At the End of the Tracks
No more bullshit!
Four more stops have passed on my itinerary since leaving Zlín, determined by interests as much as railway connections. I am writing this in Split, a word of great phonetic charm. It rolls off the tip of the tongue, then explodes just behind the front teeth. Split! Split! Banana split! But first, goulash:
In Budapest, I spent a whole day at the Lukács Baths, ate very hearty food at Frici Papa and Jedermann, and saw a few of the exhibitions that are part of the current OFF-Biennial. I also climbed Gellért-hegy at night to look at the illuminated city below, which was an excellent decision.
In Ljubljana, I read many of Igor Zabel’s essays, some of them over a glass of wine and live punk music on Eipprova ulica, walked the idyllic Tivoli park behind the National Museum of Contemporary History, and saw some of the best art I have seen in a long long time at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. It is due to the recommendations of very generous and knowledgeable friends that I felt like a stranger in these cities only in the best, untethered, curious sense of the word.
I knew it would be wise to take a break from cities, museums, and the inevitable fraughtness of historical thought before heading into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The initial plan was to make my way straight towards the Croatian coast for two days of Adriatic bathing and people watching on the promenade (both have been great fun). However, I ended up spending the night in Zagreb, a stop made necessary because it wasn’t possible to book the night train to Split at a Slovenian station. I had no expectations and little energy, and spent half the day languishing at a coffee shop before I finally peeled myself away to visit the contemporary art museum across the river. A second choice, because the National Museum of Modern Art, much closer to where I stayed, is currently closed.
This turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. Novi Zagreb, the result of a southward expansion of the city in the 1960s, was, frankly, much more interesting to me than the old part of the city. I had a great time walking around and looking at the architecture. It all reminded me of (a much bigger version of) Berlin’s Hansaviertel, which I love dearly.
The Museum of Contemporary Art itself is perhaps the largest of its kind I have ever seen. I lingered, for a long time, in front of Igor Grubic’s two-channel video installation East Side Story (2006-2008), which juxtaposes footage of violent acts that happened around the 2001 and 2002 Gay Pride parades in Belgrade in Zagreb with tenderly contorted choreographies enacted at the sites of those crimes a few years later. Nothing about this meditation on the body—in public, pain, love—feels contrived or overdetermined in the way that art sometimes does if it is trying hard to check all the boxes of political relevance. There is a lightness of touch in Grubic’s arrangement of movement and images that starkly contrasts the bruteness of the incessant beatings and slurs recorded in the documentary footage. The juxtaposition of these two modes doesn’t remedy or heal—that’s not really how history works, I think—but it changes the incantation, the resonance, which is a forward-looking gesture.
As bombs, rockets, and gunfire are going off at so many places in the world, as newspapers are discussing the strategic efficiency of certain decisions while two, three, four, seventy, a hundred dead amount to little more than a footnote, as the world I have come to know is—I think we have to face this— is ending, I do ask myself more often, and with a different sense of urgency, what the stakes of art and writing can be in this world. That doesn’t mean I am in despair about the irrelevance of my profession, or lament its impotence in the face of ending worlds and mass destruction. To decry art and the humanities as decadent frivolities produced in air conditioned ivory towers is just as fucked up and, frankly, boring as cherishing them for the ostensible respite they offer, or pursuing either with the gross insincerity of careerist ambition (there, I said it). I also don’t mean to say that these stakes should be prescribed to anyone in a thematic sense, as in “work on XY in XY manner.” I shudder at the mere thought of such restriction, even if I know that I am treading on contradictory territory if the call for no more bullshit implies some residual normative judgment. Maybe this contradiction does not have to be resolved. But if it had to be, it might help to think of the criteria for this judgment as internal rather than external: only I can know whether I am bullshitting myself, and I would rather not, especially not right now.
East Side Story struck me as a very bullshit-free artwork, specific to its immediate context and, at the same time, reaching beyond that, towards any body at risk, towards the extraordinary amounts of hate and violence that people inflict onto each other. At the same time, I also felt a sense of what it would be like to relate differently, to be hurting and tender.
Lena and I, in the steady stream of long voice notes that form the backbone of our friendship, have been talking a lot about the relationship between ideas, emotions, moods, and the nervous system—we refer to it as the “Nervenkostüm,” for the pleasantly old-fashioned ring of it. To continuously remind myself that not everything can be solved conceptually has been a revelation, if only of the kind that sounds like a terrible platitude once it’s spelled out. Art acts, I think, on the nervous system and through that makes realities sink in that, on TV and in the news, must remain distant images; it can birth into being the experience of an imagined futurity whose mere description would leave much of it in an abstract realm that covers only one part of what it feels like to know, to grasp, and then from that position to act.
The crowning act of my visit was the steep slide that led outwards. The last time I slid down a slide in a museum was in Jamtli, semi-mythical dream place of childhood summer vacations. In Zagreb, the ride was fast and bumpy, I cheered the entire way down and, landing on the soft rubber mats at the bottom, was flooded by a near-delirious sense of happiness. I am sure I looked like an idiot. Why can’t museums be like this more often? Why can’t we think, observe, close-look, scrutinize, contemplate, critique, and then also let loose, give in to gravity, feel a little scared, childlike, reckless, silly, entirely uncool, happy?1 The slide in Zagreb catapulted me straight back into the Britney/Adorno matrix.
Across these past few days, acquainting myself with the intricacies and impasses of the railway system has taken up some time and been one of the indeterminate, experiential ways of learning that travel affords and I love so much. For a somewhat anxious hour in Budapest, I thought I might have to reroute my journey entirely or take at least one flight to get to Istanbul, since the train connections thin out substantially and often do not cross state borders, as the Interrail map for 2025 shows (my stops, thus far, marked):
I could, of course, have known this beforehand, and am certain that a more intricate planner would have. The fact that I did not even look at this map before coming up with my grand plan of going by train from Germany to Istanbul is, I realized, akin to how I tend to move through life and writing: some vague gut feeling usually pulls me towards an imagined if undetermined landing. I trust the intuition/apparition, and then cobble together a path that will bring me towards it. It’s the exact point where my particular kind of intelligence and my particular kind of stupidity meet.
Never have I ever written an outline. Never have I ever planned an itinerary before the start of a journey. Usually, there is a vision—and then, without fail, a moment when I think I will never get there, was entirely misled, should delete the entire document, start over (the travel version of that moment came in Budapest). Thus far, I’ve always managed to bridge a path towards the endpoint.
As the map shoes, my arrival in Split also marks the arrival at one of the railway network’s termini, but I’ve figure out a way to make my way onwards, inching closer towards the Bosporus. Next is Mostar.
This is entirely out of context, but I hold steadfast to the opinion that the most recent, monumentally controversial documenta succeeded at dissolving exactly this dichotomy. So-called “art world professionals” should be encouraged to embarass/exhilarate themselves on skate ramps more frequently, I think.