Pacing
2020
Thursday, July 8, 5 – 8 pm
Bortolami Gallery, The Upstairs
On the occasion of Renée Green’s exhibition Excerpts A.1, Bortolami Gallery is pleased to announce a book launch celebrating the publication of Pacing (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; Free Agent Media, 2020), and the reprint of Green’s 1994 novel, Camino Road (Primary Information, 2021).
Stemming from Green’s two-year project at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts during which she presented a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions, including her major exhibition Within Living Memory (Feb 1–Apr 15, 2018), Pacing is a handsome publication illuminating Green’s unfolding process, with a sequence of exhibitions that took place from 2015 and culminating in Pacing: Facing in Toronto; Tracing in Como, Italy; Placing in Berlin; Spacing in Lisbon; and Begin Again, Begin Again in Los Angeles. The result is a meditation on creative processes across histories and media, partially inspired by two architectural icons: Rudolf M. Schindler and Le Corbusier.
Lavishly illustrated, Pacing features a new essay by Gloria Sutton, a poem and an essay by Fred Moten, and brings together a series of previously unpublished conversations between the artist and Yvonne Rainer, Nora M. Alter, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Sutton, documenting the project’s public programming. Additional contributions are provided by Nicholas Korody, and William S. Smith in addition to a foreword by Carpenter Center director Dan Byers.
Republished by Primary Information in a facsimile edition, Camino Road ostensibly traces its protagonist Lyn’s journeys to Mexico and her return to attend art school in 1980s New York, but what emerges is more an intertextual assemblage of the moments between drives, dreams, and consciousness. Much like Green’s multimedia installations encompassing the sonic, spatial, and visual, Camino Road is richly layered—part intellectual genealogy, part fictional personal memory, and part cultural criticism.
Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the 1994 group exhibition “Cocido y crudo/The Cooked and the Raw” at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the text is written in both English and Spanish, and accompanied by an appendix of photographs and ephemera tracing Madrid’s La Movida, a Spanish countercultural moment from the 1980s. The book was published through Green’s production company, Free Agent Media (FAM), which has been circulating and exhibiting media, printed matter, and time-based projects since 1994.
A unique treatise on the circuits of exchange in gender, politics, and art, Camino Road can also be read as a variation on the classic Bildungsroman genre. “I don’t feel developed in any area,” thinks Lyn at one point. “It’s very difficult being young and incomplete.” Importantly, she also muses, “I want to be swallowed by another language.”
Renée Green (b. 1959, Cleveland) is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Portikus, Frankfurt; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam; Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, among many others. Inevitable Distances, a large-scale retrospective dedicated to Green’s decades-long practice, will be held at the KW – Institute of Contemporary Art and daad galeries in Berlin this fall. Green is also a Professor at the MIT Program of Art, Culture, and Technology, School of Architecture and Planning.
