Contrast + Scott Groeniger

Until he started his graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Scott Groeniger was enveloped in a haze of typical mid-western denial. That is to say, he was in Columbus, Ohio doing his undergraduate work in Communication. But unlike most members of his graduating class Scott found himself indisposed to a career in cellular telephone sales. He shifted his focus to emerging technologies, mass media theory, the study of images and their effects on society. This led him to the discovery of Photography, and to his true calling: the making of meaning.

Since then, Scott has worked in London, Amsterdam, Florence and now resides in Honolulu where he teaches digital imaging at University of Hawaii at Manoa. His current work has brought him back and forth from the U.S. and China three times over the course of the last four years.

Now, worlds away from Columbus, a place so banal that tee shirts sporting the phrase “Surf Ohio” seem clever, he’s got himself a collection of boards and actually gets to ride them too.

Contrast: You claim that Chicago is where your “life [as an artist] officially began.” You started out in photography, what brought you in?
SG: Street photographers from the 70’s and 60’s. Gary Winogrand, Duane Michaels, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank… I started basically copying them, going out into the street with a wide angle lens, not even looking through the viewfinder and shooting constantly, all black and white. I learned what an image is and what else it is. Minor White especially, had this sort of attitude of Zen that’s inherent in photography. I thought that the camera was essentially an extension of my brain, or of my inner feelings… and I still kind of want that, although I don’t necessarily believe that anymore. Later, Robert Fichter, who’s an image maker and mentor of mine, that I worked with in Florida, completely transformed the way I thought of myself as an artist coming from photography. Photography, as you know, as soon as it hit digital, got blown into this whole other medium. It really changed. So, Fichter was huge in that.

You’ve collaborated with your wife [artist Kristen Rae Simenson] in the past and most recently in Shanghai last summer. Tell us more about the work you made with the one you love.
We’ve got these collaborative drawings where we would search through really obnoxious magazines about ‘how to live your domestic life.’ We would do these drawings based around these ideas. We decided, okay, let’s do the same sort of thing in a space. The Zendai Museum of Modern Art agreed and they found a space in Shanghai. She took the heads from supermodels and the bodies from children, in strange dresses. I lapsed into drawing satellite dishes, ‘cuz I felt like we were constantly being monitored there. So we’ve got this installation of drawings of satellite dishes, supermodel children and text, that say things like ”have you tried the new life style?” We made this comment, ultimately, on consumption. Consumption, and body image…and surveillance (chuckles).

Consumption is a prevalent theme in your work. In China, you worked to create another project that investigates social response to environmental decay. Talk about your most fulfilling piece to date.
The envirochina.net website is a collaborative project I’ve done with students in China and the States. The project started my going back and forth and teaching in Taiyuan City. It’s a very polluted place and that’s really why I went. I wanted to go and do a project about the environment, and see what student graphic designers and artists do when you ask them to respond to a really awful environmental situation. So, we made art around these ideas of our environment. It went online and we did a printed exhibition. The students played photoshop tennis from the U.S. to China. At the end no one could really say ‘I own this work, that piece is mine’.

You’re cuckoo for collaboration.
I think it’s really important that people from the U.S. and people from China collaborate, because China is a major factor in the next decade. It's massive culture is emerging into first world status. So, it’s really important that we collaborate with the Chinese, for a bunch of different reasons. If I were a scientist I’d find a way to collaborate in science… but, I’m an artist so my research is in finding new ways to visualize.

So sum it all up. The $10,000 question: what is the function of the artist?
Yeah… well, there’s a modernist and a post-modernist answer. The role of the artist in society in my opinion, vacillates back and forth between… an individual who’s capable of seeing things, a seer. I mean that’s this total modernist, Zen philosophy of artist as ‘filter’. A person who sees… filters… and interprets those things, and shows us things that we wouldn’t ordinarily be able to see. From the things that we see that the artist makes, humans then look at that thing and then they think. So the function of the artist is to make us think about things in a way that we wouldn’t be able to ordinarily. Sort of like a psychologist… or a shaman, you know? And then the other function of the artist in society is, of course, to take visual language and find new ways to make meaning. Metaphor. The world of the artist revolves around metaphor and allegory. So, we need to be experts with how things mean.