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Here is a story set in a not-so-alternate reality: a brilliant physicist, part Galadrial and part Marie Curie, has been betrayed by her lover. Enraged and imbittered, she creates a bomb which relies on a synthesis of nuclear fission and dark alchemy. Its detonation throws the world into a brilliant nuclear winter. In Genevieve Goffman’s practice, history is pliable, tractable, unprincipled. Installations like Winter4Eva, structured around a narrative which amalgamates visual references from Cold War propaganda to anime, reveal the enduring aesthetic legacies of populist fantasizing and fascist pathologizing.  

 The artist acts as bricoleur, finding and arranging images, experiences, and moments into new narratives. Rather than seek a revisionist approach to history, however, these works hold a mirror to our societal fetishization of particular aesthetics and ideologies. In this way Genevieve’s works approach historiography: they scrutinize the signs and symbols of Eurocentricity and the mythologization at the root of contemporary nationalisms, and critique the appropriation of beauty, kitsch, and popular culture by nefarious political forces. 

Genevieve Goffman is an interdisciplinary artist from Washington D. C. Goffman earned her MFA in sculpture from Yale in 2020. She’s had solo shows in Portland, Oregon, and at Lubov and Catbox Contemporary in New York. She has also shown internationally at Gallery 102 in Berlin, EXILE in Vienna, Austria, Workroom.Daipyat in Voronezh, Russia, and Patara gallery in Tbilisi, Georgia. She has two upcoming shows in 2020 including a solo show at Money Gallery in Moscow, and another at Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York.

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Interview group 1

The uranium mine releases a beast that changes everything about the world, and underlines every part of modernity. It changes our relationship to resource extraction and recalls colonial violence in Australia, Canada, the American West and Central Africa. We know the singular incident of “the bomb,” but we don’t see the million channels through which nuclear science contorted and still contorts our history. To this day military tension in the Middle East is structured in part by the history of uranium and radiation.  A witch is depicted battling a beast much larger than herself. She can only catch glimpses of her enemy.

I have always been fascinated with the far right’s obsession with the ancient Greeks and Romans. The cultural products of those civilizations are refigured as celebrations of whiteness and the physical prowess of the male body, which is itself bizarre, but no more so than the rabid American obsession with the notion of the “birthplace of democracy.” History did not begin with the Greeks, though so many derive legitimacy from tracing their theoretical lineage to that time and place. The English won’t give up the Eljen Marbles and the EU has forced the Greek nation into a state of permanent austerity while the liberal-democratic world maintains the symbolic importance of its political origins in Greco-Roman civilization. Lie around eat some grapes and look this giant muscular form, which pays homage to fictional fantasy fertilities gods as much as it does to the Parthenon of ancient Greece—or is it the Capitol building?

This building is a composite of many castles both real and fictional. Some of them are scattered around Bavaria, designed and built by Ludwig II in honor of Wagner. They were built to mimic medieval castles and Neuschwanstein in particular was copied by Disney to create his fantasy castles. This building was inspired in part by the Hercules monument in Kassel, a 515m high clockwork waterfall meant to be a testament to triumph of man over nature, growing a palace out of natural rock. These stories of architectural clowning are examples of history being used as a tool to prop up the failing regimes of the past, a process which is becoming increasingly relevant to the present.