Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

The works of art! These days such ingenuousness would trigger laughter. At Documenta 13, separating work and theory would have been seen as very old-fashioned, because there, according to all the information I had, you saw a great many works under the ambiguous umbrella of innovation presented as theory and vice versa. It was the triumphant and now almost definitive reign of the marriage between practice and theory, to such an extent that if you casually came across a rather classical-looking piece, you’d soon discover it was nothing more than theory camouflaged as a work. Or a work camouflaged as theory.

Was there any artist at Kassel with sufficient courage to just hang a painting on the wall, a straightforward painting? I imagined the great peals of laughter that would ring out if it occurred to some poor brave devil to hang a canvas on a wall in the Fridericianum. It seemed nobody there wanted to be regarded as terribly old-fashioned, so there was no way of seeing a painting anywhere.

I stopped looking sleepily at the photo of Chus Martínez and started to read her interview about whether art had to be innovative or not. My attention was caught by the final sentence—“Art is art, and what you make of it is up to you”—which was possibly just a McGuffin. Perhaps it had been said so that I should read it in my room at the Hessenland and finally understand what I’d been asked to do in Kassel. It was as if those last words ultimately meant this: “Here’s an invitation to a Chinese restaurant, we’re asking you for art, now let’s see what you make of it.”

I was now deep in the black hours, but I took refuge in my computer a few minutes longer. I was surfing around lost corners of the web when the memory of the music of Pavel Haas and the Holocaust came back to me. Many times on TV I’d been intrigued by some documentary footage frequently broadcast on all channels, especially Catalan ones, that showed Hitler and his staff soaking up the sun on a terrace — a sort of luxurious look-out in the Alps — in a place called Berghof. There were women in the film, women who posed and laughed, that was what had always struck me the most. Hitler, moreover, was seen taking some children by the hand and stroking some dogs. Everything was spectacularly strange and sinister up there on that terrace of the powerful. The weirdest thing, though, was that due to the elevation of the place, each scene was ringed with a light that virtually bounced off the screen, an exaggerated light, almost like that from the beyond.

The first time I’d seen those images I’d been surprised by the extreme beauty of the alpine landscape and the fact that the Nazi murderers were carrying on a peaceful and ordinary bourgeois Sunday morning at that look-out. I’d asked myself many times what had become of that fabulous terrace with its splendid, white-framed windows, behind which something distinctly dark and unhealthy could be guessed at. And I decided it was now the time to try and find out what could be seen today at that scene so fixed in my mind, in that alpine spot where a handful of criminals were one day placed in a frame.

The route Google took me showed the day in April 1945 when the house was bombed by the British Royal Air Force, and then the day at the beginning of May when some ruddy-cheeked American soldiers took photographs of themselves amid the ruins of the terrace while bragging about drinking “Hitler’s wine.” And finally the search engine led me to eight years later, after that Nazi cellar ran dry: more than a thousand tons of explosives left not a single clue that there had been a house there with a luminous terrace projecting menacingly out over the world.

Where the look-out had been is today an innocuous rectangle of well-cut grass. Nobody would guess there had once been a house there and a lofty terrace and some children who waved their little hands, waving their purity at you, smiling sweetly at the women who posed, also smilingly, beside their beloved murderers.

I looked carefully: the innocuous rectangle of well-cut grass might be a metaphor for this country I found myself in. But perhaps I looked at that rectangle for too long. I ended up so utterly exhausted I kept thinking that, if it were possible, I’d lie down right there on that inconsequential grass deprived of history, right on that computer screen.

Everything happened very fast. In the midst of an anguish that didn’t stop growing and reminding me obsessively of my age, how my time had already been cut irretrievably short, I imagined myself lying like a pariah on the bland rectangle, and ended up falling asleep.

I dreamed of fields of grass where beatniks were grazing, fields that split into more fields and then into killing fields like a sprawling nightmare. And then I dreamed (in the part of the night closest to my waking and, therefore, to my cheerful morning mood) that somebody stole my shoes in those fields and told me that the common, revered model of the “great man” was the opposite of poetry and the irreducible individuality of being unique. This view was the opposite of the poetry of the unique existence (ephemeral, unrepeatable), which did not need to be written, but only — and above all — to be lived. This second part of the dream, with its agreeable observations on the poetry of individuality, must have influenced my excellent mood the following morning, which was indeed the norm.

Collapse and recovery.

In the hotel bar, I had a triple espresso, which gave my energy and joy such a boost I was almost chuckling to myself. I decided to go outside straightaway to calm a certain tension. It was early, very early. There was hardly anyone around. In fact I saw only an old woman leaning in toward a shop window with a finger to her lips. Apart from this odd, potentially disturbing image, there was not much else to be seen on the street.

Feeling extraordinarily humorous, I said to myself: Just as well there’s hardly anyone around, that way nobody will look at me and say, It’s about time you got here, son — we were waiting for you to start giving contemporary art, which is half-asleep, a new direction.

Half-asleep?

I realized I still carried within me the classic fatalistic tics of the intellectuals of my country, especially those of the “lucid intellectuals.” I was still influenced by those determined to find that contemporary art was half-asleep and an absolute disaster.

Wasn’t it? It was not at its peak, you had to admit. But except during my black hours, I was bothered that some of my friends were so radically defeatist about contemporary art. I could see that it found itself in crisis and, in fact, I imagined Documenta 13 might perhaps illustrate this tricky state of affairs very well; even so, contact with some of the works at Kassel had been very stimulating so far. What’s more, I had absorbed much of what I’d seen; it had injected me with an optimistic energy right at the height of my usual dead time.

I looked at the street, which was deserted at that early morning hour, and I told myself that the lucid voices of some of my compatriots, so self-satisfied, weren’t telling the whole truth either. They were articulate and sometimes went all out to dazzle. They did so, but you couldn’t ignore the fact that they reveled in fatalism, some of them simply because they themselves hadn’t been given the gift of creativity, and this pitched them furiously up against other voices and, in passing, against contemporary culture as a whole. In the very end, I thought, so much lucidity leads them to cliché. Some maintain that we find ourselves at a slack moment, that there have been no new ideas since the seventies. Some claim that since the eighties, there have been no worthwhile novels or anything else. But some of these fatalists were already radical defeatists in the seventies, devoting themselves to preventing anyone with ideas from trying to do anything.