The Illogic of Kassel

41

As soon as it had stopped raining, we shot out of the Dschingis Khan, leaving some unappetizing cakes half-eaten. We went straight around to the back of the restaurant and from there set out on a walk through the south of Karlsaue Park.

Half an hour later, we were looking up the pronounced slope of a steep and pretty path that seemed to hail from an earlier time. After a tough climb, we stopped at a precarious little stone construction, the front of which had a closed green door and two windows with drawn blinds behind rusty security grilles. The grilles boasted a number of hinges pretending not only to be gold but to be protected by a sophisticated-looking alarm system. If you went to the back of the house, you could get in via an open door and enter a large, sparsely furnished room. A wooden sign by the back door informed the visitor that what was inside the house could be associated with The Last Season of the Avant-Garde, the work of the Berlin artist Bastian Schneider. Inside, there was an easel with an unfinished canvas depicting one of the two battles of Smolensk in the Second World War. It was so well painted, you could almost hear the din of battle. As for the easel, there was a small machine attached to it that looked like an old wall-mounted telephone, but was in fact a tiny, peculiar printing press.

On the board at the top of the easel, you could read the inscription from the tomb of a great and almost forgotten genius, Martinus von Biberach:

Ich leb und ich waiß nit, wie lang,

Ich stirb und waiß nit wann,

Ich far und waiß nit, wahin,

Mich wundert, daß ich fröhlich bin.

(I live and don’t know how long,

I’ll die and don’t know when,

I am going and don’t know where,

I wonder that I am happy.)

If you pushed the button on the little machine beneath the word fröhlich, it would crank into motion and spit out a scrap of paper on which Schneider gave his opinion that the contemporary artist these days was in the same position as the traveling artist of the pre-Aufklärung (the period before the German Enlightenment), writing not for an established community, but rather in the hope of founding one.

Squatting down, I read the bit of paper the machine had spit violently onto the floor. I thought at length about the group in the forest: that improvised community I’d seen around Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers.

That message from Bastian Schneider was just right. When I finished reading it, I went outside the house and saw the park spread out below; the view was slowly narrowing on the horizon. A moment arrived, and I had the impression that with each blink of the eye the space grew narrower still. Even in the most immediate vicinity, soon there wasn’t the slightest line or figure. And I thought: no doubt about it, we are at the center of the center of what was once a center. It’s also beyond question that we’re in the last season of the avant-garde, or perhaps the penultimate one. And the last does exist, but its whereabouts are unknown; being clandestine suits it.

I thought of the world of summer and the world of death and birth, of the world of collapse and recovery, of storms and calms: of the infinite cycle of ideas and action, of infinite invention, of supposedly endless experimentation. And because a dust cloud seemed about to swamp the place, I remembered the fearful handful of dust with which, according to T. S. Eliot, the Western tradition had come to an end. It was a fine dust that blew around out there, from left to right, from right to left, from everywhere to everywhere, reaching the heights and drifting down murmuring.

I would have given anything to know what it murmured.