Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

“Chingis what?”

“Dschingis Khan.”

“In a Chinese restaurant?”

“Yes. Writing there in front of the public.”

Given my inveterate habit of writing a chronicle every time I get invited to a strange place to do something weird (over time I’ve realized that all places actually seem strange to me), I had the impression I was once again living through the beginning of a journey that could end up turning into a written tale, in which, as was customary, I would combine perplexity and my suspended life to describe the world as an absurd place arrived at by way of a very extravagant invitation.

I looked María Boston in the eye for a few moments. It seemed she’d done this on purpose so I would end up writing a long article about a strange invitation to Kassel to work in public in a Chinese restaurant. I looked away. And that’s all, she said. Carolyn and Chus and their whole curatorial team were simply asking me to sit on a chair in a Chinese restaurant every day and carry out my normal daily activity as if I were in Barcelona. That is, they were just asking me to write and, of course, try to connect with anyone who came into the restaurant and wanted to talk to me. I mustn’t forget that “interconnection” was going to be a very common concept and recommendation within Documenta 13.

And I wasn’t to think, she said, that I was the only writer who was going to do that number, for they planned to invite four or five others from Europe and the Americas, perhaps one or two from Asia as well.

I was pleased to be invited to Kassel, but not at the idea of having to sit in a Chinese restaurant for three weeks. I was sure of that from the start. Fearing they’d eventually rescind my invitation, I felt obliged to tell María Boston that the offer struck me as too squalid, that she should therefore tell Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez that the very idea that hundreds of German grandparents on senior-citizen outings climbing out of their buses to see what I was writing and interconnect with me in a restaurant threw me mentally, even literally, out of joint.

Nobody said anything about German grandparents, Boston corrected me, rather severe all of a sudden. It was true, nobody had said anything about grandparents or senior-citizen outings, but in any case, I told her I would be grateful for another type of invitation to Kassel: to give a lecture there, for example, even if I had to deliver it in the Chinese dive. A talk on chaos in contemporary art, I said in a conciliatory way. Nobody said anything about chaos, interrupted Boston. It was true, no one had said anything about that. Most likely, I was one of those people who had a long-standing, unsophisticated prejudice against contemporary art and believed it was currently a real disaster or a swindle or any of the above.

Okay, I suddenly agreed, there’s no chaos in current art, no crisis of ideas, no obstruction of any kind. I said that, and then I agreed to go to Kassel. I immediately felt a deep satisfaction; I couldn’t forget that more than once I’d dreamed that the avant-garde considered me one of their own and would one day invite me to Kassel.

Oh, and by the way, who were the avant-garde?

María Boston’s face gradually lit up, and for a moment she looked absolutely radiant. Perhaps she was satisfied at having achieved her mission of getting me to accept the proposal.

I knew why I’d accepted, but it would not do to be too sincere. Apart from the originality and literary nature of the invitation, I’d accepted because I had never imagined that this would one day be within my reach. It was as if they’d asked me to play soccer for my favorite professional team: something that, even if only because I’d just turned sixty-three, nobody was ever going to propose now. Also, in recent years, since overcoming a collapse brought on by the excesses of my old lifestyle, I had been recovering on all levels, and part of that process included opening my writing to arts other than literature. In other words, I was no longer obsessed with just literary material and had opened up the game to other disciplines.

For a man growing old and doing nothing to hide it, going to Kassel meant finding doors opening to a new world. Perhaps there I’d come across ideas other than my habitual ones. Maybe I’d manage to reach — with the patience of a prowler — an approximate vision of contemporary art’s situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I was curious, besides, to see if there were many differences between the literary avant-garde — if it existed — and the artistic avant-garde that gathered every five years at Documenta. In the literary sphere, the avant-garde had lost ground, if not become almost entirely extinct, though there might still be the odd poetic project of interest. But had the same thing happened in the art world? Every five years, the great anticommercial fair of innovative art was held in Kassel. Documenta was famous for not being overly contaminated by the laws of the market.

I wanted to go to Documenta, I told her, but without having to go to the Dschingis Khan, for there I’d undoubtedly feel mislaid, completely displaced. Boston looked at me, smiled indulgently, and said I had just uttered the key word, for Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez planned to make their Documenta all about displacement, to put their heavy artillery behind this idea; they wanted to place artists outside their habitual mental comfort zones.

I didn’t want to hazard a guess what “mental comfort zones” were for her, but I did want to know if there was still the slightest chance they might offer me something other than spending absurd mornings in the Chinese restaurant. It would be best if I didn’t refuse to set foot in Dschingis Khan, she told me. It was to be the center of operations for successive invited writers and I couldn’t be different from the others. She could reveal in advance that it would all be quite informal. I’d be left with more than enough time to devote to doing what I did best: observing, glancing, walking around like a profound idler; the organizers knew — having read my work, the entire curatorial team had interpreted it this way — that I saw myself as a sort of erratic stroller in continuous perplexed wandering.

I smiled without really knowing why. We’re going to reduce your Chinese sentence, she suddenly said. I don’t understand, I answered. Well, you see, she said, using the authority Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez have invested in me, I’m reducing the time you have to spend in the Chinese restaurant from three weeks to one.

From what she was telling me, I figured out that the Dschingis Khan wasn’t located in a very central part of Kassel, but just the opposite. It was on the southern edge of Karlsaue Park, which in turn bordered a wooded area. In other words, the restaurant was on the outskirts of Kassel. I could take it or leave it. There were worse things than agreeing to it, because, after spending time in the restaurant, I could go for great walks through the park, through the forest. It would be a unique experience, she said, I could see unusual things, even discover (she smiled) the resolution to the mystery of the universe. .

That proposal contained very little logic, actually none. This invitation to a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel had a slightly preposterous air about it, but the trip was a year away. I thought, or wanted to believe, that perhaps in that space of time other things for me to do there would occur to the organizers. (Or should I call them agents or curators? I wasn’t experienced in these matters.)

“Will someone eventually reveal the mystery of the universe?” I asked.

She answered astutely in a voice that hadn’t lost its charm all evening, and so I asked her permission to write her answer down on a napkin. I told her I’d devote myself to admiring it for the rest of my life.