The Illogic of Kassel

8

“Make sure you see the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff. I’m told they’ve outdone themselves.” Alicia Framis, an artist friend drawn to avant-garde ideas, wrote this to me three days before I’d be leaving for Kassel. I’d never heard the names she mentioned, but understood they must be artists that might be of interest to me, and would provide me with something of which I really was entirely ignorant. (This made me enthusiastic about traveling to Germany to enter that universe.)

“William Kentridge’s project The Refusal of Time in a warehouse at the old station is worth seeing,” another friend wrote just a couple of hours after Alicia Framis’s email. And a good friend from Getafe sent me, at the end of the day, a message commenting on how interesting she’d found “Mark Dion’s stunning library, and, most of all, an oblique clock by an Albanian sculptor.”

To convince myself that it was going to be a really great trip, I began to think that there was common ground between the great expeditions of yesteryear and the solitary one I was embarking on with my sights set on Kassel. There lay the danger, an indispensable element of any worthwhile journey. Because danger, I told myself, always brings the pleasure of feeling fear. And fear is fantastic, especially fear at the prospect of finding oneself faced with strange, unfamiliar things, maybe even new ones.

All good journeys incorporate the infinite pleasure and great excitement that moments of great fear also produce. I began to think about this and felt excited from the moment I sensed that I was traveling to Kassel with a unique sensation: an intense and maybe terrifying pleasure similar to what I felt one night casually heading down a dark alley completely unknown to me. There, I suddenly noticed a breath on the back of my neck, dry but phantasmagoric, because I spun around and there was no one there. Knowing I was actually alone in that alley, I kept walking, but found it impossible to act like I hadn’t noticed; it was impossible to overlook the fact that the ghostly breathing was still there: cold, icy, rasping, discreet. How to describe it better? There was nobody there, but it felt like someone, with noticeable regularity, was huffing, and his glacial breath, in a very odd way, God knows, was landing directly on the back of my neck.