163 the dear, good gods had many arms and a cruel streak, especially the blue-skinned Kali, named black, who dances with the severed heads and arms of other beings on her husband Shiva. Shiva seems quite satisfied in most depictions. Kali is said to be the world creator and destroyer at the same time. This sounds paradoxical. Admitting contradictions, a divinely commended image of creation and destruction as a unity, as a being, triggers strong cognitive dissonances in me. My question is not what glory and the sublime are or whether there is something like a true self that I could reach by practising the techniques of a certain yoga school. My question is whether Krishna and Arjuna, Kali and Shiva would seek the creative process of the artist Katharina Grosse to depict their own understanding of legal space appropriation, of world creation and obliteration in a performance. Of course, every play with sublime words, every holy ritual act, every major act of art is to a certain extent always in part a fairground act. But these overlapping fairground numbers share the subject of space, which absorbs many contradictions without extinguishing their fire. I catapult myself back to the studio of the artist, to my favourite clump in the room with the early works. It arches up to me, its surface slightly porous in its folds. It is complex and puzzling, yet banal. It reminds me of bread. Luckily, a beautiful surface, no matter how many contradictions it might envelop, is always also a beautiful surface. And the work of Katharina Grosse is rich in beautiful surfaces. She prepares everything for us, the gaze remains hanging on the surface, the texture of the material, the rich clots of paint that trace out the emergence of a complex work. Surface and profound meaning can be one, but surface is always the beginning.
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