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ANDRÁS VISKY
and unified; it signifies not forms, but space, not things, but rather the quality of
spaces. For just this reason, in its most complete and most precise sense it is not
easily grasped in its details,
writes John Pawson in his manifesto of minimalism entitled Minimum.**
History, when great, is like fate: the person disappears from it. It is neutral
with respect to human feelings: this is what we call, when related to people,
godlessness. Alternatively: it knows neither god nor man: in other words, it
is inexorable.
In the final scene of Julius Caesar, Silviu Purcarete creates for the story
of a man (vulgo: history) its icon: objective, clean, reduced to a single plastic
gesture; naked human bodies (from which a dense cloud of white dust rises)
woven together on a not-too-large tabletop, fight the civil war following the
murder of Caesar, who had still been powerful a few moments before. We do
not know who is who, but at this point it’s not at all important, no matter that
we hear the names that were earlier familiar.
Having followed the events of the preceding three acts, we might think
that it’s the legions of the two opponents battling, led by Caesar’s murderers,
Brutus and Cassius, on one side and Octavian and Antony on the other, but
nothing of the sort. The battling, interweaving bodies present us images much
more resembling human-shaped, ravenous, anthropophagus larvae. And the
Shakespearean poetry that still sounds in the extremely confined empty space
of the starkly backlit stage is not the speech of rational man but the evocation
of the guttering out of a misunderstood and liquidated Western civilization
collapsing in on itself. Let us not even think of the magnificence of the verse;
nor are the poetics of the visual construction pretty — on the contrary, it’s
repulsive, its power difficult to bear, more resembling an installation made of
human flesh that suspends in us the dilemma of belonging to the winning or
losing side: after all, in this war, losers battle losers from the start, and the
victors, after finally having annihilated their opponents, quickly create new
opponents from within their own ranks, until at last only dust glitters on the
table in the impassive, artificial light.
“What shall I do? Or: why should I do it? — are not appropriate questions in
such places,” writes Kafka as his conclusion to the short story Railway Trave¬
lers." This enigmatic text of only a few lines regards people as passengers on
a train that has suffered an accident in a tunnel, and furthermore, in a place
36 John Pawson: Minimum, New York, Phaidon, 2006.
” Franz Kafka: Railway Travelers [Eisenbahnreisende], unpublished translation by Péter Czi¬
pott. (No existing published English translation of this parable is found.)
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