The Illogic of Kassel

61

Was Chus keeping an eye on me from high windows? Was she really spending her time spying on my attempt — my secret, perhaps my only, contribution of real interest to Documenta — at turning time into space? Did I really believe that she had picked up on my desire to spend the night in the territory of putrefaction called Untilled because, once immersed in this disconsolate chronicle of universal history (that process of incessant decomposition), I would escape from history and try to restore the timelessness of paradise? Had Chus discovered that I saw Untilled as a paradise, which could be something difficult for any sensible person to accept? Had she guessed from the high windows that I was trying to merge my life with the environment? Did she know I believed that in time you could only be yourself, while in space you could become someone else? Did she know that it seemed to me time didn’t give us much of a chance, that it only knew how to send dry, icy breaths on the backs of our necks in fascinating alleyways? Space seemed wide and full of possibilities, where logic, out of pure logic, always lost its footing.

Thinking about all this, I smiled. How could I imagine that from high windows Chus was spying with binoculars on my tranquil frame of mind in that far-flung corner of Karlsaue?

The smile stayed on my face for a long time, until I saw that for the umpteenth time, the hound was going toward the puddle near the statue with a beehive for a head, and I noticed a soft sound that was difficult to locate, a noise that seemed to be trying to give me a clue to help me decipher the intangible, the incomprehensible aspects of that territory.

The intangible? I kept my eye on the dog, who had gone toward the statue as if she’d guessed that I was buzzing with ideas and I desired to disorganize the insufferable order of the bees. I discovered that the slight but insistent sound was coming from the big puddle: from a tiny red toy boat that had been abandoned by some child the previous day. As it rolled on the water, it emitted a sad moan, perhaps mistakenly trying to provide a complete coded key to that mysterious place.

Perhaps that noise formed part of the secret history of Untilled’s territory. But I didn’t want to investigate it, preferring to concentrate on Tino Sehgal’s idea that art goes by like life. Did we not yet know how to see that life and art were walking together forming a unity, just as we experienced, for example, in This Variation? I was thinking about that when I started wondering where the caretaker of the dogs was at that moment. He was nowhere to be found, he’d disappeared; maybe he’d thrown himself into his work now that he knew I wasn’t planning to run off with his hound.

That pink-legged dog seemed increasingly persistent about the puddle. Helped greatly by the first light of the day, I focused my concentration on the territory (mine again, momentarily) and observed the perfect harmony between the different elements that composed the, let’s say, “very difficult” space called Untilled. In a short time I came to the conclusion that Huyghe’s whole intervention was a sort of brilliant synthesis of what was in this Documenta. I remembered something Boston had told me. Huyghe had been a member of Documenta’s “honorary advisory committee,” which took part in preparations for the grand exhibition, and this probably brought him close to the works that would be shown, and possibly everything influenced him, making his participation very special, for in fact, according to Huyghe himself, without realizing it he had absorbed the projects of all the other artists. “Encountering many works being created gives a certain energy to your own; it’s stimulating,” Huyghe had said.

As soon as I knew that Huyghe had said this, I thought with an obvious sense of humor — admitting the unmissable disparity — that something very similar had occurred to me at Documenta. It was beyond doubt that, since I’d arrived in Kassel — surely thanks to the third sense of the impulse, the indirect effects of “the push” from Ryan Gander’s invisible breeze — absorbing everything had given me an absolutely unheard-of creative energy and enthusiasm, and had even left me feeling happy at my habitually melancholy time of day.

Kassel had infected me with creativity, enthusiasm, a short-circuiting of rational language. Moments and discontinuities had me searching for meaning where there was no logic in order to create new worlds.

Maybe so much optimism was due to the fact that there in Kassel I’d recovered the best memories from my beginnings as an artist, as well as my admiration for those who had made writing their destiny: Kafka, Mallarmé, Joyce, Michaux, those for whom life was barely conceivable outside of literature, who made literature with their lives.

María Boston had also told me that being on the advisory committee had allowed Huyghe, in his own words, “to understand Documenta as the coexistence of thoughts, not all necessarily subjugated to theory and not all anthropocentric.”

A unique, memorable spot — that Manderley of my spirit would be difficult to forget. While I was saying this to myself and thinking how life and art went by at the same time, the dog, tired of the puddle, came over to where I was, and for a few minutes the poor animal and I became inseparable. We even came to compose, in those first rays of the day’s light, a single lonely, tragic figure, the way a bull and torero sometimes fit together in the most celebrated bullfights. And the curious thing was that the dog seemed to tune in with what I was feeling; her mood also seemed to be in a state of constant expansion. Dogs may not always understand the nuances of thought of the humans they make friends with, but they feel what they feel, and in this case there was no doubt that the pink-legged dog was with me, participating in my discreet but profoundly euphoric mood.

The caretaker reappeared all of a sudden and with him the other dog, and in a few tenths of a second the hound betrayed me and went off with them to where the cement slabs were piled up, as if she was deliberately moving away from where the secret history of Untilled emerged.

I decided to leave the territory, but first I had some doubts. I’m going, but I’m staying, I began to say. Then I began to play in my mind: I’m going but I think I’ll stay, because in reality, after my hours spent here, I am the place, the place itself, I am Untilled, and a place never moves. I’m staying because I have only calm where I’ve been, only calm where nobody tells me who I am or knows who I’ve been. I’ll stay because this dawn is slow and splinters, because all these things are familiar to me: this mist without fog, the warm cloths applied to my injuries in childhood, that winding drive I have to descend if I decide to leave.

After saying this to myself, I left.

And leaving behind those good moments, I thought it would be possible to remember that farewell to Untilled territory with the same exactness I remembered a work of art when I desired to: a work like my favorite Édouard Manet painting, Le serveuse de bocks (The Waitress).

Art, I thought then, is something that is happening to us.

I left aware that just leaving there was art, and knowing that when I had completely gone away, I would occasionally dream I’d returned to that territory, that I was returning to Untilled, and the drive leading to the place was winding away before me, twisting and turning to reveal, as I advanced, the silhouette of some kind of imposing space, secretive and silent, where everything — absolutely everything, even what I didn’t notice — had great importance, because actually nothing there had been tilled, nothing there had ever been truly cultivated; deep down — notice I say deep down—everything was all still to be done.