The Illogic of Kassel (22 page)

I was also emotional inside Artaud’s cave, because on top of everything, each time I looked off into the distance, I thought I saw the sea. It was a receding sea, which revealed a more distant sea, and in the end only allowed me to surmise a series of seas without coastlines. This visual effect seemed to tell me I should dare to go farther, unafraid, far from any handful of dust or misunderstanding of this world, that I should dare to go toward other conjectures, also without coastlines.

Under the circumstances, I was barely able to follow the thread of the film by Javier Téllez: when I wasn’t sunk in conjecture about a series of seas without coastlines, I was imagining what I could say to María Boston and Ada if they suddenly decided to ask me what I thought that invisible breeze (which possibly contributed to preventing the collapse of my mental state) was like. If the question arose, I thought I’d tell them it was like that well-known current vibrating between two poles of the tiny voltaic column that made the first electric telegraph possible; that fiendish spark was capable of leaping miles and miles over mountains and entire continents.

I don’t know how it could have happened, but when we came out of that grotto, I thought I saw the star Sirius high in the sky, and then very soon afterward, as if there were a logical connection between the two, I again met the young madwoman in mourning proclaiming, in an increasingly imposing manner, her desperation over the destruction of Europe. Confronted by this juxtaposition, I was aware of being very conscious that I would long remember the majestic, somber beauty of the scene and that she was involuntarily forming a part of it; it would be one of the key images of my journey to Kassel. And that is because, among other things, on suddenly seeing the bereaved young woman’s shadow in the night’s first electric lights and taking into account the fact that Sirius was high up in
the radiance of the eternal
, the figure of the madwoman took on a strange sort of dignity for a moment, as if all of a sudden, there in the Kassel dusk, you could see that only she was telling the truth.

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.

46

A hundred meters from the Hauptbahnhof, on the ground floor of a building in a squalid alley—I was thinking of my younger days and an old terror that would have been upon me by now in the form of a dry, icy breath directly on the back of my neck—we went in to see
One Page of Babaouo
, the singular installation by the Portuguese artist António Jobim.

Ignoring the long line, we flashed our passes, going in to see that performance directly inspired by
Babaouo
, the film script Salvador Dalí wrote in the 1930s. As was to be expected, we saw a disconcerting show (considering that Kassel wasn’t exactly known for dancing to a logical beat).

Boston had no information about that performance. She hadn’t found the time to see it and, moreover, she hated Jobim because she remembered his first visit to Kassel in the middle of a February blizzard earlier that year. At eighty-five, he was the oldest artist invited to Documenta and he arrived in the city in February to set
One Page of Babaouo
in motion. He arrived with the strange reputation of having a tendency to disappear, to vanish into thin air, to get lost; so Boston was ordered to make sure that didn’t happen. But he’s eighty-five years old! she’d said. It doesn’t matter, they told her, this is an unpredictable man, who likes nothing better than to slip under the radar. That a man of his age, in the middle of a city where it was snowing copiously, was going to get lost still seemed impossible. But it happened. António Jobim was a genius of disappearances. He arrived on the coldest day of the year and went to that squalid building in the alley (that inhospitable ground floor by the Hauptbahnhof, where they’d begun to rehearse his version of a page from Dali’s
Babaouo
). He had lunch with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez in the Osteria restaurant, singing them an emotional rendition of the fado “Não Quero Amar.” Afterward, they accompanied him to the hotel so he could have a siesta, and they put Boston in charge of setting up surveillance and looking after him as soon as she saw him reappear in the lobby.

They didn’t see him again for two days. María Boston never found out how he’d outwitted her surveillance. She had to spend all her time looking for him all over the city, calling the police, hotels, brothels, anyone who might have seen him. Jobim was originally from Angola, and in the snow of that German city, if only by pure contrast, his blackness might have made him visible, but no one saw him anywhere. He didn’t reappear until two days later, when they’d almost given him up for dead. All Jobim said was that the chocolate in Kassel—actually, all the chocolate of the Hessenland region—was very good. At that moment, if she’d been able to, Boston would have murdered him on the spot.

The work by that unexpected fanatic of Hessenlandian chocolate began with the first notes of the traditional Catalan tune “Per tu ploro” as a curtain representing a vast and desolate mineral landscape was raised. The convulsive and catastrophic shapes of the rocks offered a clear notion of an ancient geological delirium. A large, silver spoon came directly out of a rock of pure iron oxide and diagonally crossed the exposed, somewhat Angolan landscape. In the spoon could be seen two eggs on a plate. . . . Then the curtain went down and came back up again, now with the tango “Renacimiento”
playing in the background. The stage was full of cyclists, who, with loaves of bread on their heads and blindfolded, intertwined very slowly among tango-dancing couples. When the cyclists and dancers disappeared, a black woman could be seen center stage playing a harp and wearing a Chanel suit. Every once in a while she’d hit the harp brutally with loaves of bread she’d taken out of a basket set beside her. Then she’d calm down and just play. When her piece was finished, she threw the loaves and began to demand that the curtain fall, which it finally did so that everything would start all over again, that is, the Catalan
sardana
came back.

I do sometimes find
sardanas
moving; they remind me of unknown ancestors, making me cry out of a sentimental confusion. However, that spectacle essentially reminded me that I had to phone Barcelona, ask how everything was going back there. How was everything in my dull country? I noticed that it felt like an eternity since I’d left my city.

47

Ada Ara said goodbye, as she had to get back to the office. Boston said she was going to stay awhile longer, and we sat down in Die Büste Bar, near Kochstrasse.

There were children running around, chasing one another between the tables under the indulgent eyes of their parents and grandparents. The bar, full of adults crowded together almost fighting to get a drink, wasn’t the best place for a conversation. But we talked. Boston told me she was looking forward to growing old, to being able to walk more slowly and dress like an elderly lady. She managed to surprise me.

“Walk more slowly?”

I looked at her feet. She was wearing the golden sandals that had so fascinated me before, and I imagined them destroyed by the passing years. At the same time, I couldn’t help but be surprised at her sentimental, human notes infiltrating my cold investigation into the state of contemporary art (I might even say “too human”). What were those notes doing there? It occurred to me to ask her if her desire to walk more slowly might have something to do with the slow treatment of time she’d perceived in Kentridge’s work. Not at all, she said. What an idea. What was true, she said, was that she was becoming an increasingly fanatical walker, so much so that she was confident that as an old lady she wouldn’t have to give up her walks, they would just be at a slower pace, down the hallway of her house, better than ever. She would always be dressed in strange clothes; she dreamed of wearing very thin dresses with thick socks and, as night came on, falling asleep with her head back and her mouth hanging open . . .