The Illogic of Kassel Read Online Free Page A

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