In his latest book, Kassel does not invite logic, Enrique Vila-Matas creates, as he himself writes, “a fictionalized report of my participation in Documenta,” in which he mainly recounts his reencounter with the experience that art is capable of generating. Although at first, the invitation to Kassel is presented to him as a Martian proposal consisting of sitting in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of the city, during the last days of the event and staying there writing in full view of potential visitors, soon the proposal becomes an experience that reconciles him with art and creation. Vila-Matas experiences first-hand the collapse and recovery that constituted the leitmotiv of Documenta (13) directed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, so that his own initial confusion makes him wander with sufficient curiosity through some of the artistic works gathered there. In this circular, Vila-Matas encounters, for example, Ryan Gander’s Breeze occupying a very representative space at the entrance to the Fridericianum Museum. Tino Sehgal’s performance This Variation takes place in a dark space into which the visitor enters and begins to feel more or less challenged or intrigued by a series of people who move, act, sing or interact with the visitors. Vila-Matas becomes a regular visitor to the installation, which he experiences and experiences in very different ways. Finally, the writer encounters Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, the enigmatic installation in Karlsaue Park consisting of a series of aphrodisiac and psychotropic plants, the sculpture of a naked woman with a beehive with real bees on her head and the presence of a greyhound with one paw painted pink that moves freely through the space. Vila-Matas returns to the installation, thinks about it and, above all, spends time living it and soaking up the experience. This year, 2014, Pierre Huyghe is the protagonist of a notable retrospective that has been at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, is on display until the summer at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and will be arriving at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Huyghe’s retrospective is exactly what Vila-Matas talks about in his book: offering “experience”, confronting the spectator with the unexpected, appealing to their curiosity and the need to approach art with a renewed perspective and, in a certain way, free of predetermined codes. The exhibition, which is installed using the architecture of the previous exhibition at the museum, begins with a performer who announces the entrance of the visitors one by one, so that the relationship with the space, with the institution and with the works that follow can no longer be the same. Plants and animals (ants, crabs, and especially the dog with the pink painted paw) are very present in the space, creating micro environments that arouse curiosity, leaving room for the unplanned, the uncontrolled and uncodified, that is, for the moment. Like Vila-Matas, it allows us to reconcile ourselves with the true essence of art and makes us say, like the Barcelona writer, that “art was, in effect, something that was happening to me, occurring at that very moment. And the world seemed new again, moved by an invisible impulse. And everything was so relaxing and admirable that it was impossible to stop looking.”
