When considering Renée Green’s practice and the interplay between her various activities, it is difficult to separate her different contributions to the exhibition Love Supreme : notably the site-specific work Personal Props and her design of the exhibition’s scenography.
Personal Props is a frieze made of adhesive letters that runs along the upper portion of the picture rails throughout the entire exhibition space at La Criée. Renée Green has cataloged from memory the major movements and figures that have shaped the history of African American music: starting with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Sun Ra, Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy, Al Green, and even Kraftwerk. The work interacts with the other pieces, creating a back-and-forth dynamic, and attempts a reconstruction of a culture that is at once historical, mnemonic, and subjective. Through the inscriptions on the exhibition walls, Renée Green raises questions about the context of the work and its installation; she implicitly describes a continuity and redefines a framework for all the works in the exhibition. In response to Personal Props and through a play on interlocking forms and symmetry, Renée Green designed the layout of the viewing space. Visitors could read materials on African American culture or listen to Black music (jazz, hip hop, soul, or funk). Centered within the rectangular space outlined by the frieze, the reading area formed a square where visitors could curl up on cushions around a round table.
The space was also designed so that the materials made available to the public could inspire the artworks—and vice versa—though here with a certain distance maintained.
Alexandra Gillet
“When introducing herself in a few lines […], Renée Green describes herself as an artist, filmmaker, writer, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and a consulting member of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program in New York. It must nevertheless be noted that it is above all as a “visual” artist that she integrates the diversity of expressions she encounters on a daily basis, that she develops a working process in which all the elements of her “other activities” resonate equally, and that she reflects on her relationship to the contemporary world. Her entire body of work is thus composed of moments and fragments drawn from her readings, interviews, conversations, lectures, writings, photographs, films, and travels. These travels lie at the heart of her artistic investigation, which is grounded in her actual movement between cultural territories and geographical locations. […] Her conception of history is “that of an activity reflecting lived lives that relate to something very present and not very distant.” […] Consequently, by conceiving all her work in close relation to the notion of in situ (the specificity of a geographical, historical, or architectural site) and archives (written, visual, and audio documents), Renée Green articulates the various parameters of the exhibition by attempting to organize the fragments of a “self-archive.”
Elvan Zabunyan, « Renée Green (des)orientations », Le journal du CNP, n°14, 07-27 août 2001
Production : La Criée centre d'art contemporain, Rennes
