Renée Green
Begin Again, Begin Again
January 21–March 29, 2015
Opening: Wednesday, January 21, 7–9pm
Book presentation: Wednesday, January 28, 7pm
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
Questions and forms of being alive, living, inhabitation, space, time and distance are entry points to Begin Again, Begin Again. The house on Kings Road is considered as matter in space conjoined with memories. R.M. Schindler’s house becomes an “evocative object” and in turn, a generative node. Jumping off from psychologist Sherry Turkle’s definition of evocative objects as things we think with, yet have an emotional valence, artist Renée Green probes this notion to explore things and people we feel and think with, as well as spaces and places that generate conditions for feeling, thinking and wonder.
Stories grow and multiply out of the evocation. Objects, spaces, and places—in addition to specific times and dates—also resonate in this exhibition, suggesting an ongoing process. All elements become characters in an emerging narrative encountered through forms. During the second decade of the 20th century Rudolf M. Schindler arrived in the US. He began searching for his form of living and inhabitation and never returned to Vienna after his arrival in 1914. During the last decade of the 20th century the American-born Green as well continued searching for a form of living and inhabitation. For many years of that decade, she did so in Vienna. Green then returned to the US in the 21st century to continue the search. One was an architect, the other an artist, both with affinities for space. What did and may emerge from the coordinates Vienna and Los Angeles? Both locations provide a nexus for thinking about relations to the experience of many modernities and what exceeds them. These and other questions emerge via the combination of works and processes engaged during the exhibition.
In Begin Again, Begin Again, Green continues to play with variables of time and location, space and things, amongst reflections on relays, delays, movement, exile, migration, displacement and reinvention, all allowing for the contemplation of what arises amid particular combinations in a variety of conditions.
Resonant with her recent book Other Planes of There (Duke University Press, 2014), the exhibition will feature both new productions in combination with Green’s growing repertoire of spatialized works and films. Included will be Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are (2008), an immersive audio work; the film Climates and Paradoxes (2005), shot in Einstein’s Caputh summer house designed by Konrad Wachsmann before either of their migrations to the US; and Code: Survey (2006), a project which began as an experiment in how urban and architectural space can be animated in relation to how varieties of people may experience and feel in their passage through it; Code: Survey, commissioned by CalTrans, exists in its downtown Los Angeles headquarters within the Morphosis-designed building, yet its online dimension can be tested and engaged worldwide and provides another node for contemplation in the exhibition and its encounter in Los Angeles.
What emerges in Begin Again, Begin Again are questions and provocations about relationships to time and space—encountered inside and outside of the Schindler House—as evoked within the cosmos of this exhibition.
A book presentation for Other Planes of There will take place on January 28, featuring a discussion with Green and professors Gloria Sutton and Nizan Shaked.
About the MAK Center
Unique in its role as a constellation of historic architectural sites and contemporary exhibition spaces, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House develops local, national, and international projects in art, architecture, and their intersections and tangents. It seeks out and supports projects that take risks and test disciplinary boundaries. The MAK Center acts as a cultural laboratory, encouraging the development of ideas in art and architecture by engaging the center’s places, spaces, and histories. Its programming includes exhibitions, lectures, symposia, discussions, performances, music series, publication projects, salons, architecture tours, and new work commissions. It collaborates frequently with guest curators, artists and architects.
For more information, visit makcenter.org.
