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Renée Green, Exhibition design
 

BETWEEN AND INCLUDING
The works and practice of the artist Renée Green are among the most relentless and consequent attempts to explore and extend the traditional terrain of art and to use artistic production as a strategy to question meanings and how we exist.

In contrast to many other artists of her generation, however, she diverges from the usual practice of a simple transfiguration of contents (sociology as art, etc.) by including in her videos, installations, sculptures and texts many kinds of models for discerning knowledge and in turn alludes to the tensions between them and their relative status. Irony, humour and seriousness accompany the images which emerge from a complex web of associations which circulate between the past, present and imaginings of the future. These are mingled with public and private narratives from various times and locations seen through Green's lens and heard through her ears. The questioning of what appears to be transparent and available reflects a process which, while densely configured, alludes to cultural conditions far more distinctly and intensely than many examples of reductive systematics.

For "Between and Including" the Secession exhibition space has been converted into a maze. Within the maze one can encounter a combination of interrelated works which have been produced between 1996 to 1999 and which for the first time will be presented in relation to each other.
 
 

Some Chance Operations, Video 1999
 

SOME CHANCE OPERATIONS
Shot in Naples, Vienna and New York, "Some Chance Operations" explores the notion of an archival form, in this instance film, as an unstable memory receptacle that can vanish. History and how it is made is meditated upon as one of many chance operations. The filmmaker Elvira Notari, who had a film production company in Naples between 1906 to 1930 plays a significant role as an impetus for "Some Chance Operations". Despite the fact that she was a prolific filmmaker, producing over sixty feature films, only three remain intact. One of these extant films, "E'Picerella", will be shown in the film series. Notari's films enjoyed a high level of popularity in Naples and circulated throughout Italy and in New York, where they were exported to fulfill the demand by Italian immigrants far away from their natal homes. Whether or not anyone remembers these films today is one of the questions posed in the video "Some Chance Operations". How do people imagine what seems distant, both in time and location? The aspects of dreaming, fiction and projection involved in imagining even what was once familiar and how these memories are bound to words, sounds, sensations and images becomes one of the themes of the video. The idea of Naples, for a variety of people, became a rallying point for this meditation.

Questions arise in thinking about what is received as the history of cinema, with such losses being a common place. How does a fear of oblivion manifest itself? How can archives, history and memory be thought now in this time of designated endings: Century's end, decade's end, millenium's end? What systems do we rely upon and what methods do we develop for coping with uncertainty, as well as for organizing our lives - operations ranging from the serious to the mundane? The questions are rotated in a number of ways in the exhibition: by an exploration of cinephilia and it's domain, "the velvet light trap/invisible cinema"; through examining the "philosophical toy" (cinema); by following the traces of a lost film practice in contemporary Naples; by examining historical conceptual art strategies today - in particular seriality and structuralist tendencies in film; by the creation of an idiosyncratic cross-referencing system; and by questioning what becomes a monument, and the temporality of what remains.

PARTIALLY BURIED IN THREE PARTS
The theme of presence in absence is also a crucial link between "Some Chance Operations" and "Partially Buried in Three Parts". This work which consists of "Partially Buried", "Übertragen/Transfer", and "Partially Buried Continued" - each of which are also videos - began with a reflection upon a work by the artist Robert Smithson which was primarily known as a photograph and believed to no longer physically exist. The three parts grew out of a consideration of the year 1970 and the associations became more dense in the process of working.

"Partially Buried in Three Parts" involves a web of genealogical traces which are probed through the notions of sites of memory as well as site-specific work. Each part is an overlapping exploration of ways in which we attempt to reinterpret the past as well as our contemporary relations to a natal patria. The artist asks what could the notion of "site" or "nonsite" mean today when the idea of location is affected for many be circuit relations, meaning that a sense of place and time can depend largely on where one's computer screen is and when memory is heavily mediated for some by computer storage capacity. How are the "returns of what is repressed" mediated and how do they erupt? The concept of being an "American artist", and the notion of national identities and cultural predilections being conflated; entropy, memory and its contradictions, memorials and monuments, nostalgia, and "radical" change repeated as style are all ideas which circulate in this work.

The three parts have in common references to the 1970s, a time in which the artist was a child growing up in Ohio. In 1970 the artist Robert Smithson produced his site-specific work "Partially Buried Woodshed" at Kent State University in Ohio. In May of 1970 four students were shot while attending a rally protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. "May 4, 1970" was painted on the "Partially Buried Woodshed" shortly afterward and the artwork took on another meaning.

Part two (Übertragen/Transfer) explores the relationship between how the U.S. was imagined from afar as well as how the time around 1970 is imagined by several people of German descent who now live in the U.S. Since 1991 the artist lived and worked between the U.S. and Germany. In "Übertragen/Transfer" she attempts to imagine the possibility of a "cosmopolitan patriot" as suggested by Kwame Anthony Appiah:

"The favorite slander of the narrow nationalist against us cosmopolitans is that we are rootless: What my father believed in, however, was a rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism. Like Gertrude Stein, he thought there was no point in roots if you couldn't take them with you. "America is my country and Paris is my hometown", Stein said."

The musings over "natal patria" continue: "How does one return? To a country, to a place of birth? To a location which reeks of remembered sensations? But what are these sensations? Is is possible to trace how they are triggered and why they are accompanied with as much dread as anticipation?" (From "Partially Buried")

Part three ("Partially Buried Continued") focusses on the mingling of the past and present, what is near and what is far, what is other and what is one's self through reflecting on the photographic medium via a reexamination of images taken during the Korean War viewed by the artist as a child and through photographs taken in Korea in Kwangju on May 18, 1980 and photographs taken by the artist in Kwangju and Seoul in 1997. Questions of genealogy are continued with the juxtaposition of artistic forebears, in this case Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and blood relations. The complexities of how we find ourselves entangled in relationships to countries, nationalities and people, to locations and to time, and to the ensuing identifications - these aspects continue to be questioned in this work.
 
 

Flow, 1996
 

FLOW
Cross-referencing and the ways in which one can reflect on a place one is not physically familiar with is one aspect of this work. The five sections which will be accessable in "Between and Including" are called Observatorium, Sublimity Links, Archaic Nostalgia, Networks and D.I.Y. Countdown Station. In this work an attempt was made to think about the various ways in which it is possible to connect with people in global terms and the various overlaps and divergencies which have occurred via the media and the coexistance of technologies which are "current" with those which are "obsolete". "Flow" began with the artist's preconceptions about Switzerland. To challenge these she did a search on the Web about Switzerland and printed out all of the information received. She wanted to test the various ways one can enter into thinking about a specific subject and observe the ensuing associative links made by the computer and by herself:

"When I thought about famous Swiss people I remembered Robert Frank and certain attitudes involving rebellion and bohemia. I had made a reference to The Americans, his book of photographs shot in the late 1950s, in another show in which I'd placed Camino Road, a book I wrote as a self-conscious hommage to or parody of the "road novel", "bohemia", and artist-rebels, next to it. I'd been thinking about the beat generation, figures like Jack Kerouac, Burroughs, etc. - the mythic construction of the artist personality as rebel and how females, and myself in particular, entered into that. These "beat" sources seemed to form a typical American introduction to the idea of bohemia and of being an artist.

I also thought of different exiled figures who are of interest to me, either from America or Europe. Robert Frank was one. The poet Elizabeth Bishop was another. She was born in Nova Scotia, but mostly grew up in the U.S. She lived in Brazil for 17 years from the 1950s to the late 1960s. The writer James Baldwin was another. He spent time in Switzerland and lived in France, yet was a civil rights activist in the U.S. Theodor Adorno continues to be an interesting case to me. I was focussing on Minima Moralia, which he wrote while exiled in California, which must have been totally strange for him. Oh, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was in exile in different European locations after having been a citizen of Geneva. So I had the idea that I would like to make a movie or a video based on these people as characters and began writing a script, which can be seen on the Flow website."
(Adapted from "Renée Green: Decoding Cultures", interview with Armelle Leturcq, Blocnotes, Avril/Mai 1996)

Other components of "Flow" are the Observatorium in which can be viewed ten years of received postcards while watching a video which alludes to Chris Marker's "San Soleil", but via postcards. In the Sublimity Links section a connection is made between 19th century artist-travellers, including different romantic poets, and Rock'n Roll; although the time and context is different there are often very similar aspirations expressed. The list of names is presented amidst images of "sublime" Swiss landscapes and records which can be played in a blue room and listened to while lying on a pillow. The Cinema component is now a part of the "Between and Including" film series in which some selections which were chosen because of a link to Switzerland were selected. The film selection included films which were meant to disrupt the idea of Switzerland as a neutral place.

TRACING LUSITANIA: Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype
The idea for "Tracing Lusitania" emerged in 1991 on the eve of 1992 when an assortment of Columbus protests and celebrations were brewing, as well as numerous debates about "identity politics", "multiculturalism" and "political correctness". It was the artist's intention to complicate the terms of some of these debates. Rather than begin with broad themes such as "colonialism", "Eurocentrism", "racism", "sexism", "heterosexism", "imperialism" she chose to begin by examining in Lisbon specific artifacts: Maps, decorative objects, botanical gardens, museums, architecture, and literary and classificatory texts. By beginning with these objects or places and tracing their emergence she believed it might be possible to detect the intricate workings of certain ideologies which had previously been and were still in effect. One hope was to interpret these objects or places in ways which would challenge the established perceptions and to probe the complicated pleasure and discomfort which might accompany them, as well as question easy assumptions about the past and present.

Since then "Tracing Lusitania" has become a floating proposition as it's different parts have never been configured together spatially, as it is composed of so many growing fragments. The original proposal suggested the broad aim of "tracing the magnitude of Portugal's past as a seafaring power" by observing the present-day residue in contemporary Portugal, which is present in cultural forms and in the heterogenous population. Part of that project involved travelling by boat to Ceuta ( Portugal's first conquest in Africa, 1415). Visually the fantastic projections of earlier voyages were to be represented by maps borrowed from the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon and from the New York Public Library. The artist was to function in multiple roles: exhibition designer, curator, artist, writer, conversationalist.

History, space, language and narration played roles in that projected endeavor. The "Age of Discoveries" (1415 to mid-1500s) provides a recurring, near-mythic source for Portugal's formulation of a national identity. This history appears in travel books, art catalogues and literature. Part of this legacy includes the 30 million people around the world who speak Portuguese. It was proposed that, "an examination of the past enables us to grapple with the complexity of the present, and this seems especially necessary now as borders change and effects of diasporic movements are unavoidable". A film series of films from Portuguese-speaking countries was proposed as one way of making palpable the contemporary remains of this history and the creative ways in which people are still grappling with it.

What appears here are samples from four parts of the projected endeavor. These samples in video represent excerpts from the film series, from the symposium "Negotiations in the Contact Zone", which occured in New York after the journey, from footage of conversations and the artist's inhabitation in Lisbon, and from her journey to Ceuta. Some sentences which trail through the labyrinth are part of the ongoing work.

VIDEO COLLECTION
Between 1991 to 1999 the artist produced videos for installations and independent videos. Her work has included creating viewing spaces for videos and films and programming films and videos for screenings during her exhibitions. Her videos have been exhibited in many international institutions and museums of contemporary art.

These videos range from raw to polished, from silly to serious, and cover a range of topics and situations which emerged locally, nationally and internationally during this decade - from hiphop culture to hardcore music between the U.S. and Germany to views on collecting and art viewing habits to a discussion of a censored TV series in Lisbon.


BIOGRAPHY
Renée Green is an artist and writer who lives and works in New York and Vienna. Numerous exhibitions - e.g. Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art, Louisiana Museum of Art, Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, De Appel Foundation, Venice Bienale, Johannesburg Bienale. She has published essays in Transition, October, Frieze, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst and Spex, among other magazines and journals. She is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and a guest faculty member of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York and at Yale University School of Art.


PUBLICATION

	RENÉE GREEN 18 colored illustrations, bilingual Secession 1999 ___________________ available in the shop
	RENÉE GREEN Between and Including 248 pages, 138 colored illustrations, 31 b/w illustrations authors: Giuliana Bruno, Michael Eng, Renée Green, Lynne Tillman, Joe Wood Secession, DuMont Buchverlag Köln 2001, ISBN 3-7701-5845-8 ___________________ available in the shop

FILM
The exhibition is accompanied by a film series which is curated by Renée Green. Following films are shown in the Filmhaus-Kino, Spittelberggasse 3, 1070 Wien - every Wednesday at 10 p.m.

10. 2.1999 - "Shadows"/John Cassavetes
17. 2.1999 - "Zorns Lemma"; "Nostalgia"/Hollis Frampton
24. 2.1999 - "Sink or Swim"/Su Friedrich
3. 3.1999 - "The Price of the Ticket"/Karen Thorsen
10. 3.1999 - "Lumumba, la mort du prophete"/Raoul Peck
17. 3.1999 - "Last Supper"/Robert Frank
24. 3.1999 - "Der sechste Kontinent"/Benno Maggi
7.4.1999 - "E'Picerella"/Elvira Notari (Stummfilm/silent film); "Midnight Ramble"/Bestor Cram and Pearl Bowser; "Some Chance Operations"/Renée Green


CONVERSATION
A conversation with Renée Green, Lynne Tillman and Joe Wood will take place in the context of the exhibition on Wednesda, February 10th, 1999, at 7 p.m. (organized by the Friends of the Secession).
 
 
Events for School Classes
 
PUPILS SPEAK WITH ARTISTS ABOUT RENÉE GREEN'S EXHIBITION.
Together with the ÖKS (Austrian Culture Service) we have invited Renée Green's assistant, Dorit Magreiter (assistant lecturer at the Academy) to speak with pupils about the exhibition "Between and Including" (10/2 and 11/4/1999).
Reservations: telephone: +43-1-587 53 07-10
age groups: between 14 and 20 years
duration: around 90 min.
cost: ATS 300,- (plus admission fees).


Thanks to: Renée Green's students

The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of:
Die Erste Bank (Partner of the Secession)
GlaxoWellcome (Sponsor Graphikline/Archiv)
Bundeskanzleramt für Kunst
Wien Kultur
Friends of the Secession
Hotel Altstadt Vienna
Antikmarkt Süd
Retro
lichterloh .der Wohnverstärker
J. u. A. Frischeis GmbH
Funder
Friedrich Macke GmbH
Stadtkino
META GmbH



For further information and photographic material please contact:
 
Tamara Schwarzmayr
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at