The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    Pure Duchamp, I thought. And I remembered that sunshade Duchamp was working on one summer in Cadaqués, which, in the end, turned out to be to shelter him from the sun or, to put it a better way, so he could settle into the shadows, his favorite territory. Where was that sun shelter now? Only in the minds of those who saw it or enjoyed the shade beneath it. Since they’d all been dying off, there were very few left—if any—before that “canvas” (once a silent work of art) would disappear from living memory.
    Yes, it was clear: art goes by like life. And Sehgal was an illustrious heir to Duchamp. But was he innovating? Could it be said that he belonged to some avant-garde?
    No, I decided, he wasn’t really innovating. But since when was it necessary for art to be dedicated to innovation? This is exactly what I was wondering when I walked into
This Variation,
Sehgal’s dark room.
    (That night, I coincidentally stumbled upon a long interview with Chus Martínez on my computer—finally I saw her face—and her declarations helped me gauge whether today’s artists were innovators or not. In the interview Chus explained that Documenta 13 wasn’t like other exhibitions; it wasn’t just for looking at, but could