Things are not the way they were.
How can we be sure? New laws apply,
and who knows the difference between the law and the wind?
And who knows the difference between You and Me?
Paul Bowles, via Renée Green, via Begin Again, Begin Again (2015)
Artist and Professor Renée Green’s moving image work continues to be featured this Fall in two Western Modernist architectural milestones: Mies van der Rohe’s Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, IL., and Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) in Cambridge, MA.
On November 30th, CCVA will host a public program related to Green’s participation in the exhibition This Machine Creates Opacities. Shot in Le Corbusier’s Casa Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina, Green chose Argentinian directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s film El hombre de al lado to represent her thinking about our current opacities: the movie depicts a conflict between neighbors that seems to have no end.
Celebrating its 60th anniversary, Harvard’s CCVA exhibition This Machine Creates Opacities, curated by Dan Byers, “restages four major works by artists Robert Fulton, Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Pope.L that examine the ways buildings choreograph, shape, and control social life, learning, and cultural structures.”
Produced in 2018–while Green had an ongoing relationship with CCVA, which she designated as Pacing–Green’s short digital film Americas : Veritas is being screened on Le Corbusier’s building lobby, with modernist seating allowing its full contemplation and absorption.
For this exhibition, Green has produced a new work: Americas : Veritas Vitrine (2023), an indexical trace of the mental and physical itineraries traveled in the Americas by the artist, while following Le Corbusier’s traces; the vitrine highlights exilic architectural figures, such as Josep Lluís Sert, as well as Argentinian fictions and past historical traumas and realities which continue to resonate in the present.
Senior Curatorial & Public Programs Assistant Danni Shen writes about Green’s work in CCVA’s exhibition guide: “By turning new technological apparatuses like drone cameras onto […] structural realities, Green further enacts the parallel slippages between modernism and technology’s blanket promises of progress. Here, the universalist, brutalist angles and hard edges of concrete dissolve into fluid, mercurial images.”
The Last of the Animal Builders is an exhibition curated by Alberto Ortega Trejo at the Edith Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois. Exhibition statement: “The exhibition is a contemporary reinterpretation of the sculpture walk that occupied the garden during the ownership of Lord Peter Palumbo and it focuses on how modernity, minimalism and capitalism have shaped our understandings of nature, economy, resources, austerity and excess in the age of climate emergency.”
Produced in 2015 for her exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Green’s film Begin Again, Begin Again considers R.M. Schindler’s 1912 manifesto Modern Architecture: A Program, while, yet again, reflecting on what other considerations Humans might have in times of war, repression, and annihilation.
From Green’s film script, quoting Schindler’s 1912 Modern Architecture: A Program:
92) The modern dwelling will not freeze the contemporary whim of
93) owner or designer into permanent tiresome features.
94) It will be a quiet, flexible background for a harmonious life.
