The Illogic of Kassel

30

We were walking along peacefully through Karlsaue Park for what must have been a tremendously long time. Suddenly, looking to the left, I thought I saw a series of tiny individuals — sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or groups — all inside a gigantic glass of water. Like Cartesian divers, the little people rose vertically in the liquid and immediately, without having reached the surface, plunged toward the bottom, where they rested an instant before starting a new ascent.

I was very thirsty because it had already been a long walk, and I thought I might be suffering from a passing spot of sunstroke. It seemed to me that Pim had told me the glass was really an athlete holding back the flight of a great bird and contained drowned dwarves, who, trained in crime, were trying to strangle Raymond Roussel.

Okay, I said. And we carried on walking.

When I realized I was hallucinating, I put all my hopes into being able to sit and rest as soon as we got to the terrace of the café-bar at the Orangerie Palace. You could already see the terrace on the horizon casting a strange and lovely oasis-like light, in this case it wasn’t hallucinatory. We were heading for that terrace, and one might assume we’d have a good rest in the bar, but in the meantime my thirst was getting worse. I longed for water more with every moment. This did not outweigh my impression that at the same time, I was increasingly firmly in the grip of a very enthusiastic mood. The sensation was unusual for me: I was extremely tired, but at the same time I kept up my almost inordinate enthusiasm with just as much vigor as I had hours before, most especially for anything to do with Documenta. I maintained a critical attitude toward certain installations and pieces but, in general, felt very interested in what I was seeing. Entirely happy, I’d say, to stroll around a city turned upside down by avant-garde art, or contemporary art, or whatever it was.

No doubt it was this same enthusiasm that led me to want to locate the work of Pierre Huyghe, one of the artists who had been recommended to me.

“Make sure you see the work of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff,” Alicia Framis had written me.

Not even five minutes had passed, and we were already on the path through the park leading to the installation by Huyghe, a French artist who was, as Pim started to explain, hard to classify. In any case, here was a guy who had challenged the narrow, ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction and was, moreover, adored by people who loved playfulness in all manifestations of art. He was mad about Dada and Perec and Louison Bobet (the latter was the oddest, as he was a famous cyclist whom Huyghe considered a Dadaist); in fact, he was crazy about everything that struck him as displaying unfettered imagination and an unruly capacity for invention. He liked reality to turn itself into fiction and vice versa, for it to be hard to tell the difference between the two. Huyghe had been working outside the framework of the museum or gallery for over ten years, Pim went on to tell me, fleeing all that was conventional, and his work sometimes seemed related to that of the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck.

I was surprised by that name cropping up, I hadn’t heard him mentioned for decades. For a time, I’d actually studied Maeterlinck in depth. He was the author of philosophical essays about the natural world: The Life of the Bee, The Intelligence of Flowers, The Life of the White Ant. Under a very clear German influence, this Belgian writer was adept at creating atmospheres in his books that were thick with invisible forces and very somber. Víctor Erice, the Basque filmmaker, took the title of his much-admired movie The Spirit of the Beehive from the beginning of a paragraph from The Life of the Bee. And I myself had ended up writing a long article about the curious relationship between certain film titles and certain insects.

It was significant, Pim said, to see how Huyghe’s previous installations, in spite of his efforts to emphasize sociological questions, turned out to throw much more light on those somber and invisible powers already examined by Maeterlinck in his time. There was in Huyghe a constant concern with the forces that are so often hidden in fog, smoke, and the clouds.

This last observation led me to wonder about the many times I also employed poetic images of fog or the diverse iconography of smoke in my novels. Some of my tales have been set in overcast, foggy countries. Yet, while mist and smoke attracted me most, I never wanted to analyze the causes too deeply.

Clouds appealed to me less, perhaps they seemed not to possess so much mystery, or perhaps because too much had been written about them. A friend of mine from Barcelona once exhausted the subject of clouds. Sitting beside me in the cinema one day watching little puffs of white cloud cross behind the Washington Capitol in a film by Otto Preminger, he said: “A minor detail, but not irrelevant: those clouds passed that way over thirty years ago.”

I never saw anyone so focused on one of the billions of useless details from the past; never anyone so immobile in a cinema, so still, so literally in the clouds as my friend was that day. Since then, clouds haven’t played much of a role in my books; perhaps I fear that readers will become similarly immobilized or perhaps I don’t want them guessing I wish to immobilize them.

Fog, on the other hand, has always been one of the things that fascinated me most in this world. There have been times when it’s seemed to me that everything was contained within it. Curiously, I never managed to see any on my first trip to London, and I still haven’t gotten over that disappointment. Smoke, by contrast, isn’t as beautiful or as mystical, but it also appeals to me. I don’t know the reasons, much as I sometimes think I’ve guessed them. I remember that my father didn’t envy the unbearably competitive guy next door in the least, but he was jealous of the smoke that issued from that horrible neighbor’s chimney. I’ve always thought I could perhaps begin with that memory in order to understand why smoke interested me so much, at least as literary material.

We were descending a muddy path. Smoke was the first thing I saw as we started to get close to the corner of the park where Huyghe’s incredible, unforgettable Untilled was located. Land to cultivate, to farm, to plough? More than anything, on my first visit to that space I found so disturbing, I was able to appreciate the consummate oddness of the place. A person couldn’t remain indifferent there. One immediately realized it was one of the foremost spaces in the whole of Documenta.

Not even Raymond Roussel could have improved on that atmosphere of extreme weirdness. Indeed, Huyghe had just quoted Roussel in an interview, though saying that the phrase might possibly be apocryphal: “The best place to travel is your own room.” (Apocryphal it is, though not entirely. I am a humble expert on Roussel and permit myself to clarify here that the sentence was actually much longer and expressed something slightly different: in it Roussel explained he’d gone all the way around the world twice, and even so, none of those journeys had provided any material for his books, which he thought worth pointing out, because it demonstrated in a very tangible way the importance of the creative imagination in his work.)

What Huyghe had installed within the confines of the Karlsaue was a compost pile for producing humus. I didn’t find this out myself but from Pim, as I barely knew what humus might be. Later, at night in the cabin, I looked up more information about the mulch apparently being made there and about other unsettling questions related to the place. The French artist had managed to transform an area of French garden, that is, an area of well-ordered nature within the park, into a space in the process of construction/destruction, suspended in time, with both live and inanimate elements. The presence of two dogs wandering around as part of the work was conspicuous. One of them (the one with its leg painted pink) was extremely famous, the best-known dog in Europe at that time and an absolute icon for Documenta 13.

One of the odd things that occurred to me about that weird place was that it seemed to have been created especially for me, or for people very like me, in order for us to better reflect (via the all-pervading smell of the humus) on the mortal weariness of the West, the many instances of devastating fatigue that were running through the continent.

Near the compost pile was the statue of a reclining woman on a pedestal; the statue’s head was full of bees — real live ones — buzzing inside a great honeycomb. The statue was part of the compost pile and vice versa. Through the humus, that is, everything obtained by the biochemical decomposition of organic waste — roved the media hound, the lithe and extremely skinny dog with one leg painted pink. That hound loved being photographed. It posed as soon as it saw a camera. It seemed, at that late stage of the summer, to be delighted by the cameras pursuing it and even more delighted by all the changes brought about by its great fame.

Pim told me they’d gone to Spain to find that dog, because the legislation governing animals there was more relaxed than in Germany, where they did not grant licenses to paint an animal’s leg pink. The hound, photographers aside, moved with surprising agility all over that peculiar area, in which there were also hallucinogenic plants (which I didn’t manage to see), logs piled up like mountains, slabs of cement, and even a big sink full of stagnant water. Chemical reactions, repetition, reproduction, formation, and vitality were all present in the work, but the existence of a system was quite uncertain. Nothing was allocated; there was no organization, no representation, no exhibition.

I remember that place was very different from all the rest. I’ve never seen more poetically expressed, with such horror and elegance, the idea of rupture with the classical beauty always so associated with art. It was astonishing how, stone by stone, even with the tire tracks of a truck in the mud, Huyghe had reconstructed everything in that strange spot that seemed abandoned; yet it was actually extremely well cared for. After being there just a short time, you could see the place demanded constant maintenance, which in the long run ultimately revealed how complex it was to maintain this preconceived chaos.

As I describe it now, thinking of the place, I realize that as time goes by, I’m getting better at understanding what I managed to see there on my first visit. I can’t deny that the first time I went in person to that unexpected compost pile (which didn’t hold too many spectators for long, given its smell and its disquieting disorder, the clear perception of a terrifying absence of any system whatsoever), I reacted very superficially. Not knowing what I had in front of me (or rather, what I did not have in front of me), I devoted myself to observing the peculiar life of that skinny Spanish hound with the pink leg amid the mulch.

Perhaps to complement the undeniable disquiet, the notable rejection generated by everything in front of us, a young blonde German woman — who seemed quite unhinged and was dressed in strict mourning — crossed impulsively before us, got up on a pile of rubble, and began to preach vehemently and at length about what we were seeing.

Pim told me the young woman was well known throughout Kassel and was just then expounding aesthetic theories on the weeds in the area, on what was natural and what was not in our rotten world. She claimed and proclaimed repeatedly that Europe had taken a wrong turn more than two centuries back with the triumph of reason and the idea of progress in the age of Enlightenment.

We looked at the statue of the woman with the large, active beehive for a head from a distance because, although there were some completely entranced passersby over in that direction, it didn’t seem a very good idea to approach her.

I recall the instant when the young madwoman and the statue appeared to have identical mental seething going on in their respective heads. Then they went back to having nothing in common, and all I know is that, as we moved away from the installation, the tragic voice of the madwoman talking of the ruin of Europe echoed continually in my ears.