Renée Green: Pacing

Renée Green's two-year engagement as the Institution (Building) artist at the Carpenter Center launches with a public conversation between the artist and CCVA Scholar, Gloria Sutton. Given Green's prolific output during the last twenty-five years, the conversation aims at contextualizing signal moments within the artist’s seminal oeuvre.

Taking into account Green’s longstanding consideration of the historical and institutional legacies of Modernism, in Pacing, the title of her CCVA project, the artist will engage with and return to an ongoing series of questions and forms of relation, allowing during the invited period a variety of trajectories to emerge from myriad points of material, imaginings, and speculation.

Indicative of her continually expanding practice, Pacing in Cambridge encompasses and reflects upon the arc initiated earlier in 2016 by a series of Green's solo exhibitions: Spacing in Lisbon (Jan-Mar), Placing in Berlin (Jun- Sep), Tracing in Lake Como, Italy (Jul-Sep), and Facing in Toronto (Oct-Nov).

Pacing's launch is accompanied with an installation in the Level 0 Display Case: FAM Case (1994-2000), on view Oct 27.

Renée Green

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented.

Green's exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums and art institutions, among them the MAK Center for Art + Architecture at the Schindler House, West Hollywood; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, all in New York; Musée cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Portikus, Frankfurt; Centro Cultural de Bélem, and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Vienna Secession; Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; International Center of Photography, New York & Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen. Her work has also been present at the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla & Istanbul Biennials, as well as in Documenta 11 and Manifesta 7.

Her most recent books include Other Planes of There: Selected Writings (2014, Duke University Press, Durham), Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (2010, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco), and Ongoing Becomings (2009, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne). She is also the editor of the collection of essays Negotiations in the Contact Zone (2003, Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon) and a Professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, School of Architecture & Planning.

Gloria Sutton

Gloria Sutton is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University and author of The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema published by MIT Press.  A research affiliate in the Art Culture Technology Program at MIT, her scholarship is invested in the ways that durational media have altered the reception of visual art in the post 1968 period. She received her doctorate from the University of California Los Angeles and has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Getty Research Institute. She is the inaugural editor of Art Journal Open.

Her current book project provisionally titled, Pattern Recognition: Durational Conditions of Contemporary Art asks what happens when the processes of standardization, modularization and the clustering effects of digital culture, which have come to condition viewers’ expectations for time-based media art, are not considered as neutral technologies, but as powerful social markers.

Institution (Building)

Pacing by Renée Green is part the CCVA initiative Institution (Building), a biennial invitation to artists to consider the institutional behaviors and practices of the Carpenter Center and Harvard University. In repeated visits over the course of two years to the university, artists engage through an expanded form of exhibition with various facets related to the archive, architecture and history of the Carpenter Center. Their work manifests in anything from exhibitions, events, and installations to interventions, tours, and publications, taking shape and changing during the residency.