Renée Green

Since the late 1980s, Berlin-based American artist Renée Green (born 1959) has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory and cultural exchange, through immensely compelling and beautifully constructed narrative installations, among other mediums. Her influential writings, films and sound works continue to trace and interrogate the forces of culture and power and their relationships with language, knowledge and the constitutions of selfhood.
Inevitable Distances presents recent productions in conversation with some of Green’s earliest and rarely exhibited works. Indicating the encounters and distances traveled in a life’s journey, the book puts her artistic production into a speculative thematic constellation.

American artist Renée Green (born 1959) spent two years engaged with the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, during which she presented a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions, culminated with her major exhibition Within Living Memory (2018). Green’s Carpenter project, Pacing, is a meditation spurred by inhabiting an architectural icon—Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center—while exploring the historical and institutional legacies of modernism’s other forms, including cinema, visual art, poetry, music and literature.

This handsome publication illuminates 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. Despite grand ambitions, Le Corbusier was only able to realize two buildings in the Americas, the Carpenter Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curuchet, in La Plata, Argentina. In Pacing, dreams, projections and geographically distant buildings are put into dialogue through time, weaving a layered constellation of unexpected relations.

Lavishly illustrated, Renée Green: Pacing features new texts by Gloria Sutton and Fred Moten, and brings together a series of previously unpublished conversations between the artist and Yvonne Rainer, Nora M. Alter and Mason Leaver-Yap. Additional contributions are provided by Nicholas Korody, William S. Smith and Carpenter Center director Dan Byers.

Originally published in 1994, Camino Road is the debut novel of acclaimed New York–based artist and writer Renée Green (born 1959). Set between the late 1970s and early 1980s, and combining the genres of road novel, countercultural memoir, travel journal, epistolary novel and screenplay, it is the record of the mind of a young woman coming of age as an artist, traveling in Mexico and exploring the bohemian milieu of 1980s New York.

Serving as both homage to and parody of the historically male-dominated genre of the road novel, Camino Road interrogates the tropes of the form through the unusual perspective of a young woman. The relationship of language to self-formation is demonstrated by the protagonist Lyn’s attempts to learn Spanish. Accordingly, the book is divided into an English half and a Spanish half.

Published as an artist’s book for the Reina Sofía group exhibition The Raw and the Uncooked, the book includes an appendix with photographs and ephemera from Madrid’s 1980s movida punk movement.