by Rob Doyle
‘Why is Winnie-the-Pooh here?’ a bald man called over the noise of the rain to the tour guide, an Asian lady.
The guide smiled. That book had recently been banned in China, she explained, after it became a common joke among the populace that their leader, Xi Jinping, bore a resemblance to Pooh Bear. The bald man nodded, satisfied.
‘And why’s Harry Potter in there?’ asked a white-haired old lady.
‘Because it’s shit!’ offered an English lad in an Arsenal jersey who happened to be walking past, gripping his spray-tanned girlfriend in a near headlock. I let out a laugh – what were they doing here? – prompting the guide to glance at me reproachfully.
She turned back to her audience and explained that the Parthenon was installed at precisely this spot because it was here that the Nazis had publicly burned a mound of books they considered decadent, while in the adjacent Fridericianum hundreds of thousands of books had been incinerated when the edifice was annihilated under Allied bombs. She made it sound as if the Second World War had essentially been a war on books. The erection of the Parthenon of Books, she went on, was a tribute to the power of literature, which would always rise from the blazes lit by anti-democratic bad guys who sought to suppress it.
Spare me, I thought, intensely aware of my wet socks. We were encroaching on my professional territory here. I had a stake in the game, yet the earnest patter that followed about human rights, democracy and the struggle for justice had me siding with the tyrants and conflagrationists. Besides, censoring authors gave them the prestige of rock gods. When a book was deemed heretical enough to immolate – did the tyrants not see this? – it gained the impregnable glamour of revolt and edginess (though perhaps this did not apply to Winnie-the-Pooh). You couldn’t buy the kind of publicity afforded by the blazing pyre – and what was torched in one country became a bestseller in another. I pulled out my notebook and sketched a maxim: If a book is worth reading it’s worth burning. Or maybe: If a book isn’t worth burning it isn’t worth reading. I would hone it later. For Minujín’s monumental work to redeem itself from ideological triteness, she would need to stalk up in the dead of night and set it ablaze – a layering of conflagrations in dialogue across the decades, infernally ambiguous. Perhaps it was just jealousy talking: I knew I was born too late to be in with much hope of a career-boosting ban. You could write anything you liked now and it didn’t matter; everything was permitted because nothing was of consequence. The taboos had all been smashed and writers could run wild, on the understanding that their words had no importance whatsoever. The tyrants didn’t bother to burn literature any more: they knew a senile cripple when they saw one. A ban now and then indulged writers in the pretence of a swagger and virility their profession had long since lost. A cynic after my own heart, Jean Baudrillard had expressed a similar, quasi-ironic nostalgia in a passage I chanced upon while browsing the festival bookshop in the shadow of the Parthenon:
Censorship makes it possible to conceal the worthlessness of a book or an artwork … Now that this curse has been lifted, art appears in all its insignificance.
The Parthenon of Books, I soon found, was indicative of the overall tenor of the current documenta, which was avowedly politicised, abundant with art not for art’s sake but for the sake of social change, the alleviation of world suffering, the bolstering of democratic-egalitarian ideals. The present curator, Adam Szymczyk – a man so hip he didn’t even need vowels in his surname – had declared that the festival would address the multiple crises the world was currently enduring: mass migration, the renaissance of the far right, looming ecological catastrophe and so on. Leaving aside the crisis of his unpronounceable name, you could see Szymczyk’s point – it really did feel like emergency time on planet earth – but this institutional yoking of art to political engagement seemed symptomatic of a broader cultural synergy: everywhere you looked, art was becoming indistinguishable from social work, progressivist politics, liberal guilt. To join the tribe called contemporary art, it was required that you loudly declaim a humanitarian worldview and place your work at its service. Often, when I looked at contemporary art, I sensed I was meant to fall on my knees and flagellate myself. In the programme there was even a listed event entitled Shame on Us, relating to the refugee crisis. That was it: Szymczyk would not feel satisfied unless everyone who visited Kassel crawled away in shame. The European Christianity of which art for centuries had been the efflorescence was finished – no hip artist would be seen dead with it – but its morality hung over the continent like ancient incense, and the scolding curators and shame-artists were its priests.
The rain was hopping off my umbrella, streaming through the streets. The heavy-metal mass of the sky suggested it would still be chucking it down when the next documenta kicked off five years later. I left the Parthenon and wandered – in the sense of splashed – amid the buildings surrounding the square. In addition to the work exhibited in galleries across Kassel, sculptures and installations were dotted about the city, in the wild, to be chanced upon or sought out using the documenta map, which, it was fast becoming clear, bore only a glancing relationship to the territory it purported to depict. Was this some postmodernist allusion to the breakdown of representation, the loss of meta-narratives and stable moorings? Perhaps, but as a guide to figuring out which direction to walk in, the map was all but useless – increasingly so as text and graphic crumbled in the rain.
I chucked it in a bin and stepped inside documenta Halle, where a wall of warmth enveloped me as I waved my press pass. Some of the art in this multi-floor gallery was memorable enough – huge musical instruments fashioned from migrant shipwrecks recovered from the Mediterranean; a very long painting that narrativised, in Stone Age cartoon fashion, the snowy lives and bloody rituals of Arctic tribespeople. It was the audience, though, who absorbed my interest, the art-punters themselves. What struck me was the overwhelmingly middle-aged demographic. The bustling gallery was not devoid of young people – that attractive Asian couple taking thoughtful selfies by a huge red vulva sculpture, for instance – but they were the minority, the guests of honour. Generally speaking, the young and the beautiful were elsewhere – dancing at nightclubs in Berlin, say. That was understandable. The pleasures afforded by contemporary art were, in the end, relatively slight. These stylish, financially comfortable couples and grey-haired friends – the earnest Dutch, the kindly Scandinavians, the eager Germans – suggested that looking at art was what you did when the intenser modes of cultural pleasure no longer worked, when the doors of ecstasy began to shut. Youth was the season of rapture: its fruits were sex and bliss, pursued at raves on beaches or in festival meadows, at orgiastic house parties or nightclub saturnalias that lasted till dawn and then dawn again. Youth was ecstasy’s stomping ground, its home stadium – it accepted no substitute. Then you got old and you started collecting wine, or taking an interest in politics, or looking at contemporary art. Culture itself was a consolation prize, handed with a pat on the shoulder to Time’s losers, those who’d fallen behind in the sprint of species renewal. The mild and refined pleasures of contemporary art were weak surrogates for real happiness but, wandering through the gallery’s white rooms, adrift in a thirty-something liminality between youth and middle age, I found such thoughts quite soothing. Yes, I was getting older and would soon find myself excluded from the earth’s true paradise, but there would always be a place for me, a safer realm of gentle pleasures and aesthetic titillation, without euphoria or terror.
I left the documenta Halle just before eight o’clock, as the festival was shutting up shop for the night. Walking along the hillside that rose from Friedrichsplatz towards the high point of the town, above the motorway and forests, I scanned the rain-soaked walkways and elevated gardens – all quite deserted – for stray artworks. Now and then I mistook real-life objects for artistic representations of themselves – like this tent, surely pitched by a refugee or a vagrant, perched on a hillside beauty spot, looking out over balustrades. But wait, it
was a real artwork – as opposed to a real tent. I approached cautiously, just in case, but yes, it was made not of canvas but of sculpted marble, a creamy-gold hue, its folds and billows smooth and lovely under my palms. The tent seemed to radiate an inner luminescence, the brightest point on the wintry August landscape. I stepped around the front and found that the tent was open. Muddy footprints were splattered across the floor. I stuck my head inside to see if it reeked of piss: it did not. If I’d had a sleeping bag I’d have been tempted to buy a few cans and curl up in there for the night, looking out at the rain and getting plastered. I liked this sculpture. I felt a pull towards it, as if it were my home in another reality. True, I again had the sense of an artist wagging her finger at me – the ease of my life compared to the biblical sufferings of the refugees who flooded Europe – yet there was an optimism to this luminous tent, squat like a Buddha with its back to the middle-aged crowds of Kassel.
The next morning I hurriedly fixed a mug of instant coffee, skipping breakfast to make up for a late start, the students in adjacent blocks having kept me awake blasting hip-hop with bass that rattled the headboard. I read an email that had arrived while I was in the shower, from Nesrin. She instructed me to visit an address that Google Maps indicated to be nearby. Fifteen minutes later I arrived at a ground-floor address in a run-down block on a street that was deserted but for a dog that snarled weakly before descending into a pedestrian tunnel.
As Nesrin had indicated, the door was unlocked. I stepped inside, leaving it ajar behind me. In the centre of the small studio room was a bed, low and unkempt, whose soiled linen no doubt accounted for the reek of stale sweat that hung in the air. On the floor next to the bed were two red buckets, empty. Six words were written in black marker on the wall: Eternity has never been so precarious. Pasted around the text were a number of black-and-white photographs that, I realised with a start, had evidently been taken the previous evening: I was looking at myself, from a stalker’s distance, wandering in the rain through the deserted gardens at the top of the city. I’d had no sense of being followed; the awareness that I’d been the object of covert attention brought a nervous thrill. Spotting a black marker on the floor by the bed, I picked it up and wrote the words Fuck Arses next to the first message. Two could play this game.
A short walk brought me to the so-called Neue Neue Galerie, not to be confused with the Neue Galerie up at the far end of the city. A nondescript building in the grimier part of town, the Neue Neue was already host to a chattering weekend crowd. I like a good video installation, and the work that detained me longest here was one such titled Samsara Europa. In a dark corner of the gallery, a film was projected from the back of a red van that had plants growing inside and which, I read in the accompanying text, had been driven across Europe by the Norwegian artists, a lesbian couple. The film was an oneiric road movie in which the van, emerging from the Mediterranean, made its way to Athens, passed through Kassel, and finally plunged into the North Sea. Along the way, naked beauties thumbed for rides at parched roadsides; a man in flames left an out-of-town bar and collapsed; a biker fired a shotgun into a murder of crows. I sat on the floor nestled against the van’s back wheel as the film played on a loop, lulled by this dream of Europe, its scrapheap hinterlands and dusty southern planes.
As I watched, I thought of another film that my friend Kelly had evoked so passionately I felt as if I’d seen it for myself. Kelly had viewed the film on her twenty-third birthday, while high on LSD, at an exhibition of mystical art in Dublin. For hours she had sat in the dark, entranced by the lurid streets and verdant landscapes of Vietnam, where transvestites and grieving widows enacted rituals that marked the transience and cyclicality of human existence. Kelly seemed not quite able to unravel herself from the films she watched, the books she read, even from other people’s minds – it was as if she never knew where she ended and everything else began. On the internet she called herself Tangle and I could see why. It seemed to confound her that she happened to be herself and not, for instance, me, or a village girl in Laos, or a sunflower. She spoke of this world as if it were one of any number where she might have found herself alive, and appraised its qualities as if against some metaversal template. ‘It’s such a clever world,’ she enthused once, as we listened to a song whose synth line delighted her. Whenever I was in her orbit, reality acquired an implausible, bizarre dimension where the boundaries of the possible seemed to come unstuck.
Resting my head against the wheel as the screen darkened and then lit up again, I drifted in and out of wakefulness. I dreamed I followed Nesrin into a dim room beneath the streets. We had sex as two masked men with assault rifles roared at us. I began punching Nesrin’s face as she howled in assent. I awoke with a start, disoriented and embarrassed. A little boy holding his father’s hand regarded me serenely as they walked away. I got to my feet and shuffled towards the exit, feeling certain of two things: first, that I would find Nesrin if I could; and second, that if I did it would spell catastrophe – a blackness would spread from this German town to colonise my life, pitching us into a horrible entwinement. In the toilets I splashed water on my face and waited till the squall of lust and revulsion subsided.
By a coffee stand in the nearby park, I texted Fran about the dream. He was travelling in Japan with his girlfriend, but he replied promptly:
Sounds nuts … Did u meet her yet?
No. She’s been following me taking pictures.
I warned u!
Yeah. How’s Japan? Did u get to Kyoto yet?
Yeah Jpn is amaze. Florence and I haven’t spoken in 3 days tho. It’s a drag when yr travelling together.
Ha.
A photograph appeared: a shimmering city viewed through a train window.
Got to split. Arriving in Osaka now … in miserable silence. Chat later. Beware the Kurd!!!
I spent the rest of the morning seeking out permanent installations from documentas past, the imaginative sediment that had accrued over decades on Kassel’s parks and squares. The rain held off and silvery light leached through the clouds that hung above the city, awaiting orders. A text came in as I walked towards the Hauptbahnhof – my curator friend Stavro in Berlin, telling me his friend Estefanio was in Kassel for the week; I ought to meet him, he’d know the best parties. On the plaza in front of the train station I descended a metal staircase into a disused underground station that had been repurposed as art space. Weeds sprouted from between the tracks. Long white sculptures resembling strands of DNA snaked through the cavernous structure. Whispering voices filled the air, emanating from unseen sources embedded in the walls. In the glow cast by erratic chandeliers, I noticed a woman on the other side of the tracks, further down the platform. She was dressed in black, with dark hair, and she was taking photographs. I stood watching her until finally she looked up. We gazed at each other for longer than seemed appropriate. Then she turned and walked through a doorway. After hesitating a moment I leaped down, crossed the tracks and followed her. I entered a room where iridescent, digitised mosaics rotated and breathed on the walls and floor. I was alone: she had left through one of three doors, or via the staircase.
Back in daylight, I stopped for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant that bustled with map-clutchers. I ordered a falafel and chips. While awaiting my meal I checked my inbox: there was a new email from Nesrin, sent only minutes earlier. An inline image manifested over several data-sucking seconds. The photograph was in black and white, grainy like a CCTV still. Once more I was looking at myself, from above and behind this time, standing in the grimy studio I had entered hours earlier, with the buckets on the floor. The scene was as I remembered it but for one jarring difference: the bed in the middle of the room was not empty. In it lay the body of an unnaturally tall woman – or the black, scratchy outline of one. It did not look as if the image had been superimposed so much as burned away, an acid-corroded silhouette revealing an underlying dimension. The face was indistinct, but it was easy to imagine it was screaming. I scrolled d
own. A line below the image read: Choose the caption you prefer.
There was a list:
Endlessly disintegrating / My death waits like a witch in the night / Who I fucked and what it meant / Poetry from the past, projected into the future as violence / Love in an air raid / Love in a bomb shelter / Our hate will never die / Only I know how much I loved you / An infinite and magnificent sorrow / Blood butterflies / Once and never again / Family of ghosts / An investigation into my own disappearance / The wanderer and her shadow / A knife without a blade, that has lost its handle / I stay alive only to haunt you / Whispering into a seashell on a beach in the north
I copied Love in an air raid and pasted it into my reply, adding no words to the message. Then I gazed again at the photograph. I hadn’t noticed any camera in the room: it must have been well concealed above the doorway. Again I felt that dark frisson of intimacy, a not entirely unwelcome sense of violation. I sent another one-line email: Was that you in the underground?
After my falafel I texted Estefanio. He replied while I was drinking an espresso, suggesting we meet that evening at an opening some young artists he knew were having at the train station. And then maybe we could head to a club.
Twenty minutes later I was standing over an apparently unremarkable square of sandstone on Friedrichsplatz, in front of the Parthenon. If you didn’t know it was there you could walk right over it, which is what plenty of people were doing as I stood aside and considered this most suggestive of artworks. An inconspicuous plaque confirmed that the stone square marked the top, and only visible part, of Walter De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer. In the centre of the slab was a metallic disc, several centimetres in diameter. Allegedly, this was the top end of a brass rod that plunged into the earth to a depth of, yes, one kilometre. It was a good gag – a work of massive proportions almost the entirety of which could not be seen. Constructed and buried in the seventies, the Vertical Earth Kilometer was, from one perspective, decades ahead of its time. Our digital epoch was busy making actual the dreams of presence and permanence – in a sense, of eternal life – that had haunted mankind immemorially. Everything that happened now would stay happened, and there was nothing that could not be searched for and found. At the twilight of impermanence, transience acquired a new mystique, and absence became charismatic. I thought of the mandalas created over many years by Buddhist monks in the mountains of Ladakh, meticulously drawn using pigmented sand, only to be wiped away the moment the final grain was in place. The Vertical Earth Kilometer stopped short of such extremism; to go the full way, it would have been necessary to cover over the sandstone marker, so that people walking above had no idea of the subterranean artwork below. Ideally, the work would never have been built at all. Then it would cross from the realm of the suggestive into that of the sublime – though there would be no one around who knew it. Since the only way such a perfectly self-erasing work could exist was in the imagination (as I had just imagined one), it left open the possibility that the world already contained many such secret artworks, invisible marvels at the dawn of omnivoyance.
