Interview: Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

It is quite amazing to witness what you have done to this place. Like other recently built art institutions, Arken has often been criticized of being more of an ‘architectural showpiece’ than an actual museum. Thriving on every odd corner and on any raw material, your kind of installation seems to appropriately ridicule such discussions, and I should think this rendition of a rare Scandinavian brutalism suits you fine. What do you think of this space and how do you deal with it in terms of your upcoming exhibition?

First of all, there is this 150 meters long axis cutting through a set of quite conventionally functional exhibition spaces. Its plain concrete walls and floor, its metal ceiling, and its practical artificial lighting give it an ambiguous feel, somewhat between urban outdoor space and industrial storage. When do you ever come to a museum, where you can actually walk 150 meters, turn around and see all the way back where you came from, to instantly recapture your experience? This narrow, long passage called for a dramatic structure, even theatricality. There was the fantastic opportunity for me to work with drastic scale shifts, the simultaneous presence of different image systems and materials, which would reference both the interior and outdoor notions, such as the grouping of canvases or the soil mountain.

I came by foot, as many visitors probably do because of the somewhat scenic surroundings, and I must say that the atmosphere out there is pretty much like in here. I think it has to do with the gravel paving and the strange way that you approach the huge dividing wall. Instead of going right it feels like you could just as well go left and straight into the storage room.

One could easily think that this is not a museum, but rather some kind of a factory, at least when seen from a distance.

An easy way to draw the attention to a surrounding landscape is through panoramic windows, or through vision anyway. That is the case with Louisiana. But here at Arken it is rather an atmosphere of uncertainty, a feeling of ambivalence brought along by the visitors themselves.

The landscape seems artificial somehow.

It has a certain rhythm of development and abandonment. It shows signs of many different stages; small time workshops, a yacht club, social housing projects, and wooden slipways left to rot. No matter whether you come from the countryside, as I did this morning, or from the city it is strange feeling of being in-between, in a place generally referred to as a ’terrain vague’. Just outside, next to the path, I saw piles of dirt, and I thought: “Oh this really makes sense.”

I totally agree. And the exhibition space reflects all of that.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

In my introduction to this interview I have written: “Grosse’s installations echo the delicate metaphysics of frescos, the spontaneous phenomenological effects of murals, the emotional states of abstract expressionism as well as the open-mindedness of Colorfield painting or psychedelic art. On top of all that comes the aggression of graffiti.” What do you think of this line of heritage?

More than any of these things my work is rooted in German Expressionism due to the fact that this is what I saw growing up. But you are right; another significant source is Italian Renaissance Fresco Painting, which I studied closely living in Florence for a year in 1992.

Aggression is essential to any form of art not only graffiti. In my case it has nothing to do with a violent opposition to the ideas of someone else. Quite the contrary. What I’m talking about is the aggression inherent in the activity of getting very close to something or someone, mentally of course, but also physically. Like this close to somebody! (Grosse abruptly puts her hand about 5 cm from my eyes).

But how do you feel about abstract expressionism?

Well, I am distant to Pollock´s famous phrase: “We paint from within”, as if some sort of emotional stages were being portrayed. That is not at all what I do. I am not very happy with the term “abstraction” either. I experience myself working within an infinite dynamic continuum that keeps unfolding while I work. The immediate present is all there is, and while you go through the installation, you reconstitute the entire system accordingly.

Philosophically speaking ’abstraction’ normally indicates the mind’s capacity to conceptualize otherwise heterogeneous objects and experiences by filtering out all the tiny differences, everything not considered necessary to that particular thought at that specific moment. But since there is no adequate meta-level, no solid position inside or outside the system, what you ask of us is to redefine everything around at the speed of our very own experience?

Anyway, that’s how I would like to experience life. It is hard to coin a term for a process that constantly renews itself as it defines everything else at every moment.

In terms of site-specificity and mood, how do you balance aggression and adaptation? Is your action/painting real, or does it rather transcend the dichotomy of real /imaginary?

This can all happen at the same time. The elements, which you just enlisted, are not dialectical, their relations are not reciprocal, but something else. In general my work thrives on the experience of having different systems coincide, structures that at first seem to exclude each other. If I paint on an interior surface of a museum, the architectural qualities of this surface are not erased. Maybe they even become more visible. At the same time as the surface gets covered by paint it puts forward a totally different notion of space. To show the rules guarding an actual built space entails the possibility of other rules, hence different readings. Another apparently exclusive metaphoric structure is paint, being either matter or colour, either body or the immaterial notion of what that body might contain. And it is the same with aggression and adaptation. One really needs the other. But I don’t think of my work as site specific in a sense that it discusses the social structures, or the political implications of the space and its surroundings.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

The significant white areas, which are the result of spray-painting canvasses, or whatever leaning up against the wall, seem an index of process art. How do you actually execute these major installations? Is everything planned, or do you reconsider connections in search of change?

Change connections, what do you mean?

Well something that could only happen at that particular moment and at that particular place. The diffuse white spots work as an index of time passed, but of course this can be carefully planned.

All items used to constitute the work are staged. They are part of an intended artificiality, hence theatricality. The soil does not remain soil in that staged context, not does paint remain simply paint, as house-paint does in a house. The process of transformation is a continuous activity of planning. In that sense planning and executing takes place at the same time as does thinking and acting. The concept of spontaneity or improvisation does not exist in the process that I prefer, nor does the notion of the anticipated result through executed plans.

Turning your own bedroom into an installation full of intimate strangeness, seems to hint at an emotional place where your odd selection of objects might come from?

I love the bedroom and you are right, it is a very intimate piece revealing a lot about me. At the time I was so fed up with the bureaucracy around my practice that I felt the urge of looking closer at things I seemed to have neglected in my painting; sexuality, intimacy, privacy. I was fascinated by how differently the paint behaved on various objects, the whole question of boundaries. How otherwise heterogeneous things like a shoe and a duvet could all of a sudden be reunified by one colour. This made me understand in more detail what I was already trying out using different architectural surfaces. And furthermore, I also understood that this new, and far more comprehensive way of working, offered me an exiting co-existence of two quintessentially different notions: On the one hand the so-called abstraction of paint, colour, gesture and movement. And on the other hand the specific logic of small everyday objects like clothes, shoes, books, money and pieces of furniture, which are normally determined by use, or by exchange value. After the bedroom piece, I started to stage all sorts of objects like books, clothes, furniture, empty canvases together with my paintings, until I expanded to uncountable materials such as soil and Styrofoam. Thus, I could integrate a metaphoric subtext.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

Your colourful and large-scale interventions seem to be moving painting from the domain of beauty towards the sublime; an orchestration of this disturbing yet ugly exiting moment where you experience the grandness of something beyond your control.

I’m very uneasy about the function or meaning of ‘the sublime’ as well as the acquired transcendence of something to get there. In my experience nothing has to be left behind for you to get to some sort of accidental understanding of life’s vastness. All can take place at the same time, non-dialectically, as a paradox.

In my use of the term ‘sublime’, I maybe wasn’t aiming so much at a moment of transcendence as I was trying to investigate the possibilities of the human mind from a Kantian point of view; our capacity to look at something aggressive and potentially dangerous as part of our aesthetic experience. If you sit at night - for instance in a roof top bar in Tokyo with only a thin sheet of glass between you and the illuminate void of this heterogeneous city - you might experience something beyond the picturesque, something possibly even beyond beauty?

I think the really interesting question is: “What are we afraid of?” Earlier on, when I was doing my installations, I planned them extremely carefully. I wanted to feel absolutely sure about everything, but then I realized that all this planning made me feel even more afraid something would go wrong. I thought: “This is the wrong attitude. There is no reason to be afraid, because in the end we cannot control anything, not even the smallest things.” Anyway, when do you actually consider something to be big? And when does it start to be so big that it becomes overwhelming? Of course I’m not doing my paintings just to make them big. I’m rather trying to make the smallest version of some very large form.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

What do the colours express; you, their own nature, the place, or the entire situation?

I do not express anything, nor do I generate meaning by building up causal relationships between the particles in my work, i.e. the colours, the objects, the soil, the architecture or the canvases.

It is a very complex situation, and it is quite hard for me to put it into simple words. You know, if I were more of a theoretical person I would also be making totally different paintings, works that could probably be exploited theoretically with more ease. I don’t know. But what I’m constantly dealing with is thoughts being put into matter, not matter put into thoughts. I primarily use unmixed colours. Their brightness makes them very strong indicators of movement. And this helps the viewer to distinguish the different layers of the painting.

Because they don’t blend so easily?

You can easily tell at exactly what stage they were applied. Even though, each kind of activity is followed by yet another, in the end they are all visible. You can thereby achieve this really weird fusion of causality and synopsis. Seeing everything at the same time, you get the ability to reverse causality. This is a unique and subversive potential of structure that painting offers.

I’m not quite sure I understand. I’m not a painter of course, but to me at least it seems an obvious case of causality, as we know it. Even though you use a white coat of paint, you will never be back where you started.

What matters is that you can see all of the layers at the same time. This enables you to redo everything in your mind. In this way painting do allow the co-existence of systems that would otherwise exclude each other. It is quite incomprehensible. One thing can follow from another, and still they are there at the same time.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

Your small drawings and your large canvasses equally seem part of something bigger; a process that simply goes on from installation to installation. Do you conceive of the more traditional paintings as sketches, or as objects to be transformed within the total process of your practice?

There are many different kinds of relations, and they all develop gradually. Sometimes studio paintings enter an installation only to be painted over. And white canvasses start out as parts of an installation, but end up in the studio as individual works. Sometimes I even use paintings that I may already have considered finished, in three or four new installations. Each time they collect certain new ‘visual data’. Eventually they might end up being shown exclusively in some exhibition. Here, all their marks and traces of several timelines and contexts hint at some grand pool of painting of which that particular show is only a fragment. In HELLO BUTTERFLY… there is actually a painting particularly chosen, because it was part of an installation I did in Odense a few years back. I have recently tried to let all the methods, which I have developed trough out the installations, reflect upon my studio practice. And suddenly I was dealing more consciously than ever with visibility and invisibility as constitutional elements. All of this has changed my studio practice immensely, and besides the paintings I have arrived at things like the huge ellipses, which are semi...

...Architecture, sculpture, painting. The ellipsis mounted halfway out on the floor seems to be equally a wall, an object, and a canvas.

Exactly. A lot can suddenly happen when a painting is no longer up on the wall, but instead has become equally a partition, and an object in itself. At the moment I’m working with a variety of warped shapes.

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

Initially I had an important question that I never quite came around to ask you. Is the morphological strangeness of your rooms in any particular way related to land art’s turning the inside into an outside, and possibly also the outside into an inside?

It is already a statement.

No, no, there is a question mark here somewhere.

I really miss the feeling of vast space, which I experienced as a young student dealing with landscape painting. This was also a time where I was much into painters like Edward Munch. He actually had an outdoor studio with just a roof. Apparently he painted with such strong colours that he felt they had to be bleached by the sun. And once I saw some photos of his paintings lined up in the snow where he had left them overnight. He would walk all over the canvasses saying: “Now they’re getting the real treatment.”

Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.		Katharina Grosse : Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What's Your Name, 2009.

What is inside, and what is outside?

I basically think that is what painting, as a media, is all about. A few coats of paint are all it takes to generate all these complex notions of volume, space or even narration. That is truly amazing. This is the reason why I consider painting to be so very close to thinking, to imagination. Something obviously goes on in our heads without us knowing exactly where or how. Right now, I can’t see what you are thinking, but I can still kind of tell from your body. Because the mental part of our lives, the realm of thinking and imagination, might get a little neglected by our determination on the material level, I would very much like to point to the fact that we are present on both levels at the same time. You know, it ties up so much energy to try and organize material life, where as if you simply travel in your mind, you can do anything and go anywhere.

And painting is somewhere in between?

It shows what happens when these two realms meet. It’s where thoughts start to be formed, and that is precisely the moment I’m interested in. From an amorphous material being, everything becomes ever more precise and concrete, only to once again disintegrate. My focus is on the point where something initially starts to crystallize, the instance of becoming. That’s where the real potential is.

Thank you.