Spleen

Short essay originally published last year in Nothing Personal magazine (UK)

I see an empty gravel path hugged by evergreen trees. MANU’S SPLEEN in blocky white type in the centre of the screen, and then the caption disappears, and a group of three people enter from the left: leading the way, a shortish young man with dark curls cropped close to his head; a button-nosed androgyne, her dark blonde hair cut in a shag, wearing a burnished brown leather coat; along with a third person I can’t make out because the framing is much too tight. Finally, the camera pulls back and steadies itself to take in all three figures: what surely must be Manu, then the shag-haired woman, and then the man. I hear a slight squelching noise as their leather shoes twist in gravel. I recognise the language as German, but can’t make out what they’re talking about.

Alongside, I hear a hooky seventies-infused instrumental refrain redolent of unhurried days at the beach. As they walk, all eyes are drawn towards the closest figure, leaving no doubt that this woman is the titular Manu, the definitely – rather than probably, or even surely – Manu. Taller than her companions, Manu is oddly formal, funereal, even, wearing a well-cut black pea coat over a billowing white polo-neck. Her wavy white-blonde hair does little to counter the nearly gratuitous sharpness of her face. Her lips are full, her jaw is square and her strong nose is perfectly straight. Walking with a distinctly regal air, Manu keeps her sharp chin high, gaze solemn and fixed, with an inexplicable sense of determination, on the path ahead. The idea of Manu doing mundane things – shopping in a supermarket, for example, or sitting upstairs on a double-decker bus – simply does not fit.

I first watched Rosemarie Trockel’s Manu’s Spleen I (2000) in Hamburg, in a large group exhibition on the subject of mourning. The film was playing on a loop on one of those chunky retro monitors that are so popular these days, perhaps as a way of resisting the self-obliterating immersion of much contemporary video art. Standing directly in front of the small monitor, just one among many others, I watched the seven-minute-and-twenty-second film a few times before moving on. Initially, I just liked the title. I liked its vague but distinct hyperbole. There was a quality of the baroque about it – something dark and excessive, festering. Who was Manu? And what is a spleen, anyway? The combination of these two words, neither of which really signified anything for me, was thrilling. I had no idea what would come next.

As they move, the man says, “kalt,” and it does look cold, though their clothes are not warm enough for German winter proper, so I would guess it is November or maybe March. Aside from Manu, they appear relaxed and informal. Not-Manu is idly tearing and eating something as she walks. At one point, the man makes eye contact with the camera, but looks away as soon as he becomes aware of himself doing it; this makes me think that whoever is filming is familiar, but not exactly one of the gang. Moving from left to right, the group slink alongside a boxy curtain of mint-green trees punctuated with dilapidated gravestones. Manu extends her pale left hand to point at something directly ahead and off-screen. Reciprocating, the man points at the same thing – I still don’t know what it is – before drawing his hand to the back of his neck in a tender gesture of surprise, worry or concern. They then come to an abrupt stop.

After a brief pause the three part and disperse, allowing the camera to see what they see. In the centre of the frame, a young man is lying on his back in a freshly cut grave, hands resting on his belly in a neat and somewhat mannered fold. Seemingly dead, but on open soil. Manu’s two accomplices jump down. The woman picks up the dead man’s legs while the man grabs his upper torso, hoisting him up from his silver belt buckle to shunt him into place at the right-hand side of the hole. Oddly, they seem to do all of this without really thinking about it. Once the man is pushed flush with the soil wall, the two stand on either side of the hole, peering in. “Ist das OK?” the man asks Manu. By way of response, Manu starts moving slowly from the left-hand side of the screen towards the grave, a flash of blonde in the darkness. Hands packed into her coat pockets, she steps down and falls back into the hollow, assuming the same position as the dead man to her left. She quickly looks peaceful too.

I can’t say for sure why Manu drops into that grave. Perhaps she is bored or wants to briefly escape. Given the title of the work, the reason is probably more melancholic. Up until that point, though, they were just having a pleasant stroll in a cemetery, nothing especially odd about that, chatting about art or maybe gossiping about mutual acquaintances. Of course, the film is scripted – it’s certainly not a documentary, but it is scripted to appear unscripted. In this, I suspect, Trockel didn’t want to imply premeditation; rather, she wanted to say something about the impulsiveness, the why-not-ness of youth. Manu sees an open grave and decides to lie down in it – this is all I know for sure. And for five minutes, it’s like she goes somewhere else. Lying beside the “dead” man in an open grave, Manu offers viewers a kind of transubstantiation. Still the same, but different. Rapt, I look at her sleeping because, on some level, I am not sure whether she will come back. Or perhaps more accurately, I watch because I hope, on some level, that something will happen, and that she will come back changed.

Since opening a few months prior to my visit, the exhibition – the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s yearly blockbuster show – had mostly been closed. Because of this, it had been extended two months past its initial closing date; this was the only reason I got to see it. On the day I visited, the weather was unseasonably cold and wet, and the museum was almost full. Cautiously moving around other bodies, along with Manu’s Spleen I, I saw other artworks more reconcilable with my knowledge of the “difficult” German conceptual artist: a trio of gleaming cooking hobs mounted on pristine white enamel (o.T. [Ofen]), 1994) along with three mannequin heads covered with ski masks – from left to right, in swastika, Playboy bunny, and circle patterns – sitting in a mirror-lined display case (Balaklava, 1986). Sensing the dark right-ness of the mise-en-scène, I took a quick selfie with my own masked face between two of Trockel’s patterned heads.

The curators could not have foreseen how relevant an exhibition on mourning would turn out to be: staged in the middle of a global pandemic, the very thing some of us were looking to avoid at all costs. For my part, I was in Hamburg with the simple intention of avoiding reality. To do this, I figured I needed to move and only stop in an unfamiliar place. I set off early on a Friday morning. The journey there was seamless, switching from Berlin’s central train station to Hamburg’s and then onto the local U-Bahn, markedly sanitary and modern in comparison to the one serving Berlin, in less than three hours. At the comfortingly bland hotel, the friendly receptionist unfurled a street map, marking all the key tourist sites on it in blue pen. I hung back from the counter at a socially acceptable distance, twisting the room key in my hand. I had done plenty of research for this particular weekend away. I hadn’t been able to leave Berlin in the previous six months. 

In Hamburg’s city centre, apart from the fact that everyone was wearing masks and hand sanitisers seemed to be mounted on every available vertical surface, you could just about think everything was OK. Walking inarguably novel streets, it was still possible to inhabit the role of a tourist and check out. It just meant cultivating a bland kind of dispersed perception, a form of seeing-but-not-seeing. It also required an almost selfless commitment to extravagance, the kind of existential recklessness only afforded to people who are passing through. This took effort. I was in Hamburg for three consecutive days, for example, and ate ice cream every single day. Only an hour after arriving in the city, I was tucking into a stack of three thick pancakes topped with oozing dark chocolate and swirls of vegan cream. I finished them despite feeling full after just one and felt queasy for the rest of the afternoon.

Unable to stay still, after visiting the Kunsthalle I took a trip on the Elbe and saw some remarkably large but otherwise featureless boats. After that, I pounded over to the Speicherstadt, the city’s iconic nineteenth-century trade storage quarter recently granted UNESCO world heritage status. This had somehow achieved the feat of being restored to look like a reproduction of itself. Everywhere, people were taking photos of one another smiling and leaning on pretty pointed bridges and just generally putting on a good show. A steady stream of boats took more adventurous individuals through the city’s winding canal system. I kept moving, finally coming to rest at the Planten um Blomen, which I’ve since taken to describing as possibly-the-best-park-I’ve-ever-seen. Certainly, I was very attached to the idea of this being true.

The film seems to elude its own time; oddly caught dazwischen, in-between. This particular semblance of timelessness is undone, however, when a phone rings, and the woman pulls out a blocky mobile similar to the first one I ever owned. The woman answers to say that she cannot talk and hangs up, then returns to peer down at Manu, who is still feigning sleep. “Wie spät ist es jetzt?” (How late is it now?) she asks the man, who consults a black watch on his left wrist. “Zwanzig vor zwei” (Twenty to two). Together, they move up again towards the top of the grave. The woman crouches at Manu’s head, her companion by that of the dead man. Maybe feeling pressured to reciprocate Manu’s calm indifference towards the idea of death, he drops his hand to skim the man’s face. “So kalt,” he says, shuddering, before wiping his hand clean on his thigh.

After returning from Hamburg I started to visit art exhibitions again. I can’t say I was particularly interested, more that I felt pressure to cultivate a sense of normality, to go back to things like they were, without acknowledging the things that had been lost. On a purely mechanical level, this meant doing the things I used to do. Now, it was summer. In one exhibition at a prominent Mitte gallery, I saw a collection of art made by stressed artists during lockdown. This included a turquoise lightbox hoisted up high and hung where the gallery’s wall met the ceiling. Another World is Possible, it said. Fashionable couples dressed in black shuffled gingerly around piles of objects on the floor; moving in a delicate, self-conscious two-step – back, then forward, then back again – as they studied other works on the wall. I remember re-tweeting something, scared and hopeful, back in March, just as the world came to a crashing halt: ‘Is it just me or did it get a little easier this week to imagine the end of capitalism as opposed to the end of the world?’

Following five minutes and thirty seconds of simulated death, Manu wakes with a start and sits up. The man extends his hand to help her and she grabs it and steps out of the grave. Now she is in the middle of the frame. Her female companion dusts down her back. Without talking about the bizarre intermission they have just experienced, they start walking, or maybe drifting, back in the direction they came. Manu asks the man for a cigarette and he gives her one. She starts smoking. She neither looks fazed nor particularly altered. If anything, Manu looks happy; far away, somehow. Perhaps a bit dreamy or stoned. They continue smoking and walking and then the film ends. The music has started up again.