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Craig Willse: Because your work has these very clean, minimal, formal aspects, people have connected what you’re doing to Modernism. What was Modernism trying to do that you’re not trying to do? Jonah Groeneboer: Modernism has, among its goals, a sort of absolute idealism that it tries to achieve. Absolutism often is so entrenched in binary thinking and my project is about breaking down those dichotomies. But this type of question always gets me into cyclical thinking. Lately I have been thinking about the myth of the new thing. Postmodernism suggests that there is no new, yet we still insist on promoting art in this way. I think this question of Modernism comes from the assumption that we must always be progressing forward toward the goal of the new; which is funny because it is actually a very Modernist notion. And it is also precisely this kind of concern in my work that separates the project from Modernism. |
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Jonah Groeneboer is a Brooklyn-based artist and Craig Willse is a writer based in New York. Groeneboer’s work will be on view at Bellwether from January 10 to February 9.
Craig Willse: Because your work has these very clean, minimal, formal aspects, people have connected what you’re doing to Modernism. What was Modernism trying to do that you’re not trying to do?
Jonah Groeneboer: Modernism has, among its goals, a sort of absolute idealism that it tries to achieve. Absolutism often is so entrenched in binary thinking and my project is about breaking down those dichotomies. But this type of question always gets me into cyclical thinking. Lately I have been thinking about the myth of the new thing. Postmodernism suggests that there is no new, yet we still insist on promoting art in this way. I think this question of Modernism comes from the assumption that we must always be progressing forward toward the goal of the new; which is funny because it is actually a very Modernist notion. And it is also precisely this kind of concern in my work that separates the project from Modernism.
CW: You have a piece, Wave, in which you’ve built an ocean wave with string. The first time I saw this piece, I was struck by how strongly I could feel both the movement of the wave and it’s volume, which might seem surprising, given that some would say you had frozen the movement of the wave and reduced it from volumetric mass to a mere connected set of points. Can you tell me some more about that piece?
JG: Wave was conceived during a day trip to Brighton Beach. Whenever I am in the sea I find myself navigating the space of opposition between the smallness of the self and the vastness of the ocean. It’s the moment when you feel your body become a threshold and these false opposites dissolve. I wanted viewers of Wave to have a similar experience.
In general, my string installations serve as visual amalgams of a threshold. They hang but appear to float. They reference the past and the future. They have a seemingly sophisticated rendering that turns out to be pieces of string tied together. They appear hard, sometimes the material is even confused for wire, but are always soft. They often appear symmetrical, but have a place where this symmetry is fractured. Conceptually they reference time or motion but there is stillness in their presence.
CW: Your work also engages thresholds between dimensions, and you told me once that you were interested in exploring the “four-dimensional lives of three-dimensional objects.” Can you describe some of your work in which you explore that secret life? And what might thinking fourth-dimensionally give us?
JG: 00:16:24;28 (Clouds, Bird, Jet) is a video-generated drawing. The numbers in the title are the time code of the video. I began by taking footage of the sky on a cloudy day then traced the movement of the clouds, birds, and a single jet that passes through the corner of the frame. The thing I noticed most was how different the paths were based on their three-dimensional forms. The paths of the birds’ movement are these big swooping lines, where as the jet is really just a diagonal across the corner. The introduction of time to the three-dimensional object alters its properties. The path of movement over time becomes the form and the object-ness becomes what delineates the path. The object becomes a still, a moment, a section of the overall form of the path.
In terms of what fourth-dimensional thinking can give us, I think that it takes the idea of experiencing an object as a entity that exists in a fixed state and opens it up into a shifting, morphous thing that can inhabit multiple states, some of which seemingly contradict each other. It goes back to the whole dissolving of false opposites idea.
CW: How important is it that somebody have a background in math and physics to appreciate your work? Or do you expect the pieces to stand alone?
JG: I don’t think it’s important to have a background in physics or math to appreciate the work. There is the meaning that I am working with when I make the piece and there is the meaning that is created when someone views the piece. I like the idea of a shared or mutual experience of meaning-making that occurs when the work moves into a public realm. It means that the dialogue around the work can shift and grow instead of remaining static within the parameters I have set.
