Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of 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.

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.

Although many other things could be said about that dark room, in principle I could summarize: Tino Sehgal was presenting This Variation, a space in darkness, a hidden place in which a series of people awaited visitors and, when the moment was right, sang songs and offered the experience of living a piece of art as something fully sensory.

Sehgal, Boston reminded me, rejected the idea that art had to have a physical expression, that is, it had to be a painting, a sculpture, an artifact or installation; he treated the idea of a written explanation of his work with equal disdain. Therefore, as she’d told me before, the only way to be able to say that you’d seen a Sehgal work was to see it live. For example, there wasn’t even a record of that piece in the thick Documenta 13 catalogue, as Sehgal had asked Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez to respect his desire to be invisible.