The Illogic of Kassel

13

When María Boston arrived at the Hessenland to relieve Alka of her mission and incidentally, I suppose, rescue me from her laughing assistance, I, logically, thought it was Chus Martínez who had arrived at the hotel. What else was I going to think? For that reason, when she warned me that she wanted to resolve an important misunderstanding, I was a little lost. It might strike me as odd, she said, but a year ago in Barcelona she had found herself forced to pass herself off as her boss, as Chus. Chus had begged her to usurp her personality, for she feared I would get angry if she didn’t show up at our meeting that evening. Did I forgive them for the deceit?

First I was astonished. Then I reacted. Sure, I forgave them, I said, but had they imagined I was so sensitive, so irascible? Perhaps someone had told them that since turning sixty I’d become somewhat intransigent? Who’d told them?

I pretended that it didn’t much matter, but in reality I couldn’t really understand it very well. That identity exchange was surely odd, almost as odd as people, seeing my taxi go past, stopping in the streets of Kassel to approve my arrival with their gazes. No, there was nothing that could justify María Boston pretending to be Chus that evening in Barcelona. Even so, I decided not to make too much of a fuss about it. Besides, I thought, if I admitted my skepticism, I might be seen as a neurotic or not very flexible guy, maybe not very understanding of human weakness, and, most of all, as not much of a lover of what I most defended in my literature: playing games, transferring identities, the joy of being someone else. .

I tried to act as naturally as possible and asked Boston about Pim Durán. What I really wanted to know was whether Pim Durán was also her, because now anything was possible.

“She’s my assistant,” Boston said, “and I’m Chus’s assistant.”

I asked her if she knew where her boss was and if her boss wasn’t afraid — now that she had more reason to be than she did a year ago — that I’d get angry that I still hadn’t met her.

What happened, María Boston hurried to explain, was that the incredibly busy Chus had to go to Berlin that very morning, but I mustn’t worry, since she was coming back just to have dinner with me on Thursday evening, at eight on the dot. She urged me to write it down: at the Osteria restaurant on Jordanstrasse; everything was foreseen, planned, organized with true Germanic order.

I wanted to know where the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff could be found. I pronounced those names as if I’d known them all my life when actually I had no idea who they were.

Tino Sehgal’s contribution to Documenta, said Boston, was taking place in the building right next door to the hotel, and, if I wanted, she’d go there with me. It was called This Variation. It was, in fact, of all the works presented in Kassel, the only one that was very close; it was just there, in an old annex of the hotel, now unused and currently one of Documenta’s venues. Was I a Sehgal fan? I preferred to tell her the humble truth, that I knew nothing of that artist’s activity, actually I knew nothing of any of the participants in Documenta 13.

“This is so contemporary!” she exclaimed.

She meant that in the world it was more and more normal not to know about what was truly contemporary. Her phrase was also a sort of a wink, she said later, to a recent Tino Sehgal performance in Madrid, where a group of museum guards — to the visitors’ surprise — suddenly came to life, began to dance, and then softly sang the phrase This is so contemporary while pointing toward the Sehgal piece.

What people appreciated so much about this trendy artist, Boston said, was that the museum workers seemed to be part of the work of art, maybe they were even the work itself.

I didn’t yet know the greatness and genius of Sehgal. I just thought that placing museum workers as artworks was not the least bit original. After all, who hasn’t at some point thought that museum guards were the real works of art? As for putting life before art, that was something I had the impression it was all well and good and even healthy to do but had very much been seen before.

Later, I began to take more interest in Sehgal, especially when I saw his principal motto could be: “When art goes by like life.” Sehgal proposed that only by participating in his performance could a person say he or she had seen his work. If you think about it, that’s really good. When art goes by like life. It sounded perfect.

Boston and I went outside and into the old tumbledown annex next door to the Hessenland. After walking down a short corridor, we arrived at a small garden, where on the left-hand side was the room in which nothing could be seen and where you could, if you wanted, venture into the darkness itself to see what happened, what kind of experience awaited you. It was a dark room, Boston warned me, a room you entered thinking no one was there, perhaps just another visitor who had preceded you, but after being inside for a while, we started to perceive, without being able to see anybody, the presence of some young people, like otherworldly spirits, singing and dancing and seeming to live among the shadows. They were performers of sometimes enigmatic, sometimes fluid movements, occasionally stealthy and then frenetic, in any case invisible.

Although many other things could be said about that dark room, in principle I could summarize: Tino Sehgal was presenting This Variation, a space in darkness, a hidden place in which a series of people awaited visitors and, when the moment was right, sang songs and offered the experience of living a piece of art as something fully sensory.

Sehgal, Boston reminded me, rejected the idea that art had to have a physical expression, that is, it had to be a painting, a sculpture, an artifact or installation; he treated the idea of a written explanation of his work with equal disdain. Therefore, as she’d told me before, the only way to be able to say that you’d seen a Sehgal work was to see it live. For example, there wasn’t even a record of that piece in the thick Documenta 13 catalogue, as Sehgal had asked Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez to respect his desire to be invisible.

Pure Duchamp, I thought. And I remembered that sunshade Duchamp was working on one summer in Cadaqués, which, in the end, turned out to be to shelter him from the sun or, to put it a better way, so he could settle into the shadows, his favorite territory. Where was that sun shelter now? Only in the minds of those who saw it or enjoyed the shade beneath it. Since they’d all been dying off, there were very few left — if any — before that “canvas” (once a silent work of art) would disappear from living memory.

Yes, it was clear: art goes by like life. And Sehgal was an illustrious heir to Duchamp. But was he innovating? Could it be said that he belonged to some avant-garde?

No, I decided, he wasn’t really innovating. But since when was it necessary for art to be dedicated to innovation? This is exactly what I was wondering when I walked into This Variation, Sehgal’s dark room.

(That night, I coincidentally stumbled upon a long interview with Chus Martínez on my computer — finally I saw her face — and her declarations helped me gauge whether today’s artists were innovators or not. In the interview Chus explained that Documenta 13 wasn’t like other exhibitions; it wasn’t just for looking at, but could also be lived. And when she was asked if art was still being innovative or if it was more schematic, she answered: “In art we don’t innovate, that happens in an industry. Art is neither creative nor innovative. That we leave to the world of shoes, cars, aeronautics. It’s an industrial vocabulary. Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you. Art, of course, neither innovates nor creates.”)

Not yet knowing that Documenta 13 was for living and, especially, not knowing “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” I walked into This Variation and advanced through the dark room without seeing anything or sensing anyone’s presence. I even forgot that there might be more than one person or ghost in there.

Soon I found out I was not alone. Suddenly, someone, who seemed more accustomed to the semidarkness of the place, went past me and intentionally brushed against my shoulder. I reacted, prepared to put up some resistance if anyone tried to touch me again. But it didn’t happen. For the rest of the day, I wouldn’t be able to get the feel of that touch out of my head.

Soon afterward, I thought I noticed — it was impossible to see anything but darkness — that the person who’d brushed up against me was dancing away toward the back of the room, gathering there with other souls, who, when they distinguished my presence in that impenetrable obscurity, abandoned their silence and also began to dance, humming strange, slight songs or chants, almost like Hare Krishna.

I walked out of there thinking it had all been more than odd and that, depending on how you looked at it, it was terrible to discover the significance of a stranger brushing against one’s shoulder.

“Well?” was all Boston asked when she saw me.

I understood that she wanted to know how my experience inside the gloomy room had been, but I found it difficult to communicate what had happened to me there. I had the impression I’d just seen something that wasn’t art about some matter, that wasn’t discursive or about anything weighty that I’d spent a lifetime fleeing and not managing to get away from; it seemed to me that I’d just seen art itself. But I didn’t know exactly how to explain that to Boston; I had to think more about it; so I opted to answer evasively, telling her I’d just been reminded of the canon of Poitiers.

The word canon sounded strange in that context. Of what? she asked. Someone Montaigne wrote about, I said, a preacher who didn’t leave his room for thirty years and gave some extraordinary excuses for not leaving. Sounds like Ratzinger, remarked Boston; they say he never moves from his office in the Vatican.