it is gloomy, with some last words containing a revealing change of mood on the part of the walker: “I had risen up, to go home, for it was late now and everything was dark.”

Walser’s tiny dodge reverses the rules of the game for the book, and the happy wandering comes to a sudden end. The streets go completely dark. If up to that point the walker had always professed to feeling good (tremendously good), to being constantly delighted by everything, all of a sudden he tells us it has grown dark and things have changed, to the extent that the book has reached its end and the rambler wishes to take refuge in his den.

Soon after this, I was going on about my health to María Boston when abruptly—as if night were falling on my words—she interrupted me to say that
Study for Strings
was a better place than anywhere else to meditate on the great Collapse. Her delivery was so forceful, I was left rather mired in the boggy state brought on by my fragility, as if carrying my grandfather’s two pounds of mud on the soles of my shoes. And this caused me to wonder whether Boston was attempting to keep hold of me, or if she only insisted on the walk so I’d say no and that way couldn’t subsequently claim she’d had no intention of spending further time with me.

I soon saw that things were heading in a different direction, perhaps still a touch darker than I had imagined, and perhaps even more complicated. It was necessary, vital, that I go to that platform, Boston said, looking at me with the same rage she had on that previous, horrible occasion. Never before in my life had anyone pressed me in such a manner to go to a train station. I asked, timidly, why this displacement was so essential. The sun was setting almost completely and the clouds over Kassel had been turning an intense scarlet. Because, Boston said, almost chewing her words, I want to go on walking awhile, I like walking, and also it’s about time you finally understand you’re not in a Mediterranean country, but a profoundly tragic one. It’s unbelievable you don’t know the relationship between a bottle of Aryan perfume and avant-garde art, she said, revealing at last why she was so angry with me.

That had surely been my big mistake of the day: not being convinced that Braun’s perfume could be related to avant-garde art. Although a new question arose: did avant-garde art really exist? Much was said about an art that was ahead of its time, but for me it was far from clear it existed. The very expression
avant-garde
seemed to have a different meaning now from what it had meant at the beginning of the last century . . . but this wasn’t the right time to talk about that.

During the arduous walk that followed, I was able to discover, among other things, that Kassel’s great postwar reconstruction didn’t come about until 1955, when its citizens bravely opted to take a much more insecure path than the one other compatriots had chosen; instead of industrial development, they decided on rebirth of a cultural nature, putting Arnold Bode—an architect and lecturer—in charge of the first Documenta, which had a clearly restorative character. Germany under Hitler had classified contemporary art as degenerate, expelling and murdering its artists, but now it paid tribute to the art of the twenties and thirties, with an exhibition that, according to Bode, “finally brought art to the workers.”

When at last we arrived at the city’s old central station, we headed with slow steps to the far end of platform 10. Once there, I was able to understand almost in an instant why that sound installation,
Study for Strings
, was a better place than any other to think about the Nazi years (what Boston called the great Collapse).

Everybody knows that most so-called avant-garde art these days requires one part that is visual and another that is discursive to back it up and try to explain what we are seeing. Curiously, nothing of the latter was in evidence in
Study for Strings.
At Susan Philipsz’s installation, it was enough to simply position oneself at the end of platform 10 to understand it all at once; there was no need for a leaflet that would finish off the story being told there.

Study for Strings
was a somber installation, a simple piece that went directly to the heart of the great tragedy, the end of the utopia of a humanizing world. Philipsz had situated loudspeakers in an enclosed area of Kassel’s Hauptbahnhof that were audible to people walking to the end of that stretch of platform—exactly the same stretch on which a great number of Jewish families waited for the train that would transport them to concentration camps; from these loudspeakers came beautiful but devastatingly sad music: a sort of funeral march for those who died before their time called
Study for Strings
. It was a composition that in Kassel 2012 harked back to the memory of the Holocaust. Its composer, the Czech musician Pavel Haas, wrote the piece for the chamber orchestra in Theresienstadt, shortly before being transferred to Auschwitz, where he died.

We listened to the piece standing, with the same grave expressions as everyone else gathered there, watching other spectators come join that railway music performance that lasted under half an hour, one of many identical performances that were separated by short time intervals and played one after the other on the cheerless platform every day. In the end, a group of around thirty people formed, who had followed the concert of violins and cellos with emotion, remaining motionless and sunk in thought, moved, profoundly silent, as if recovering from the collapse provoked by what they had heard, and also by what they remembered, what had been evoked, almost reenacted, I’d go so far as to say experienced, because it wasn’t difficult to feel vulnerable and tragic there, like a deportee.

I would have liked to confess to Boston that it seemed incredible to me I hadn’t been aware from the outset that the political, or more accurately the eternal illusion of a humanized world was inseparable from artistic endeavors, from the most forward-thinking art. But I said nothing because underneath it all I felt a certain resentment toward her. At that point in the evening, I still hadn’t been able to get over the fact that my question about the Nazi perfume and avant-garde art had led her to punish me, to literally punish me, and, consequently, to oblige me to take one walk too many, perhaps with the severe notion that I’d correct such thoughtlessness at the far end of this platform.

I would have liked to say to her: How could I have been so stupid? Or perhaps the opposite: to reproach her for the fact that she had wanted to scold me like that, albeit in such a subtle manner. Whatever the case, I opted to keep quiet and devote myself to carefully observing the general mental recovery of the people gathered there. I ended up identifying an intense communion between all those strangers, who, having surely come from such different places, had congregated there. It was as if they were all thinking, we were all thinking: we’ve been the moment, and this is the place, and now we know what our problem is. It was as if a spirit, a breeze, a current of morally bracing air, an invisible impetus, were pushing us toward the future, forging forever the union between the diverse members of that spontaneous, suddenly subversive-seeming group.

This is the kind of thing, I thought, that we can never see on television news programs. There are silent conspiracies between people who seem to understand one another without talking, quiet rebellions that take place in the world every minute without being noticed; groups form by chance, unplanned reunions in the middle of the park or on a dark corner, occasionally allowing us to be optimistic about the future of humanity. They join together for a few minutes and then go their separate ways, all enlisting in the hidden fight against moral misery. One day, they will rise up with unheard-of fury and blow everything to bits.

21

I already knew how to get back to the Hessenland unaided, I told Boston, I just had to stay on Königsstrasse. Two kisses and farewell. Boston didn’t specify a time, but she said she’d come pick me up from the hotel the next morning to take me to the Chinese restaurant. Just as I’d feared, it was clear no one was going to save me from the trip to the Dschingis Khan. Over the course of the afternoon, I’d avoided asking her anything to do with what I privately called “the Chinese number.” I’d done so, foolishly thinking that I’d get out of the whole nuisance that way. But the ostrich approach doesn’t always turn out to be useful and, ultimately, when we were saying goodbye, I saw how “the Chinese number” ended up bobbing to the surface and, what’s more, it did so at the moment that packed the most punch, just when I thought I’d outmaneuvered it completely.

It was late now, and everything was starting to get dark.

I observed that for the first time in my whole life it wasn’t fun to feel as though I were inside someone else’s novel, in this case, a book by Robert Walser. Although it was poetic to think that, as in
The Walk
,
it was late and everything was getting dark, it nevertheless seemed more appropriate for this to be experienced by whoever wrote it, in other words by Walser, and not me. And yet it was unsettling to see that what was happening to me was exactly what happened to the happy narrator in that book: it got dark, and I suddenly thought it better to stop walking. Usually I was already at home when darkness fell, so it followed that my melancholy there in Kassel was in fact similar to Walser’s.

Maybe not everything is so sinister and strange, I said to myself, trying to keep from having an anxiety attack in the middle of the street. Right then, it was a question of being able to cover—relatively calmly, with all the calm in the world—the distance separating me from the Hessenland. A somewhat forced calm, perhaps, but it could be useful if I at least managed to stave off the first onslaught of melancholy. And I did, I deflected it; I observed I was still enjoying everything I saw in the street instead of being depressed by it. But very soon afterward, sensing I was all alone, I began to feel low. Underneath it all, I am Chinese and I’m going home, I thought. And those things became still further complicated for me, as I did not dare to look at the people on the street, because once more it seemed some of them were saying: it’s about time you got here.

“Were you expecting me?” I wanted to shout at them.

I was sure they were looking at me strangely. Might it not be the case that some of them really were waiting for me and had made an agreement to pretend otherwise if I finally decided to inquire about it? I wanted so much to say to them: “I know you’ve been expecting me for days. I noticed it as soon as I got here.”