Read Online The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online
Authors: Enrique Vila-Matas
Tags: Fiction, Visionary & Metaphysical
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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.
Boston confirmed that Gander had titled that ethereal breeze—which seemed to lightly push visitors along, giving them a gentle unexpected strength—an extra impetus:
The Invisible Pull
. I found that current of air very
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.
Boston confirmed that Gander had titled that ethereal breeze—which seemed to lightly push visitors along, giving them a gentle unexpected strength—an extra impetus:
The Invisible Pull
. I found that current of air very
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