The Illogic of Kassel

56

For a while, as I was eating my tortellini, we got marvelously caught up in Chus’s idea that art was essentially thought more than experience, which led her to conclude that artists should play a fundamental role in our society, as should poets, if art and poetry weren’t the same thing. As for politicians, they all came off looking really bad.

It was perhaps the key moment, the most fascinating of my trip, because I noticed how her words were gradually restoring a lost atmosphere from my past, a former climate of rupture with conventional art, a way of considering things that I’d almost forgotten. It was as if I were reencountering what I would enjoy encountering most, my inner truth. It was a truth, however, that I’d been constructing on the basis of four initial misunderstandings. Maybe that’s why many of my past mistakes began to file through my mind and I remembered the supposed avant-gardist I was for years and dreamed of being, as well as my yearning to go beyond provincial rupturism.

I remembered when I was barely twenty, I randomly wanted to be like the cineaste Philippe Garrel, who visited Barcelona for a showing of some of his underground movies at the Filmoteca. Garrel’s “sad young man” appearance and his very radical attitude toward art attracted me. Back then, unknowingly, what so fascinated me about my contemporary’s pained figure was the romanticism emanating from everything that he did and said; in fact, he was — though I didn’t know it at the time — Romanticism itself in its purest and most original form: that of its beginnings, when that movement, that “odyssey of the German spirit,” was the first of all vanguards (though its followers didn’t gather under that emblem since the word had only a military meaning back then). These followers invented Literature as we now know it, also inventing the cult of genius (in which life sprang forth in freedom and developed with creative force), an outrageous cult to the so-called geniuses of vigor, who took the stage to announce what ended up being called vanguardismo many years later: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz playing the fool, Friedrich Maximilian Von Klinger showing off by devouring a piece of raw horsemeat, Cristoph Kaufmann sitting down at the duke’s table bare-chested to his belly button, his hair a mess, with a colossal knotty walking stick. . I was, unknowingly, an heir to Garrel, who in turn, also unknowingly, was an heir to Kaufmann and company. But if someone had spoken to me of Klinger or Kaufmann in those days I wouldn’t have understood, apart from the description “geniuses of vigor.”

When I was most absorbed in German avant-garde inventions of a now — distant century, Chus suddenly asked me if I’d seen anything else in Documenta apart from the dark and brilliant work of Sehgal. Luckily, I reacted in time. Of course I’d seen other things, I said. Essentially I was there to be a wanderer; I considered myself Documenta’s rambler. That’s what I said, and I told her that the invitation to Kassel had reminded me of another that had made me happy years ago, a proposal that came from Yvette Sánchez that I should be — and I was — the official rambler of the Basel Book Fair. In Kassel, as I walked around what seemed to me more and more like a huge estate full of oddities, I felt like the rambler in Locus Solus, that profoundly leisurely, erratic, perplexed wanderer, the inexhaustible visitor to the estate where Martial Canterel would show anyone around who wanted to see the strange inventions collected there.

Of course I’d seen other works, I said, I’d seen lots and in all of them I’d found ideas that connected me to an exceptional creative energy. In Huyghe’s impressive Untilled, I thought I saw that only art in the margins and distanced from galleries and museums could really be innovative and present something different. I said I was planning to spend the night there in that installation, in the middle of the landscape of humus with an Ibizan hound with one pink leg.

Naturally, hearing my plan, Chus looked up from her plate and stared at me, as if trying to guess whether I was truly insane. I wasn’t at all crazy. In fact, I was thinking of something Chus had said in an interview I’d read on the Internet: Documenta was not a traditional exhibition; it was not just for looking at, it could also be lived, something that could be visibly inferred from quite a few of the installations, such as that created by Pierre Huyghe with his surprising intervention.

I’ve observed, she said, that you speak seriously and jokingly at the same time. That’s true, I said, but you’d do well to take it all seriously.

I’d announced I’d be spending the night out in the open, beside the statue with the built-in beehive for a head. I couldn’t back down now. Actually, I’d announced it to her so I’d have no choice but to carry it out. As soon as dinner was over and Chus went to sit with her friends at another table (which she surely must have been eager to do by then), I would try to transfer my “thinking cabin” to the freedom of the open air in a corner of Untilled; it would be my way of paying homage to a hypothetical art of the outskirts of the outskirts.

It might be a strange experience to spend the night in an installation I considered very odd and which must be even more so in deep darkness. I saw myself out there at the mercy of the elements, following the pink-legged Spanish dog’s progress. At the same time, I imagined traveling by balloon in those nocturnal hours as Robert Walser once did toward an abyss of frost and stars. Would I be scared? What would I see? Would I be alone or would I discover that at night the place filled with secret conspirators from the world of the outskirts of the outskirts of art? Would I manage to travel a very long way while essentially staying right where I was?

Chus didn’t want to say that spending the night with the pink-legged dog was a bad idea. She simply asked me if I’d seen Scorsese’s film George Harrison: Living in the Material World. In it, she said, you could see lots of thinking cabins, though in the form of “transcendental meditations.” I hadn’t seen it, I said, but I’d stumbled upon many things in Kassel that had dazzled me. I thought she’d want to know which ones, but she didn’t ask. Like someone downing a shot of vodka without thinking about it, Chus suddenly dropped a question, maybe the question I would have most liked not to be asked, since I didn’t have a suitable answer for her.

“I almost forgot. How’s it going at the Chinese restaurant?”

The color and expression of my face changed. And I was more Piniowsky than ever.

Luckily, when I started to tell her something, I saw that she was not overly interested in my reply. In fact, she’d turned her face away and started exchanging signals with her friends at the nearby table. When she finally turned to look at me, she encountered my absolute Piniowsky face. She must have grasped my immense distress and taken pity on me because she suddenly started talking about hammocks strung between palm trees and the sounds of coconuts falling. She was talking about Gino Paoli songs and bathing suits and deserted beaches, salty breezes and love stories, and what was always, she said, hidden in the middle of the invincible summer.