The Illogic of Kassel

2

And so, three nights later, I showed up punctually for the meeting, which the Irish couple did not attend, but Boston did. She was a tall, luminous young woman with very black hair, a red dress, and marvelous golden sandals; she was intelligent and smart at the same time. As I looked at her, I couldn’t hide an inner lament, which intuitively, young as she was, she caught; she seemed to know that something related to age was happening to me, a deep dejection and sorrow.

Without a doubt I had never seen her before in my life. She was at least thirty years younger than I was. Sorry for the snag, the snare, the windup, she said as soon as we met. I asked what snag, what windup she was talking about. Don’t you see? I’ve ensnared you, the McGuffins don’t exist, she said. And she explained that this had seemed the best way to get me to pay attention, for she guessed that, considering my eccentric literary fame, an extravagant call might be more likely to stir my curiosity and achieve the difficult objective of getting me to go out at night. She had to see me in person to make a proposal, since she feared she wouldn’t get the response she wanted if she asked me over the telephone. And what is this proposal you want to tell me about? Is it the same thing the McGuffins would propose? Above all, she said, she felt happy knowing she had the time ahead of her to be able to set out the proposal her employers, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez (the curators of Documenta 13) had assigned her to convey.

So then, I said, Carolyn and Chus Martínez are the McGuffins. She smiled. Exactly, she said, but now I’d like to know if you’ve heard of Documenta in Kassel. I’ve heard a lot about it, I said. What’s more, some of my friends in the 1970s came back from there transformed by having seen prodigious avant-garde artworks. In fact, Kassel was — for this and other reasons — legendary and has been since the days of my youth; it is an intact legend, my generation’s legend, and also, if I’m not mistaken, that of the generations that followed mine. For every five years, groundbreaking works concentrate there. Behind the legend of Kassel, I ended up telling her, is the legend of the avant-garde.

Well, María Boston said, she had the job of inviting me to participate in Documenta 13. As I could see, she added, she hadn’t exactly lied when she spoke of an irresistible proposal.

That proposal did make me happy, but I contained my enthusiasm. I waited a few seconds before asking what they expected of a writer like me at an art exhibition like that. As far as I knew, writers didn’t go to Kassel. And birds don’t go to Peru to die, said Boston, demonstrating her conversational agility. A good McGuffin phrase, I thought. . A brief, intense silence followed, which she broke. They had assigned her to ask me to reserve three weeks at the end of the summer of 2012, to spend each morning in the Chinese restaurant Dschingis Khan on the outskirts 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?