Genevieve Goffman
Interviewers Jeanette Bisschops and Ihsan Alisan, Music composer and text editor N. Lund, Portrait photographers Alyssa Kazew and Dane Manary, Creative directer, videographer, and photographer Saul Appelbaum @ The Pioneers, Special Thanks to William Nance and Ricky Lee for production and publicity support
“That's in and of itself this scene of drama that I created on this little island that's suspended on the wall”
Genevieve Goffman (b. 1991, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Goffman earned her MFA in sculpture from Yale in 2020. Mixing history and fantasy, Goffman creates otherworldly sculptures that draw from an expansive inventory of visual symbols found in architecture, internet aesthetics, and fantasy novels.
Recent solo exhibitions include “Before It All Went Wrong,” Hyacinth Gallery, New York (2022), “Grind,” Money Gallery, St. Petersburg (2021), and “Here Forever,” Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2020). Goffman has participated in group exhibitions at Fragment Gallery, New York (2022); Lily Robert, Paris (2022); Patara Gallery, Tbilisi (2020); EXILE, Vienna (2019); and Gallery 102, Berlin (2017). In Berlin, she self-published her book Genevieve and the Hydra: An Anti-Fascist Fairy Tale.
On the occasion of Goffman’s solo exhibition at Hyacinth Gallery, Saul Appelbaum worked with Jeanette Bisschops, Ihsan Alisan, and Goffman to create a multi-voice, multi-location, multi-channel, and multi-media interview exploring the dramaturgy of Goffman’s sculptures.
Jeanette Bisschops: I was really happy to see your solo show at Hyacinth gallery. It looks amazing! But I wanted to start this conversation more from the beginning. I was really curious about how you were drawn to the art world and how you found your way in it.
Genevieve Goffman: When I was younger, I was actually very interested in poetry, and I was never one of those kids that people were like, oh, you're so good at drawing. I was not good at drawing. I actually really struggled learning to write and to hold a pencil. It took a while for my parents to figure this out, but I was actually born with a motor issue. Basically, it's like a motor disability, specifically fine motors. So I as a kid really couldn't hold a pencil, and I still really struggle with that now. It's not like I was very good at working with clay or anything like that. I really struggled with my hands. I struggled to learn to tie my shoelaces or put up my hair. And it's something that, as I’ve gotten older, it's become very not obvious to people. But when I was younger, it was very, very obvious that I had a physical disability. And so I wasn't really someone where anyone said, “oh, you should go into the arts”. But I was very interested in poetry, and from there, I became very interested in design, moving from poetry into becoming interested in the way that words appeared on the page.
And I started to create maybe when I was 18 and 19. I had been introduced to computers very young as this was a way to deal with my disability. And so I started to create poetry that was about the way words would come to appear in space and on the page. And this also started to tie into my interest in history and language. The way things are presented through text about history. So I started to create in my early 20s this body of poetry. It was really visual art because it was about looking at how the language and the visual appearance of historical events are recorded on a page. Once I recorded myself for 24 hours, and I took all of that language, and found a way to represent it visually. And so while I was doing this as a hobby, I was also making a lot of 2D collages.
I thought of it at the time as a little bit more like graphic design. I made all of these borders for a friend for one of her poetry Zines. And then eventually, I began to stop seeing it as poetry and start seeing it as visual art. I began to understand it as something that works better as an image versus something to be read. A lot of times I'd work with the same language repeated over and over and over again. And I began to combine the words and collage them into a set of zines and larger prints. And I began to make more and more of these collages. In the beginning, I was using reference material. I would take 500 screenshots from one iPhone video game and use these to make a bedsheet set out of that, or I took all of these Google Maps screenshots and created a fabric out of that.
So I collected a lot of archival materials and then combined it with the written word. I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time, and I had these two shows there. They were very research heavy. I'd research this one historical thing and the work was a one-to-one reflection of this exact research.
And at the time I felt fairly self-conscious about making art. The art that I was seeing around at the time was about people making art about their identity. So I felt to validate my art, I had to have it be incredibly concrete. I made this massive project that was at Portland State University in a hallway that was about the history of the bystander effect. And it was so hyper specific and only pulling on the language and the documents of first degree research.
Then I started to learn how to do 3D modeling and 3D design, which really opened up a lot of possibilities because for the first time ever, I was able to have an image in my head and re-create it. I would have a diorama in my head and re-create it. By doing that, I started to teach myself how to do that in 2D as well, with collages. So taking images and creating new images out of them, from very minute captured details in Photoshop and Illustrator. In a lot of ways, my practice is still informed by what I was doing with language because a lot of it is poetics, the poetics of mixing imagery together. Poetry often felt like I was solving a puzzle that didn't exist yet. And so I was making up the puzzle pieces and fitting them together. And the 2D collages I made felt very similar to that, almost. But it was really having taken this final step to be able to create these 3D objects in the real world, objects to be held in someone's hand, that gave me the power to be able to put my own voice and my own spin on my art.
And it also helped me to distance myself from this need to have direct research to point to. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it gives me more freedom to be more experimental and for my art to open itself up to speaking, to an ambiguity of emotions or an ambiguity of subjects, which I think is what makes art different from writing. This ability to address ambiguity.
That's amazing. I had no idea that's the way you started your art practice. I was really curious about the references that helped shape your work, artists, maybe writers or other cultural references?
A big influence for me is my mother, who is an art historian. She studies Christian Renaissance art, specifically Italian Renaissance art. I grew up around her research. I grew up in a house that she filled with those old art history slides that go in a projector. And so as a kid I would constantly play with those. Some of the ways that my work is dioramic or symbolic pulls from her. I learned about art from her much more than I learned about it from school. It was her understanding of these classical paintings with all sorts of storytelling, biblical stories, but also replacing figures in the biblical stories with contemporary politicians and actors. And this kind of story that everyone knew, to set up a scene that everyone would recognize, and to depict something different in it, had a huge influence on my art.
Fantasy and fantasy novels are another huge influence. It's something that I've always loved and enjoyed. I had this conversation a long time ago with this artist Leigh Ledare who was visiting my grad school. He's also someone whose approach to art has been really helpful for me. He talked about my relationship to fantasy and my relationship to anime being kind of perverse. Not perverse in the standard sense, but perverse in the sense that I am very aware of all the shortcomings of the fantasy genre—and yet that's also what I find fascinating about it. The repetition and the simplicity of it and the way that characters are often boiled down to archetypes and the characters represent that archetype, and the way that even when the book is political, it's never quite political because they're always taking place in these fantasy realms that support the right to rule of a king or the connection of a certain people to a land.
And they're very conservative tropes. But I find it's very helpful to pull on these worlds that are anathema to my own beliefs, but also fulfill this place in my head where the fantastical and the magical and the fascinating and the appealing live. Both anime and fantasy have helped me with my visual language. And it's a way for me to stay interested and engaged in my work because it's not just this dry, research based thing, but it's also this fantastical thing. And that's this thing of storytelling where I get to tell stories through my art, which is important to me. And it's what motivates me to keep working.
When I saw your exhibition, there's a few smaller sculptures on the wall and they're all these little narratives, little stories. I was wondering how you come to each work. How do you conceptualize your works?
I'm definitely a romantic. So I have a tendency to build stories and romanticize almost everything in my life, from an outfit I'm wearing to a conversation. Often this translates into a lot of anxiety. And so when I made something early on I would look at a piece of history and build a story. But I think now, whenever I look at a scene or a piece of architecture, one of the things that will draw me in is to imagine a romance or some kind of drama going on around it. And so for the piece at Hyacinth in the middle Monument to the Hand Made Arts, I set up this workshop. And in the workshop I built, I was taking handheld manufacturing processes, like a printing press and a drafting table, a mail working station, and a place for people to cook and prepare food.
And I have the drama of all these people working around it. And then I have in the front these two characters. A character has clearly just come in and is having an interaction or back and forth with the character who's welcoming him in by opening the door. And none of this would necessarily be visible to the outsider, but I need to imagine what's going on between those two characters to build the scene around it. A more obvious one in the Hyacinth show would be Lady Listens to Music, where you have this cat woman who's lounging under a tree and listening to music. And there’s a centaur deer fawn playing the music. But they're clearly standing very far away from each other. She's listening up on a hill while the centaur is playing the music much further down. So you have this narrative of one creature entertaining the other creature, and the other creature enjoying the music but not really acknowledging this centaur that's there for her entertainment.
And so that's in and of itself this scene of drama that I created on this little island that's suspended on the wall. And in certain shows I did, there's been an overarching narrative. But this one it's much more about these small vignettes, and then it is about a larger story. One of the things that was exciting to me about creating these mini worlds is that it wasn't a filled out story. But I got to capture just this moment of a story, an interaction between someone running a workshop and someone coming there to buy something. Or there's this beautiful resin purple building, and you have Pan playing the pipes for these dancers. This moment could be very recognizable, almost an anachronistic story out of another story. Then I can build a fantasy around it, which motivates me to keep making.
I saw in your earlier works that you also reference histories coming from Europe, and I was wondering, what is your relationship or your interest in that, having been born in America?
I feel like a lot of my interest in Europe came from being fascinated with the history of the Cold War, and historical tensions that have run this throughline to shape the reality we're experiencing now. And there's always been this idea that a lot of America has this isolationist history that just comes from other parts of America, sort of ignoring the fact that so much of what has always shaped America is its foreign relations and the way it was relating to other countries. After World War II, to change and develop its culture, to create a security apparatus, and make a whole new biopolitics to shape America in response to what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. But it was also a response to the way that America wanted to be seen by other countries. And so as an American, I have been interested in looking at the fear or the anxiety or “the push” that American decision makers were responding to.
Another is a personal connection. My mom is part Greek, and I have spent a lot of time in Europe. I was with my mom when she was doing a lot of research in Italy. I have family members that live in Brazil too. I have family members that have lived in England. It's not so much that I identify as American, even though I have spent most of my time in America, but my upbringing was always very aware of what was going on with these family members that were living in other places internationally, going back and forth between other locations. In that way, I have always had one ear to what was going on in Europe. On top of that, there was a way in which I found some of the historical architecture styles that I was seeing in Europe to be a really good jumping off place.
To engage with architecture in the United States, a lot of it was a response to or play on or a throwback to something that had happened in Europe before. And so I've always found that to be very fascinating. When I'm pulling on parts of history, I don't feel stuck engaging with just American history, because what is really interesting to me is not just situational things, but things that have happened in the past that affect the present. And those can happen internationally almost anywhere. Like something that happened in Athens 30 or 40 years ago could actually have a very serious impact on the States now. And so I have this way of jumping all around the world, in a sense, because I think things are very interrelated.
You engage with art history in a unique way, like the way that you are using 3D printing. As you have mentioned before, it's often seen as an alien form of production in art. Do you feel like it gives you the agency to place yourself within art history, or the language around 3D printing, do you feel it gives you more or less agency working with this means of production?
On a technical level, it allows me to actually get exact replicas of culture and intervene with it. And I would think that would place me more directly in an art historical canon or in the line of addressing it. But I found that it has been very hard for me working with 3D printing to place myself in a direct lineage to other sculptors or the history of sculpture in general. I found there's been a lot of pushback against that. I think that's shifting. It’s changing a lot. Some of the pushback has been it's not just that I'm doing 3D printing, but I'm doing 3D printing to make figurative sculpture, and dioramic historical figurative sculpture. All of which is not really in line with a lot of what's been going on in sculpture and art in the United States for the past couple of decades.
The dioramas make me think about the theatrical aspects of your work, and also seeing the works, they're so small. I was thinking about the way that one walks around them, and one has to come really close, and also close to other people to view together. One can't really see everything. One moves around it and wants to see but as the scene unfolds, maybe one can't see everything. With the history of dioramas, there was also a part where they had these spaces one was invited into, or that one became part of. With your work, being so zoomed in, one may imagine oneself in it, but in a different way. Will you speak a bit about these aspects of your work?
I think scale, size, and the manufacturing process are things I've always tried to engage with in different ways and have been experimenting with for the past two years. Since leaving grad school, I've really pushed to figure out smart ways to make objects really large to engage, and produce these large 3D printed sculptures with everything from combining pieces together to using cheaper materials. And this was a response to some of the criticisms I got, which often had to do with scale and inaccessibility due to scale. I got to this place where I want there to be something very small, and very powerful, especially because so much of my work is inviting you into a place, but it's inviting you into a place that doesn't exist. So it's inviting you into a story. It's inviting you into a pocket sized world. I made this piece that I think of as the history of the world, but in that it's very facetiously and obviously not the whole history of the world.
It's interesting because I was thinking a lot about the body and movement in that sense. And if one just realizes that if there’s less work, there is more space for the viewer. And I know it's not necessarily something you focus on while you’re working, the viewers and their experience. But it was something that stayed with me strongly, the movement of me as a viewer and the others. Also hearing about your motor disability, I was thinking about how the body and bodily movements inform your work. Does body movement play a role in your work?
It's funny because no one that knows me really well could watch me move around and realize that motor disability has been such a struggle my whole life. But I've gotten so much better and it's not a day to day struggle, but I don't think about it much because my body has never been a good metric. There's always some sort of way in which it doesn't quite function. It functions to a lesser capacity than other people. So I have been like alright, that's a bad metric to make art from. But subconsciously there is a role that it plays with making these fantasy worlds and these fantasy characters that are never quite human and are usually half human, half animal hybrids. They never are just people and they always have this sort of surreal or strangeness about their bodies.
But also the way that I do make these works small, even when they're not wall works, they're often pushed up against the wall or they're almost doubles without a double. There’s this sense of the physical drawing back and a projection of a fantasy. A challenge for myself lately is creating works that could sit comfortably in the middle of the room like the brass piece at Hyacinth, and not want to pull back against the wall. But that's actually the time that’s been much more challenging because I have to really acknowledge my own body existing in space and acknowledge what it would mean to move from space to space. If I'm being totally honest, it is not something I'm very comfortable or confident with. Me being able to understand how someone else would move through a room. And I tend to feel very physically awkward around stuff. Part of my desire is to push everything to the corners because then there's a lot of space to move awkwardly and not crash into things.
But also my desire for a fantasy world, or my desire to place myself inside of a fantasy has to do with a desire of escaping the body. Not existing in the physicality that I exist in now, which really lends itself to miniatures.
You're from Washington, DC. You lived in Portland. You're in New York now. And I was wondering how being in different cities influences your practice. Being around different kinds of architecture, having to deal with different histories. Being in New York do you feel like the city has also impacted your practice in a certain way?
It was almost a learning from the negative of being in Portland and having such an awful time in Portland. I'm not a West Coast person. I grew up on the East Coast. I grew up in DC. Which isn't a big city, but it is a city. And it is a city full of monuments and monumentalism, and it's full of impressive buildings that are buried under the infrastructure of the city itself, and new buildings are inserted in. It's a very strange, bizarre place to grow up. But I think I didn't quite realize how important architecture and watching people move from place to place was for me until I left. When I moved to Portland, the architecture there, please forgive me, was deeply uninspiring. It's a city with a lot of newer architecture. There's not a lot of emphasis on communal architecture being in any way important. And I found the city to be very empty and kind of uninspiring. I left and moved back to New Haven and then I moved to New York.
And New Haven is crazy because you see these university buildings that are interspersed inside a city where on the one hand you're looking at this crazy graveyard with a million ancient gravestones, a really over the top arch, and then there’s just a normal industrial plant that powers a city. So it's very strange. And then coming to New York reminded me that these very active physical building spaces are things that I draw a lot from. And I also like being surrounded by a lot of people. It’s something that you grow up with, and I feed off of that energy. My boyfriend and I constantly joke that if we're going to move somewhere, it would only be to a bigger city. We'd want to move somewhere that is even more stimulating than New York. I'm very inspired by places where the architectural life of the city is matched by the multiplicity, the high energy of life in the city itself.
And so that is one of the reasons why I was so drawn to New York. I'm very interested in spending time in other cities. I lived in Berlin for a tiny bit, and that was amazing. There's something very valuable about opportunities for artists to go other places and work other places, and research there. That's something I want to pursue. But in terms of the United States, living in New York has given me a lot of opportunities to walk around and see things that feed my practice. There's other parts of the country that I'm very drawn to artistically.
I have been going back and forth, twice now, between the Southwest, looking at old uranium mines, and old sites of mineral extraction. It's not for a specific project yet, but it's something I’m very interested in. But there is something really important about buildings and neighborhoods and active interplay and the age of everything that I find in New York.
What are you currently working on and what are you looking forward to in the future?
I've been reading about these monks in Paris. During several wars they kept this practice of making wine and liquor, up in these monasteries, shut off from the world while all this historical conflict was going on around them. And there's this very famous wine and liquor that's associated with these monks. Paris isn't the only place that has happened. There's all these stories of monks in Europe where there's chaos raining down around them, and they're shut in their monasteries brewing. And I found these stories very compelling because when people look at wine, a lot of the value is derived from how old it is. And as it's sitting and aging, it's maturing. And as it's aging, it's taking on the history of everything around it.
So wine that's made before war has aged through a war. It's keeping this historical record of everything that's happened before. It’s like the rings of a tree or a sort of time keeping through liquid, like water clocks. And the passage of liquid as a way of keeping time is really fascinating. I was looking at people who grow grapes. They have this tool where they can prick a grape and test the sugar level. It's very familiar to me, like a Geiger counter, because I've always been interested in radiation uranium. It's one of my hobby interests. And I saw this parallel similarity between Geiger counter testing for radiation and this sugar tester for grapes for wine. Playing with those ideas, but also trying to tell the story of these monks making wine during times of incredibly heightened conflict, where you could look at it as these people separating themselves from the suffering of the world. Or you could look at it as part of the process of timekeeping, that people are in history making and recording that's happening constantly throughout mankind. So, I was thinking about and started some large wall pieces that are going to address the story of these monks. Maybe working with a sculpture that talks about clocks, a metering device that measures sugar. But sugar is going to be an analogy for something else.