Katharina Grosse: Picture Park
Spectacle is often a predictable mechanism. It seduces its audience, only to inevitably frustrate them. Katharina Grosse’s site-specific installation, Picture Park, at GoMA, takes this process a step further by using spectacle to draw attention to the slow and minute decay of its own monumentality. Once the initial pleasure in Picture Park’s vivid mash of colour and form fades, discontent—a desire for ‘more’-—leads us to examine the work in closer detail. Just days into the exhibition, the slowly shrinking balloons fill the space with the distinctive smell of contracting rubber, and the stiff surface of the painted earth starts to crack and shift. The carefully constructed façade is beginning to break down, revealing the temporality of the experience.
Although we witness the effects of these small movements, we do not actually see them occur. This absence of motion serves to reinforce the work’s overwhelming sense of stasis. This stillness is also thrown into relief by human activity as, despite its texture and theatricality, the installation remains untouchable. Gallery-goers move along the central component of the work, rather than physically engaging with it, like small boats drifting past a giant, crazy-coloured iceberg. This sense of ‘passing by’ is accentuated by the corridor-like space in which the work is installed: as a site of both transit and contemplation, this space also holds a tentative link with Walter Benjamin’s arcades and the notion of flânerie. Indeed, despite the lack of iron and glass, Picture Park is experienced primarily via the kind of detached ocular tactility that characterises window-shopping.
Grosse has often commented that the site-specificity of her work is at odds with the disconnectedness she experiences whilst creating it. During installation, she