Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

On hearing this, Boston couldn’t refrain from a kind, beautiful laugh, really very friendly. She shot me a friendly glance. (I’d started to uncomplainingly put up with that type of fond glance “toward the old man,” which some women had thrown my way with sad affection lately.) And I realized that sometimes her natural happiness surpassed the charm of her marvelous voice, which was really saying something. It seemed to her, she said without letting slip her expression of strange satisfaction, that there was nothing less conducive to meditation than staying sitting in a closed room or a “thinking cabin,” or a fretting cabin, or whatever I wanted to call it.

She said it in such a captivating way, it might even be the case, I thought, that she was absolutely right. But I did not want her to notice I’d admired the wisdom of her words, so I acted as if I’d heard nothing. I pretended not to have taken in what she’d said. And while I was pretending, I started to turn over in my mind the fact that somebody had brushed up against me in Sehgal’s dark room and that I had thought at the time about resisting a second touch. It was not something to pass over with indifference. Maybe this was a touch, I said to myself, I would find hard to forget.

Today, I think things would have gone better for me if at that juncture I’d already read — I did not read Chus’s piece until that evening — that “art is art, and what you make of it is up to you,” that peculiar McGuffin from Chus Martínez that could also be interpreted in this way: “The touch has already happened, and now it all depends on you, let’s see what you can make of it.”

But at that point I still hadn’t come across Chus’s sentence. Happening on it that night, I associated it with something Boston had said to me during the afternoon about Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s desire that participants in Documenta 13 be left to make something , and that there should be no artistic brief to mold their intervention. Through that association, everything caused me to wonder if perhaps Carolyn and Chus, with their strange invitation to the Dschingis Khan (an invitation without sense or instructions) had deliberately brushed up against me , to see if I were capable of turning their Chinese proposal into something creative, or what amounted to the same thing: a fertile and properly productive way of making something of it.

I did not have Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel in my luggage, a novel I adore but didn’t bring with me. It was as though I had, because I knew it almost all by heart. I’d read it an infinite number of times and always had the feeling that memorizing it instead of taking it with me constituted a sort of strange, and no doubt singular, good luck charm. For me, Roussel’s whole book has always been, above all, a summary of walks. Over the course of an afternoon — which takes on the character of an itinerant initiation rite — the learned Martial Canterel goes along expounding each one of the rarities dotted around his property, the lovely villa at Montmorency.

Sometimes, I find it amusing to feel as though I’m in other people’s novels. Perhaps because of this, when María Boston and I finally arrived, after a brief walk, at the great esplanade of the Friedrichsplatz, I remembered the beginning of the second chapter of Locus Solus when they “came in sight of a broad promenade which was completely bare and very smooth.”

In fact, that route traveled with Boston was the prologue to other walks that would come later and would in part turn my trip to Kassel into the story of a journey punctuated by strolls, during which I saw, in the style of Locus Solus , a good number of rarities, many marvels.

On arriving at the grand esplanade, we arrived at a point on Friedrichsplatz where we could literally go no farther due to the huge crowd waiting to enter the Fridericianum, the oldest public museum in Europe and the heart of Documenta since its beginning in 1955. It was unthinkable to visit the whole exhibition and not enter the impressive neoclassical building (one of the few to survive the brutal devastation of the war), since that would have been like traveling to Germany and not even hearing about a city called Berlin.

In short, I had never seen such a gigantic line in my life. The pleasant temperatures for August, along with the fact that Documenta was only on for another four days, had filled Kassel with a host of last-minute visitors. In the line I seemed to once more see, with astonishment, that there were people looking at me with a strange fixation. They were all but saying: It’s about time you deigned to get here. Once again I felt I could be someone they were expecting: an impression entirely lacking any sense, but from which I could not escape, which allowed me to suspect that everything I thought I was observing had some hidden basis in truth, a truth I would not necessarily one day know.

Of course, they might simply be mistaking me for somebody else. We’ve got these brilliant passes, Boston said, and we can skip all the lines. When I heard her say this, I could have jumped for joy. The thing is, this type of maneuvering, in which you get ahead of the crowd, has always seemed to me very good therapeutically, perhaps because we drag too many frustrations around with us. From time to time, it’s good to skip the humiliation of standing in a monotonous line, which evokes for us the single file we all stand in sooner or later to enter Death’s domain.

This sort of ploy was always well received by me, and so I welcomed the news with satisfaction, while remembering that the only useful bit of advice my paternal grandfather ever gave me was that if I wanted to be someone in life, I should always jump right over people standing in bothersome lines.

While the security guards were looking at our passes with more than rigorous attention and simultaneously containing the fury of those who complained we were jumping the queue, Boston told me of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s conviction that one could change reality with art, although one could not force that change: Carolyn had been in favor of change from the outset, but without putting pressure on the participating artists, not exerting excessive control over their work, letting them be the ones who, if they so desired, revealed new paths.

We passed through security and headed into the mythical Fridericianum. Once inside, we started to cross vast exhibition rooms on the ground floor, rooms that had been left empty and seemed to be, Boston said, a reflection on saturation and emptying out; in this main exhibition space of a big international show, the emptiness was far more noticeable than in any other setting.

Faced with such emptying out I couldn’t help but remember the Sunday morning a few years back now when they opened the newly built museum of contemporary art in Barcelona (the MACBA) to the public with evident haste; they threw it open to the citizens, but without pictures, not a single painting or sculpture, nothing inside it. The people of Barcelona wandered through the museum admiring the white walls, the solidity of the construction, and other architectural details, proud of having paid for it with their taxes and telling themselves that the works of art could wait.

I was thinking of all this in the Fridericianum, thinking of that happy period for Barcelona, when Boston, noticing I was being bothered by the current of wind circulating around those vacant rooms, which had obliged me to turn up my collar, led me over to a small, inconspicuous plaque set in the corner between two bleak white walls.

There on the plaque I saw, with surprise, that the current was artificial and signed by Ryan Gander. Brilliant, I thought. Somebody was putting their signature to a draft! Fantastic. Although, naturally, I couldn’t avoid thinking of the detractors of contemporary art: no doubt they would find inspiration for all-out mockery in that plaque.