Published for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, A Report on the City combines essay, fiction, reportage and urban anthropology centred on Mexico City.
Menick lived there for several years, and the book turns that experience into six interrelated pieces populated by hypochondriacs, obsessive travellers, counterfeiters, an elusive snuff-film dealer and other figures moving through the city’s informal economies and mythologies. Menick describes it as “part journalism, part invention, part folly,” which is about right.
Mexico City is never 'explained'. Instead, Menick keeps returning to competing stories about the city: what people say is dangerous, what they say is modern, what they say is backward, what they insist everyone knows. In the title essay, the repeated phrase “I’m told” becomes almost a method, accumulating hearsay until the city appears as a structure built from rumours, anxieties, cliché and partial knowledge. Elsewhere he moves through Tepito’s counterfeit markets and the unstable boundary between documentation and spectacle. The prose is dry, digressive and sharp, sitting somewhere between cultural criticism, travel writing and conceptual fiction. Frieze singled it out among its notable books of 2012.
Edition / condition: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2012. First edition. Published on the occasion of dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 9 June–16 September 2012. Softcover, 144 pages. Light rubbing and minor shelf wear to covers and edges; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.
