The Illogic of Kassel

22

I got up from the bed in order to escape from my private Galway Bay, and I had a depraved glance at Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria: “The peddler has perfectly naked eyelids, without a single lash, and a wooden leg crudely fixed to the stump with thongs.”

Afterward, I played the game of pretending to myself that what I’d read astonished me. Peddler, naked eyelids, wooden leg. I feigned surprise when I knew perfectly well that in reading Cela I was bound to encounter the medieval: another world a thousand light-years from where I found myself.

Then I went straight to the computer and looked up information about the city I was in, and the first thing I came across was material about the Documenta of 1972. If I read that 72 backwards, I got my room number. This didn’t exactly compel me to keep reading, but it did make me take more interest in what I read. An admirer of “that historic Documenta”—the one in ’72—claimed to have discovered in it that the latest members of the avant-garde belonged to the purest strain of romanticism, the beatniks in particular.

Suddenly, for reasons that still escape me today, my attention focused entirely on the beatniks. What did I know about those people? For a moment, I was disorientated by my own question. I only managed to leave the muddle of the beatnik mystery behind when I remembered I had that old copy of Romanticism, by Rüdiger Safranski, lying in my suitcase. Once again, I hadn’t made a mistake in choosing it for company. I opened it to the page where I could read that only as aesthetic phenomena are the world and existence eternally justified.

I thought: Didn’t I come to Kassel precisely to seek the aesthetic instant? Yes, but not only that. Besides, I’d never found that instant in my entire life so far, and everything seemed to indicate that things would go on the same for me after passing through Kassel. In fact, I didn’t even know what an aesthetic instant might really be, since up to that point I’d only managed to get glimpses of it, not much more. I paused to think. Why had I traveled to that city? I’ve come, I told myself, purely to think. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to mentally construct a cabin, a human refuge in which I can meditate on the lost world. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to read something about a peddler and his stump and an incurably gloomy Spain. I’ve come to discover the mystery of the universe, to initiate myself into the poetry of an unknown algebra, to seek an oblique clock, and to read about Romanticism. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to investigate what the essence, the pure, hard nucleus of contemporary art is. I’ve come to find out if there still is an avant-garde. In fact, I’ve come to carry out research on Kassel. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come simply so that on my return home I can tell people what I’ve seen. I’ve come to find out what beatniks are. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to get acquainted with the general condition of the arts. Again, I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to recover enthusiasm. I paused a little less thoughtfully. I’ve come so I can narrate my journey later on, as if I’d been to the country estate in Locus Solus, or to the Alcarria, an Alcarria described by Roussel, for example. I’ve come to gain access to that instant when a man seems to take on, once and for all, who he is. I paused thoughtfully. I’ve come to leave my wife in peace for a few days. I paused thoughtfully again. I’ve come to hesitate. I paused doubtfully. I’ve come to find out whether there is any logic in being invited to Kassel to pull off a Chinese number. I paused thoughtfully.

I paused for even more reflection when I noticed that the pessimism that came over me so inexorably at that hour had begun to strongly take hold. I was beginning to see that the so famous aesthetic instant (I had thought that one day I would or wouldn’t know what it was) would never be within my grasp. Was it normal for my pessimism to increase so much in so few minutes? Unfortunately, yes. The onset of the black hours always erupted without warning, and straightaway I got to thinking that I didn’t have many years left and everything in my life had gone by very fast; why, just a few days ago, I was young and carefree, but it had all changed in a short time, this was now an incontrovertible fact, and I felt sad. When the black hours flared up almost punctually evening after evening, I could never avoid sliding relentlessly down the slippery slope of the most pessimistic and dangerous thoughts.

To top it all, I remembered something a friend told me (not such a good friend, to judge by his actions) whenever he wanted to depress me. He’d do this when he noticed I was already depressed. He said that during the night the essence of night does not let us sleep. I have never understood very well what the sentence meant, but I found it terrifying. I turned it over in my mind a few times. Preventing us from sleeping. Was that something at the very core of the night? Did the night only make sense when it managed to stop us resting? It was early to go to bed, but I was worn out; the final punishment of the walk to platform 10 had been brutal, and the dawning of consciousness there was so intense it had left me in bits. I now thought only of sleep, though I was very afraid I wouldn’t be able to attain it. In spite of the desire to lie down, I found the strength for something that turned out to be very banal compared to Pavel Haas’s music on the platform.

I found the strength for a final foray into Google, where I stumbled upon a photograph of Chus Martínez, whose face seemed to me essentially lively, making me guess (I wasn’t in the least bit mistaken) that this was someone who’d internalized her ability to have ideas as profoundly as someone once said that the whaler in Moby-Dick had internalized his harpoon.

I don’t know how long I spent, half asleep, looking at the photo of Chus; she had invited me to Kassel and we still hadn’t met, though there was every indication I’d have dinner with her on Thursday. The more I looked at her face, the more I saw it brimming with ideas, and ultimately that made me think about them thoroughly — about ideas, I mean, and their presence and absence in modern art. I remembered that, in the mid nineteenth century, no European artist was ignorant of the fact that, if he wanted to prosper, he had to interest the intellectuals (the new class), which turned culture into the topic most often addressed by its creators, and the sole objective of art became the suggesting and inspiring of ideas. Strolling around Kassel, one was left in no doubt that there at least, things were still under the influence of that mid-nineteenth-century transformation. Elsewhere, no. Because almost all over the rest of the world the intellectual had taken a nosedive, and culture had become extraordinarily trivialized. But in Kassel a certain romantic and Duchampian aura remained; it was a paradise for those who loved intellectual conjecture, theoretical discussions, and the elegance of certain speculations.

I’ve always been enormously entertained by theories, so I could feel satisfied. For a long time I didn’t get contemporary art, but here in Kassel I was overloaded with stimuli to investigate the position of that art. That said, as a young man, it bored me to look at a Rembrandt. Confronted with a painting by that admirable artist, I didn’t know what to say. But, if I saw a readymade by a humble imitator of Duchamp, all sorts of commentaries poured out of me and I started to feel, once and for all, like an artist too. The same thing, I recall, happened to me with Manet, an artist very influenced by Mallarmé and whose most significant disciple may have been — I dare say — Marcel Duchamp. Mallarmé told Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” That sentence prefigured the modern abandonment of the two-dimensional plane and the ascent of the conceptual to a position of dominance.

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.”