I did everything I could to show secretarial nonchalance and convince them all that I belonged to Documenta’s imaginary board of supervisors, but of course all that was only my conjecture and what everyone saw was a young woman with a seductive voice and an old man both brazenly flourishing bits of paper and getting straight in without any trouble. The protests were loud and even caused me a certain amount of reasonable panic, as the passage was narrow. In addition, I was becoming increasingly sensitive, no doubt as a result of having slept so little.
But once inside the old and antipoetic bank building, all was well. Tacita Dean’s chalkboard murals had a blindingly green background and were an evocation of time suspended in the snowy Afghan mountains, although the truth is I was slow to realize that those perfect drawings — among the most elegant I’ve seen in my life — had been done in chalk in situ, in that very place with a long commercial history where, according to Boston, many artists had previously refused to show their work but which, on the contrary, Tacita Dean had liked from the outset.
The artist had spent several weeks in Kassel drawing that very lovely series of images for Fatigues, in which she depicted, with originality and great precision, the Hindu Kush mountains, and the glacial source of the Kabul River. The drawings showed the melting and annual descent of snow-water on the capital of Afghanistan, a phenomenon that seemed to be both welcomed and feared. But in that series, which Boston told me constituted Tacita Dean’s return to drawing on boards (she hadn’t touched chalks for ten years), the artist was also giving a nod toward Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Ford o’ Kabul River” (a moving piece about British soldiers who drowned in the second Anglo-Afghan War), as well as to the forces of nature and the Kabul River’s terrible power.
María Boston said Tacita Dean’s show was among the most visited at Documenta, which didn’t surprise me, given the sober and impeccable, classical elegance of the drawings. It did seem strange that in an exhibition of the avant-garde, the closest thing to what could be considered orthodox should make such an impression.
While we were walking around what used to be the offices of the old savings bank, we ran into Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the head commissioner or curator of Documenta and one of those people you see right away, as soon as you meet them, who need no kind of push, not even of the invisible sort; she was someone whose gaze seemed to carry a certain brilliance, and you could tell she enjoyed stirring things up verbally. She was accompanied by Chus’s assistant, Ada Ara, a woman from Zaragoza who lived in Berlin. Her name seemed made up or a pseudonym, all the more so if you knew that in Catalan ara means now.
“Ada Now,” I said. “That sounds like a stage name.”
No sooner had I let drop this remark — none too fortuitous, it goes without saying — than I blundered into what might be described as a brief and unfortunate loop of clumsiness. It all started when Carolyn asked me in English (which I understood perfectly) what I thought of Documenta. No doubt it was a routine question, but I wasn’t ready for the artistic director, the one responsible for the whole show — it’s always impressed me greatly to meet the person in charge — to ask me such a thing, and I became absurdly tongue-tied, as if the power of speech had been snatched from me.
“Carolyn’s asking how the work you’ve seen in Documenta has made you feel,” Ada Ara clarified for me.
“That. . well, um. . that there is no world.”
Ada Ara translated my answer with a smile that sought to minimize the possible contradiction in what I’d just said. Carolyn, giving me what seemed a look of disappointment, wanted to know what there was if, as I maintained, there was no world. It was one of the most challenging questions of the day, but at that moment an invisible impulse — or perhaps it was just nervousness due to my extreme fatigue — pushed my energy level up another notch, as if it wanted to come to my aid.
“There’s a corollary,” I said.
But asserting this — possibly a bad move, influenced by the excessive energy I sometimes suspected flowed from that invisible inner current — was even worse. I bowed my head, conscious that what I’d said didn’t make the grade as a McGuffin and also aware that I wasn’t even altogether sure why I’d expressed it that way. I never liked taking exams and I had the feeling I was taking one there in front of Carolyn; maybe that’s what had made me nervous and gotten me lost in the deranged muddle of my answers.
Ada Ara asked what a corollary was. It’s an outcome, a conclusion, Boston said. They amused themselves arguing over what a corollary was, and in the end Carolyn, getting impatient, asked me again what on earth there was if there wasn’t a world. There’s a conclusion, Boston said, speaking for me. Carolyn pierced me with a terrifying look that made everything infinitely more difficult. She seemed to be saying: But, really, is this the writer they recommended to me, the one they told me we should select? Then she asked me, What conclusion? I was paralyzed, utterly mute. None, I ended up saying. I saw Carolyn was very upset and angry. Suddenly, she let fly: “So what do we do now? Accept it all calmly, implode with panic, or what?”
I remained impassive, thinking of those linguistic short circuits that are inevitably part of the most mundane conversations. “Nice day today, ma’am.” “Don’t even go there, sir.” “Did you see that amazing light?” And the lady doesn’t answer. Brusque interruptions, the breakdown of language in the most pointless exchanges. Of course, people contribute to the short circuit sometimes without even wanting to.
43
Toward evening we arrived at the Hauptbahnhof to see Artaud’s Cave, a film installation made for Documenta by the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez. It was showing in a strange space inside the old station.
On the way over, Ada Ara, Boston, and I talked about my ridiculous mix-up with Carolyn. The only thing that might have been worse, said Boston, is if you’d told her the world is kept spinning by two tsetse flies.
In that space in the Hauptbahnhof — designed as a cinema but looking like a grotto — Téllez looped his single-channel film. This was what Boston and Ada told me, thinking that since Artaud was involved the work would surely interest me. The installation showed a performance of The Conquest of Mexico, an Artaud text that I recalled sought to bludgeon the viewer, to create the harsh effect of an ax-blow on the frozen sea lying within us all. It was all very much in line with theories forming the foundation of the Theater of Cruelty, established by Artaud himself in his bid to make an aggressive impression on the spectator: “For that reason, actions, nearly always violent, come before words, thus freeing the subconscious to fight against reason and logic.”
The video by Téllez was extraordinarily interesting and subconscious-freeing: it was acted out by mentally ill patients from the Bernardino Álvarez hospital in Mexico City. The video took place in two parallel time frames, alternating daily life in the psychiatric institution with the historical events of the conquest of Mexico as told by Artaud, which made the patients of the Bernardino Álvarez duplicate themselves ingeniously: playing themselves as patients and at the same time identifying with Moctezuma and other historical characters.
I didn’t say anything, and it seemed as if I wasn’t interested in the cave, or the video, or the conquest of Mexico. But that wasn’t the case; it was that I’d just seen the young blonde German approaching, the woman in strict mourning I’d seen before at Untilled, enlightening people about the death of Europe. It was unmistakably her, still in the same dark clothing and once more shouting at people as she came toward us. Arriving where we were, she handed us a sort of pamphlet she had written and was distributing to inform us that Antonin Artaud was one of the first to condemn the Enlightenment for destroying the West. In fact, it was nothing very different from what she’d said previously from up on a pile of rubble.