The Illogic of Kassel

50

Thinking about art itself, I thought that it was definitely right there, in the air, suspended in that moment, suspended in life that went by as I’d seen the breeze go by.

I was in my room now. Moments before, I’d waved to This Variation from the balcony, as had become my ritual. I sat down at my computer and googled the word impulso (which is how I thought of, or how I’d translated, the word pull in Ryan Gander’s title). I discovered that it wasn’t necessarily what I’d thought it was, because in physics, “impulse” is the “physical magnitude (usually denoted as p) defined as the variation in the lineal moment of an object within a closed system.” The term is different from how we habitually think of it: it was coined by Isaac Newton in his second law of motion, in which he called it the vis motrix, referring to this force of movement.

In any case, I was enjoying a vis motrix, I’m almost sure of it. Then I looked up my next day’s activity on Google: “The Lecture to Nobody,” which I soon saw they’d programed for six in the evening. Would anyone attend? I expected to go along, propelled by my own vis motrix, but I hoped not a soul would show up. What was I planning to talk about, anyway? I kept looking for more information about Documenta 13 and found a feature article in which Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev praised the confusion one might encounter walking around there. I remembered Boston telling me to bear in mind, when judging The Brain, that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was of the opinion that in art, confusion is a truly marvelous thing. “At the risk of unsettling people,” Christov-Bakargiev said, “this Documenta does not have a single guiding concept. Due to the fact that there are many valid truths, one is constantly confronted with unsolvable questions; thus it has become a choice between not making a choice, not having a concept, acting from a position of withdrawal; or making a choice that one knows will also be partially or inevitably ‘wrong.’ What these participants do, what they ‘exhibit,’ may or may not be art.”

I also found Carolyn’s Letter to a Friend, in which she suggested that Documenta 13 was more than a big exhibition; it was actually a state of mind. I was on the verge of believing she had said that for me, since, after all, in a few hours I’d changed into someone enormously enthusiastic about everything he’d seen in Documenta, that great garden of contemporary marvels.

There were emails to answer in my inbox. In one of them, someone wrote to me from Neuchâtel to ask how I was getting on in Kassel and whether I was planning to write about it all when I got home. “If you do decide to, if I were you, I’d forget about genres and remember that every art, every science, operates by means of discourse; if it is practiced for its own sake as art, and if it achieves the highest summit, it is poetry.”

As I read this, I thought that there are some friends who would like for you, not them, to take on great challenges. Still, I couldn’t agree more with the idea of doing without genres. My favorite author was Nietzsche; I could never put his books down when I read him, so when I traveled I preferred to bring books in which he appeared only indirectly, such as Romanticism. To me, W. G. Sebald seemed to be just Nietzsche’s distinguished disciple, though I had to admit he’d managed to give a poetic touch to his romantic pilgrimages. And, thinking of Sebald, I could never forget that lovely text of his on Robert Walser about how Walser seemed truly freed from the burden of himself the night he undertook a journey in a hot air balloon, from Bitterfeld — the artificial lights of whose factories were just beginning to glimmer — to the Baltic coast. A trip over a sleeping nocturnal Germany. “Three people, the captain, a gentleman and a young girl, climb into the basket, the anchoring chords are loosed, and the strange house flies, slowly, as if it had first to ponder something, upward,” wrote Walser, the perfect rambler. For Sebald, that wanderer was born for this hushed journey through the air: “In all his prose works, he always seeks to rise above the heaviness of earthly existence, wanting to float away softly and silently into a higher, freer realm.”

Another more prosaic email contained for the umpteenth time — I’d received no end of emails about this matter — directions to my dinner with Chus, including a detailed map of the neighborhood showing my hotel and the Osteria restaurant, separated by barely three hundred meters. It seemed like a simple trajectory, even though all the street names were in German. I felt insecure, perhaps because — for some reason that escaped me — the sensation of being just another citizen of Kassel had begun to fade. But I wouldn’t say I’d gone back to feeling I was from Barcelona either; rather, I simply felt lost, lost in the center of Europe. In fact, it seemed increasingly obvious to me — as in the old song — that to get out of Europe I would have to get out of the forest, but to get out of the forest I’d have to get out of Europe.

Sometimes, when I noticed a change of light in my frustrated “thinking cabin,” I felt lost, and that lost feeling led me to see myself as one more dead European.