Monday, January 08, 2007

Renee Green - World Tour

from Renee Green:
"World Tour":
Adorno on American pop culture and California
Marcel Broodthaers
p54: "some of your work uses a kind of literalism as a way of addressing concepts. ... "reading between the lines," where you would literally read between the lines, and the literalization of some ideas about color per se. ... like Bruce Nauman... but with more specifically instrumental goals.
coloured thinking... creative misreading
55:
your work often requires the viewer to look through ... lenses. it puts a lot of emphasis on the actual process of seeing
RG: power is related to seeing and vision. being able to see and name something implies a certain amount of power. I keep trying to make viewers aware of the process involved in seeing, so that it doesn't just seem self-evident. I did a lot of reading a while back around these topics--Jacqueline Rose's "Sexuality in the Field of Vision", Foucault's "Power/Knowledge",--and, very importantly, the anthology edited by Henry Louis Gates, "Race," Writing and Difference".

shifting positions... to relate to the desire to get away from a fixed point of view, not just in the literal sense of the physical place from which you view the work, but also, in a metaphorical sense, in how you see the world.
RG: my idea was that the process of actually physically piecing things together would lead people to act out, even in an unconscious way, certain ideas having to do with power, movement, and the way places and positions are designated.

58:
... It's not that I don't want to express certain ideas, or that htere isn't something to be gained in terms of understanding things having to do with African-American culture, but i think of it more in terms of a heuristic approach that is meant to spark interest in things, and pique people's curiosity,. I would just like there to be more of a multiplicity of ways that people can approach working. One of the most appealing aspects about being an artist is that you can have fun.

There's a real element of playfulness in your work. But the categories you fool around with often deal with areas which historically have been very seriously defended and contested.
RG: Right. and i would say that the whole idea of "race" is one of those categories. ... it's very limiting to always think in terms that are defined by certain ethnic, cultural positions. I work from my own subjective position, which, of course, is influenced by, among other things, being African-American as well as a woman.

... problematizing the idea of essences

Import/Export: you self consciously use an anthropological structure in this work that involves a multiple flipping of conventional expectations. you go to europe and conduct research there on their culture, but hte aspect of the culture that you're looking at turns out to be heavily dependent on African-American culture... the relationship starts to fold in on itself so much that it begins to problematize and break down some of the implied hierarchies of most cross-cultural exchanges.

... I've done a lot of text-related work in the past, and I'm interested in trying pieces that rely more on the formal aspects of the installation and the sound of ambient music, although I will also continue to use text.

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