With some disdain, María Boston said that the work, according to the catalog, was about the instability caused by the fluctuation between the lasting and the fleeting. And saying it, she used a metallic voice that pitilessly distorted hers, which made me hate that momentary, monumental mound of trash by Favaretto even more.
But beyond feeling sad about the voluntary deformation of a marvelous voice, I wondered what the artist of scrap iron might have said about her own work. That mise en scène of a monumental destruction was, above all else, insufferably ugly. Without a doubt, we could have spared ourselves the visit and I would have been grateful. Although I felt enthusiastic about many of the things I was seeing in Kassel, I hadn’t lost my critical eye, and looking at Momentary Monument IV, nothing better occurred to me than to think of Las Meninas by the painter Velázquez, and of the music of Mozart and Wagner, and I was on the verge of bursting into violent sobs.
We still had time to get back to the old station, where a project called The Refusal of Time, by the South African artist William Kentridge, awaited us in a large, old warehouse. As we were walking there — seeing that, in spite of the time of day, I was continuing to feel joy and an exaggerated interest and curiosity for everything — I again wondered if it wasn’t strange for there not to be even the slightest sign of anguish in my head. Normally by this time, my body coincided with the loss of the day’s energy, and along with my mental fatigue, anguish perfectly undermined my good mood.
Not that I hadn’t seen a few signs of anguish, but I’d rejected them so emphatically and they’d disappeared so swiftly that even I was surprised. Normally, anguish erupts simply when I’m reminded of my age and how few years, long-lived or not, are left to me.
Maybe, since I’d modified my daily routine and slept so badly the previous night, the unimaginative, secret regulator of my moods had been misled, and I’d been brought to a new, long-forgotten sensation: a good mood at this difficult time of day.
I thought: Let’s hope it lasts. It was perfect timing, since I didn’t have any of Dr. Collado’s pills and I had to have dinner with Chus Martínez and I’d better arrive with a good vibe.
Taking for granted that I’d like Kentridge’s work, I started to look at The Refusal of Time, a spectacle on which the physicist Peter L. Galison had worked, as well as several composers (Philip Miller and Catherine Meyburgh); it was an explosion of music, images, shadow play, with a Da Vinci-esque memory machine, easing the visitor into a fabulous, epic dimension, where time eventually began to be canceled.
The Kentridgean narration, Boston whispered to me, was a great dance of shadows, among which the artist — the artist in abstract — would appear and disappear, crossing an imaginary space of geographical maps. All this, according to her, should be read as a reflection on time that was refracted as it crossed places and people’s lives and also in the different zones of the earth, the dawns and dusks, until all was united in a cosmic whole.
Though I was still keen to like Kentridge’s work, Boston’s words complicated everything for me. What did she mean? Had she memorized and recited this speech for me? Did she herself understand what she was saying? I arrived at the conclusion that she definitely did not, though I also thought it was much better that way. Because in the end, not having been able to easily follow its development, I found the work opening many doors for me; in fact, it had a beneficial effect, allowing me to sense that maybe art forms were changing and increasingly relating differently to one another and to everything else. Perhaps, among other tasks, it had fallen to me to guess where was the sign that stood out and made these new relations visible. Would I know how to find it? It seemed to me that this sign was an ellipsis. I sensed that, when Boston tackled the less well-known aspect of Kentridge as a draftsman, this was something she was undoubtedly better at explaining than The Refusal of Time. It was interesting, she said, this mania of his that in all his drawings you could see what was there, but you could also see a trace of the previous drawing. . She didn’t know anyone else who drew like this. He had, on the other hand, a brilliant and at the same time naïve side: he used dotted lines to make his characters’ gazes visible, managing to show something as impossible to describe in painting or drawing as the visual behavior of people’s eyes that we cannot see.
I understood that those dots that sometimes served to unite glances were just a preamble to a sort of uncertainty that did not exactly invite Reason. Antonin Artaud would have so enjoyed feeling his way along those dots, shrieking intensely while touching them, maybe turning them into music for losers, heroes of our time, poets of our unique and ephemeral existence. .
Was there ever a better drawing of the human condition than ellipses, with their cheerful suspension of what, after all, only aspires to remain eternally suspended?
For me, the image most related to perpetual suspension will always be the patio of my school, when we pupils left for home in the afternoons and little by little the shadows grew and the patio was left abandoned like a quadrangular eternity — tidy and forever disturbing — offering us the condensed pearl of our school weariness.
46
A hundred meters from the Hauptbahnhof, on the ground floor of a building in a squalid alley — I was thinking of my younger days and an old terror that would have been upon me by now in the form of a dry, icy breath directly on the back of my neck — we went in to see One Page of Babaouo, the singular installation by the Portuguese artist António Jobim.
Ignoring the long line, we flashed our passes, going in to see that performance directly inspired by Babaouo, the film script Salvador Dalí wrote in the 1930s. As was to be expected, we saw a disconcerting show (considering that Kassel wasn’t exactly known for dancing to a logical beat).
Boston had no information about that performance. She hadn’t found the time to see it and, moreover, she hated Jobim because she remembered his first visit to Kassel in the middle of a February blizzard earlier that year. At eighty-five, he was the oldest artist invited to Documenta and he arrived in the city in February to set One Page of Babaouo in motion. He arrived with the strange reputation of having a tendency to disappear, to vanish into thin air, to get lost; so Boston was ordered to make sure that didn’t happen. But he’s eighty-five years old! she’d said. It doesn’t matter, they told her, this is an unpredictable man, who likes nothing better than to slip under the radar. That a man of his age, in the middle of a city where it was snowing copiously, was going to get lost still seemed impossible. But it happened. António Jobim was a genius of disappearances. He arrived on the coldest day of the year and went to that squalid building in the alley (that inhospitable ground floor by the Hauptbahnhof, where they’d begun to rehearse his version of a page from Dali’s Babaouo). He had lunch with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez in the Osteria restaurant, singing them an emotional rendition of the fado “Não Quero Amar.” Afterward, they accompanied him to the hotel so he could have a siesta, and they put Boston in charge of setting up surveillance and looking after him as soon as she saw him reappear in the lobby.
They didn’t see him again for two days. María Boston never found out how he’d outwitted her surveillance. She had to spend all her time looking for him all over the city, calling the police, hotels, brothels, anyone who might have seen him. Jobim was originally from Angola, and in the snow of that German city, if only by pure contrast, his blackness might have made him visible, but no one saw him anywhere. He didn’t reappear until two days later, when they’d almost given him up for dead. All Jobim said was that the chocolate in Kassel — actually, all the chocolate of the Hessenland region — was very good. At that moment, if she’d been able to, Boston would have murdered him on the spot.