The Illogic of Kassel

31

We strolled along, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that walking cleared the mind, or ordered it to run more freely, helping us to speak more genuine sentences, perhaps because they were less carefully crafted. But from time to time, a phrase slipped out that was spontaneous, which nonetheless sounded complex, so much so that it even seemed preplanned and dropped like lead into a pool of uranium. I remember one that I let loose when we were still two hundred meters from the beautiful, French-style Orangerie Palace. I wonder, I said, whether a compost pile can be a work of art; I’m not saying it can’t be, indeed, maybe even the fact that it’s so far from being able to be art is precisely what makes it so. Pim didn’t answer. Her silence was interrupted by a phone call from Chus Martínez in Berlin. I realized straightaway it was the first time I was properly close to the person actually responsible for my invitation, unless Boston was toying with me again, phoning Pim and pretending to be Chus. But I soon saw it really was Chus on the other end of the line. Pim passed her over to me, and, luckily, I decided not to ask what she was expecting me to do at the antiquated table in the Dschingis Khan. That would have been a mistake. I saved myself from a scolding — from being asked, for example, how it was possible I didn’t have any ideas, when she’d entrusted me with the Chinese number so I could find out how to make good creative use of the absurdity of the commission.

I think that underneath it all, I was afraid Chus would say she had a feeling they’d tricked her when they told her I was one of the few avant-garde people around in boring old Spain. I’m glad I didn’t for a moment lose sight of the far from unlikely possibility that Chus — famous for being very clever — had invited me to Documenta to put me to the test. It was better to see things that way and not make mistakes I might regret later on; better to pitch myself onto that wild path of the most positive side and believe that with her illogical invitation to the Chinese restaurant, she’d endeavored to give my creativity a push, that is, she’d endeavored to see what I made of it when confronted with this oriental commission that made no sense.

I opted to see things this way and not more bitterly. I talked to Chus about something else, about Barcelona and the pro-independence rally. Chus knew my city well because she’d lived there for many years; it was a comfortable topic for a telephone conversation. I studied at a school in La Pedrera, she said, and it was really cool. I was surprised, not that she’d said “cool,” but that she’d studied in a school inside a Gaudí building. I’d never met anyone before who’d studied at such a curious school. Fortunately, at this point in the conversation I was also careful not to succumb to the temptation to make cheap psychological interpretations, saying, for example, that her vocation as curator or art agent must have been born between the four walls of her Gaudiesque school.

The problem was that, biting my tongue in order not to make any mistakes, I sank into excessive silence. She too was silent at times. And I suffered a brief moment of panic, a sort of sudden terror that must have run, trembling, all the way along the invisible wire linking our respective phones.

That silence was like a powder keg. Well, Chus said finally, we’ll see each other tomorrow night for dinner. I relaxed. I was going to ask the address of the restaurant, but that would have once again shown poor reflexes and imagination, as the curatorial team office had already sent it to me various times by email. I decided to fall back on a McGuffin, though none occurred to me, and right at that moment, unable to avoid it, I sneezed deafeningly. Twice. Sorry about the smudges in the air, I said. She laughed, and I took the opportunity to somehow end it there, passing the phone back to Pim, who caught it in midair without dropping her constant false smile.

The occurrence of smudges in the air had possibly saved the day and perhaps I could feel rather smug. But my happiness didn’t last long. While Pim was talking to Chus about what a lovely morning it was — yes, that’s what they talked about — I began to slip dangerously toward that torment reserved for anxious minds that the French call l’esprit de l’escalier (staircase wit), which consists of thinking of the right thing to say too late: going through the moment when you find the perfect response, but it’s no longer any use to you because you’re already on your way down the stairs and should have given the ingenious reply sooner, when you were at the top. And so, reviewing the brief conversation with Chus, reconstructing it piece by piece, word by word, I began to see what I could have said but didn’t, and ended up wondering whether, when I went back to Barcelona on Saturday and told people about my trip to Kassel, I’d realize what I should have said or done in the city but didn’t. . And, well, if I wrote the story of this journey one day, I went on thinking, I’d no doubt work with that staircase wit. I should be so lucky. .

Minutes later, Pim pointed out a mound in the distance that seemed part of the park but was actually a strange garden in the shape of a hill: Doing Nothing Garden, the work of Song Dong, almost the only Chinese artist — apart from Yan Lei — invited to Documenta.

The most logical thing for our walk would have been to pass alongside that hill-turned-garden before we got to the Orangerie, but very soon afterward, something unexpected took us out of our way.

I am going to digress here a moment, just briefly, to skip ahead to something that happened later that night in my cabin, when I changed my name and started to call myself Piniowsky.

Yes, Piniowsky.

That happened at night, when Autre lost his provisional surname and started to call himself Piniowsky too, a minor character in a story by Joseph Roth called The Bust of the Emperor.

All I’m going to say in advance is that after the sudden change, I began to feel relieved, happy too, because my own name that I’d had for so many years had come to feel like a dead weight and was really nothing more than something from a youth I’d spun out too long, in my opinion. In fact, my own name, in my mouth, always gave me a funny feeling.

I will also say that during that night, now as Piniowsky, I thought deeply about Huyghe and his installation Untilled. It seemed obvious to me that only art at the margins, distanced from galleries and museums, could be truly innovative. Huyghe showed discreet wisdom by taking the last route that appeared open to the avant-garde, as well as foresight in seeking out a tucked-away place in the Karlsaue for his pessimistic landscape of humus and a pink-legged Spanish dog; perhaps it was a tribute to a hypothetical art of the outskirts of the outskirts.

Maybe, I thought that night in my room, Untilled created an idea of a return to a time before art. In an age as uncertain as the current one in which everything was changing at incredible speed, it spoke of the necessity of no longer making art as we’d understood it up to now, of the need to learn to stand apart, perhaps to be like Tino Sehgal (Sehgal didn’t wish to be visible and seemed to propose returning to the mortal dark room that’s always been there). It was as if Huyghe were telling us: when all’s said and done, hasn’t the avant-garde fundamentally always sprung from a need to sweep everything away, to get back to the obscurity of the beginning?

And might not that flight from a dead art be an attempt by Huyghe to go beyond simply sweeping everything aside: to head toward the outskirts of the outskirts and then on toward nothing, literally toward nothing? Was the most innovative art of my day going toward nothing? Or was it going toward something I still hadn’t found and that it would perhaps do me a lot of good to discover?

But let’s get back to the morning of that same day, when Autre and I were still in one piece and Piniowsky hadn’t yet even raised his head. My mind hadn’t become so tangled in so many questions as it had that night in the “attempted thinking cabin” of my room.

Let’s get back to that fine morning when I still allowed myself to be carried along by my passion for walking around and glancing at things like a profound idler, like a passerby who might be happy. Everything was going quite well, and even though I was dying of thirst, I was catching the smile (possibly false at times) that hardly seemed to leave Pim’s lips. I ended up in such a great mood, I was even able to laugh thinking of the anguish that assaulted me almost punctually in the evenings. It was easy to do that early in the day, by which I mean that the very easy, heartfelt mockery of my melancholy tribulations wasn’t so commendable.

How did I get on such a high? There are always means. I made use of a McGuffin — let’s call it an intimate, secret one — a McGuffin that parodied the most horrendous kitsch language and consisted — I held back a giggling fit — of telling myself that there would be no shadows if the sun were not shining. It was enough to make a person laugh his head off, shedding four pounds of solemnity all at once.