The Illogic of Kassel

15

I did not have Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel in my luggage, a novel I adore but didn’t bring with me. It was as though I had, because I knew it almost all by heart. I’d read it an infinite number of times and always had the feeling that memorizing it instead of taking it with me constituted a sort of strange, and no doubt singular, good luck charm. For me, Roussel’s whole book has always been, above all, a summary of walks. Over the course of an afternoon — which takes on the character of an itinerant initiation rite — the learned Martial Canterel goes along expounding each one of the rarities dotted around his property, the lovely villa at Montmorency.

Sometimes, I find it amusing to feel as though I’m in other people’s novels. Perhaps because of this, when María Boston and I finally arrived, after a brief walk, at the great esplanade of the Friedrichsplatz, I remembered the beginning of the second chapter of Locus Solus when they “came in sight of a broad promenade which was completely bare and very smooth.”

In fact, that route traveled with Boston was the prologue to other walks that would come later and would in part turn my trip to Kassel into the story of a journey punctuated by strolls, during which I saw, in the style of Locus Solus, a good number of rarities, many marvels.

On arriving at the grand esplanade, we arrived at a point on Friedrichsplatz where we could literally go no farther due to the huge crowd waiting to enter the Fridericianum, the oldest public museum in Europe and the heart of Documenta since its beginning in 1955. It was unthinkable to visit the whole exhibition and not enter the impressive neoclassical building (one of the few to survive the brutal devastation of the war), since that would have been like traveling to Germany and not even hearing about a city called Berlin.

In short, I had never seen such a gigantic line in my life. The pleasant temperatures for August, along with the fact that Documenta was only on for another four days, had filled Kassel with a host of last-minute visitors. In the line I seemed to once more see, with astonishment, that there were people looking at me with a strange fixation. They were all but saying: It’s about time you deigned to get here. Once again I felt I could be someone they were expecting: an impression entirely lacking any sense, but from which I could not escape, which allowed me to suspect that everything I thought I was observing had some hidden basis in truth, a truth I would not necessarily one day know.

Of course, they might simply be mistaking me for somebody else. We’ve got these brilliant passes, Boston said, and we can skip all the lines. When I heard her say this, I could have jumped for joy. The thing is, this type of maneuvering, in which you get ahead of the crowd, has always seemed to me very good therapeutically, perhaps because we drag too many frustrations around with us. From time to time, it’s good to skip the humiliation of standing in a monotonous line, which evokes for us the single file we all stand in sooner or later to enter Death’s domain.

This sort of ploy was always well received by me, and so I welcomed the news with satisfaction, while remembering that the only useful bit of advice my paternal grandfather ever gave me was that if I wanted to be someone in life, I should always jump right over people standing in bothersome lines.

While the security guards were looking at our passes with more than rigorous attention and simultaneously containing the fury of those who complained we were jumping the queue, Boston told me of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s conviction that one could change reality with art, although one could not force that change: Carolyn had been in favor of change from the outset, but without putting pressure on the participating artists, not exerting excessive control over their work, letting them be the ones who, if they so desired, revealed new paths.

We passed through security and headed into the mythical Fridericianum. Once inside, we started to cross vast exhibition rooms on the ground floor, rooms that had been left empty and seemed to be, Boston said, a reflection on saturation and emptying out; in this main exhibition space of a big international show, the emptiness was far more noticeable than in any other setting.

Faced with such emptying out I couldn’t help but remember the Sunday morning a few years back now when they opened the newly built museum of contemporary art in Barcelona (the MACBA) to the public with evident haste; they threw it open to the citizens, but without pictures, not a single painting or sculpture, nothing inside it. The people of Barcelona wandered through the museum admiring the white walls, the solidity of the construction, and other architectural details, proud of having paid for it with their taxes and telling themselves that the works of art could wait.

I was thinking of all this in the Fridericianum, thinking of that happy period for Barcelona, when Boston, noticing I was being bothered by the current of wind circulating around those vacant rooms, which had obliged me to turn up my collar, led me over to a small, inconspicuous plaque set in the corner between two bleak white walls.

There on the plaque I saw, with surprise, that the current was artificial and signed by Ryan Gander. Brilliant, I thought. Somebody was putting their signature to a draft! Fantastic. Although, naturally, I couldn’t avoid thinking of the detractors of contemporary art: no doubt they would find inspiration for all-out mockery in that plaque.

Boston confirmed that Gander had titled that ethereal breeze — which seemed to lightly push visitors along, giving them a gentle unexpected strength — an extra impetus: The Invisible Pull. I found that current of air very interesting and at first connected it to Duchamp, with his perfume Air de Paris, then to the geometry textbook he gave his sister when she got married, that she had to hang outside the kitchen window, letting the wind flick through to choose the geometry problems to solve: that volume Duchamp titled Unhappy Readymade, guessing its fate, as in the end the wind left not a single trace of the gift.

However Duchampian The Invisible Pull might be, that did not stop them from placing that breeze at the heart of Documenta 13, placing it at its spiritual center. It was a brilliant notion on its own account and even generated a certain happiness. Actually, it also allowed me to experience at moments a hint of an “aesthetic instant,” something I recalled was one of the things I’d come to Kassel to find: a sort of instant of harmony. I didn’t quite know what that might consist of, but I was keen to sample it. Still, what the hell, I thought: that invisible breeze filled me with a strange but interesting sense of well-being. It seemed to me that this on its own already justified my whole journey to Kassel. I was fascinated by it. I didn’t need to know why it exercised such a hold over me, it was enough to know that it put me in a good mood, which was the same thing that happened with the intrinsic pleasure of mornings — I compared this to the art of forgetting, that art of forgetfulness as light as the first morning air and always liberating — while the evenings and above all the nights only drove me into a malaise inasmuch as they turned out grim and bitter, like the very art of remembering. That art of remembering brought only the tenacious memory of the past and, in tandem with resentment and melancholy, was terrible.

The bad thing about this divide between mornings and evenings — between these states of mind that in themselves signaled whether it was daytime or night — was that it was so systematic in nature: in over five years, there had not been a single day during which I managed to escape from this monotonous rule of well-being in the mornings and anguish as night fell.

I turned and went back to where the plaque was, reread it, smiled happily, and then returned to my previous position beside Boston, standing looking at her golden sandals, the same ones I’d found so charming in Barcelona. Now they seduced me less and her voice, too, seemed to have lost something of its devastating force on the day of our first meeting; but all this was to be expected and, in any case, she still seemed to me an extremely agreeable presence (though I never lost sight of our age difference and, above all, the “fond glance toward the old man,” which, as if it were a question of target practice, seemed to be her favorite pastime).

For this and other reasons, I decided to concentrate on the invisible breeze. And then, aware of what it meant to go down a certain path, I wondered about that sentence by some author about the space a work of genius leaves behind, when it burns this space away, which is always a good place to light one’s own small flame. I didn’t remember who the author was, nor do I recall it now. The fact is, for that current of air, there was a before and an after, and that current seemed to me, over and above everything else, to be the creator of its own light.

Perhaps it wasn’t the best work of art in that Documenta — how could I tell, after all, when I’d only seen two pieces up to that point and one of them was a darkened room? — but a light issued from there, settling firmly within me, and it did not leave me again for the duration of my stay in Kassel.

From the work of genius, I thought, something always springs that inspires us, pushes us forward, leading us not only to imitate what has dazzled us, but to go much further, to discover our own world. . There was nothing that could be done now to change my opinion about the genius of that breeze. Boston at no point tried to quell an enthusiasm she perhaps secretly shared with me. Although she did, it’s true, see fit to warn me that “genius” was an overly used term, as it had ended up meaning too many things. Nevertheless, she said, the word “genius” was indeed useful for understanding people.

Still, with Boston at my side, I weighed up the possibility that I’d maybe made a mistake, acted rashly, perhaps I’d been wrong to lay on my enthusiasm for the breeze so thick; but none of that mattered now. If my attraction to the invisible push was somewhat unfounded, all that was happening to me was what happens to us so often in love, the great realm of the unfounded and the uncalled-for. Did I no longer remember, for instance, the enamoring of Stendhal, who traveled around Italy and fell for that country with such force, such gratuitousness that his love at first sight took the face of an actress who sang Cimarosa’s Secret Marriage in Ivrea? That actress had a broken front tooth, but the truth was that this hardly mattered, with that invisible push contained in every amour fou. Or did I no longer remember that Werther, when he fell in love with Carlota, only glimpsed her through a doorway while she was cutting slices of bread for her siblings, and that first sight, although trivial, drove him a very long way, carrying him off to the greatest of passions and to suicide?

That extra, invisible impetus might already be an object of mockery for thousands of idiots all over the world, but that didn’t matter in the slightest now, what difference did it make? I had fallen in love with that breeze, that pull, and, what’s more, I suspected that in its force, its pull, was hidden something that escaped me, perhaps a coded message.

“Where did you buy those sandals?” I asked Boston.

“Why? Do you like them?”

“They go well with the breeze. Yes, I like them. But”—I put on an affected voice, making out I was joking—“there are moments when I think they might drive me to the greatest of passions.”

“To love?” she asked, conspicuously wary.

“Or to suicide. Can you imagine? Killing yourself over a pair of golden sandals?”