The Illogic of Kassel (3 page)

When I woke up the next morning, I had a sensation of having been very close to an essential message, which I suspected only Pitol knew to its most profound extent. Sometimes, like today, when I return to that dream, I realize that when María Boston called to say the McGuffins wanted to reveal the mystery of the universe to me, I agreed to go to the meeting in part because my unconscious was still under the influence of the Sarzana dream. It’s not out of the question that when I agreed to go to Kassel, I did so deep down (actually, very, very deep down) expecting to find there the secret of contemporary art, or maybe be initiated into the poetry of this unknown algebra, or perhaps to find what lay behind the door in a pointed Arabic arch, a door leading to a distant Chinese past, where pure language would be leading a hidden life.

6

A year after that encounter with the fake Chus, at the beginning of September 2012, and a week before I was to fly to Frankfurt to catch the train to Kassel, things had changed, and I was even doubting whether to go on this trip. After a long year in which I’d hardly had any contact with Documenta’s curatorial team, there was almost nothing encouraging me to leave in a week for Germany. In that whole long year I’d received one single succinct email, from someone named Pim Durán, with my Lufthansa tickets attached and instructions for catching the train from Frankfurt to Kassel.

I had no further news from Chus Martínez (or, rather, from the person I believed to be Chus Martínez), and all my attempts to communicate with her had failed. Even so, I was completely sure I’d be seeing Chus as soon as I arrived at Documenta; a friend of hers had told me that most likely she’d been very busy co-curating the huge exhibition and hadn’t had time to get back in touch with me, but in Kassel things would probably be easier.

From what I’d been able to read about Documenta 13, one thing was very clear: that is, it had far surpassed the previous occasion, the twelfth, which, among many other mistakes, had given in to the temptation of pandering to the media by inviting the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià. Its far-reaching television coverage undermined one of the unwritten laws of the twice-a-decade exhibition: to maintain a weak connection with the art market.

As if that weren’t enough, I remembered that the unfortunate twelfth edition had been a venue for Ai Weiwei’s media initiative that surprised everyone by bringing 1,001 Chinese citizens to Documenta. This event cast a shadow over my invitation. When I was seized by gloominess—this inevitably happened every evening and sometimes lasted way into the night—I feared, sometimes very dramatically (as comical as that might seem), that 1,001 Chinese writers were going to show up at the Dschingis Khan to see what I was writing, all standing behind me, at my back, gossiping about my handwriting and my writing behavior . . .

In any case, given the lack of attention I’d received over the past year, nothing obliged me to go to Kassel, and even less thinking that the trip was only to hole up in a corner of a Chinese restaurant to show impertinent and curious people what I was writing.

With very little time left before my departure—I see myself on that day I’ve not forgotten, September 4, to be precise, just one week before having to leave for Germany—I remember walking in circles around my desk in Barcelona. Perhaps because of the late evening hour, feeling anxious and tormented, actually completely anguished, I’d been bothering everyone with my huge doubts about whether or not to leave for Frankfurt.

In spite of being invited to travel there, I knew absolutely nothing about Kassel, except that downtown there was a cinema called Gloria, a fascinating photograph of which I’d come across on the Internet one day. I’d saved a copy of it on my computer because there were no longer any screens like that in Barcelona, and because the Gloria seemed so very much like the neighborhood cinemas of my childhood, with continuous showings of classics on the big screens. As a boy, I’d hung around them looking at stills from the next week’s films and also those announced with the ambiguous sign saying “Coming Soon.”

For months, the Gloria Cinema was all of Kassel for me, since at no point did I see any other image of the city. On one occasion I even came to suppose that it was named in homage to the Van Morrison song “Gloria,” that track whose beauty comes in part from the singer only speak-singing, or sing-speaking, imitating a growl like Howlin’ Wolf’s, that son of cotton farmers, whose voice was compared to “the sound of heavy machinery operating on a gravel road.”

In fact, for a whole year, whenever I remembered that I’d soon have to travel to Kassel, all I could think of was going to the Gloria Cinema and the sound of heavy machinery.

Complicating everything on the evening of September 4, when anguish arrived punctually for its appointment with me as it did every evening, I received, through an editor of a newspaper that I habitually contribute to, a message from the Mexican writer Mario Bellatin, one of those authors I knew had preceded me in the Chinese chair at the Dschingis Khan. Bellatin had asked the editor to alert me to certain dangers that awaited me in Kassel: “If you see our mutual friend, tell him to tread carefully at Documenta, because they’re quite irresponsible. The artists get accident insurance, but the writers don’t. I had my computer stolen in broad daylight while I was working, and they couldn’t have cared less.”

When I read this, my fears got much worse and I considered not participating. So this famous Dschingis Khan, I thought, wasn’t just a boring place at the far end of a park; it was also a dive where delinquents came straight in—with machine guns, one could only imagine—and took the tools of trade away from poor prose writers.

I decided I would not go to Kassel, but it didn’t take me long to change my mind again when I remembered how eager I was to know what the state of the avant-garde of contemporary art was. I also thought that if I didn’t go, I’d be left wondering forever what possible hidden charm there might be at the very heart of the Dschingis Khan and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez’s proposal.

Curiosity turned out to be stronger than fear, and I decided I’d go, though there was no way I was going to show up at the Chinese restaurant with my laptop. After all, nobody likes to get their gear stolen. But about three days before embarking on the journey, I sent an email to Bellatin to find out just how dangerous it was to set up in the Dschingis Khan. “Hi, Mario,” I wrote, “I’d like it if you could give me more details about the circumstances surrounding the theft of your computer so I can get a better idea of the situation in which I’ll find myself in a few days in that Chinese restaurant.”

He answered almost instantly: “Don’t worry. You just sit at a table in the back of the restaurant to write for a while. Go with a pencil and eraser and don’t take your laptop, though that’s not where mine got stolen . . . I had another activity at the Documenta bookstore. I was working there trying to sell a hybrid book, and that’s where the theft happened, someone in the middle of the throng took my briefcase with all my stuff in it.”

Having learned that the danger wasn’t at the restaurant, I calmed down a little and decided to write Pim Durán to inquire about certain aspects of my upcoming visit. In the email she’d sent me in April, under the letters of her name was written “Personal Assistant to the Head of Documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Friedrichsplatz 18.” Such a long description of her position made me remember a Blaise Pascal phrase, a McGuffin about brevity, or its opposite: “The only reason this letter is so long is because I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

I wrote to Pim Durán: “Dear Pim: The day on which I am theoretically to fly to Frankfurt is approaching, but the lack of news from your end makes me uneasy. All I have is a piece of paper with a round-trip ticket, and nothing else. I don’t know what to expect.”

As soon as I sent that email, I realized that perhaps I’d gone on too long with the text because I hadn’t had time to make it shorter. I was about to send another to apologize when I received this succinct, efficient, very speedy reply from Pim Durán: “I’ll get in touch with Alka, who is the person in charge of your visit to Kassel. Don’t worry, you’ll be well taken care of and we’ll keep you apprised of everything. Alka will be waiting for you at the Frankfurt airport.”

The message calmed me for a few moments, although it worried me to have to depend on Alka, which was an indecipherable name for me. I didn’t know if it was a masculine or feminine name, or that of a fourth-generation German robot. On the other hand, what did this mean, a “person in charge of my visit to Kassel”? Would they not let me take a step on my own?

I did a Google search and found an Alka Kinali, a Croatian belly dancer born in 1986 and known simply as Alka; she’d been dancing since childhood and had won international recognition thanks to a variety program called
Zagreb Show
. It could be her, why not? I didn’t look any further. When I met Alka, I wouldn’t tell her, but I’d always associate her with the Croatian dancer. My grandmother’s sister had been the lover of a Croatian dancer, but that was another story; it’s probably not at all relevant, although it confirms that, as a dear second cousin, the grandson of my grandmother’s sister, used to say, every story leads to another story, which in turn leads to another story, and so on into infinity.

7

Over the following hours I searched for information on the thirteenth edition, which only had a week left to run. I was interested to find out that Documenta 13 had brought together two hundred artists, philosophers, scientists, critics, and writers, who had presented an enormous number of works and been involved in all kinds of events, many of them simultaneous. Some had lasted for weeks. They were held or conducted not only in Kassel but as far afield as Canada and Afghanistan. Nobody could even dream of seeing it all. In Kassel alone the exhibition had spread over the entire urban area, throughout Karlsaue Park, and even into the forest beyond the huge park—that is, it had spread over all the usual spaces, and was also in others never utilized before at Documenta.

Karlsaue Park was an immense space, with gardens, paths, and canals located symmetrically in front of the summer palace, the Orangerie. Evidently, I read in an online newspaper, Kassel 2012 reproduced “that sublime postmodern condition: the sense of one’s own infinitude that comes from experiencing the disproportionate, pointing toward what we’ll never apprehend or comprehend.” I read this, and for a few moments my occasionally postmodern mind concentrated on certain “experiences of the disproportionate” I had seen up close and on the impossibility of taking in, of hanging on to, of partially or totally comprehending the world. I ended up wondering whether traveling to Kassel might not be the greatest opportunity I’d ever had to approach—almost to caress—a certain total reality: at least that of contemporary art, which was no small thing. But a little while later, I wondered why I wanted to take in so much.

Then, perhaps so I wouldn’t be so scared about those six days ahead, with their more than possible promise of a radical solitude, I told myself that as soon as I arrived in Kassel, it would be advisable to find what one might call a “thinking cabin” for the evenings. It might suffice to remember the words of an enamored Czech to his fiancée: “I have often thought that the best mode of life for me would be to sit in the innermost room of a spacious, locked cellar with my writing things and a lamp.” I thought I should know how to convert my hotel room at dusk into a sober isolation chamber, suitable as a place for reflection.

Please understand me. The world was in very bad shape in September 2012, in terrible shape when I traveled to Kassel. The economic and moral crises, especially in Europe, had deteriorated utterly. One had the feeling—as I write this, one still does—that the world had perished and was irremediably in bad shape, or at least would be for a long time to come. This inevitably contaminated everything and created an atmosphere of fatality, leading me to see the world as something now tragically lost. At my age, it was easier to look at things like that, because everything seemed hopeless; any idea of changing things seemed to lead one to unending, fruitless efforts.

By way of simple self-defense, I’d decided to turn my back on the lost and irreparable world, which is why the idea of trying to set up a place of meditation in the evenings in Kassel seemed sensible to me, certainly much more so than the world; in my “thinking cabin” I could devote myself to pondering joy, for example, to try to see it as something close to the nucleus of all creation. The cabin would help me to concentrate on art. Here, after all, was an opportunity to try to modestly emulate persons I’d admired for certain gestures: persons who had known in their time how to submerge themselves in those tiny spaces so suitable for solitary reflection. Wittgenstein, for example, retired to Skjolden, Norway, to a cabin he built himself in a completely isolated place. He retired there to delve into his despair: to intensify his mental and moral distress, but also to stimulate his intellect and reflect on the necessity of art and love and also on the hostility of the world toward those necessities.

The book I had first thought to take with me to my German cabin concerned precisely the joy of art when it revealed its essential seriousness (not about the world, but entirely about art). In the end, I left this book in Barcelona and brought Camilo José Cela’s
Journey to the Alcarria
instead. It was an outlandish choice, because of the contrast I’d found between the modernity and sophistication of Kassel and the belfries and terrible cripples of the world of my compatriot Cela. But I wanted to take a book that told of a journey so different from my own, and that one met my criteria.