The Illogic of Kassel (5 page)

When I arrived at the Frankfurt airport, contrary to what I’d been told, no one was waiting for me. At first, I was incredulous. One always fears these kinds of things are going to happen, and they often do. When they do, one even feels slightly upset: it’s the same sensation as feeling lost in a strange place without knowing where to spend the night or who might shelter you in a distant city.

I tried to remember the name of the young lady who was supposed to meet me to help me get the train to Kassel. Finally I remembered: she was called Alka and was Croatian. That’s what I remembered hearing from Pim Durán, whose telephone number I’d had the good idea to save in my cell phone. I called her to say I was in Frankfurt and nobody had come to meet me. How odd, said Pim Durán. Hang up, and I’ll call you right back. I hung up, beginning to plan my return to Barcelona. After all, now I had a justification for leaving. Actually, I had two. The other would be that at the last moment, on arriving in Frankfurt, I’d realized that the labyrinth of the avant-garde of contemporary art just made me laugh and I was backing out, returning that same day to Barcelona and to Catalonia’s National Day celebrations. But I couldn’t use that miserable excuse because I’d systematically forbidden myself to laugh, as so many do, at certain types of avant-garde art aspiring to originality. I’d forbidden myself because I knew that it was always quite easy for idiots to insult that sort of art, and I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of people. I detested all those ominous voices very common in my country that displayed their supposed lucidity and frequently proclaimed fatalistically that we were living in a dead time for art. I guessed that, behind this easy tittering, there was always a hidden resentment deep down, a murky hatred toward those who occasionally try to gamble, to do something new or at least different; this tittering hides a morbid grudge against those who are aware that, as artists, they’re in a privileged position to fail where the rest of the world wouldn’t dare, and that’s why they try to create risky works of art that would lack meaning if they didn’t contain the possibility of failure at their core.

I had systematically forbidden myself to laugh at avant-garde art, though without losing sight of the possibility that today’s artists were a pack of ingenues, a bunch of Candides who didn’t notice anything, collaborators unaware that they were collaborating with the powers that be. Of course, so I wouldn’t get entirely discouraged, I kept in mind a novel by Ignacio Vidal-Folch,
The Plastic Head
, in which he laid out a funny sketch of the business of visual arts, with its museum directors, critics, gallery owners, professors of aesthetics, and (as a dispensable element given the abundance on offer) its artists. It was a tale that intelligently and energetically set out the paradox of the most furious and radical visual arts having turned into an ornament of the nation. Vidal-Folch—who is essentially a man of letters—showed some sympathy for the poor artists, who, though they were the final and weakest links in the chain, seeming to him still in some way dangerous and powerful.

Maybe because I’m a man of letters and still believe that one can be somewhat optimistic in this world—to tell the truth, I only believe that in the mornings when I enjoy an enviable mood—I was on the side of some of the artists. This was a choice I’d made at a certain point in my life and I’d promised myself that, even if I found some reason to, I’d never change. One sometimes needs to think that not all the strangers surrounding us are horrible beings. I think I was telling myself this, or something similar, when my cell phone rang.

“Alka speaking. I am here in the airport. And you?”

“Alka!”

I wanted to love her, you’ll have to understand. When one spends a long time alone in the Frankfurt airport, one goes crazy at receiving even the tiniest crumbs of affection.

The strange thing is that, after I exclaimed her name, from then on, over the course of six exhausting telephone calls before she finally figured out my exact position in the airport, she never again spoke to me in my own language. She spoke in English, German, and even Croatian, languages I neither speak nor understand. Maybe that’s why we took over an hour to find each other. There was no way to clarify anything. Alka had clearly memorized those first three sentences she’d said when I’d answered my phone, but she didn’t know how to say anything else in Spanish.

After almost an hour of countless telephonic vicissitudes, we finally saw each other face-to-face. By then I was on the very verge of insanity. Suddenly, Alka appeared with an enormously wide smile and she was so beautiful and exotic, so irremediably sexy, that I lost all capacity for rage. I didn’t complain at all about the wait, turning into a silly fool and probably moving and acting as if I’d been stupidly seduced. I followed her obediently to the train. Halfway to Kassel—perhaps because in spite of many attempts, we could only manage to understand each other through physical and sometimes quite confusing signals—I started imagining that she, in our unspoken language, was telling me it was very hot and she kept repeating this until finally showing me that she wasn’t wearing anything under her skirt. I took a good look. It was true, and then I threw myself on Alka, and she encouraged me to continue and said to me: Yes, yes, destroy me,
destrózame
!

12

Setting aside that torrid scene, I returned to the real world, where I confirmed once again that everything was monotonous, and poor Alka, as far as I could tell from her ridiculous gestures, was describing something she’d eaten the previous night in Kassel, which was quite possibly a hamburger, although it might also have been, according to the drawing her fingers sketched out several times, an ant.

I told myself the latter was true, that her story wasn’t as humdrum as I believed, but I had no way of knowing. I decided to turn my gaze toward the landscape framed by the train window: monotonous villages without church steeples to break the flat perspectives, all the houses the same height, a pure apotheosis of tedium. I remembered something Roland Barthes had written about his admired and later so reviled China, what he’d commented about the Chinese villages seen from afar: all so insipid, he said, because of their lack of steeples, all absolutely insipid, like Chinese tea.

“So, you’ve been eating ants,” I said. I knew that luckily she wouldn’t understand me.

Soon afterward, after arriving at the more modern of the two stations in Kassel, we took a taxi to the Hotel Hessenland, located at the top of Königsstrasse, an important thoroughfare in the city. I still find it difficult to forget the trip between the station and the hotel, because all along the way, it seemed like people in the street were stopping all of a sudden when they saw me go by, standing and following me with their gazes, as if saying: It’s about time you got here.

Were they expecting someone and confusing me with him? That was really weird. How could I think that passersby were staring at me when in reality the opposite was happening and nobody—I well knew—was expecting me in Kassel?

Now I know what was happening to me was that I felt so alone, I had to imagine people were waiting for me to arrive like a breath of fresh air. Still unhinged from thinking everybody might be waiting for me there, I crossed the threshold of the Hessenland. I thought the receptionist, who was brokenly speaking my language, received me as if she thought it was about time I got there. Answering one of my questions, she told me that Karlsaue Park, the forest, and the Dschingis Khan restaurant were more or less on the opposite side of the city.

“
Muy lejos
,” I heard her say. Very far away.

Then, she told me about the forest and explained that there was a great variety of birds and, for her taste, very few squirrels. That was what she said, and it struck me as so exaggeratedly trivial, I even suspected she’d received orders to be that way, that is, to be so banal. I decided to surprise her and ask if what she really meant to tell me was that in Kassel there were very few squirrels with a truly avant-garde soul. Alka laughed, as if she’d perfectly understood my question. But she hadn’t understood, that’s for sure. So it became clear that Alka was laughing because her job obliged her to laugh at everything I said. There is nothing more irritating.

“Desiring stupid women requires one to be understanding,” I said.

It was just a McGuffin, but Alka laughed and laughed and her whole belly trembled.

“Alka speaking,” I said to her in Spanish. “I am in the
aeropuerto
. And you?”

It was horrible because she went into such convulsions that she fell on the floor laughing. When she stood up with my help, I almost said “Alka speaking” again to see if she’d test out the cold floor of the spotless Hessenland reception area once more. But I resisted this malicious temptation.

13

When María Boston arrived at the Hessenland to relieve Alka of her mission and incidentally, I suppose, rescue me from her laughing assistance, I, logically, thought it was Chus Martínez who had arrived at the hotel. What else was I going to think? For that reason, when she warned me that she wanted to resolve an important misunderstanding, I was a little lost. It might strike me as odd, she said, but a year ago in Barcelona she had found herself forced to pass herself off as her boss, as Chus. Chus had begged her to usurp her personality, for she feared I would get angry if she didn’t show up at our meeting that evening. Did I forgive them for the deceit?

First I was astonished. Then I reacted. Sure, I forgave them, I said, but had they imagined I was so sensitive, so irascible? Perhaps someone had told them that since turning sixty I’d become somewhat intransigent? Who’d told them?

I pretended that it didn’t much matter, but in reality I couldn’t really understand it very well. That identity exchange was surely odd, almost as odd as people, seeing my taxi go past, stopping in the streets of Kassel to approve my arrival with their gazes. No, there was nothing that could justify María Boston pretending to be Chus that evening in Barcelona. Even so, I decided not to make too much of a fuss about it. Besides, I thought, if I admitted my skepticism, I might be seen as a neurotic or not very flexible guy, maybe not very understanding of human weakness, and, most of all, as not much of a lover of what I most defended in my literature: playing games, transferring identities, the joy of being someone else . . .

I tried to act as naturally as possible and asked Boston about Pim Durán. What I really wanted to know was whether Pim Durán was also her, because now anything was possible.

“She’s my assistant,” Boston said, “and I’m Chus’s assistant.”

I asked her if she knew where her boss was and if her boss wasn’t afraid—now that she had more reason to be than she did a year ago—that I’d get angry that I still hadn’t met her.

What happened, María Boston hurried to explain, was that the incredibly busy Chus had to go to Berlin that very morning, but I mustn’t worry, since she was coming back just to have dinner with me on Thursday evening, at eight on the dot. She urged me to write it down: at the Osteria restaurant on Jordanstrasse; everything was foreseen, planned, organized with true Germanic order.

I wanted to know where the works of Tino Sehgal, Pierre Huyghe, and Janet Cardiff could be found. I pronounced those names as if I’d known them all my life when actually I had no idea who they were.

Tino Sehgal’s contribution to Documenta, said Boston, was taking place in the building right next door to the hotel, and, if I wanted, she’d go there with me. It was called
This Variation
. It was, in fact, of all the works presented in Kassel, the only one that was very close; it was just there, in an old annex of the hotel, now unused and currently one of Documenta’s venues. Was I a Sehgal fan? I preferred to tell her the humble truth, that I knew nothing of that artist’s activity, actually I knew nothing of any of the participants in Documenta 13.

“This is so contemporary!” she exclaimed.

She meant that in the world it was more and more normal not to know about what was truly contemporary. Her phrase was also a sort of a wink, she said later, to a recent Tino Sehgal performance in Madrid, where a group of museum guards—to the visitors’ surprise—suddenly came to life, began to dance, and then softly sang the phrase
This is so contemporary
while pointing toward the Sehgal piece.

What people appreciated so much about this trendy artist, Boston said, was that the museum workers seemed to be part of the work of art, maybe they were even the work itself.

I didn’t yet know the greatness and genius of Sehgal. I just thought that placing museum workers as artworks was not the least bit original. After all, who hasn’t at some point thought that museum guards were the real works of art? As for putting life before art, that was something I had the impression it was all well and good and even healthy to do but had very much been seen before.

Later, I began to take more interest in Sehgal, especially when I saw his principal motto could be: “When art goes by like life.” Sehgal proposed that only by participating in his performance could a person say he or she had seen his work. If you think about it, that’s really good. When art goes by like life. It sounded perfect.

Boston and I went outside and into the old tumbledown annex next door to the Hessenland. After walking down a short corridor, we arrived at a small garden, where on the left-hand side was the room in which nothing could be seen and where you could, if you wanted, venture into the darkness itself to see what happened, what kind of experience awaited you. It was a dark room, Boston warned me, a room you entered thinking no one was there, perhaps just another visitor who had preceded you, but after being inside for a while, we started to perceive, without being able to see anybody, the presence of some young people, like otherworldly spirits, singing and dancing and seeming to live among the shadows. They were performers of sometimes enigmatic, sometimes fluid movements, occasionally stealthy and then frenetic, in any case invisible.