PETER LODERMEYER: It strikes me that your works often display formal characteristics which are typical for so-called minimal art: simple geometric forms in paratactical order, series, symmetrical configurations, stacking, etc. For example, the open wooden rectangular boxes of The Other Appears are reminiscent of the modular skeletal structures of Sol LeWitt. How much does your work owe to minimal art?

JOHANNES GIRARDONI: The reduction of elements to a simple form is a central component of my work, however, it is not an end in and of itself. It is very important to me that my work has a sense of silence – because silence has the potential for great presence. Minimalism’s reduction of the formal aspects of shape, volume, color and surface to the point of where those elements are only themselves, and not concealed as something else, is a quality I use to create that silence. This intention of minimal art, to create an absolute independence of context is a starting point, and is a principle that in my work I use as “vocabulary”. The type of wood I used initially predicated the rectangular structure of my early work. I used shipping palettes and attached panels to those palettes with hinges to create triptychs. The repetition of elements, however, comes from a completely different source. I spent some time doing rapid repetitive drawings from life. These drawings were done without looking at the paper, and without raising the pencil from its point, from the beginning to their completion. After the drawing was finished, I kept repeating the process five, ten or fifteen times: another drawing done in the same manner of the same subject. The repetitive nature of this process, a system of acts guided by a specific set of rules, alludes to a form of ritual and this impulse informs the repetition in my work now. Whereas in minimalism the repetition tends to be a standardized, industrialized process, in my work, repetition comes out of a process that is distinctly man(hand)-made.

P.L.: The used and weathered material lends your works something raw, brittle, highly emotionalized. At the same time, it inevitably evokes an association with the passage of time and with temporality. When did you decide to use materials you had found? What were your aesthetic and personal intentions in doing this?

J.G.: When we look at the example of Sol LeWitt and his “Cubes”, it is important to note that he progresses from cubes made of wood, painted to disguise the wood, to cubes made of metal. His interest was to remove the “hand-made” and the nature of the material to solely emphasize shape and form. In a work such as The Other Appears, the origin of my “cubes” happens to be found elements, left in their original state, juxtaposed to a beeswax structure composed of four blocks of wax. These blocks were my response to the finding of the wood and their inherent rawness is purposefully left intact to create an emotional charge. I am interested in the juxtaposition of “empty” space versus the solid structure of beeswax, from a formal, but also an emotional perspective. It was not a conscious decision to use found material. It was an action done because I felt it unquestionably needed to be done. I make a practice of using an intuitive process where I purposefully eliminate rational orders, and rely on a subconscious method of working. Rather than filling myself with thought, I find it more useful to “empty” myself of thought in order to enable an open process where the work creates itself. The (formal) elements of the work dictate what needs to happen and thereby invest it with a “significant form”. Everything must evolve out of necessity; nothing must be superfluous.

P.L.: Where do you look for the objects you find and what criteria must an object possess in order to be suitable for your works?

J.G.: I search for material in the streets late at night with my van. Sometimes these trips yield great finds, other times I may just find one or two usable pieces – some nights there is nothing at all. Often I find something in large bins where buildings are being built or torn down, but sometimes it also just sits there in the street. For me the search is a process that is all about the potential of work and disúcovery. It is the first step and it carries with it the anticipatory thrill of an urban hunt or harvest. Without material there is no work and without work there is no idea. The wood I pick up has been formed by human action for a specific purpose, but has been weathered by the process of aging. It is always “raw”, that is to say – never is it embellished through human action. It has a past, but no specific context. It has a resounding presence. It speaks to me about potential.

P.L.: Your works nearly always reveal a multiple binary coding. You regularly work with formally oppositional values such as full/empty, open/closed, treated/untreated, rough/smooth, colored/colorless, etc. Is this dual structure derived from a certain basic thought?

J.G.: The inherent duality of the work is a metaphor for experiúencing more deeply and fully through the medium of change. You can learn about something from within (in the absolute), however, to truly understand, we have to have context. I juxtapose one thing to another, and in doing so, hope for the possibility to more deeply discover and experience the whole. In my earliest work, and in all work that I do that involves hinges, this duality is carried to the point where these works actually exist in several physical states. And in doing so, by involving the viewer in this physical change, the viewer is invited onto a road of discovery of the work and himself. This element of change has taken many forms in my work, but a primary structure of it is the juxtaposition of elements that relate to one another in the form of a duality.

P.L.: Besides the wood you find, wax is your most important working material. The encaustic, that is, the use of hot wax as a binding agent for pigment, albeit an age-old technique, has always played a rather marginal role in western art. What led you to use this technique?

J.G.: Most of my earliest works were done in oil. However there were many limitations, not the least of which was how oil paint behaves when it is applied in very thick layers. I started to use the medium in a thick, sculptural manner, painting not only “on” the canvas, but also working with building up paint around the edges. Later I covered the entire structures I built in oil, typically with a palette knife – not a brush. I applied the oil in quantities where it became increasingly difficult to control, also because it has a very slow hardening time. Wax on the other hand is stable as soon as it is applied. I discovered encaustic by way of Jasper Johns, however by the time I started using it, I was already working in a more sculptural than painterly manner. Wax catalyzed the move away from “painting” (ironically though, I do mostly apply wax by brush – something I did not do when I was working with oil). The beeswax allowed me to “build” color and the manner in which pigment is suspended in wax, allows me to create a sort of glow from within. I developed my craft and use it in varying applications including painting, molding, scraping, melting, fusing, pouring and dipping – depending on what I want to accomplish or what is necessitated by the specific work.

P.L.: You once made the statement that you understand your art as the reflection of our lives as spiritual beings. Only, in recent decades there has scarcely been a claim of modern abstract art which was more basically criticized than that of expressing the “Spiritual in Art”, as Kandinsky worded it. Fundamental to the so-called post modern era was, among other things, a radical criticism of metaphysics.

J.G.: At the core of all artistic efforts is the concern, implicitly or explicitly, to express and experience what it means to be human. To be human means more than to be able to think; it encompasses the integration of all the senses and faculties we associate with the human person. The fullness of the experiences of the senses with the thoughts of the mind interpreted in and through the body is a holistic encounter that can be brought into being through the arts. “Spirituality” is a problem in contemporary art, much because it is also a problem in contemporary life. The artist’s impulse in post-modernism has been to deny spirituality, to turn abstract art into a purely formal exercise void of inner meaning and beyond that to actually reduce art into a form of commoditized, if somewhat unusual, communication. It lacks what Kandinsky calls “inner necessity” and what I call “individuated presence”, where external elements are reduced in such a manner that an “individuated” whole arises. My interest is in creating work that does not rely on the external to complete itself, thus giving the viewer the chance to find meaning within. With more emphasis on “communion” rather than “communication” in the dialogue between artwork and viewer, I strive to have the work be a catalyst for a contemplative experience of the self. In a culture, one of whose primary qualities is noise, I believe it is a worthwhile pursuit to attempt to rediscover oneself through silence.

P.L.: And yet, astonishingly, you live and work in New York City (Manúhattan), the world capital of noise, and not in the desert, like Agnes Martin.

J.G.: I have found that where I work, whether that has been in coastal Maine, New York City, or in the remote countryside of eastern Austria, has had little effect on the work itself. It is all part of that emptying out I spoke of earlier. The focus is more internal – but New York, of course, can be the ultimate diversion. Here there is a convergence of all elements of our culture. One can experience our culture’s highest and lowest moments all within a very short time, sometimes simultaneously. It is infinitely complex and alive – it is colossal and omnipresent. Over time, though, you learn how to shape your own, or make your own, New York. My New York, necessarily, has a lot more solitude and stillness than one might expect.

P.L.: I find it highly interesting that you speak of a process of individuation in the development of your work. According to C.G. Jung, one of the very first steps of individuation is to integrate your shadow, which means that one tries to accept the characteristics about oneself, which one normally suppresses and overlooks. With relationship to your work, what was suppressed, the shadow you had to integrate?

J.G.: Jung spoke of the search in humans for an archetypal experience, one that would give them an incorruptible value. As long as we depend upon outer conditions, he said, we depend upon our desires and ambitions. We depend upon other people because we have no value in ourselves. The sort of liberating experience that Jung spoke of would come to me in my studio. There was a piece I completed early on, a triptych, whose predominant characteristic was that each section was wrapped or concealed with either string or canvas. I worked on it with great intensity and when I was done, I was not able to return to my studio for a month. I had the dramatic self-realization at the time I completed the work, that my inner self was deeply buried underneath many layers shaped by the external. The structure of the piece masked its underlying nature, its inner nature, and that is what this work communicated to me. Coming back to the studio marked the beginning of the process of peeling away these layers and completely rebuilding myself, and illustrated to me how art can be the occasion through which one individuates. It was a formative experience and one that has guided me to develop my self and my work from an internal and intuitive core.

(First published in: Peter Lodermeyer, PERSONAL STRUCTURES. WORKS AND DIALOGUES, New York City 2003, pp. 54 f.)

© 2003 by Peter Lodermeyer