Renée Green

February 28 - May 16, 2004

Two distinct trends have dominated in the recent history of installation art. Some practitioners have attempted to dazzle the senses of visitors to their engulfing environments, designed to invoke the power of the beautiful and sublime. Others have transformed exhibition spaces into participatory social settings and/or service centers. The former offer private aesthetic experiences, prompting intense physical and emotional response. The latter foster progressive, ameliorative communal interactions.

In a little more than a decade, Renée Green has pioneered a profound and influential third approach. Her work blends aspects of these other practices with documentary and biographical narrative elements presented in interactive installations, variously involving found objects, extant and original texts and images, film, video, and sound. Her physical structures and spatial arrangements, which have encompassed modes of display ranging from labyrinths to individual units, effect how a viewer may encounter diverse material spanning ephemera and film. In this way, Green offers loosely structured encounters with fragmentary information that may be woven into partial, personal accounts of important constellations of thought and activity in our common history. She resists the production of master narratives and the suggestion that there is anything approaching an absolute truth of collective experience, preferring, as she says, to demonstrate the complexity of things Green writes, “to make any one kind of authoritative statement about the ways things are is specious.”Her explicit subjects have been wide ranging-- from the social valence of race and gender in the twined histories of Saartjie Baartman (known as the “Hottentot Venus”) and Josephine Baker (Revue, 1989), to the real and imagined relationship of artistic modernism in the work of Robert Smithson to contemporary political protest of the war in Vietnam (Partially Buried, 1996), and the suggestive nature of cultural exchange between U.S. and European popular and intellectual cultures (Import/Export Funk Office, 1992). But her deep subject--the formation of the individual consciousness and the fluid nature of human subjectivity--has remained consistent throughout.

In her ongoing series of wavelinks projects, Green explores the many different relations people have to sound-electronic sound and music, in particular. Using many sources of original and sampled film footage, and her own interviews with and documentation of individuals who produce, write about, and listen to music, she suggests the power of manipulated aural experience to impact the listener at the level of and below consciousness. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer first observed, unlike the visual and other performing arts, music does not directly reproduce some aspect of the world; instead, it has a power at once more subtle and compelling: to move the listener without the mediation of imagery. The sound and video environments presented here by Renée Green offer audiences an opportunity to both experience and reflect upon this power as it has been mobilized in meditation, political persuasion, and a host of other important cultural practices.

Renée Green’s exhibitions, videos, and films have been seen in one-person exhibitions at Portikus (Frankfurt), Fundaci. Antoni T.pies (Barcelona), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). Other venues include Documenta XI, Johannesburg Biennial, Kwangju Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, Aperto (Venice Biennale), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). She has contributed writings to Texte zur Kunst, Spex, October, Transition, Frieze, Flash Art, and many other publications. Her books include Between and Including (Secession/ Dumont, Vienna, Germany 2001), Shadows and Signals (Fundaci. Antoni T.pies, Barcelona, 2000), Certain Miscellanies (DAAD, Berlin/De Appel, Amsterdam, 1996), After the Ten Thousand Things (Stroom, The Hague, 1994), Camino Road, (Free Agent Media/Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 1994), and World Tour (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993). She holds a Distinguished Artist professorship in the Department of Art at the Universityof California, Santa Barbara. She lives and works in New York and Santa Barbara.

EXHIBITION SPONSOR:
Alice F. & Harris K. Weston

2003-2004 SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR:
Dr. Stanley & Mickey Kaplan