Renée Green: In Circuits

Programmed by: Avivit Ashman

The moving-image works of artist, writer, filmmaker, and professor Renée Green redraw the possibilities of film in their remapping of the world. Green’s videos and films, which she describes as adopting a method of “integrated essaying,” activate a dizzying array of textual, architectural, archival, and geographic fragments. Montage, as a displacement of images and times, facilitates deeper explorations of physical displacement, itinerancy, the circulations of knowledge, and the metamorphosis of thought and feeling across history and time.

Since the late 1980s, Renée Green’s installations, including Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile (1992-1993), currently on view at the Art Institute, have crossed media and disciplines, combining sound, sculpture, writing, photography, textiles, and video for rigorously philosophical experiments in pattern, color, language, memory, and site. Reworking postwar minimal and conceptual artistic traditions, Green is interested in the construction of systems and the subsequent moments of rupture: “there is an excess that seeps out of the schematic, and it is this created tension/space — interval, break, interstice — that I like to probe,” she writes.

The cinematic is, then, a natural medium for these concerns. “It’s a kind of composing in space,” she has said, a practice of almost architectural investigation. Green extends montage, a space of relation between images, to represent a space of relation between people, thoughts, dreams, and geographies. Her works are moments of contact between locations (New York City, Gwangju, Vienna, Lisbon, Los Angeles, La Plata) and influences (including, but not limited to, Chantal Akerman, Robert Smithson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harun Farocki, Michelangelo Antonioni, On Kawara, and Lygia Clark). Her approach is, in her words, fundamentally “circuitous,” having “much more to do with association than anything literal or a direct way of going about things.” This series attempts to draw out the rich citational network of Green’s films and videos, viewing them as works circulating in a dense network of filmmaker-artist-thinkers in constant motion. “What might be a relation?” Green has written, an open question she also asks through these films. “Forms of wandering? Montage? Linking? There is no answer.”

Doc is pleased to welcome Renée Green to campus on November 7. Special thank you to Renée Green and Javier Anguera, FAM Archivist, as well as to Video Data Bank and Bortolami, New York.