Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

Pure Duchamp, I thought. And I remembered that sunshade Duchamp was working on one summer in Cadaqués, which, in the end, turned out to be to shelter him from the sun or, to put it a better way, so he could settle into the shadows, his favorite territory. Where was that sun shelter now? Only in the minds of those who saw it or enjoyed the shade beneath it. Since they’d all been dying off, there were very few left — if any — before that “canvas” (once a silent work of art) would disappear from living memory.

Yes, it was clear: art goes by like life. And Sehgal was an illustrious heir to Duchamp. But was he innovating? Could it be said that he belonged to some avant-garde?

No, I decided, he wasn’t really innovating. But since when was it necessary for art to be dedicated to innovation? This is exactly what I was wondering when I walked into This Variation, Sehgal’s dark room.

(That night, I coincidentally stumbled upon a long interview with Chus Martínez on my computer — finally I saw her face — and her declarations helped me gauge whether today’s artists were innovators or not. In the interview Chus explained that Documenta 13 wasn’t like other exhibitions; it wasn’t just for looking at, but could also be lived . And when she was asked if art was still being innovative or if it was more schematic, she answered: “In art we don’t innovate, that happens in an industry. Art is neither creative nor innovative. That we leave to the world of shoes, cars, aeronautics. It’s an industrial vocabulary. Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you. Art, of course, neither innovates nor creates.”)

Not yet knowing that Documenta 13 was for living and, especially, not knowing “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” I walked into This Variation and advanced through the dark room without seeing anything or sensing anyone’s presence. I even forgot that there might be more than one person or ghost in there.

Soon I found out I was not alone. Suddenly, someone, who seemed more accustomed to the semidarkness of the place, went past me and intentionally brushed against my shoulder. I reacted, prepared to put up some resistance if anyone tried to touch me again. But it didn’t happen. For the rest of the day, I wouldn’t be able to get the feel of that touch out of my head.

Soon afterward, I thought I noticed — it was impossible to see anything but darkness — that the person who’d brushed up against me was dancing away toward the back of the room, gathering there with other souls, who, when they distinguished my presence in that impenetrable obscurity, abandoned their silence and also began to dance, humming strange, slight songs or chants, almost like Hare Krishna.

I walked out of there thinking it had all been more than odd and that, depending on how you looked at it, it was terrible to discover the significance of a stranger brushing against one’s shoulder.

“Well?” was all Boston asked when she saw me.

I understood that she wanted to know how my experience inside the gloomy room had been, but I found it difficult to communicate what had happened to me there. I had the impression I’d just seen something that wasn’t art about some matter, that wasn’t discursive or about anything weighty that I’d spent a lifetime fleeing and not managing to get away from; it seemed to me that I’d just seen art itself . But I didn’t know exactly how to explain that to Boston; I had to think more about it; so I opted to answer evasively, telling her I’d just been reminded of the canon of Poitiers.

The word canon sounded strange in that context. Of what? she asked. Someone Montaigne wrote about, I said, a preacher who didn’t leave his room for thirty years and gave some extraordinary excuses for not leaving. Sounds like Ratzinger, remarked Boston; they say he never moves from his office in the Vatican.

Leaving Sehgal’s room behind, we crossed the garden of the old annex, walking along the corridor that led to the street.

Boston said she was a fan of strolling, of journeying on foot. It seemed so odd to her that the most natural and basic way of getting around could become the most luminous of activities; perhaps it was such a creative thing to do because it took place at human speed. Going for a walk, she told me, seemed to produce a clear mental syntax, a narrative of its own.

After this brief reflection, she went back to worrying about the impression Sehgal’s room might have made on me, she wanted to know how I’d felt.

“Well, look,” I said point-blank, “I have to tell you that without England’s resistance to Hitler, I wouldn’t be here today.”

That sentence was clearly a McGuffin, perhaps arising directly from the very art of walking. It came out as the first thing that entered my head. I realized that this art of journeying on foot facilitated, among other things, the ability to say things without thinking about them first; you said things, letting them literally fly out of your mouth. Unlike what we say after we’ve carefully formulated an idea, polishing it until we feel ready to let it go, the sentence that is unconsidered and born directly from a walk may be daring, strange, and seem at times as though it is not ours. On other occasions, it may even have an unexpected syntax that sometimes surprises us, because we discover it was overwhelmingly ours without our knowing it.

“Without England’s resistance?” Boston queried.

I kept quiet, I didn’t know what to say; in truth that McGuffin hadn’t felt like mine at any point. I kept quiet, but it was not an embarrassing silence. When two people walk along conversing, the silences are never tense, violent, or serious. It doesn’t matter, for example, if you don’t respond to something, because in fact everything follows its course without any excessive dramatization.

On our left-hand side, on an avenue that crossed Königsstrasse, Boston pointed out the stop for the Documenta bus. In the mornings, it could drop me for free at the door of the Dschingis Khan in fifteen minutes.

These were the words I most feared: Dschingis Khan.

Going to that Chinese restaurant felt like a schoolroom chore, and, on top of that, I had no desire to show anybody at all what I was writing. Perhaps that’s why I pretended I hadn’t heard, staying very focused on my walk.

A few seconds followed, during which I looked solemnly at the ground. We were heading down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, the central museum, or temple of Documenta. I felt I was walking along resisting everything and particularly going into the Dschingis Khan.

“Sehgal’s dark room is the closest room you have to your hotel bedroom,” Boston said, accompanying her convoluted sentence with beguiling diction and an attractive slight smile.

I didn’t understand why she said that, but for precisely that reason the sentence stayed more firmly engraved on my memory; I think I retained it in the hope of understanding it later on, as in fact did happen. When I returned to the hotel two hours later and went to my room with the idea of starting to turn it into a “thinking cabin,” I remembered her phrase straightaway. I remembered it as soon as I saw that, in effect, you really could lean into the street from the balcony and see the entrance to the building where the dark room was to be found.

“And are you going to write about this?” she asked, as we slowly continued making our way down Königsstrasse toward the Fridericianum, about a twelve-minute walk. Write about what? Oh, she said, I’m asking whether you’re thinking of writing about your direct connection with Sehgal’s dark room. Well, possibly, was all I said in reply, perhaps a little thrown because the question seemed related to the idea of showing my texts to visitors at the Dschingis Khan. But later I realized that perhaps what she was really asking me was to write for her. Why not? Was it then true that one could take a girl captive by writing? Luckily, thinking things through more carefully, I very soon saw I’d get nowhere if I considered wanting to take Boston captive. So, making the most of my common sense, I calmed down, telling myself that by no means had she asked me to subjugate her. I then chose to explain to her that I planned to shut myself up in my hotel room in the evenings and turn it into a place of isolation, a space well-suited to reflection: a place similar in the imagination to a cabin where it would be easy to devote myself to thinking, to meditating on joy, for example, and seeing it as something possibly within the nucleus of all creation; the location was as similar as possible to a space where I could think of my relationship with the lost and irreparable world. Perhaps I would write something there but I didn’t think so; my objective in that room-turned-cabin was not to write, but to think.