Is it Multicultural if She's: "African-American," Born in Cleveland, Allergic to Tomatoes, Possessor of a Driver's License, an Avid Pedestrian, a Woman, and Lots of Other Things? The Cultural Products of Renee Green in the "Age of Multiculturalism"
"To be recognized for my negating activity is to be valued for my power to make a difference rather than to reflect it..."By Ryan Griffis, M.F.A. Candidate
Written for Dr. Sharon Pruitt's African American Art Seminar
-- Homi Bhabha 1
The subject of "multiculturalism" has become a widely desirous issue in certain "academic" disciplines over the last several years. There are many forums dedicated to the subject in one way or another, and the concept shows up in many different forms and terminology.2 While it seems to have become "fashionable" within the "Art" community, thankfully it hasn't become completely marginalized and stagnant, and is still being contested by different parties.
The debates surrounding ideas of "multiculturalism" have also become hot topics in the field of public education. Certain ideas held by those calling the shots have been institutionalized and implemented into the practices of education. My education has certainly been affected by these practices. For example, at my undergraduate university, there existed conditions for graduation that required one to enroll in a given number of courses designated "multicultural" or "foreign culture." These classes were generally ethnographic studies of non-Western cultures and liberal studies of topics such as women's studies or "African-American Music." For the most part, I was uncritical of how and what these courses were [re]presenting. In fact, being an enthusiastic anthropology minor, I was often caught up in the excitement of learning about "different," far away, often no longer existent, cultures.
Now, I have many questions about the way those issues and topics were [re]presented. Where I once thought those practices were counter to xenophobic and essentialist reasoning, now aspects of that very reasoning seem part of them. It's not that I think that ideas to promote diversity through education are wrong, it's quite the opposite, but the manner in which it is being practiced needs to be continuously refocused to ensure that is what it's doing. What Rasheed Araeen criticizes in current "New Internationalism" is its supporters' feigned attempt at an "escape from Eurocentricity" while operating under and continuing to support the same political and economic practices that facilitate and nourish the very Eurocentrism they declare undesirable.3
Impetus for much of my shifting perspective on these issues has come in part from the work of certain contemporary artists/writers. One such cultural producer is Renee Green. Renee Green is an "African-American" artist that produces installations and various written and visual publications in the U.S. and abroad. Her work is usually discussed, by others as well as herself, in relation to the way issues of "race" and "multiculturalism" carry with them certain attitudes. Her participation in these discussions is my focus here.
Within her work, Renee Green has developed certain themes and devices that she uses to communicate ideas. One of the first things to become apparent as important in reading her activity is the installation-specific convention of her sitings. The concept of "site" that Green uses is not a "purely" phenomenological one, but includes an "historical" context specific to the installation, (including her previous installations, hence the adjective "installation-specific") and an ever-changing contemporary situation within and surrounding the "site." In this manner, she practices within what Miwon Kwon calls the "social/institutional" and "discursive" paradigms of "site."4 The type of spaces Green has chosen to work within are the spaces of the art institution, the museum and gallery.
Her interventions within a museum/gallery often bring into play the "historical" relationships of the particular institution or location to racial and cultural ideologies and practices and their current relevance. In dealing with the issues of "race" and other cultural concepts/practices within a particular context, she [re]presents them in an arbitrary manner emphasizing their contingency or contextualism. This would seem to support the idea that debates can only be grounded within a context and not in some generalized/genericized "umbrella" framework. The installations Bequest and Mise-en-Scene are good examples of this preference.
For Bequest (1991), an installation produced for the Worcester Art Museum, MA, Green sets up a "fictional" museum within the W.A.M..5 To enter the space of the installation, the viewer passes through a free-standing doorway, which is painted gold, suggesting a picture frame, thus one enters through the "frame of Art," emphasizing that her installation, as well as the [re]presentation(s) of the museum, is staged. Inside, the patriarchal lineage of the museum's founder, Stephen Salisbury III, is visually presented in the form of portraits hung on the walls. Two rows of white, clapboard-like walls, suggestive of the architecture of the area, and a "gangplank," which creates a path on the floor between the "walls," lead one to a small fabricated room. Quotations from writings by E.A. Poe, H. Melville, N. Hawthorne, and W.E.B. DeBois relating to concepts of "blackness" and whiteness" are stenciled "between the lines" of the clapboard walls and plank. The constructed room that one is led to is locked with "Master" locks. Part of the walls of this room are created with muslin, allowing one to peer in, but the locks prevent one from entering. Similar to Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum, the object of investigation seems to be what has been and continues to be a negated aspect of history and culture by the institution and what the ideology behind those acts of negation is.6
Mise-en-Scene (1991) addresses the historic and contemporary situations of the city of Clisson, France.7 The significance of Clisson's role, as a port city, in the 18th century slave trade triangle in France is conflated with present-day imagery through the presentation of period-style "artifacts" and contemporary photographs of the city. These included a decorative toile produced by Green that juxtaposes typical floral motifs with imagery from engravings depicting activities and cruelties of the slave trade and pictures of modern buildings, such as a restaurant named L'Esclave (The Slave). That the ideologies responsible for the slave trade have been, supposedly, long since dismissed is questioned by the conflation of these images from the past and present.
Institutional critiques like those described above, may at first seem something undesirable for most cultural institutions. It is important to note though, that these critical installations are requested by the institutions and that they have absolute authority over what they choose to show.8 All of Green's installations are commissioned by a host institution, knowing fully well what kind of work she does. The production for Clisson was even promoted by Clisson authorities to encourage its showing in other cities. Being conscious of this "reality" in working within the "Art world," Green has used certain "devices" to take this into account.
One manner with which Renee Green performs this is by "framing" her identities within the "narrative" of the installations as a "subject." This is set up in number of ways with the use of visual cues that allude to the "presence" of the artist, as both "viewer" and "viewed," For Partially Buried (1997), she included as part of the installation (as well as in written work by her "external" to the installation, such as her "article" "Partially Buried" [ October 80] in which she gave an account of the video portion of the installation that related some personal history of Green and her connection to Smithson's "..Woodshed" at Kent State through her mother's activities there) photographs of herself in tourist-like activities and textual information relating personal history.9
In Idyll Pursuits (1991), a photo of Green (dancing in a conga line!) while in Venezuela is shown in the context of other information referencing the travels of the 19th century painters of the Hudson River School to the same region10. References are also made to certain European/U.S. literature of the 19th century that display the ideologies held by travelers from colonial nations at that time, illustrated by concepts such as "exoticness" and "adventure," which are then questioned for their continuation in the present, and what comes along with their continuation. By placing herself in relation to the artistic and travel practices of the 19th century, some interesting questions are put forth regarding identity, difference, and non-difference. How does identity change with acquired authority as one moves among cultures? What becomes different when Renee Green, often simplistically considered the "other" in the U.S. as an "African-American," assumes a role in Venezuela, supposedly [an]other culture entirely? Does a degree of difference occur or does a European/U.S. standard still determine "otherness," and is her art more "authentic" in this context than that of white, male Euro-Americans because of her "otherness" status assigned to her in the U.S.?11
These kinds of questions are significant for many reasons. In positioning "herself" [with]in the work, she is recognizing the authoritative power that institutions impose on anything placed within them. Their fictional existence as neutral or benign, or worse - sacred, entities transpose that quality onto any material within them by removing context and any sense of time. What Renee Green appears to do is, to a certain extent, to question her own authority, as it is provided by the host institutions. By questioning her authority, and therefore that of the institution, she suggests that there is no single point of view that can give one a thorough assessment of a situation, especially the one provided by the dominant institution. This also attempts to counter-act the tendency of cultural institutions to apply "token" privileges, making the assumption that because she is of a particular background, she can speak for an "other." A question she asks herself is an indication of what is meant here: " [H]ow do you succeed in not getting stuck in a position that is not questioning the position itself?"12
Another concept that is present in much of her work, and becomes part of her "created" identities, is the concept of travel. Her activities literalize "travel" as an ideological moving to and from different locations as well as the "back and forth" exchange of cultural forms. Many of her installations and publications are produced abroad, and this has become an important element in her work. "Traveling" has become a useful way for Green to address notions of "difference" and "non-difference," and how these concepts become rooted in our experiences. The arbitrariness of experience becomes the paradigm instead of hegemonic homogenization that attempts to address everything from an indifferent perspective. As she states her intentions: " It has always seemed necessary to me to address different locations and not get stuck in one perspective, but to have a certain amount of flexibility to allude to life's complexity."13
Green also extends mobility to the viewer through her interventions. In her installations, she positions the various materials and props so as to encourage the viewer to experience them peripatetically. In fact, she has set up most of her installations in a manner that requires one to actively move about and sort through the presented material in order to "get" what is going on.
In her installation for the Out of Site show at P.S.1, Sites of Genealogy, she used three rooms, the boiler room, stairwell, and attic.14 The spaces were transformed into settings that referenced African-American literature and allusions and how conceptual dichotomies like "high/low," "black/white," "good/bad" were channeled through well known writers. The architecture was exploited to heighten this sense of dichotomy of the boiler room and attic and the stairwell became the interstice where these concepts meet and the dichotomy breaks down. Certain props are included to make one become more aware of their movements and changing perspective, as in one section where the viewer is invited to climb a ladder in order to peer through a telescope. Such devices allow Green to provide viewers the opportunity to "not get stuck in one perspective," and at the same time to illustrate the arbitrariness of one's perspective.
The exchange of cultural forms is another activity under analysis by Green in her mobile production. Import/Export Funk Office, an installation in Cologne, Germany, explores this activity in a very interesting manner.15 For this piece, Green "investigates" the importation and dissemination of U.S. popular culture in Germany. The activities of Diederich Diederichsen, editor of a German music magazine that is involved in U.S. "black popular music," are "anthropologically" examined. Information from these studies is shown in conjunction with material on the U.S. civil rights movement and some references to Theodor Adorno and Angela Davis. Adorno and Davis are used to help confuse the boundaries of unilateral conceptions of cultural exchange. Davis, an African-American, studied "Critical Theory" in Frankfurt and when she returned to the U.S. became active in the Black Panthers and subsequently an icon in U.S. black culture. The current situation sees Germany importing certain popular cultural forms from the U.S., namely "black popular" music, that has been affected by the actions of people like Angela Davis.16 The inference that revolutionary practices can easily become "popular" and lose their initial context is made in the analogy as well.17
The questions that are implicit in this kind of production are significant to ideas of "multiculturalism," "internationalism," and "global" economy. By blurring and confusing common conceptions of culture as distinct and contained, Green poses challenges to the ideologies and practices that dominate trade and cultural exchange. The manner in which culture is appropriated by one society from another is also questioned. The example of the German dissemination of U.S. "black" musical forms in Import/Export becomes questionable. What does it mean for one society to appropriate an aspect of another's culture when certain ethical issues are involved? How is the borrowing society responsible for those ethical issues? What if the aspect of culture in question is itself an appropriation by a dominant culture from an internally dominated group? This could be the case if, say the term "black popular culture" refers to certain cultural activities that have been appropriated and reproduced by dominant institutions with racist motivations in order to perpetuate the dominant racist social structure. What, then does this mean for a society "borrowing" these activities?18
The [re]presentation of cultural forms becomes an important issue if "equality" is desired in the context of cultural exchange. Management of culture and its reproduction is a crucial problem as elements of different cultures are "imported" and "exported." This is as relevant to "internal" cultural production as it is to "international" exchange. Renee Green makes the observation of a conference, "Black Popular Culture," that the majority of participants, both speakers and audience consisted of "specialized academics" and that the producers and consumers of the cultural products in question were conspicuously missing.19 The apprehension she expresses regarding this administration of culture "from above" is justly felt. "What are the unintended consequences of theoretical practices, which include a questioning of the 'essential black subject,' for supposed audiences of black popular culture who are not participants in the academic games?"20
The discussions above attempt to show how Renee Green deals with these problems. Her manner of addressing these issues in her installations can also be compared to her other modes of production, her various publications, in a way that provides another way of "reading" her work. The singularity of her site-specific installations becomes blurred by her consistent re/use of certain motifs and visual cues. The specific context of her installations seems to become blurry and their contingency expands to other "sites." The "site" can not be seen as a contained unit that can be evaluated or critiqued from a singular vantage point. "...and not get stuck in one perspective..."
This is visually played out with the repetition of materials and implied references. The fabricated toile in "Mise-en-Scene" and "Taste Venue"; repeated quotes from U.S. writers showing concepts of "blackness" and "whiteness" in "Bequest" and "Sites of Genealogy"; the visual references to Theodor Adorno and Angela Davis in "Import/Export Funk Office" and "Partially Buried" are some of the more obvious examples. The effect of this "strategy" alludes to Green's conception of life's complexity.
In her publication Certain Miscellanies Some Documents, a book published by the De Appel Foundation, images, essays, interviews, and correspondences are compiled in a fragmented, seemingly non-hermeneutic manner.21 We are presented with the variety and diversity of her work, but not in a "typical,, didactic fashion. The presentation of material in this manner seems entirely intentional, and is similar to other productions. For a production entitled "F.A.M. (Free Action Media),' she set up a fictional company to distribute "alternative" publications as what she describes as "a bit of a parody of diversification."22
What are her intentions here? She appears to be attempting to create a disruption in the way information is currently disseminated. By creating a kind of "heterotopic space" for her "information,, she establishes a counter-action to the hegemonic, pedagogical flow of information from dominant institutions that often simplify and essentialize discussions.23 "There often seems to be an expectation that the work will have a didactic aspect. But it really mocks didacticism. Hopefully my work demonstrates the complexity of things, that to make any one kind of authoritative statement about the way things are is specious."24
This practice seems to be similar to what Homi Bhabha refers to as "enunciative," as opposed to "epistemological" practices that are descriptive of culture and tend "toward a totality." 25 Green appears to be positioning herself in particular way within certain frameworks. Her contribution to the show, "The Ideal Place," is exemplary of this activity.26 The installation, commissioned by The Haags Centrum Voor Aktuele Kunst, consisted of photographs by Merlin Carpenter, Sowon Kwon, Nils Norman, and Green herself, who also included video footage of a symposium called "The Contact Zone," which she organized27. The photographs had no apparent visual theme among the four different artists, who have been in conversation with each other for some time, and were all involved in the mentioned symposium.28 This led at least one reviewer to conclude that the photographs were part of an ongoing dialogue between the artists concerning issues like those raised at the symposium. 29 The "ideal place" then is the "space" of discourse and conversation among the participants (the artists in this case), not that of the unilateral "monologue" usually sanctioned by the art museums. The space of the art institution in this example can be seen as serving the artists need for communication. Of course, the institution is not entirely "used," it in return can promote its complicity in the dialogue by housing, and thus "supporting" the work and its intentions30.
What do these "art" practices signify in extra-art terms. I have tried to show how Renee Green deals with some issues common to the current "multicultural" situation, but how does her means of dealing with them relate in economic, political, and social terms. Her work does critically question notions of "purity" regarding culture and concepts of "otherness" and an unquestioned "sameness," but the manner in which she does so warrants some discussion.
"Imagining the 'virtual subject' or oneself as a virtual subject becomes easier and easier as modem communication in portable computers become a necessary tool for those artists, who are as mobile as the fluctuations in international capital."31
Statements, like the one above by Green, are telling and provide some cues to important concepts of contemporary significance. For example, whom is it easier for to imagine a "virtual subject"? As Jon Bird points out in his review of another artist, Alfredo Jaar, travel can be looked at in at least two ways, as a luxury and "expression of privilege" or as a "necessity, escape, or exile."32 An important question is then: who's travel practices does Renee Green's activities, and other artists like her, parallel and what is the significant correlation?
The correlation of artistic practice to modern (Northern) business practices cannot be missed. The activities of some artists, including Green, have increasingly paralleled the shift from a production/manufacturing orientation to a service/information paradigm. The artist now too becomes customer oriented, providing a custom service for the client. The "service" can often be seen in terms of selling "difference," similar to marketing services, showing off regional uniqueness or an institution's "support" of "multicultural" celebrations.33 This is not entirely unlike the situation and practices of multinational communication-based corporations competing in the "global marketplace." These companies base their practices on the ability to be mobile and flexible and to differentiate themselves in terms of style and diversity.34
Likewise, her analogy of the contemporary artist being "as mobile as the fluctuations in international capital," brings up some things to consider. Are "artistic" activities, like Green's, symptoms of the same globalization that is becoming the dominant paradigm in both culture and economics? If one concedes that "international capital" is indeed still controlled, for the most part, by the same, dominant powers that have held control over access to wealth, do artists, like Green, then really want to carry that association? While capital may indeed "fluctuate" and move among "international" lines now, I think it is safe to say those lines are still well within the prescribed boundaries patrolled by the hegemonic "Northern" institutions. Geographical "freedom" is only freedom for those with the ability (and necessity) to operate globally.
Of course, there are other ways one can approach activities like Green's. The similarities don't have to signify complacency or endorsement. They could be read as an appropriation of the devices and modes of transnational business in order to provide an opposition to their hegemonic use by dominant institutions. By using these concepts in a fragmented, non-didactic manner she could be enacting a subversive use of them in an anti-authoritative stance.
These are not self evident evaluations of these practices, and require constant [re]evaluation and discussion. I have not come up with many, if any, answers to questions regarding the relationship between current cultural and business practices, and what they may mean for our "multicultural," "global" society. I do see a strong similarity between these questions and those being discussed in the debate over communication technologies and the "democratization" of information. The importance of language has become apparent and is widely recognized in the discussions, which is positive if dialogue is to take place, the problem of implementing practice, though, is another story. As Renee Green says, "The questioning continues."35
"I'm not playing with words: the meaning of what one intends is coded in the language." Rasheed Araeen36
"It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power...but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural with which it operates at the present time." Michel Foucault37
1 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, New York, 1994.2 In her essay, "I Won't Play Other to Your Same" (M/E/A/N/I/N/G 7, May 1990), Renee Green makes the point that discussion of "The Other" has become a "cultural industry" in itself.
3 Araeen, Rasheed, "New Internationalism or the Multiculturalism of Global Bantustans," Critical Studies in Modern Art, The Open University, 1996. pp.60-5.
4 Kwon, Miwon, "One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity", October No. 80, Spring 1997. p.85.
5 See the following reviews:
-Avgikos, Jan, "How to Read Fiction," World Tour (exhibition catalog), MOCA, Los Angeles, CA 1993. (WT)
" Renee Green" [Pat Hearn Gallery], Artforum v.30, Summer 1992, pp.109-10. (RG)
-Corrin, Lisa, "Installing History," Art Papers, v.18, July/August 1994, pp.8-9. (IH)
-Geer, Suvan, "Visiting Artist: Renee Green's World Tour at MOCA," Artweek v.24, May 6, 1993, p.20. (VA).
-Insights: Renee Green, Bequest (exhibition catalog), Worcester Art Museum, MA, 1991. (IRG)6 see:" Services:Working Group Discussions," October No. 80, Spring 1997, p.117, and Corrin, Lisa, "Installing History," for discussions of Fred Wilson's projects.
7 All descriptions are from: WT, RG, IH, VA, IRG.
8 Although sometimes refusal to show something can lead to more bad publicity than any installation, as instances with Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren proved to the Guggenheim. See: Alberro, Alexander, "The Turning of the Screw," October No. 80, Spring 1997.
9 Baker, George, "Renee Green" [Pat Hearn Gallery], Artforum, v.35, February 1997, pp.89-90.
Wallis, Brian, "Excavating the 1970s," Art in America, v.85, September 1997, pp.96-97.
Green, Renee, "Partially Buried," October No. 80, Spring 1997, pp.39-56.10 RG & WT
11 WT
12 Green, Renee, "The Impossibility of Finding a Perfect Balance" Certain Miscellanies Some Documents, (CMSD) DeAppel Foundation, Amsterdam, 1996.
13 ibid.
14 Denson, Roger, "A Genealogy of Desire," Flashart, No. 160, October 1991, pp.125-7.
15 Hermes, Manfred, "Renee Green: German Outstation of Funk", Flashart, No.166, October 1992, p.94.
16 In her article "Black Popular Culture" (Art & Text No. 42, Summer 1992, pp.94-5), Green gives an account of her attendance at a conference and her reaction upon seeing Davis (one of the speakers): "almost involuntarily the words 'Sister Angela Davis' came to mind, as if I'd been programmed from some previous nationalistic era.".
17 This is made more explicit in "Partially Buried" by the conflation of images of Adorno, Davis, and an Italian fashion advertisement selling the once-revolutionary afro hairstyle. See : Wallis, Brian, "Excavating the 1970s." In his essay, "The Political Effects of Contemporary Ar" (Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas, Humanities Press, 1997), Carl Briscoe also notes the "unique ability of the U.S. to merchandise dissent." Although as the example pointed to in "Import/Export" does not represent the U.S., and I would disagree that "merchandising dissent" is an ability unique to the U.S.
18 Hermes suggests , "German tokenism has an even more racist motivation than in the U.S.A. because it imagines itself benignly beyond racism, and does not even need or possess the concept of a representational instrument."
19 Green, Renee, "Black Popular Culture," Art & Text, 42, Summer 1992, pp.94-95.
20 ibid.
21 CMSD
22 "The Impossibility of Finding a Perfect Balance," CMSD
23 Heatherington, Kevin, "The Utopic of Social Ordering - Stonehenge as a Museum Without Walls," Theorizing Museums, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, p.153. Heatherington gives his summation of Foucault and Marin's uses of the terms "heterotopic" and "utopic" respectively, which I am pulling from here.
24 VI p.E57
25 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture, p. 173
26 Peters, Philip, "The Ideal Place: A Subversive Positioning," Art & Design, v.10, May/June 1995, p.54.
27 "The Contact Zone" symposium was organized by Green to support dialogue regarding multiculturalism and race relations at the level of interaction and relationships, i.e. "The Contact Zone." See "The Impossibility of Finding a Perfect Balance," CMSD
28 ibid.
29 ibid.
30 This is not entirely dissimilar to the "greening" performed by many industries
with public relations and consumer gimmicks.
31 Green, Renee, "Peripatetic at Home," CMSD, p. 33.
32 Bird, Jon, "Making Visible: Difference and Representation in the Work of Alfredo Jaar," Art & Design, v.9, July/August 1994, pp.34-43.
33 see" Services:Working-Group Discussions" October No. 80, Spring 1997.
34 Marshall McLuhan's commentary on business and experimental art in Understanding Media (London, 1964,pp.64-6) seems to coincide with these concerns, although in a much more positivistic manner. "The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs....It is this aspect of new (his emphasis) art that Kenneth Galbraith recommends to the careful study of businessmen who want to stay in business....so the artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis of the life of forms, and structures created by electric technology."
35 Green, Renee, "Black Popular Culture."
36 Araeen, Rasheed, "New Internationalism or the Multiculturalism of Global Bantustans."
37 Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, NY, 1980, p.133.