Der Soziographische Blick 7 / Green

Projects Realized, Imagined and Ongoing (2002 and beyond) Relay, a definition: 1. a series of persons relieving one another or taking turns; shift. 2. a fresh set of dogs or horses posted in readiness for use in a hunt, on a journey, etc. 3. Sports. a. See relay race. b. a length or leg in a relay race. 4. Mach. an automatic control device in which the settings of valves, switches, etc., are regulated by a powered element, as a motor, solenoid, or pneumatic mechanism actuated by a smaller, sensitive element. 5. Elect. a device, usually consisting of an electromagnet and an armature, by which a change of current or voltage in one circuit can be made to produce a change in the electric condition of another circuit or to affect the operation of other devices in the same or another electric circuit. 6. (cap.) U.S. one of a series of low-altitude, active communications satellites for receiving and transmitting radio and television signals. 7. to carry forward by or as by relays: to relay a message. 8. to provide with or replace by fresh relays. 9. Elect. to retransmit (a signal, message, etc.) by or as by means of a telegraphic relay. 10. Elect. to relay a message. [ ME relai (n.), relai(en) (v.)< MF relais (n.), relai(er) (v.), OR: to leave behind, equiv. to re- RE- + laier to leave, laxare; see RELAX]

The work of Renée Green continues to explore and examine the complex webs and circuits within which we live and our ways of imagining existence amidst and beyond these. As the work investigates relations to a number of processes and conditions, it is understandable that dynamic models encompassing multiple effects provide entry points. “Relay,” the term and the exhibition, suggest ways of thinking about the recent work. This work occurs in different and overlapping forms, and takes place over time and in multiple locations. It includes physical objects, projected films, videos, a website, a preliminary database and processes of interaction and labor, which can be understood as different kinds of relay effects. “Relay” consists of two projects, “Code:Survey” and “Elsewhere? Here,” presented with new work, all of which focusses on the relationality and tensions arising in and between locations, movement and passages of time.

„Historical knowledge consists of transmissions in which the sender, the signal, and the receiver all are variable elements affecting the stability of the message.“ „Each relay willingly or unwittingly deforms the signal according to his own historical position.“ „Historical recall never can be complete nor can it be even entirely correct, because of the successive relays that deform the message.“ George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962)

We live in a time very different from 1999, when Green last exhibited solo work in Austria. Historical recall involves a relay process, suggested by the above quotes included in the video “Elsewhere?” (2002). The “Elsewhere? Here” project emerges from an ongoing interest in imagining what kinds of existences can be possible to effect “the dream of better living” in the present. Does this only lead to delusion and calamity or is something else possible? The project encompasses the “Elsewhere? Matrix,” now transmuted from it’s original proposal (to attempt the creation of a “ dream library” conceived of as an imaginary system inserted into an actual location for the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Public Library) into the current prototype for a Movable Contemplation Unit (MCU) and print version. The proposition to insert new links to imaginary places within an existing library catalogue still stands.

A simultaneous video projection of the video “Elsewhere?” (2002), first presented in Documenta XI and “Here Until October 2004” (2004), finished just before the U.S. 2004 election results were in, will be continuously screened. The juxtaposed videos provide an unusual meditation on current conditions of living, in the U.S. and elsewhere, combining lyricism, beauty, history, silence, anger, violence and hope. Reflections on these themes intersect the other components in the exhibition.

“Code: Survey” is a work which exists as a physical structure of glass, film and steel in the Caltrans Headquarters of the California Department of Transportation in downtown Los Angeles. The work was comissioned by Caltrans and the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis and opened to the public in February 2005. The work also exists as a website and is thus accessible internationally. Green was interested in testing what ways a public artwork can now exist and how it might be possible to experience a work beyond a fixed location by constructing a dense information network, which exists as another dimension of the work, in which a variety of historical, structural and subjective materials, in the forms of audio, video, still images and texts can be excavated for examination, via links, and thus allow one’s perception of a physical encounter with a place to alter or to imagine locations and relations to movement even if a physical encounter doesn’t occur. What emerges from this engagement with data, space and time allows one to explore and question utopian claims of freedom associated with mobility.

“Relay” refers to signals, attempts to make contact beyond a physical place through time and distance, and the videos in the exhibition serve that role. “Relay” also includes references to how thought processes are developed and how that can matter to what kind of world we can inhabit. Education, as a field of institutionalized knowledge production, is a contested, possibly damaging and potentially potent activity to effect being in the world. The ways in which it can be perceived are affected by the locations and political climate in which it takes place. An aspect of the exhibition contains intersections or relays between the Innsbruck Kunstraum Project Room, in which students and recent graduates’ work is presented, as the role of education and what is passed on from one person to the next is put into question. To examine the process of how knowledge is created, the effects of the conditions under which this takes place and what this can mean, Green invited current and former students, Jürgen Bock, the director of the Maumaus – Escola de Artes Visuais in Lisbon and two professors, Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, from the departments of Sociology and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara to participate in the “relay” attempted between Lisbon, Santa Barbara, Vienna and Innsbruck.

Pressetext

Der Soziographische Blick 7
Renée Green: Relay