Europe: ancient future
The Halle Für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, Austria
April 23 – August 15 2021

First published in 1994, Camino Road is artist Renée Green’s debut novel—a short, ruminative work infused with semantic ambiguity and the dreamy poetry of the quotidian. Republished here in a facsimile edition, the book 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. Lyn does her Spanish homework and makes note to read Anna Kavan and Cortázar; she watches Fellini; she dreams about the Mediterranean Sea. 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.

Green has described the book as a “self-conscious homage to or parody of the ‘road novel,’ ‘bohemia,’ and artist-rebels.” “I’d been thinking about the beat generation, figures like Jack Kerouac, Burroughs, etc.—the mythic construction of the artist personality as rebel and how females, and myself in particular, entered into that,” she said. “These ‘beat’ sources seemed to form a typical American introduction to the idea of bohemia and of being an artist.”

Originally created as part of Green’s contribution for the 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 since 1994 has been circulating and exhibiting media, printed matter, and time-based projects.

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.”

120 pages
4 x 7 inches
Paperback
Edition of 2500
April 2021
ISBN: 9781734489781

Flatwing
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
25 March – 8 August 2021
Member preview days beginning March 18

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.

Paperback
9 x 11.75 in.
300 pages
ISBN: 9781735230504
Designer: Wkshps with Chad Kloepfer
Publisher: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts / Free Agent Media

Score for 7 Solos

The Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin

30 January – 27 March 2021

Fabric As…

The Fabric Workshop and Museum | Philadelphia, PA

September 10, 2020  – April 18, 2021

January 04 – January 30, 2021
La MaMa Galleria | 47 Great Jones St.
Galleria Open: Friday & Saturday; 12pm–6pm; or by private appointment
Curated by Sam Gordon

The New Bauhaus
LACMA online screening
December 4, 2020
10am