Katharina Grosse – Infinite Logic Conference

Exhibition catalogue no 30
No of pages: 59, color, illustrated
Binding: hard cover
Graphic design: Mattias Givell

Language: Swedish and English
Year: 2004
Publisher: Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
ISBN: 91-974236-5-3

“What can really imbue life with brilliance and luster does not need to be anything more than a good story told by someone toward whom you feel love.” Gabriella Håkansson

“He who dies disconsolate, however, has made his entire life meaningless.” Theodor Adorno

– Hello! It’s starting now!
– Hello?
– Come here!
– Hello! I want to tell you something!
– I want to tell you about something bad!
– Hello?
– Do you want to hear how bad it is?
– Come here then! Check it out! Juggling without hands!
– This is an essay by Lars Mikael Raattamaa written during the first weeks of 2004. It’s called “Paint More” and is number 2 in the ten-year plan project Sprawl. “Paint More” is an essay about the bad. They say there is no truth and they say we can no longer – or at least ought not to – speak about good and bad taste, and not about high and low culture either. None of that is true.
– No, did you believe otherwise? Of course bad things exist. Just like there is bad food, or bad water, either because it is old and rotten – overripe – or it’s simply inferior in terms of nourishment, or even enjoyment for that matter.
– Do you want to know about what’s bad?

– It’s popular to talk about the ugly. Dirt is the wrong thing in the wrong place, they say. But it’s rare, unfortunately so rare, that such ideas extend beyond a narrowly defined group of freaks. Like old sailors’ yarns of docks brimming with one-eyed men, prostitutes, pickpockets, hunchbacks, and three-legged dogs. But we thrive in the rhizome. Of course we can imagine a pink piece of furniture, or sink into a Japanese comic book or a detective story from Scania. But the much-discussed deterritorialization does not extend beyond a handful of design details.
– But the bad.
– Imagine a top-secret, hyper-modern medical clinic that is doing research on traveling into people’s brains. No, more precisely, into people’s souls. If you worked there, as a psychonaut, you could travel into other people’s dreams and desires, their fantasies and memories. Maybe your task would be to try to establish contact with a severely autistic child of a millionaire, maybe you wander through rolling dunes and into oases of white-pink cherry trees, maybe you try to get the little kid to come along on a sailing trip, maybe the boat he points to is a wreck while the vessel you suggest turns out to be a broken toy boat. Would you doubt, would you want to get away, or would you thank your lucky spider and wish that the same events would occur again, including the little spider. (…)