After a year of international solo exhibitions, ACT Professor Renée Green has embarked upon a two-year residency with Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA), which is located in Le Corbusier’s only built structure in the United States.
As CCVA’s 2016–18 Institution (Building) artist, Renée Green has conceived the project entitled Pacing. Over the course of this two years, Green will engage with and return to an ongoing series of questions and forms of relation explored in her 2016 exhibitions: Spacing, in Lisbon; Placing, in Berlin; Tracing, in Como, Italy, and Facing, in Toronto.
Pacing’s first iteration, FAM Case, takes shape in the case located on Level 0 of the Carpenter Center which displays a selection of Free Agent Media (a.k.a. FAM) printed matter: books, newspapers, print outs, public lecture notices, screening programs, exhibition announcements, and other ephemera. Green has used the moniker Free Agent Media as the authoring tool for her projects since 1994 as a means to register art’s complex relationship to the culture industry and complicate the tendency to read art emanating from “the museum,” “the academy” or “the market” as the only designated institutions for the production and reception of art. Instead, Free Agent Media contextualizes the broader media ecology in which Green’s works, writings and ideas circulate. FAM Case (1994-2000) will be on view until January 15th, 2017, and will be followed up by FAM Case (2001-2016), will open to the public on January 26th, 2017.
As ACT Research Affiliate and art historian Gloria Sutton writes in the first booklet produced for the project, “broadly framed, Pacing is indicative of Green’s continually expanding practice as an artist who has been at the forefront of her generation’s more socially and politically engaged, and project-driven, art production for more than 25 years. Like the spaces for encounter and contemplation, sound units, and screening scenarios that Green has produced in museums, galleries, theaters, gardens, and other public spaces since the early 1990s, the encounters that unfold through Green’s Pacing at CCVA encourage the viewer to make connections and draw linkages across historical periods and between topics and discussions that may at first appear far afield but find common ground at the intersections of architecture, music, film, literature, poetry, and philosophy that Green creates in her discreet artworks. By offering us a process of examining and distillation through both proximity and distantiation, Pacing is not a reductive or revisionist project. Rather, it remains generative, offering an unfolding critical model of engagement that puts into relief current habits of skimming and scanning.”
In Pacing, Green will consider relations sparked by conjunction with Le Corbusier’s building, allowing during the invited period of engagement a variety of trajectories to emerge from myriad points of material, imaginings, and speculation.
A series of screenings and related programs will also take place in CCVA during the Spring under the umbrella of Green’s Pacing.
