The Illogic of Kassel

45

“The horror, the horror,” whispered Kurtz, that Conrad character holed up in the Congo. For a moment, Momentary Monument IV struck me as the twisted prolongation of that madman’s harsh mental landscape, but also an outrageous landscape that fit well with the figure dressed in mourning shouting about the destruction of Europe.

Momentary Monument IV was an immense mountain of industrial ruins, for which Lara Favaretto claimed responsibility. The monstrous agglomeration of four hundred tons of scrap was piled up on the other side of the Hauptbahnhof and protected by tense security guards who, at the possibility of a predictable accident (children were the most likely potential victims), made sure no one attempted to climb on that criminal heap of sharp, old bits of metal.

With some disdain, María Boston said that the work, according to the catalog, was about the instability caused by the fluctuation between the lasting and the fleeting. And saying it, she used a metallic voice that pitilessly distorted hers, which made me hate that momentary, monumental mound of trash by Favaretto even more.

But beyond feeling sad about the voluntary deformation of a marvelous voice, I wondered what the artist of scrap iron might have said about her own work. That mise en scène of a monumental destruction was, above all else, insufferably ugly. Without a doubt, we could have spared ourselves the visit and I would have been grateful. Although I felt enthusiastic about many of the things I was seeing in Kassel, I hadn’t lost my critical eye, and looking at Momentary Monument IV, nothing better occurred to me than to think of Las Meninas by the painter Velázquez, and of the music of Mozart and Wagner, and I was on the verge of bursting into violent sobs.

We still had time to get back to the old station, where a project called The Refusal of Time, by the South African artist William Kentridge, awaited us in a large, old warehouse. As we were walking there — seeing that, in spite of the time of day, I was continuing to feel joy and an exaggerated interest and curiosity for everything — I again wondered if it wasn’t strange for there not to be even the slightest sign of anguish in my head. Normally by this time, my body coincided with the loss of the day’s energy, and along with my mental fatigue, anguish perfectly undermined my good mood.

Not that I hadn’t seen a few signs of anguish, but I’d rejected them so emphatically and they’d disappeared so swiftly that even I was surprised. Normally, anguish erupts simply when I’m reminded of my age and how few years, long-lived or not, are left to me.

Maybe, since I’d modified my daily routine and slept so badly the previous night, the unimaginative, secret regulator of my moods had been misled, and I’d been brought to a new, long-forgotten sensation: a good mood at this difficult time of day.

I thought: Let’s hope it lasts. It was perfect timing, since I didn’t have any of Dr. Collado’s pills and I had to have dinner with Chus Martínez and I’d better arrive with a good vibe.

Taking for granted that I’d like Kentridge’s work, I started to look at The Refusal of Time, a spectacle on which the physicist Peter L. Galison had worked, as well as several composers (Philip Miller and Catherine Meyburgh); it was an explosion of music, images, shadow play, with a Da Vinci-esque memory machine, easing the visitor into a fabulous, epic dimension, where time eventually began to be canceled.

The Kentridgean narration, Boston whispered to me, was a great dance of shadows, among which the artist — the artist in abstract — would appear and disappear, crossing an imaginary space of geographical maps. All this, according to her, should be read as a reflection on time that was refracted as it crossed places and people’s lives and also in the different zones of the earth, the dawns and dusks, until all was united in a cosmic whole.

Though I was still keen to like Kentridge’s work, Boston’s words complicated everything for me. What did she mean? Had she memorized and recited this speech for me? Did she herself understand what she was saying? I arrived at the conclusion that she definitely did not, though I also thought it was much better that way. Because in the end, not having been able to easily follow its development, I found the work opening many doors for me; in fact, it had a beneficial effect, allowing me to sense that maybe art forms were changing and increasingly relating differently to one another and to everything else. Perhaps, among other tasks, it had fallen to me to guess where was the sign that stood out and made these new relations visible. Would I know how to find it? It seemed to me that this sign was an ellipsis. I sensed that, when Boston tackled the less well-known aspect of Kentridge as a draftsman, this was something she was undoubtedly better at explaining than The Refusal of Time. It was interesting, she said, this mania of his that in all his drawings you could see what was there, but you could also see a trace of the previous drawing. . She didn’t know anyone else who drew like this. He had, on the other hand, a brilliant and at the same time naïve side: he used dotted lines to make his characters’ gazes visible, managing to show something as impossible to describe in painting or drawing as the visual behavior of people’s eyes that we cannot see.

I understood that those dots that sometimes served to unite glances were just a preamble to a sort of uncertainty that did not exactly invite Reason. Antonin Artaud would have so enjoyed feeling his way along those dots, shrieking intensely while touching them, maybe turning them into music for losers, heroes of our time, poets of our unique and ephemeral existence. .

Was there ever a better drawing of the human condition than ellipses, with their cheerful suspension of what, after all, only aspires to remain eternally suspended?

For me, the image most related to perpetual suspension will always be the patio of my school, when we pupils left for home in the afternoons and little by little the shadows grew and the patio was left abandoned like a quadrangular eternity — tidy and forever disturbing — offering us the condensed pearl of our school weariness.