Inhabiting Modernism:
Renée Green at the Carpenter Center
Exhibition review for Art in America online, March 26, 2018
View of Renée Green's exhibition "Within Living Memory," at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass., 2018.
Excerpt
A core concern of Green’s exhibition is how to index the dreams (and nightmares) of modernity—how to filter and transmit histories of futures past in ways that can activate their potential in the present. Displayed alongside prints of two lightly altered texts by Schindler are a series of letterpress works titled “Selected Life Indexes,” which trace the lives of five intellectuals—W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Lou Harrison, Paul Robeson, and Muriel Rukeyser—who shared in common their residence in the United States after World War II and their commitments to pacifism and internationalism, if little else. Giving form to these social histories through her longstanding interests in seriality and citation, Green samples words and phrases associated with each figure, sequencing them in alphabetical and other orders on 18-by-22-inch prints bookended by years of birth and death. Fragmentary constellations of concepts and events emerge as fallow traces of these lives, prompting us to engage with their unfinished legacies.