Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

The problem was that, biting my tongue in order not to make any mistakes, I sank into excessive silence. She too was silent at times. And I suffered a brief moment of panic, a sort of sudden terror that must have run, trembling, all the way along the invisible wire linking our respective phones.

That silence was like a powder keg. Well, Chus said finally, we’ll see each other tomorrow night for dinner. I relaxed. I was going to ask the address of the restaurant, but that would have once again shown poor reflexes and imagination, as the curatorial team office had already sent it to me various times by email. I decided to fall back on a McGuffin, though none occurred to me, and right at that moment, unable to avoid it, I sneezed deafeningly. Twice. Sorry about the smudges in the air, I said. She laughed, and I took the opportunity to somehow end it there, passing the phone back to Pim, who caught it in midair without dropping her constant false smile.

The occurrence of smudges in the air had possibly saved the day and perhaps I could feel rather smug. But my happiness didn’t last long. While Pim was talking to Chus about what a lovely morning it was — yes, that’s what they talked about — I began to slip dangerously toward that torment reserved for anxious minds that the French call l’esprit de l’escalier (staircase wit), which consists of thinking of the right thing to say too late: going through the moment when you find the perfect response, but it’s no longer any use to you because you’re already on your way down the stairs and should have given the ingenious reply sooner, when you were at the top. And so, reviewing the brief conversation with Chus, reconstructing it piece by piece, word by word, I began to see what I could have said but didn’t, and ended up wondering whether, when I went back to Barcelona on Saturday and told people about my trip to Kassel, I’d realize what I should have said or done in the city but didn’t. . And, well, if I wrote the story of this journey one day, I went on thinking, I’d no doubt work with that staircase wit. I should be so lucky. .

Minutes later, Pim pointed out a mound in the distance that seemed part of the park but was actually a strange garden in the shape of a hill: Doing Nothing Garden, the work of Song Dong, almost the only Chinese artist — apart from Yan Lei — invited to Documenta.

The most logical thing for our walk would have been to pass alongside that hill-turned-garden before we got to the Orangerie, but very soon afterward, something unexpected took us out of our way.

I am going to digress here a moment, just briefly, to skip ahead to something that happened later that night in my cabin, when I changed my name and started to call myself Piniowsky.

Yes, Piniowsky.

That happened at night, when Autre lost his provisional surname and started to call himself Piniowsky too, a minor character in a story by Joseph Roth called The Bust of the Emperor .

All I’m going to say in advance is that after the sudden change, I began to feel relieved, happy too, because my own name that I’d had for so many years had come to feel like a dead weight and was really nothing more than something from a youth I’d spun out too long, in my opinion. In fact, my own name, in my mouth, always gave me a funny feeling.

I will also say that during that night, now as Piniowsky, I thought deeply about Huyghe and his installation Untilled. It seemed obvious to me that only art at the margins, distanced from galleries and museums, could be truly innovative. Huyghe showed discreet wisdom by taking the last route that appeared open to the avant-garde, as well as foresight in seeking out a tucked-away place in the Karlsaue for his pessimistic landscape of humus and a pink-legged Spanish dog; perhaps it was a tribute to a hypothetical art of the outskirts of the outskirts.

Maybe, I thought that night in my room, Untilled created an idea of a return to a time before art. In an age as uncertain as the current one in which everything was changing at incredible speed, it spoke of the necessity of no longer making art as we’d understood it up to now, of the need to learn to stand apart , perhaps to be like Tino Sehgal (Sehgal didn’t wish to be visible and seemed to propose returning to the mortal dark room that’s always been there). It was as if Huyghe were telling us: when all’s said and done, hasn’t the avant-garde fundamentally always sprung from a need to sweep everything away, to get back to the obscurity of the beginning?

And might not that flight from a dead art be an attempt by Huyghe to go beyond simply sweeping everything aside: to head toward the outskirts of the outskirts and then on toward nothing, literally toward nothing? Was the most innovative art of my day going toward nothing? Or was it going toward something I still hadn’t found and that it would perhaps do me a lot of good to discover?

But let’s get back to the morning of that same day, when Autre and I were still in one piece and Piniowsky hadn’t yet even raised his head. My mind hadn’t become so tangled in so many questions as it had that night in the “attempted thinking cabin” of my room.

Let’s get back to that fine morning when I still allowed myself to be carried along by my passion for walking around and glancing at things like a profound idler, like a passerby who might be happy. Everything was going quite well, and even though I was dying of thirst, I was catching the smile (possibly false at times) that hardly seemed to leave Pim’s lips. I ended up in such a great mood, I was even able to laugh thinking of the anguish that assaulted me almost punctually in the evenings. It was easy to do that early in the day, by which I mean that the very easy, heartfelt mockery of my melancholy tribulations wasn’t so commendable.

How did I get on such a high? There are always means. I made use of a McGuffin — let’s call it an intimate, secret one — a McGuffin that parodied the most horrendous kitsch language and consisted — I held back a giggling fit — of telling myself that there would be no shadows if the sun were not shining. It was enough to make a person laugh his head off, shedding four pounds of solemnity all at once.

In Doing Nothing Garden , Pim said, plants had been grown on a mound of organic waste. If I understood correctly, Song Dong had found the rubbish piled up in her mother’s house in northern China and had it transported to Kassel, where she planted seeds and left it so that, over time, it turned into a little landscaped hill. A not very well-informed viewer might see it from a distance as he headed for the Orangerie — someone very thirsty, like me, for example — and have no idea that in under two months, that very peculiar little hill had taken on the deceptive appearance of having been part of the park for years.

This is where we were when the distant rumble of a bombardment interrupted our walk toward the Orangerie (where, according to Pim, there was a bar and also an astronomy museum with collections of clocks and antique stargazing instruments).

I was thirsty, more thirsty than anything, and even now I distinctly remember that terrible thirst. The bombing noise, Pim said, is from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers. And she said no more. A bit later on, she conceded the installation had the enveloping sound of the tumult of battle, mixed with a symphony orchestra and rustlings from the forest, and in some manner it re-created the bombing raids Karlsaue Park and the city of Kassel had suffered during the Second World War.

For the first time that whole morning, I saw not a trace of Pim’s constant cloying smile, because what she’d just told me really didn’t allow for joy, either genuine or false. Until a minute ago, she’d been the epitome of joy. And I remembered that meditating on joy in my German cabin had been, since the beginning, one of the objectives of my trip: to reflect on the possibility that in joy could be found the central nucleus of all creation.