Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

The moment has been engraved in my memory, not only because I was momentarily startled, but also because the person who’d grabbed me was Nené, an old girlfriend of my friend Vladimir (an ex-girlfriend from a very long time ago — to tell the truth, from the early seventies). I was quite shocked. I thought, if such things were happening to me — meeting a woman like her here — it meant when I got home I’d have to write about what had happened to me on this trip. Who could have expected things might still happen to me?

Nené was alone in the truest sense of the word. She was about to have dinner on her own when she saw me coming up the street. She was, she said, enormously thrilled. She was as high-strung as ever, though older, with a slightly crooked nose and shiny, bouncy auburn hair. She had just been left by her husband, a famous German artist. When? An hour ago. Horrible, she said. Her husband? No, that she’d been dumped again; my friend Vladimir had done the same thing, didn’t I remember? I didn’t remember that Vladimir had left her, was all I could say, and I thought this really took the cake; all I needed now was to have to justify decisions my friends had made in the seventies.

You’ve aged, she said maliciously. I’m not surprised, I thought. Was I not coming from experiencing a scene in Die Büste Bar with a decidedly elderly atmosphere? You’re gaga yourself, I was about to answer, but I was bursting with such well-being that it was unthinkable I could hurt a recently separated old dame. She kept insisting I come have dinner with her. I don’t know how many times I told her I had dinner plans with the co-curator of Documenta at the Osteria and couldn’t have two dinners in one night, but the fact is, I didn’t put up too much resistance going into the Sackturm, since I was really quite hungry and had been for hours.

I hadn’t heard that you’d participated in Documenta, Nené said after ordering a salad to share, once we’d been seated at a table inside the Sackturm. I hid from her the fact that I was still participating; I didn’t want to have to see her the next day in the Chinese restaurant or at my lecture. Nené was just as intellectual as she’d been in those distant days when I’d seen her often in Barcelona. I told her I had never seen anything like This Variation , but she made a gesture of absolute disdain. I would swear she hadn’t heard of the installation, but there remained that gesture. While she was making it, I suddenly felt the beneficial stealthy company of toil, that concept so familiar to me since coming across it in a line by Yeats: “In luck or out the toil has left its mark.”

I talked to Nené about this, and she half understood me.

“You can’t live without art?” she said. “Well, I’ve had it up to here with my German husband, my artist husband. Germans are a pain and so are artists. Art is too, let me tell you, art is a complete bore, a big fat nothing.”

Luckily, I was still in good spirits, which enabled me to survive all that.

Then I told her that in general a work of art — as in Sehgal’s dark room — went by like life, and life went by like art.

It was very odd, she almost slapped me across the face.

Minutes later, when the irreproachable polipetti al pesto arrived, my enthusiasm for everything I’d seen in Kassel had reached such a height that even Nené seemed uncomfortable at my unstoppable praise, my long commentaries on all I’d seen. She told me I was “going way overboard with my enthusiasm.”

It’s not that I exactly believe in contemporary art, I told her, but every once in a while I’m able to see extraordinary details in it, and, besides, I don’t think we’re doing everything so badly in comparison with the ancient Greeks or the Renaissance. What do you want me to say?

She threw me a look of hatred. Maybe she’d guessed that I was thinking of leaving soon, without ordering dessert. I then started to tell her I wasn’t praising what I’d seen in Documenta just for the sake of it, but that since I’d arrived in the city, I felt that an invisible force had taken hold of me, making me find everything exciting, as if Kassel had presented me with an unexpected shift of gears, an unforeseen impetus that would help me have more optimism in the future toward art and life, though not toward the world, which I’d already given up for lost.

I almost choked saying all this all at once, almost without a pause. And, to top it off, I felt her look of unbridled hatred on me again.

“I didn’t get any sleep last night,” I said. “And that’s altered my behavior, my mood, both of which were always very regular until now, arriving in an orderly fashion and on time. In the mornings, I experience happiness and the idea that everything’s possible. In the evenings, I experience fatigue and darkness. Suddenly — perhaps it’s due to the Kassel climate — everything has changed. I’ve gone mad. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.”

I said this and managed to get away from her much more easily than I’d expected. We agreed to meet at midnight in the foyer of the Gloria Cinema, but I had the impression neither of us would show up. I certainly wouldn’t, because I didn’t even know where that cinema was, even though a year earlier I’d downloaded a photo of it when I came across it on the Internet and it had reminded me of the neighborhood cinemas of my childhood.

I reached the street, finally heading in the right direction toward the Hessenland, and as I was walking, I started imagining that I had left the city and come back once Documenta had closed, and I went into the abandoned salon of This Variation to see what the place was like when it wasn’t dark, with dancers lying in ambush. It didn’t take long to discover that it was an uninteresting, rundown space. But there was someone there that I hadn’t expected: an old Indian man, who asked me if I was aware that the soul survived in a “suprasensitive” world. I didn’t know that, I said in fright. The soul survives, he told me, in coexistence with forces that those initiates of the ancient world understood very well, even their most mysterious aspects. I didn’t know that either, sir, I explained, and almost felt the need to apologize for not knowing. A shame, he said, because you won’t be able to connect with the superior beings of the celestial hierarchy. A long silence. Here in this room there was avant-garde art, I tried telling the Indian man. And to my surprise my words affected him the way a stake would have affected a vampire. So much so that I watched him leave completely horrified. It seemed clear to me that the term “avant-garde” caused serious problems for the densely populated, cosmopolitan colony of ghosts in Kassel.

Thinking about art itself , I thought that it was definitely right there, in the air, suspended in that moment, suspended in life that went by as I’d seen the breeze go by.

I was in my room now. Moments before, I’d waved to This Variation from the balcony, as had become my ritual. I sat down at my computer and googled the word impulso (which is how I thought of, or how I’d translated, the word pull in Ryan Gander’s title). I discovered that it wasn’t necessarily what I’d thought it was, because in physics, “impulse” is the “physical magnitude (usually denoted as p ) defined as the variation in the lineal moment of an object within a closed system.” The term is different from how we habitually think of it: it was coined by Isaac Newton in his second law of motion, in which he called it the vis motrix , referring to this force of movement.

In any case, I was enjoying a vis motrix , I’m almost sure of it. Then I looked up my next day’s activity on Google: “The Lecture to Nobody,” which I soon saw they’d programed for six in the evening. Would anyone attend? I expected to go along, propelled by my own vis motrix , but I hoped not a soul would show up. What was I planning to talk about, anyway? I kept looking for more information about Documenta 13 and found a feature article in which Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev praised the confusion one might encounter walking around there. I remembered Boston telling me to bear in mind, when judging The Brain , that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was of the opinion that in art, confusion is a truly marvelous thing. “At the risk of unsettling people,” Christov-Bakargiev said, “this Documenta does not have a single guiding concept. Due to the fact that there are many valid truths, one is constantly confronted with unsolvable questions; thus it has become a choice between not making a choice, not having a concept, acting from a position of withdrawal; or making a choice that one knows will also be partially or inevitably ‘wrong.’ What these participants do, what they ‘exhibit,’ may or may not be art.”