Read Online The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas - Free Book Online Page B

perhaps secretly shared with me. Although she did, it’s true, see fit to warn me that “genius” was an overly used term, as it had ended up meaning too many things. Nevertheless, she said, the word “genius” was indeed useful for understanding people.
    Still, with Boston at my side, I weighed up the possibility that I’d maybe made a mistake, acted rashly, perhaps I’d been wrong to lay on my enthusiasm for the breeze so thick; but none of that mattered now. If my attraction to the invisible push was somewhat unfounded, all that was happening to me was what happens to us so often in love, the great realm of the unfounded and the uncalled-for. Did I no longer remember, for instance, the enamoring of Stendhal, who traveled around Italy and fell for that country with such force, such gratuitousness that his love at first sight
took the face of an actress who sang
Cimarosa’s
Secret Marriage
in Ivrea? That actress had a broken front tooth, but the truth was that this hardly mattered, with that invisible push contained in every
amour fou
. Or did I no longer remember that Werther, when he fell in love with Carlota, only glimpsed her through a doorway while she was cutting slices of bread for her siblings, and that first sight, although trivial, drove him a very long way, carrying him off to the greatest of passions and to suicide?
    That extra, invisible impetus might already be an object of mockery for thousands of idiots all over the world, but that didn’t matter in the slightest now, what difference did it make? I had fallen in love with that breeze, that pull, and, what’s more, I suspected that in its force, its pull, was hidden something that escaped me, perhaps a coded message.
    “Where did you buy those sandals?” I asked Boston.
    “Why? Do you like them?”
    “They go well with the breeze. Yes, I like them. But”—I put on an affected voice, making out I was joking—“there are moments when I think they might drive me to the greatest of passions.”
    “To love?” she asked, conspicuously wary.
    “Or to suicide. Can you imagine? Killing yourself over a pair of golden sandals?”
    16
     
    Feeling helped along by the invisible pull, I arrived at the rotunda of the Fridericianum, where I saw a work that was christened
The Brain
by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Installed by Carolyn herself, what was exhibited there—separated from the rest of the museum behind glass—attempted in some way to summarize the lines of thought developed in Documenta 13. It was a microcosm representing the puzzle posed by the whole huge exhibition. It seemed to me perhaps an excessively arbitrary
brain
, given that it brought together Giorgio Morandi’s bottles painted in Fascist Bologna with sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, linking them with objects damaged during the Lebanese civil war, or books carved out of stone from the Afghan valley (where the Taliban wrought destruction on age-old Buddhas), and the last bottle of perfume that had belonged to Eva Braun.
    That
brain
, I felt, lacked a certain internal coherence. It gave the impression that other, very different artistic elements could have been brought together and the result would have been similar. Everything exhibited in
The Brain
seemed more piled up than selected. I remarked on this to Boston, and she said I could be wrong, above all if I wasn’t considering the fact that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev believed that confusion in art was a truly marvelous thing.
    Confusion? I remembered having read that many visitors to Documenta 13 took a firm stand on the confusion they felt viewing the eclecticism of the large display, although many mentioned it not as a criticism, but to emphasize the brilliant plurality of its focal points, the sweeping scope that the assemblage managed to achieve, and the fact that it was an interesting metaphor for our historical moment.
    I remembered this, but I continued to be among those who found
The Brain
baffling. Perhaps because of that, I