The Illogic of Kassel

32

In Doing Nothing Garden, Pim said, plants had been grown on a mound of organic waste. If I understood correctly, Song Dong had found the rubbish piled up in her mother’s house in northern China and had it transported to Kassel, where she planted seeds and left it so that, over time, it turned into a little landscaped hill. A not very well-informed viewer might see it from a distance as he headed for the Orangerie — someone very thirsty, like me, for example — and have no idea that in under two months, that very peculiar little hill had taken on the deceptive appearance of having been part of the park for years.

This is where we were when the distant rumble of a bombardment interrupted our walk toward the Orangerie (where, according to Pim, there was a bar and also an astronomy museum with collections of clocks and antique stargazing instruments).

I was thirsty, more thirsty than anything, and even now I distinctly remember that terrible thirst. The bombing noise, Pim said, is from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers. And she said no more. A bit later on, she conceded the installation had the enveloping sound of the tumult of battle, mixed with a symphony orchestra and rustlings from the forest, and in some manner it re-created the bombing raids Karlsaue Park and the city of Kassel had suffered during the Second World War.

For the first time that whole morning, I saw not a trace of Pim’s constant cloying smile, because what she’d just told me really didn’t allow for joy, either genuine or false. Until a minute ago, she’d been the epitome of joy. And I remembered that meditating on joy in my German cabin had been, since the beginning, one of the objectives of my trip: to reflect on the possibility that in joy could be found the central nucleus of all creation.

A pity, I said to myself, that at the last minute I’d packed Journey to the Alcarria instead of the book on joy I was going to bring. Nevertheless, just thinking of that “book about walking and seeing,” as the author himself called it, reminded me that my stay in Kassel had the structure of a stroll, during which I was contemplating the natural as well as human landscape, while not neglecting to also study the landscape’s theoretical heft, something that, by the way, was conspicuously absent in Cela’s book.

Art about walking and seeing, I thought, while we continued strolling toward the cheerful terrace of the Orangerie bar. We were heading that way, but hearing what was coming from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers, we ended up acceding to their demands and taking a path that led us to an area with a large lake. (This was where the bombardment seemed to originate.) It was a beautiful place, this lake with a small romantic temple, surely the finest part of Karlsaue Park, with a vibrant nature reserve full of birds on one side. On the other, I was at last able to see what looked most like a forest, most like the leafy area that in Barcelona I had imagined I’d see all the time I was in Kassel.

For me, there’s nothing as German as this forest, I said to Pim, who didn’t answer, or preferred to refrain from making any reply. Even better, she pointed to a water fountain at a bend in the path. I must have had a sign on my forehead saying I was dreadfully thirsty and that was why I said crazy things, revealing what felt like a hairy bear living inside me. In any event, I drank water like never before, feeling, in addition, that the fountain was a perfect miracle on our way. I drank for a long time, like someone who has been hypnotized by water.

Then we resumed our walk somewhat uncertainly toward the clamor of war. Little by little, the sounds issuing from the loudspeakers grew louder, and you were better able to appreciate that they were re-creating the din of an immense battle: it sounded like shells were dropping all through the forest. The birds in the nature reserve were going crazy. Pim ended up explaining to me — she seemed to have been there before with other writers and it bored her to have to say it again — that we were heading toward FOREST (for a thousand years. .). The title, she said, referred to the thousand years that Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich would endure and perhaps also to the thousand years of age the city of Kassel had reached when it was almost entirely destroyed by British firepower.

I remembered Janet Cardiff was part of the holy trinity in Alicia Framis’s email (“Make sure you see the work of. .”), but I didn’t expect that any installation would shake me up the way that one did. I was struck — hard to forget it — by the discovery of a group of about forty people in the middle of the forest. They were sitting on tree stumps — forty mute, emotional people — terrified but secretly conspiratorial at the same time, as if a subversive, invisible thread passed through them, an immaterial impulse, an infinite breeze reminiscent of Ryan Gander’s: forty people sitting in the great shade of the trees, listening to the brutal sound of an aerial bombardment that, thanks to the speakers installed in the tops of the oaks, created the compelling sensation that it was all happening right there exactly where we stood.

That was, without doubt, the most impressive thing. You ended up believing yourself the target of the bombs because you felt them approaching by an auditory sleight of hand; you felt the very real sensation of being in the middle of a battlefield. You heard everything as if it were actually taking place beside you: the hair-raising yells of men in hand-to-hand combat, the overflying airplanes, the breathing, the shouts, the footsteps through dry leaves, the nervous laughter, the wind, petals blown on the rain and squall, the enigmatic rustling in the forest, thunderstorms moving off, the din of ancient battles, bayonets tearing through the air, shots, explosions, shrapnel. .

And then, suddenly, came the heavy blow of silence, and with it the reflection on the rediscovery of music: a classical symphony issued from the loudspeakers and allowed for pondering and recuperation. After the intellectual impact of the bombardment, there followed minutes of meditation and powerful recovery after the great collapse; during these minutes I was able to think things over and put an end to any further questions I might still ask myself about the possible, or impossible, relationship between innovative art and a bottle of perfume belonging to a Nazi woman, about the possible relationship between innovative art and our historical past and present. I seemed to guess that I wouldn’t revisit the matter for a long time to come. It had become clear to me that art and historical memory were inseparable.

Any activity connected to the avant-garde — assuming the avant-garde still existed (which I doubted more with each passing hour) — must never lose sight of the political dimension: one that required us to bear in mind that perhaps nothing would do us poor mortals more good than for the avant-garde to disappear, not because it was worn out, but because, through an invisible current, it had turned into a source of pure energy, transforming itself into our own fascinating life.