Enrique Vila-Matas: The Illogic of Kassel

Kassel’s Ständehaus was for the most part destroyed during the last war. Originally the old Parliament Chamber of Hesse, it is once again today a solid and imposing three-story building, architecturally influenced by the Italian Renaissance. Every five years, when Documenta comes to town, its main hall is fitted out as a venue for many lectures related to contemporary art. Mine was announced for six o’clock in the evening on Friday, September 14. On a discreet sign at the entrance, you could still read “Lecture to Nobody,” a title now totally out of context, for I had previously believed that the talk would be given in a place beyond the farthest forest, bordering the edge of Karlsaue Park.

When I arrived with Boston and Alka at the Ständehaus, they took me to an office near the entrance hall, and there I signed a few documents I assumed were to do with the lecture fee. I chatted in French about the Brothers Grimm with some people I didn’t know from Adam. Then I escaped from the office for a few moments and went to spy on the hall where I would have to speak, wanting to know whether the lecture had attracted a little bit of expectation, or none at all. There was none, as was to be expected. But ten innocent people were sitting there, waiting for my lecture to begin. Since the hall was huge, it looked very empty. Perhaps worst of all was that the ten audience members showed not the slightest sign of knowing what they’d gotten themselves into.

“Here before you, Piniowsky,” I imagined telling them.

Given the circumstances, I would have been content with a single spectator knowing something about me, about my books. And, while I was telling myself this, I ran into Chus Martínez, who told me that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev was thinking of coming to my talk and was apparently very interested in what I might say there.

“Why?”

“You intrigue her,” she said.

Accompanied by Chus, I returned to the office by the entrance hall, where I was surprised to see Alka sitting there with her legs crossed, leafing through Journey to the Alcarria . That was my copy of Cela’s book, which I’d brought with me in case I was caught empty of ideas mid-lecture and had to resort to reading someone else’s text. I was sure I wouldn’t require it, but I needed it as a nearby object that I could touch; I needed to know that something as concrete as a book by another writer could save me if I got into a tight spot. I was really very surprised to find Alka leafing through the book, but even more so by the casual conjunction of Alka and Cela. I remembered at that moment that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev had said that everything the Documenta participants set out to do “did not necessarily have to be art.” This wasn’t a bad idea, it took away the absurd pressure of having to do something artistic. That said, the image composed by Alka with Cela’s book was pure art, actually a good stab at what I’d once imagined a great aesthetic instant to be like.

In that same office, Boston handed me a second document, which I also signed, without knowing this time what it was. And a few minutes later, escorted by Boston and Alka, I headed for the hall, which I found slightly fuller than I’d left it. My uncertainty with respect to the kind of audience I’d have for that atypical lecture made me experience a moment of fear. I wanted to convince myself that my talk was just a formality I had to go through, but when I saw Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev arrive, accompanied by a large retinue, I confirmed what I always knew: there is no such thing as a talk in public that is just a formality, and if anyone takes it that way — I’m going to exaggerate somewhat, but not much — he runs the risk of losing in a single hour all the prestige he may have accumulated over decades.

By way of introduction, I improvised lightly on the little bit I’d written (I’m reconstructing here quite faithfully because I still have what I wrote for the beginning of that lecture, nor have I forgotten, the changes I made to it as I went along):

I came to this city, via Frankfurt, in search of the mystery of the universe and to be initiated into the poetry of an unknown algebra. I also came to Kassel to try to find an oblique clock and Chinese restaurant, and, of course, though I believed it might be an impossible task, I also came to try to find my home somewhere within displacement. I did find it. It’s not far from here. In fact, I’d say that I am in it, because I believe this evening I’m speaking to you from my homey scaffold in the Dschingis Khan.

Then, thinking of the place from which I was theoretically speaking (it’s well-known that to situate yourself in the world, you have to do as much as possible to seem already situated), I quoted Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place

That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves

And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

From my scaffold, in this case, sprang the lecture. Surging from that charming Chinese gallows, the talk reflected the roughness of living in a world that was not mine and was sometimes tough, though Kassel had given me blazoned days, infecting me with enthusiasm and creativity and categorically refuting that contemporary art was finished. Finished? I had seen only splendor, and certain great changes that were finally bringing this art toward life. Had I not learned from Tino Sehgal, Ryan Gander, and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that art is what happens to us , that art goes by like life and life goes by like art?

I tried to transmit this in some way to the audience, but they were so glib and restless, there was nothing to be done. I’d barely been speaking for three minutes and already more than half the people — seeing that I was addressing them in neither English nor German — had gone to look for their simultaneous translation devices, or had simply left. With so much movement on the part of the public (I had never had so many people coming and going at the beginning of a lecture), it was difficult to concentrate. It wasn’t until ten minutes had passed that I had the feeling of being able to count on a stable audience of about thirty people, Carolyn and Chus among them, in the front row.

Just when I started to feel that sensation of stability, I saw — first with surprise and then with fear — that young Kassel, the frightening blonde in mourning, had entered the hall. She settled down — in a manner of speaking, because I’ve never seen anyone sit in a less settled, more dislocated way — in a seat in the back row. She didn’t seem to need simultaneous translation, she seemed to be following my words attentively, and every time I pronounced the word “Kassel” she stirred in her seat as if she felt alluded to.

I tackled the story of Sophie Calle and told how thanks to her phone call, my ever-delayed yearning to escape from literature and open up to other artistic disciplines finally became reality. Perhaps thanks to that, I said, I was here, in Kassel, such a legendary place for me ever since I’d first heard people talking about it back in 1972, when the best minds of my generation spread the rumor that the essential and most audacious avant-garde in history gathered here: it was a subversive breeze that would change everything.

I told them that at the meeting in the Café de Flore, Sophie Calle showed me a book by Marcel Schwob, which featured a text on the imaginary life of Petronius, the Roman poet, who according to Schwob, when he’d finished writing sixteen books of adventure stories, read them to his slave Syrus, and Syrus laughed and hooted and clapped, and when Schwob finished, the two of them agreed to live those written stories out in real life.

I opened a parenthesis here to tell them that Jules Renard — observing that at the end of his life, Schwob traveled to Samoa with his Chinese servant Ting to contemplate the tomb of one of his favorite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson (and in the end he didn’t see it) — wrote this: “Before he died, Schwob lived out his stories.”