To top it all, I remembered something a friend told me (not such a good friend, to judge by his actions) whenever he wanted to depress me. He’d do this when he noticed I was already depressed. He said that during the night the essence of night does not let us sleep. I have never understood very well what the sentence meant, but I found it terrifying. I turned it over in my mind a few times. Preventing us from sleeping. Was that something at the very core of the night? Did the night only make sense when it managed to stop us resting? It was early to go to bed, but I was worn out; the final punishment of the walk to platform 10 had been brutal, and the dawning of consciousness there was so intense it had left me in bits. I now thought only of sleep, though I was very afraid I wouldn’t be able to attain it. In spite of the desire to lie down, I found the strength for something that turned out to be very banal compared to Pavel Haas’s music on the platform.
I found the strength for a final foray into Google, where I stumbled upon a photograph of Chus Martínez, whose face seemed to me essentially lively, making me guess (I wasn’t in the least bit mistaken) that this was someone who’d internalized her ability to have ideas as profoundly as someone once said that the whaler in Moby-Dick had internalized his harpoon.
I don’t know how long I spent, half asleep, looking at the photo of Chus; she had invited me to Kassel and we still hadn’t met, though there was every indication I’d have dinner with her on Thursday. The more I looked at her face, the more I saw it brimming with ideas, and ultimately that made me think about them thoroughly — about ideas, I mean, and their presence and absence in modern art. I remembered that, in the mid nineteenth century, no European artist was ignorant of the fact that, if he wanted to prosper, he had to interest the intellectuals (the new class), which turned culture into the topic most often addressed by its creators, and the sole objective of art became the suggesting and inspiring of ideas. Strolling around Kassel, one was left in no doubt that there at least, things were still under the influence of that mid-nineteenth-century transformation. Elsewhere, no. Because almost all over the rest of the world the intellectual had taken a nosedive, and culture had become extraordinarily trivialized. But in Kassel a certain romantic and Duchampian aura remained; it was a paradise for those who loved intellectual conjecture, theoretical discussions, and the elegance of certain speculations.
I’ve always been enormously entertained by theories, so I could feel satisfied. For a long time I didn’t get contemporary art, but here in Kassel I was overloaded with stimuli to investigate the position of that art. That said, as a young man, it bored me to look at a Rembrandt. Confronted with a painting by that admirable artist, I didn’t know what to say. But, if I saw a readymade by a humble imitator of Duchamp, all sorts of commentaries poured out of me and I started to feel, once and for all, like an artist too. The same thing, I recall, happened to me with Manet, an artist very influenced by Mallarmé and whose most significant disciple may have been — I dare say — Marcel Duchamp. Mallarmé told Manet: “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces.” That sentence prefigured the modern abandonment of the two-dimensional plane and the ascent of the conceptual to a position of dominance.
Back in the days when Rembrandt left me mute, I already loved lofty theories (I didn’t understand any of them, but that was another matter). Above all, I loved the interviews in which the main topic was Theory, in that case with a capital “T.” I’d been fascinated at the beginning of the seventies by some questions that had been put to Alain Robbe-Grillet, which made him writhe against theories like an upside-down cat: “Let’s say I’m old-fashioned. For me, all that counts are the works of art.”
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.”
23
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.