Dialetical Images
Peter Lodermeyer
Peter Lodermeyer
JOHANNES GIRARDONI
Florian Steininger, Peter Lodermeyer
Translated by Elizabeth Volk
116 pages
Edited by Feichtner Editions
Vienna, Austria, 2007
ISBN: 3-9502072-1-X
Florian Steininger, Peter Lodermeyer
Translated by Elizabeth Volk
116 pages
Edited by Feichtner Editions
Vienna, Austria, 2007
ISBN: 3-9502072-1-X
I.
“…image is dialectic at a standstill.”
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
When it comes to acquainting the impartial observer with the basic thoughts of American-based, Austrian-born artist Johannes Girardoni, there is scarcely a better-suited series of works than his triptychs. The first thing that becomes clear in these works is that Girardoni’s art originally developed from painting, and despite all the changes and developments, he has never denied this origin. Rather, he has subtly incorporated it into the “appearance” of his sculptures and objects. Nearly all of his works hint at this in their given relationship to the wall and their striking presence of color. We witness both of these features in the triptychs. Take the large works Triptych — Cadmium Green Light of 2003 or Triptych — Titanium White of 2007, for example. When closed, each appears as a two-part monochrome painting. At first glance, the homogenous color surface, interrupted only by the vertical cleft in the middle, is what dominates over the three-dimensional character of the work. The gaze of the viewer is initially riveted by the singular surface — though neither shiny nor dull — of the pigmented, wax-covered wooden panels. Only upon closer examination do we discover the metal hinges on the sides, which in turn indicate that the front surfaces are in fact moveable doors that may be opened and closed.
Up to the present day, modern artists have shown repeated interest in the centuries-old form of the triptych. Triptychs, however, were mostly understood as simple, three-part paintings, whereby the central picture customarily received particular emphasis through its size, manner of creation, or content. A wide range of examples may be found; think of the triptychs of Francis Bacon or the numerous minimalist and later, figurative triptychs in the work of Jo Baer. What makes Girardoni’s triptychs different from these works is the aforementioned use of moveable side parts. Girardoni’s creations are a play on the winged altar from the late Middle Ages and its increasingly refined reincarnations in early modern times. Thus, with his triptychs we are dealing with moveable or changeable three-part objects with a total of five viewable sides.
A general feature of Johannes Girardoni’s works should be noted here: they always relate to art of the past, and reference both traditional forms and more recent art, such as Minimal Art of the 1960s. In doing so, Girardoni does not quote, but rather concerns himself with structural, non-figurative transpositions or approaches on a formal, fundamental level. With the triptychs and diptychs, fairly clear historical connections may be made, (even where they have perhaps not been consciously intended). When looking at Girardoni’s Diptych — Yellow Green made in 2007, you may be reminded of Roman consular diptychs, a late antique art form stemming from the 5th and 6th centuries. Made of ivory, their inner sides — designed to be written upon — were covered with wax, tinted yellow with orpiment. With other forms Girardoni uses, the reference to historical models remains subtle. His Drip Boxes, for example, blocks of wax that have been mounted on wooden bases and fixed to the wall, may conjure the formal structure of console figures as they occur throughout the centuries in the most diverse cultural circles, but especially in the European Middle Ages. The Face Boxes, on the other hand, appear to be an original answer to the traditional painting metaphors of the window and the mirror. The framed hollows in the objects of this series take up the motifs of the opening of the picture plane and the viewer’s self-encounter, transforming both fundamentally by making it possible for the viewer to physically experience the art: the Face Boxes invite the viewer to press his face into this opening. The visual approach to the work culminates in direct bodily contact.
II.
Let us return to the triptychs. In medieval and modern religious painting, the broader central panel of an open triptych normally comprises the central motif, for which the themes of the side panels have a preparatory, supplementary, and auxiliary function. In Girardoni’s triptychs, the viewer’s expectations according to this tradition are dashed with a visual shock. When you open the auxiliary wings, instead of the powerful color of the outsides you discover: nothing … merely the naked wall, an empty surface framed only by several rough, narrow wooden boards placed in vertical rhythm. Here the concrete reality of the works, the construction out of wood and wax, is blatantly exposed. What does this empty center offer as a possible interpretation in terms of content? The triptych as a winged altar is a form that was traditionally reserved almost exclusively for religious themes. Through these, Girardoni’s works are inevitably charged with a certain sacral meaning — a state, which may also be observed in many other works of his as well.
But concerning the content, how may we bring the empty center of the work into connection with this? Many interpretations are plausible, since instead of the traditional portrayal of the Divine there is only a gaping void. Can we see this atheistically as an indication that God does not exist? Or from an existential standpoint, as a sign of his absence? Or do we view this in the sense of negative theology, moreover perhaps as the Jewish or Islamic ban on pictures, as a sign that God may not be portrayed? And would it be permissible to use numeric symbolism to interpret the three empty fields in Girardoni’s newest triptychs of 2007 as an abstract indication of the Trinity? Or is it a purely formal exercise that serves to show how easily (and also superficially) concrete contents may be tied to certain culturally predetermined forms? Such speculations immediately trigger a feeling of uneasiness, caused by the fact that the most opposing interpretations are possible simultaneously. Which interpretive associations are brought to the works apparently depends on the cultural and personal dispositions of the viewer. It is precisely this ambiguity of the trigger — which allows various interpretations — that interests the artist. Girardoni has often referred to his works as “catalysts”. This is a very fitting term. Just as a catalyst in nature acts to initiate a chemical process in which it remains uninvolved, the works themselves remain neutral vis-à-vis all associations. They neither disclaim nor confirm them. It is Girardoni’s intention to make the viewer’s personal interpretation of the artist’s works possible, while at the same time, avoiding any pre-determined interpretive concept. This is also why — as a rule — the titles of his works are kept neutral and descriptive: most of them consist of a formal designation of what we see, plus the name of the pigments with which the wax has been colored. The central voids of the triptychs display a fundamental characteristic of Girardoni’s art: namely that the intrinsic reality of an artwork can be contained in the non-visible — in the supposed void. This is the clearest sign of the openness of structure and content in these works, which avail themselves of the viewer’s cooperation as he looks, thinks, and senses. Thus, paradoxically, the voids are at the same time the densest places in these works. Mention has previously been made of the Face Boxes, whose hollowed-out spaces can take in the faces of viewers. Bodily contact is closer yet in the Monopods of 2005, which have been placed on wooden supports: the viewer is able to place his or her head and upper body inside their empty center. In Seven Silent Moments the title itself even refers to the seven vertical voids within and between the individual parts of the installation.
Despite their associative openness, these works are, of course, not arbitrary. The types of associations viewers apply to the works show clearly that by using as simple a formal means as possible, Girardoni manages to address fundamental personal depth-layers and thus, issues of existential relevance, which have to do with our feelings about ourselves as physical and, therefore, vulnerable and mortal beings in space and time. Girardoni is not concerned with the communication of nameable contents, but, as he puts it, with the “communion or community between the work and myself, or the work and the viewer.” We may also describe this with a word pair used by the literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: in his works Girardoni restrains the meaning effects, i.e. the meanings with regard to context, in favor of an enhancement of the presence effects. Here the word presence means the corporeal closeness, the sensual intensity and tangible presence of the work of art. This not only appeals to the eyes of the viewer, but also to his or her other senses. The haptic qualities of the rough, weathered, wood surfaces, the smoothness and the intense smell of the beeswax — all of these create an atmosphere of intense physical presence.
III.
“… opposites and contradictions — this is our harmony.”
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Opening and closing, compactness and voids, color and colorlessness, smooth wax and rough wood — the opposites that may be found in Girardoni’s triptychs as formal characteristics run like a thread throughout his entire oeuvre. Opposites and contradictions, as well as the complex dialectic between them, are Girardoni’s fundamental themes. The artist has pointed out repeatedly that this interest in opposites, and the (penetrable) borders between them, goes back to his biographical roots: Girardoni grew up on the Austro-Hungarian border, which was still a buffer zone between two political and military blocks in the 1960s and ‘70s. Added to this is the contrast between his European and American identity since he was 15; and more recently, the commute between his studio in Manhattan and the Burgenland of eastern Austria, i.e., between life in the metropolis and life in the country. Border experiences and their dialectics as an artistic theme are no contrived, theoretical matter for Girardoni, but constitute structures that are deeply anchored in his personal experience.
For this reason we could term Girardoni’s works with a famous concept coined by Walter Benjamin as “dialectic images.” Benjamin’s concern gave thought to the simultaneousness, the lightning-flash constellation of myth and the modern: “It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is that in which the past and the now flash into a constellation. In other words, image is dialectic at a standstill.” We see an immediate encounter between modernity and the age-old, “the has-been,” in Girardoni’s works as well. The history of forms, among these, the form of the sacral picture, has been preserved. His works have the effect of being at once “of today” and archaic or timeless. Girardoni refrains from giving in to the “urge to continually find something new,” which always makes a tragicomedy out of art, since nothing ages as fast as something unconditionally new. But by the same token, he neither succumbs to nostalgia nor returns to familiar forms; rather, he only approaches them by radically reducing and abstracting them, defining them at a formal, basic level.
The dialectic in Girardoni’s works can be most clearly seen in his newest series called In Front of the Plane. In it, “the past,” and “the now,” coexist and are subtly conveyed simultaneously. We might refer to these works as “temporal triptychs,” because in each of them, three “images” from three time planes are enmeshed with one another. The first stage, an installation of thinly poured and then cut surfaces of wax on the studio walls of the artist, is itself not present, but only photographically documented and present for the viewer in the form of a reminder. The photograph, as a representation of this first stage, is the second stage. It is itself presented as an object by having been installed, like the wax surfaces it shows, at a short distance from the wall. On the floor, stacked upon a rough wood base, are the wax plates of the wall installation. This third stage of the work, its end state, is the plastic form of implosion of the installation. What was once spread flat across the walls, pervaded by light, has been condensed and “archived” here. Stacking, as the simplest plastic interpretation of minimalist serialization, is the classic form of keeping things in archives: books and files are stacked in such a way.
In Front of the Plane also contains a complex meshing of genres. The monochrome wax panels of the first stage — think, for example of the early encaustic works of Brice Marden, which served as important stimuli for Girardoni’s development from painting to sculpture — have an obvious relationship to the genre of painting in the broadest sense. Between it and the third stage there is photography as a mediator, and as a technical archive medium. At the end of the process there is the sculpture, the medium that represents everything Girardoni’s artistic development builds up to. Thus the gaze of the viewer goes back and forth between one medium and another, attempting to connect the work’s present and past forms of appearance. The subject, however, is not only the material work, but also its spatial and temporal transformation. In all of this, the viewer’s perspective can reverse and the first stage can once again become the departing point for a potential wall installation that only exists in the imagination. With In Front of the Plane we are dealing with works that remain in constant motion with their three stages and two material parts, and where the viewing will never reach a definite end. These are dialectic images “if it is true, that in Benjamin’s eyes the dialectic image remains fundamentally open and restless.”
“…image is dialectic at a standstill.”
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
When it comes to acquainting the impartial observer with the basic thoughts of American-based, Austrian-born artist Johannes Girardoni, there is scarcely a better-suited series of works than his triptychs. The first thing that becomes clear in these works is that Girardoni’s art originally developed from painting, and despite all the changes and developments, he has never denied this origin. Rather, he has subtly incorporated it into the “appearance” of his sculptures and objects. Nearly all of his works hint at this in their given relationship to the wall and their striking presence of color. We witness both of these features in the triptychs. Take the large works Triptych — Cadmium Green Light of 2003 or Triptych — Titanium White of 2007, for example. When closed, each appears as a two-part monochrome painting. At first glance, the homogenous color surface, interrupted only by the vertical cleft in the middle, is what dominates over the three-dimensional character of the work. The gaze of the viewer is initially riveted by the singular surface — though neither shiny nor dull — of the pigmented, wax-covered wooden panels. Only upon closer examination do we discover the metal hinges on the sides, which in turn indicate that the front surfaces are in fact moveable doors that may be opened and closed.
Up to the present day, modern artists have shown repeated interest in the centuries-old form of the triptych. Triptychs, however, were mostly understood as simple, three-part paintings, whereby the central picture customarily received particular emphasis through its size, manner of creation, or content. A wide range of examples may be found; think of the triptychs of Francis Bacon or the numerous minimalist and later, figurative triptychs in the work of Jo Baer. What makes Girardoni’s triptychs different from these works is the aforementioned use of moveable side parts. Girardoni’s creations are a play on the winged altar from the late Middle Ages and its increasingly refined reincarnations in early modern times. Thus, with his triptychs we are dealing with moveable or changeable three-part objects with a total of five viewable sides.
A general feature of Johannes Girardoni’s works should be noted here: they always relate to art of the past, and reference both traditional forms and more recent art, such as Minimal Art of the 1960s. In doing so, Girardoni does not quote, but rather concerns himself with structural, non-figurative transpositions or approaches on a formal, fundamental level. With the triptychs and diptychs, fairly clear historical connections may be made, (even where they have perhaps not been consciously intended). When looking at Girardoni’s Diptych — Yellow Green made in 2007, you may be reminded of Roman consular diptychs, a late antique art form stemming from the 5th and 6th centuries. Made of ivory, their inner sides — designed to be written upon — were covered with wax, tinted yellow with orpiment. With other forms Girardoni uses, the reference to historical models remains subtle. His Drip Boxes, for example, blocks of wax that have been mounted on wooden bases and fixed to the wall, may conjure the formal structure of console figures as they occur throughout the centuries in the most diverse cultural circles, but especially in the European Middle Ages. The Face Boxes, on the other hand, appear to be an original answer to the traditional painting metaphors of the window and the mirror. The framed hollows in the objects of this series take up the motifs of the opening of the picture plane and the viewer’s self-encounter, transforming both fundamentally by making it possible for the viewer to physically experience the art: the Face Boxes invite the viewer to press his face into this opening. The visual approach to the work culminates in direct bodily contact.
II.
Let us return to the triptychs. In medieval and modern religious painting, the broader central panel of an open triptych normally comprises the central motif, for which the themes of the side panels have a preparatory, supplementary, and auxiliary function. In Girardoni’s triptychs, the viewer’s expectations according to this tradition are dashed with a visual shock. When you open the auxiliary wings, instead of the powerful color of the outsides you discover: nothing … merely the naked wall, an empty surface framed only by several rough, narrow wooden boards placed in vertical rhythm. Here the concrete reality of the works, the construction out of wood and wax, is blatantly exposed. What does this empty center offer as a possible interpretation in terms of content? The triptych as a winged altar is a form that was traditionally reserved almost exclusively for religious themes. Through these, Girardoni’s works are inevitably charged with a certain sacral meaning — a state, which may also be observed in many other works of his as well.
But concerning the content, how may we bring the empty center of the work into connection with this? Many interpretations are plausible, since instead of the traditional portrayal of the Divine there is only a gaping void. Can we see this atheistically as an indication that God does not exist? Or from an existential standpoint, as a sign of his absence? Or do we view this in the sense of negative theology, moreover perhaps as the Jewish or Islamic ban on pictures, as a sign that God may not be portrayed? And would it be permissible to use numeric symbolism to interpret the three empty fields in Girardoni’s newest triptychs of 2007 as an abstract indication of the Trinity? Or is it a purely formal exercise that serves to show how easily (and also superficially) concrete contents may be tied to certain culturally predetermined forms? Such speculations immediately trigger a feeling of uneasiness, caused by the fact that the most opposing interpretations are possible simultaneously. Which interpretive associations are brought to the works apparently depends on the cultural and personal dispositions of the viewer. It is precisely this ambiguity of the trigger — which allows various interpretations — that interests the artist. Girardoni has often referred to his works as “catalysts”. This is a very fitting term. Just as a catalyst in nature acts to initiate a chemical process in which it remains uninvolved, the works themselves remain neutral vis-à-vis all associations. They neither disclaim nor confirm them. It is Girardoni’s intention to make the viewer’s personal interpretation of the artist’s works possible, while at the same time, avoiding any pre-determined interpretive concept. This is also why — as a rule — the titles of his works are kept neutral and descriptive: most of them consist of a formal designation of what we see, plus the name of the pigments with which the wax has been colored. The central voids of the triptychs display a fundamental characteristic of Girardoni’s art: namely that the intrinsic reality of an artwork can be contained in the non-visible — in the supposed void. This is the clearest sign of the openness of structure and content in these works, which avail themselves of the viewer’s cooperation as he looks, thinks, and senses. Thus, paradoxically, the voids are at the same time the densest places in these works. Mention has previously been made of the Face Boxes, whose hollowed-out spaces can take in the faces of viewers. Bodily contact is closer yet in the Monopods of 2005, which have been placed on wooden supports: the viewer is able to place his or her head and upper body inside their empty center. In Seven Silent Moments the title itself even refers to the seven vertical voids within and between the individual parts of the installation.
Despite their associative openness, these works are, of course, not arbitrary. The types of associations viewers apply to the works show clearly that by using as simple a formal means as possible, Girardoni manages to address fundamental personal depth-layers and thus, issues of existential relevance, which have to do with our feelings about ourselves as physical and, therefore, vulnerable and mortal beings in space and time. Girardoni is not concerned with the communication of nameable contents, but, as he puts it, with the “communion or community between the work and myself, or the work and the viewer.” We may also describe this with a word pair used by the literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: in his works Girardoni restrains the meaning effects, i.e. the meanings with regard to context, in favor of an enhancement of the presence effects. Here the word presence means the corporeal closeness, the sensual intensity and tangible presence of the work of art. This not only appeals to the eyes of the viewer, but also to his or her other senses. The haptic qualities of the rough, weathered, wood surfaces, the smoothness and the intense smell of the beeswax — all of these create an atmosphere of intense physical presence.
III.
“… opposites and contradictions — this is our harmony.”
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Opening and closing, compactness and voids, color and colorlessness, smooth wax and rough wood — the opposites that may be found in Girardoni’s triptychs as formal characteristics run like a thread throughout his entire oeuvre. Opposites and contradictions, as well as the complex dialectic between them, are Girardoni’s fundamental themes. The artist has pointed out repeatedly that this interest in opposites, and the (penetrable) borders between them, goes back to his biographical roots: Girardoni grew up on the Austro-Hungarian border, which was still a buffer zone between two political and military blocks in the 1960s and ‘70s. Added to this is the contrast between his European and American identity since he was 15; and more recently, the commute between his studio in Manhattan and the Burgenland of eastern Austria, i.e., between life in the metropolis and life in the country. Border experiences and their dialectics as an artistic theme are no contrived, theoretical matter for Girardoni, but constitute structures that are deeply anchored in his personal experience.
For this reason we could term Girardoni’s works with a famous concept coined by Walter Benjamin as “dialectic images.” Benjamin’s concern gave thought to the simultaneousness, the lightning-flash constellation of myth and the modern: “It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is that in which the past and the now flash into a constellation. In other words, image is dialectic at a standstill.” We see an immediate encounter between modernity and the age-old, “the has-been,” in Girardoni’s works as well. The history of forms, among these, the form of the sacral picture, has been preserved. His works have the effect of being at once “of today” and archaic or timeless. Girardoni refrains from giving in to the “urge to continually find something new,” which always makes a tragicomedy out of art, since nothing ages as fast as something unconditionally new. But by the same token, he neither succumbs to nostalgia nor returns to familiar forms; rather, he only approaches them by radically reducing and abstracting them, defining them at a formal, basic level.
The dialectic in Girardoni’s works can be most clearly seen in his newest series called In Front of the Plane. In it, “the past,” and “the now,” coexist and are subtly conveyed simultaneously. We might refer to these works as “temporal triptychs,” because in each of them, three “images” from three time planes are enmeshed with one another. The first stage, an installation of thinly poured and then cut surfaces of wax on the studio walls of the artist, is itself not present, but only photographically documented and present for the viewer in the form of a reminder. The photograph, as a representation of this first stage, is the second stage. It is itself presented as an object by having been installed, like the wax surfaces it shows, at a short distance from the wall. On the floor, stacked upon a rough wood base, are the wax plates of the wall installation. This third stage of the work, its end state, is the plastic form of implosion of the installation. What was once spread flat across the walls, pervaded by light, has been condensed and “archived” here. Stacking, as the simplest plastic interpretation of minimalist serialization, is the classic form of keeping things in archives: books and files are stacked in such a way.
In Front of the Plane also contains a complex meshing of genres. The monochrome wax panels of the first stage — think, for example of the early encaustic works of Brice Marden, which served as important stimuli for Girardoni’s development from painting to sculpture — have an obvious relationship to the genre of painting in the broadest sense. Between it and the third stage there is photography as a mediator, and as a technical archive medium. At the end of the process there is the sculpture, the medium that represents everything Girardoni’s artistic development builds up to. Thus the gaze of the viewer goes back and forth between one medium and another, attempting to connect the work’s present and past forms of appearance. The subject, however, is not only the material work, but also its spatial and temporal transformation. In all of this, the viewer’s perspective can reverse and the first stage can once again become the departing point for a potential wall installation that only exists in the imagination. With In Front of the Plane we are dealing with works that remain in constant motion with their three stages and two material parts, and where the viewing will never reach a definite end. These are dialectic images “if it is true, that in Benjamin’s eyes the dialectic image remains fundamentally open and restless.”