162 I find myself in a work that with its title claims to intervene in the celestial skies. In an installation that is full of colours, but not really colourful, as if the sole function of colour is to make form available to experience. An installation that seems light, but requires heavy equipment to create. I find myself in a space dominated by paradoxes. There is the famous paradox of omnipotence: can an all-powerful goddess create a stone that she is unable to lift? Is there not only a paradox of omnipotence, but also a paradox of vulnerability? Does an all-powerful goddess make herself vulnerable in executing her omnipotence? Would she still be omnipotent if she admits her vulnerability? Is vulnerability always something that diminishes power? There is another work phase of the artist: sculptures that look like crashed spaceships on a distant desert planet, worn down by sand storms, the tips so pointy and the edges so sharp that they can generate fear. A work like Shifting the Stars would have no chance against the attack of such a spaceship, it would have destroyed it in just seconds. Hopefully, the different phases in the oeuvre of this artist won’t declare war upon one another. Since the artist told me that she was interested in yoga and the 2500-year-old Bhagavad Gita, a key mystic text of Vedic India, I go on a further journey. I land on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Arjuna is a son fathered by a divinity, his charioteer is the incarnation of a god and is named Krishna. He rides Arjuna through the troop lines of two large armies. Arjuna is a member of one of them, and members of his family fight on both sides. Arjuna wonders whether he should slaughter family members, and Krishna gives him lessons that have to do with sublimity and glory, with collecting and the true self that can be found, but needs to be sought out in a disciplined way. But most importantly, it’s about making Arjuna ready to assert his family’s claim to country and throne as a warrior. A claim to land! Spread out legally! That sounds familiar. India is a subcontinent where the earth’s crust is especially thin, closer to the fires of hell than all others, and I was there once. The general flammability and the Hindu culture of affect frightened me a great deal. Most of Grosse as a star shifter, I see testimony to cosmic events, thunderbolts, traces of lightning strikes. Geology. The star shifting is contained in the small hilly landscapes and table mountains, it can be no different. And yet they are not heavy. If we took them all together, what would they weigh on the scales? Not much. Do the works of Katharina Grosse have any weight at all? What weighs on the landscape or on the cloth, the paint sprayed onto Styrofoam? Is that an interesting question? A mist, a nothing, and at the same time a conquest, a war. A beautiful breeze and a clap of thunder. The early works have a single clear purpose: to help the artist to enter the space. Then there’s a rupture. After this rupture, it seems, as a matter of course she lays claim to the entire space, whether in nature or indoors. She covers it with paint or fabrics, she sticks large jagged sculptures between trees. Expansive here means: she takes hold of space. She works in so many weight categories and with so many materials that there seem to be no limits for her in the studio. And yet, she cannot place anything in the landscape without directing our gaze to the borders separating what she places in it and the wild land not yet explored by her art. But by feeding half tree trunks with some of the roots still on them into her work, she also lays a claim to the territory of wild nature. I am surprised by how much the artist subjects her work to the public, to the footsteps, the access of visitors. How vulnerable she makes itself. The more one expands, the larger the prone surface becomes – and the works by this artist expand quite a bit. And yet, the word “vulnerability” seems to surprise the artist: she will have none of it. Can an artist create a work that is so expansive that the pure gesture of taking hold of the space can only be interpreted as a gesture of power, but where the material, translucent fabric, is so vulnerable that it is impossible to imagine that it would refer to something else than the vulnerability of the artist herself?
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