The Illogic of Kassel

16

Feeling helped along by the invisible pull, I arrived at the rotunda of the Fridericianum, where I saw a work that was christened The Brain by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Installed by Carolyn herself, what was exhibited there — separated from the rest of the museum behind glass — attempted in some way to summarize the lines of thought developed in Documenta 13. It was a microcosm representing the puzzle posed by the whole huge exhibition. It seemed to me perhaps an excessively arbitrary brain, given that it brought together Giorgio Morandi’s bottles painted in Fascist Bologna with sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, linking them with objects damaged during the Lebanese civil war, or books carved out of stone from the Afghan valley (where the Taliban wrought destruction on age-old Buddhas), and the last bottle of perfume that had belonged to Eva Braun.

That brain, I felt, lacked a certain internal coherence. It gave the impression that other, very different artistic elements could have been brought together and the result would have been similar. Everything exhibited in The Brain seemed more piled up than selected. I remarked on this to Boston, and she said I could be wrong, above all if I wasn’t considering the fact that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev believed that confusion in art was a truly marvelous thing.

Confusion? I remembered having read that many visitors to Documenta 13 took a firm stand on the confusion they felt viewing the eclecticism of the large display, although many mentioned it not as a criticism, but to emphasize the brilliant plurality of its focal points, the sweeping scope that the assemblage managed to achieve, and the fact that it was an interesting metaphor for our historical moment.

I remembered this, but I continued to be among those who found The Brain baffling. Perhaps because of that, I sought further information. With the intention of discovering more about that rotunda, I asked additional questions. I soon found out, for example, that Braun’s perfume bottle — undoubtedly the object that most caught my attention — had made it to our day in one piece because it had been found in April 1945 by the American war correspondent and artist Lee Miller in the dictator’s bathroom, in the apartment Hitler and Braun occupied on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich.

In a vitrine in the Fridericianum there was also a bath towel monogrammed with Adolf Hitler’s initials. Towel and perfume had been carried off by Lee Miller to her Munich hotel, and one could never know whether she ended up using those peculiar, possibly fetishistic, trophies of war in her daily life. Did it matter? Not much, in fact not at all. In any case, I thought if I’d found the towel, I wouldn’t have even touched it, it would have utterly repelled me. But that was me. In the same display case as the perfume and the towel with the initials A. H. were four photos of Lee Miller cheerfully immersed in Hitler’s bathtub. Apparently, the images had been judged frivolous and created a certain amount of polemic when they were published in the New York Times at the end of the war. I’d never seen those pictures before or even heard about them. They might be frivolous, I thought, but that wasn’t something that was overly obvious. What was very clear was that the bathtub was far more modern than any I’d ever had in all the different houses in my life. That is what I thought. It seemed a trifling detail, but maybe not. That bathtub was more modern than any bathtub of mine.

Soon afterward — as if I were ashamed of having thought that — I rubbed my face like I was trying to forget what had gone before. After that rubbing, I looked behind me toward the invisible breeze, as if it might be seen, and little by little a sinking feeling came over me. My sense of loss was the same as a person feels when, along the way, he turns back and sees the stretch he’s covered: the indifferent path is visible, its unbending trajectory expressing the irreversibility of time.

In the end that’s all that’s left, I thought, the backward glance perceiving nothingness. Perhaps that’s why I suddenly wanted, desperately, to look forward. But what I encountered was what I was running away from: the bad vibe Braun’s perfume bottle gave me and, of course, the same irreversible past that I had thought I left behind, including my steps around the brain that was preserved in that rotunda in the Fridericianum.

I was in Germany; it was the first time during the whole trip that I started to feel somewhat conscious of being there. We recognize that in journeys to countries by plane, we take time to truly land where we’ve set ourselves down. In my case, it wasn’t until I came upon A.H.’s towel and Braun’s perfume that I had the feeling for the first time that perhaps I had now landed on German soil. The Nazi artifacts and the presence of the irreversible past succeeded in making me come down to earth all at once, with a bump. There was the old horror, the giant stigma of interminable Nazi guilt. But did that constitute a landing? Perhaps I hadn’t completely set down and I should keep asking myself whether I was in Germany.

Shortly before leaving the Fridericianum, María Boston insisted on taking me to a separate room to see Sleeping Sickness, the strange work of a Thai artist, Pratchaya Phinthong. At first, what I thought I saw was a black smudge caught at the center of a large sheet of glass on top of a large table. But when I got closer I saw it wasn’t a little smudge. According to what was written on a small plaque, it was two tsetse flies, a fertile female and her sterile consort. In that instant — later on I would see more oddities — the work seemed extremely weird to me, very far from my idealized concept of avant-garde art.

Pratchaya Phinthong, Boston told me, was researching the ecological control of the tsetse fly, which spread sleeping sickness in humans. I was left confused, not knowing what to say, thinking of people I’d known who behaved just as though they had been bitten by that deadly fly.

Afterward, leaving the vicinity of the Fridericianum, I thought again of Eva Braun’s perfume bottle and ended up going off on the subject of guilt. That question came back to me like flies returning to an infected person in order to infect them twice as much. In my home country — a nation especially famous for its macabre civil war — guilt barely existed; that vulgarity was left to the ingenuous Germans. Nobody in Spain wasted time regretting having been a Nazi, or pro-Franco, or even a Catalan collaborator with the dictator in Madrid, an accomplice himself to the assassins of the Third Reich. In my country, we have always lived with our backs to the drama of Europe’s demise, possibly because — as we didn’t directly take part in either of the two world wars — all that was seen as other people’s business. Perhaps also it is because at bottom we’ve almost always lived in our own decline; we are so sunk in it, we don’t even recognize it.

You are in Germany, an inner voice seemed to want to repeat to me, reminding me somehow of the voice running through Europa, that Lars von Trier film that speaks to us, powerfully and obsessively, of the brutal ruination of the old continent.

“You are in Europa” was heard insistently in that film, and what the cameras showed us was a continent turned into a vast, infinite hospital.

As I came out of the Fridericianum, the voice telling me I was in Germany became unrelenting, and I felt it was likely that I had now finally, really landed. If that were so, I was in a country famous for combining intelligence and barbarism, one deeply familiar with remorse, which had spent years hesitating between feeling great pain for its sins and trying to feel a lesser regret; in short, a country whose citizens tried to find a reasonable balance between going overboard and placing too little emphasis on it, perhaps aware, on the one hand, that without memory they ran the risk of turning monstrous again, but also with too much memory, the risk was that they’d remain firmly stuck in the horror of the past.