The Brooklyn Rail

Renée Green was born in Cleveland in 1959. In her multidisciplinary practice, she draws on Minimal and Conceptual traditions as well as myriad literary, philosophical, and historical sources to examine perception and memory with consideration of site and time. On the occasion of her exhibition The Equator Has Moved at Dia Beacon, the artist spoke with Professor Nora M. Alter on the New Social Environment (Episode #1,190) about the puzzle-like nature of the installation process, how one’s perception of the work corresponds with one’s orientation in the gallery, and the relationship of reading, writing, and drawing in the artist’s practice. Professor Nora M. Alter teaches at Temple University and is author of numerous essays and books including Chris Marker, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction, and most recently Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence.

Nora M. Alter (Rail): I wanted to start with something you wrote and maybe you can respond to it. You wrote this back in 2016 in your essay, “Certain Obliquenesses,” part of Essays on the Essay Film, a book I edited with Timothy Corrigan. At one point, you ask a question, and you answer it. You say:

What has been specific and distinctive about my way of working? My answer: Schematically, a way of consistently combining: the spaces, the architectures, colors, and the moving images, and sonic circulations, and constructions, objects, and things. Yet there is an excess that seeps out of the schematic, and it is this created tension/space—interval, break, interstice—that I like to probe.

I’m wondering if you can comment a little bit about that, because I think so much of your work is bringing together these elements. From my perspective, on the one hand there’s so much control, it is very schematized, yet, there is something that’s seeping out. There is something in the interstices, in between the various elements that are at play.

Renée Green: I have to go back in time to think about that quote. In that instance, I was thinking about a project I had just completed at the Schindler House in Los Angeles in 2015, Begin Again, Begin Again. The exhibition involved several different elements: moving image, sound, banners, prints, vitrines, and Schindler’s architecture. I have used all of these elements in different ways, through time, in different projects. It is schematic, and there are always things seeping out. What I’m curious about at this point, I think partly having just completed the Dia Beacon exhibition, is how other people respond in space to the different elements.

Rail: What made me pick out that quote was thinking about the Dia Beacon show, The Equator Has Moved, and the way it is organized. In it, one really does see all those developments so well, in the colors, the “Space Poems,” the “Bichos,” the way everything is put into a constellation which is directly related—each element is somehow related to another one. When I was going through some of your catalogues, you often have these elaborate diagrams with circles and connections and lines intersecting. I can almost see those imaginary lines, as you must have been planning with Dia’s curator, Jordan Carter, how to install this amazing exhibition.

Green: In most of my publications there are drawings and diagrams, and even in Dia’s brochure there’s a plan of the space. It’s something that we used to try to help people orient themselves in relationship to what’s there. The whole process of the exhibition, though, took place during a three-year period, and it was quite complicated. In terms of working out the show, I was using a physical model for over a year to think about the different configurations. Once we were there installing in the galleries, with the works and with the team, it was possible to position things more precisely, to move them around and place them in relation. There were many things to test, the installation process took six weeks. Jordan was present throughout all of that, along with the whole team. A lot of decisions were made then.

For example, there are different ways in which it’s possible to enter the exhibition. I was curious as to how you came in, because you will have a different experience depending on where you entered. A lot of my decisions had to do with, first of all, choosing that particular space, Dia Beacon’s central corridors. I was very excited by the possibilities, and I imagined how it could be used for the exhibition. I spent a lot of time visiting Dia through these years, trying to imagine the exhibition, walking and moving through the space, looking at both sides, through the different entrances and exits. So, I wonder about how you first encountered the exhibition.

Rail: That’s an interesting point, because that leads me to return to that initial quotation from you, where you talk about excess or leakage. Elsewhere, you talk about how important the relationship is of the spectator or participant or viewer with your work, and that is something that cannot be controlled. So maybe that is where there is a leakage, or seeping, and meaning is coming out.

As for my first encounter with the exhibition, I came in through the left-hand side of the galleries; I walked all the way down one side and then into the next and all the way back up and around. I did that circle several times, then I kind of zigzagged about, spending more time with individual pieces, going into some of the “Bichos” and seeing what was happening there. I was really struck by the openness of the space, how you manage to fill it, but not make it too full or too empty, and which works you and Jordan had selected from the course of your trajectory. I also was very impressed by the “Space Poems.” You’ve been making those for almost twenty years now, right?

Green: Since 2007.

Rail: Unfortunately, that’s almost twenty years now. [Laughter] I’ve seen the “Space Poems” installed on the walls, and sometimes as they’re hanging now, from the ceiling, and this, again, gets back to this idea of structure, and the architecture of the show, how you really conceive architecture and space. You’ve done this before, with the Schindler House, but also with Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at Harvard. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your interest in architecture and how that works for you.

Green: Well, I guess in terms of thinking about an exhibition, it’s always somewhere. It’s always in space. In terms of what kind of spaces are possible to use and the kind of work I’m interested in presenting, I think about these things together, so I don’t make a separation in terms of thinking about the material and the space. I think about them as elements that are going to be in relation to one another. In this instance, it took a while to work out what this show would contain, but in conversation with Jordan, we were talking about specific aspects of some of the early works that I had made. We talked about the color works, because paintings from the “Color” series had never been presented together, and there are works that were made in the early 1990s; that was an interest: to think about my work trajectory to the present. The exhibition that we discussed was not a survey, but something that could be capable of engaging with earlier works but also, with current works, and then, the travel in between. It’s been an interesting process, to have access again to some of these earlier works, and to be able to think about them again, to think about this other moment. The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, Colour Games, a painting. The process was gradual, almost like a puzzle. Even the installation process was like piecing together a puzzle, with these different elements, each seeming to need something, like a very specific location that would allow it to be in dialogue or in relation with the other elements. It took a long time to position each work. Jordan was very involved in this conversation and the process of thinking about the relationship between each of the different elements: in space, in the walls, but also, in the ceiling. I had different proposals based on the model I’d been working with, and the digital renderings that FAM produced. As I mentioned, I had already made a miniature version of the space and the elements that I was playing with—like a doll house, someone said, when they saw it. [Laughs] The whole process, though, has an emotional weight, I would say, in terms of revisiting earlier works that I hadn’t seen since they were made, because many of those works were exhibited and later sold and placed in Europe. I mean, only rarely have I seen any of these works. But it's not a retrospective, either. I really like the way Jordan is designating it—what was the expression? “Chronologically defiant.” I really like that way of describing it.

This open space at Dia Beacon was very exciting to be able to work with. In the ceiling, there’s a pattern, the way that the structure of it forms. That was something that I was interested in working with, partly because I was thinking about the “Space Poems,” trying to imagine them there. I thought this could be an interesting counterpoint to the kind of systemic regularity in the space, as the “Space Poems” are always staggered when they’re installed.

Rail: I was really struck by the openness of the space, and I think that it works with this chronological defiance, as opposed to the labyrinthian model in your previous exhibitions at the Secession in Vienna, or the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona.

I mean, in a way, the labyrinth—with these individual chambers and rooms that one enters—brackets the work, it closes things off, and it doesn’t allow for as much dialogue as this open space, where one can turn, move, look up, down and around to the side to see what are the connections, what are the constellations that I’m going to make?

Counterpoint has come up in your writing too, as an important way of structuring multiple levels of meaning. Counterpoint was sort of taken over, in a way, by the Soviets—specifically by Sergei Eisenstein—when sound was first introduced into cinema as this additional line of meaning. Thinking about your earlier works in cinema and always having these multiple tracks that are taking place simultaneously, could you speak a little bit more about counterpoint, not necessarily in your cinematic or media works, but in terms of the exhibition itself?

Green: I think of it in relation to pattern, as well as forms of rhythm and interruption, different breaks. It’s interesting to think about what you were just mentioning about Eisenstein, for example, and this kind of seditious use of sound. I think both counterpoint and color function in ways that seem to be disruptive. It’s not about necessarily intending to create a disruption, but rather, it’s thinking about forms. What do different forms elicit? How do they affect us in different ways? What are those sensations that affect our perception? How do we feel in different spaces, with different colors, with different sounds, with different rhythms?

As you mentioned, this open space at Dia Beacon is very different from the smaller spaces that were created with the labyrinthian walls in the Secession, for example, or even at the Tàpies Foundation. This is something else. At Dia Beacon, the light source is primarily from the sky, and there aren’t artificial lights used for most of the spaces. Of course, in some dark corridors or galleries there is artificial light, but in most of the museum, and in the central galleries that I am using, light is coming from the ceiling or the windows. That’s very specific, and it’s something that is very interesting to observe throughout the day, but also, to see how the light continues to change during different seasons. That affects the way it’s possible to experience what’s in the space. You mentioned the media element, and we can talk about that further, but just in passing, I like to think about it in relation to light and punctuation or counterpoint: this is not a darkened space, a black box. It’s always possible to see the entire room. And in these “Bichos,” these units, it’s possible to experience the moving image work, in the Bicho Units (2025), as well as audio works in the Sonic Bichos (2025). How is attention directed, in different ways and in different spaces? I was very interested in that, because moving through the rooms at Dia Beacon, you’re walking most of the time. You’re not necessarily pausing and contemplating something. You might lean against an area or stop somewhere, and you can look and pause, but often you’re in motion. And I was thinking about what could happen—especially as these spaces are so large—if you can stop sometimes and look around and see the different elements simultaneously. So, for example, with the Bicho Units and the Sonic Bichos, it’s possible to see whatever it is that’s inside, or to hear what’s inside, as well as to look up or out and see other elements of what’s going on. To get back to your earlier point or question about the multiple elements and the crossing, overlapping, the excess and spilling: in a space like this, so large, it was possible to have an experience of multiplicity and layering that also allowed breadth, spaciousness, not claustrophobia. I think that can change how the works are perceived. The layers that are embedded in the works, that complexity, is very intentional. It is not random, but yet, random encounters can take place because of the overlaps and how works have been arranged in relation in space. I guess one could call that the counterpoint effect.

Rail: It also makes me think about montage as a construction method, probably because I’m coming more from a filmic background. Going back to the Soviets, with montage being, as Dziga Vertov says, “building bricks.” Out of a set of bricks, you can make a school, you can make a hospital, you can make a house. It’s all in the placement of each individual brick. It makes me think about all these different elements which are being brought together across time and space. As you said, many of them hadn’t been exhibited together in decades. But then, there’s this new structure that you’re making out of all these elements in this exhibition.

Green: I think about this often. For example, in The Film Sense by Eisenstein, what appears in that book is this double page diagrammatic spread, which I usually show to students in the “Synchronizations of Senses” class that I teach at MIT, just to think about the crossing of all the layers when one is composing. Montage fits into that in terms of the image aspect, but there’s also the sound, the text, all the different layers that you can visualize in Eisenstein’s diagram. I would say the way that I work is related to that. It’s a kind of composing in space: the sound and the images, the moving images, but also the objects, and their placement. It’s as if the entire space is a place for composition, a place for montage. I’m interested in these ways of perceiving in conjunction, in perceiving complexity: you can look at and focus on the individual elements, but you can also engage with what happens when things are next to each other and overlapping, as there’s also this reading element in my work, there’s language throughout.

Rail: The exhibition at Dia Beacon also brought to mind the procedure of a kaleidoscope, your allusion to the kaleidoscope as a way of organizing thought or images. The kaleidoscope was very important for Max Bense, in his writings about the essay, but I know that it’s been important for you, as you cite it in your Gilles Deleuze print from 2011, also in the exhibition. You’ve obviously thought about the kaleidoscope as well. Can you speak a little bit about that?

Green: Yes, sure. I like to think about different lens-based forms, and what happens depending on how you might be looking through something. The kaleidoscope is interesting as you have these different particles that, via turning and through movement, forms are composed. The print states: “Statements resemble dreams & are transformed as in a kaleidoscope,” and the word kaleidoscope is reversed and flipped. For me, that’s a portrait of Gilles Deleuze and his thought. The print also includes a reference to the color bars that you would use to calibrate image color for a broadcast. So yes, in a kaleidoscope, all these different elements are circling in space, then fixed briefly when there’s a moment of stillness, and then, they’re reconfigured again as you move it. But I was also thinking about Donald Barthelme’s essay, “Not-Knowing.” I think about an aspect that he mentions in it: there can be these different elements—and this is related also, I would say, to the essay as a form—that you could place in one frame, or one room, or an essay or a story, but the relationships between any of them could keep shifting, could keep turning all the time. There’s no fixed way that perception is meant to happen. That’s the imaginative linkage taking place. I think of that as a very freeing and opening possibility for thinking about composition and montage. You can think about it in relation to making a film as well. Another reference that you and I share is Harun Farocki. I remember in a conversation I had with him once that we talked about making ten films out of the same elements, for example. That kind of kaleidoscopic possibility is something that I think is very potent in terms of imagining how compositions can take place.

Rail: And now, with the easy access to images and sounds through the internet it allows practitioners to play around with archival fragments and put things together in an interesting and productive way. I really like what you were just saying also about movement. Nothing is ever static. It’s moving, moving through time, which also connects to migrations. There are mediatic migrations or cinematic migrations, intermedial migrations, but also, the migrations of these works. For example, concrete poetry or language poetry used to appear fractured on the printed page in the sixties and seventies, with these experiments as to where the words would be used to create various forms. You’re moving it off the page, you’re transforming it. You’re actually pushing away the poetry from the printed page into these three-dimensional constellations, where the words are in different spaces and times, and they’re also corresponding to each other through how they are hung.

Green: I’m doing that in different ways. For example, the combinations of what you can see in the space as you walk. In Dia Beacon, there’s the Gerhard Richter Gallery, which is in between the doorways that you can enter the exhibition through, where my mural work Elsewhere? [Wall version], (2002/25) is located, and then there’s a Sol LeWitt wall drawing that’s around the corner. When you enter one of the corridor galleries, there is a Bicho Unit in which you can watch a film called Elsewhere? (2002). There’s a sound you hear in the corridor, a whispering sound of different imaginary places’ names. And when you watch the film, it has a running title of these imaginary places. Everything is color coded, so the color references come back. They come back again and again in different kinds of ways. There are a lot of different levels of engagement in terms of what you might perceive, or what might connect to something else.

Rail: That brings me back to the kaleidoscope: “Statements resemble dreams & are transformed, as in a kaleidoscope.” But I want to get back to this idea of dreams and imaginary places versus another thematic I see traversing your work, which is vanishing. We can call it entropy, we can just say vanished histories, what no longer exists. The vanished gardens, the ephemeral, and then the imaginary, the dream, reconstituting these spaces in another dimension, as it were.

Green: In terms of vanishing, I would say that transmutation is also important, because when something might seem to disappear in one way, there’s still some element that remains. If you think about particles or anything that’s on Earth and what happens to it over time, what are the processes? What happens to these things? I think about that a lot. The title of the exhibition is The Equator Has Moved, for example. [Laughs] The vanishing and the ephemeral and dreamlike aspects are all intersecting. For example, Space Poem #6 (Tracing Excerpt) (2025), the twenty-four enamel plates dispersed throughout the exhibition, each plate includes the name of a vanished garden, which are juxtaposed with names of those who made maps in the world over a 2000 year period. I’m constantly thinking about time and its duration—something might seem to vanish within this expanse of time. These are ongoing things. I think even Excess (2009)—one of the films present in the exhibition—is related to what can vanish and reappear in a different format. In that instance, I was thinking about Hollis Frampton and his “Magellan” serial film project. All this has to do very much with dreams, imaginings, wishes, and the ways in which they are transmuted, or they shift, or they don’t happen in the way they were originally imagined, but still, they reappear in another form. Another print, William Morris (2011), relates to that idea of things that are imagined or dreamed but aren’t realized during any one person’s existence, but might need to be realized by other people at a different time. It’s kind of circular.

Rail: That’s really interesting. There is this idea of circularity, this temporality, but it isn't pure dreaming imagination, because you’re always grounding the work in this almost scientific way of ordering, these agreed upon systems of arranging things, whether it be alphabetical or numerical. I find that fascinating, this way of using the alphabet as a system of ordering.

Green: There are different symbol systems that are used, different structures, geometry, and language. There are ways to order perception and consciousness, and within those there are always different systems and patterns that repeat or break in different ways. I’m continually interested in that.

Rail: The exhibition’s title, The Equator Has Moved, is interesting because it is such an open statement. It’s getting back to this idea of scientific explorations, and seeing the arbitrariness of what things are postulated as scientific givens. But now we realize the equator isn’t really where it was determined to be. I find that a lot of your work questions those scientific givens, but also relies on some symbols as a way of producing order in your own pieces.

Green: I think a lot about the ways in which people all around the world, in different cultures throughout time, have tried to figure out their position on earth: What happens once you’re born? Where are you? What are you? What are you doing? These are basic questions that have been faced for eons, even just in terms of imagining forms of survival. How do people exist? What do they require? What do they need to do? Migrations are another way of imagining movement and time, especially thinking about what happens to the Earth itself over time, and what’s speculated in terms of how different histories could be written about our time. I do think about scientific investigations, but also the disagreements around those findings, like with plate tectonics, for example. That is something I was referencing while thinking about The Equator Has Moved. With climate relations especially, when looking at millions of years and thinking about time in these ways, very interesting questions, still unresolved, continue to emerge. I find these things fascinating and endlessly possible to probe.

Rail: Maybe, since we’re talking about migrations and the mobilization of texts and works through time: what happens as your work moves through time? You’ve now been making and exhibiting work for many decades. Some of the works in this show are new, some of them have been exhibited before. What has changed in your idea of traveling, in this road of your practice?

Green: I guess I just think about it in relation to life, the span of a lifetime. For example, my novel, Camino Road, is based on adolescence, young adulthood. And I think of it as something that might continue beyond this novel into other forms. But this is a road novel in a way. Travel is not something that I think about separately from anything else. I think of it as something that takes place every day in the most basic ways. But also, in terms of being alive, and what I needed to continue working and living, travel has entered in there. Sure, I have an interest in it, but it’s something that’s very interwoven into my existence. I’ve been thinking about long stretches of time before I was born: what travels were needed by those relations who preceded me, and how does that affect the present and ways of existing? I’m also curious about different places and different ways of being able to live. Travel, for me, is part of living, finding a way to live. I remember having discussions about it some time ago, people would ask me, how is it you’re able to travel? I think that everybody considers how they are able to live, and tries to figure out how to do that. Sometimes that involves travel. That’s a very broad thing to say, but I think looking at people’s individual lives, it’s very interesting to examine what travel has entailed, for their parents, for their predecessors, and whether those ancestors could stay where they were. That’s the rarity, in my view, to be able to remain in a place. It’s hard to even imagine that as a possibility. It’s kind of incredible. There are so many conditions and circumstances that affect how it is possible for us to live. Of course, at different moments in time travel has different significations. Something I thought about a lot in relation to Camino Road was the Beat generation in the United States around the time of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. That existed before I was born. For the character in this novel, the time is the late 1970s moving into the early 1980s. How can you think about that now? The book itself was written in the 1990s, it was published originally in 1994, and now it’s been reprinted by Primary Information. But, yes, travel runs throughout all the work that I’ve made.

Rail: I guess I was also thinking of the traveling of the work. So, for example, Camino Road, I think you were stating earlier that this was recently discovered by a collective in Madrid who decided to exhibit it, right? This image has traveled through time to be rediscovered, and as your works travel through the decades, their meanings may change depending on who’s consuming them. Meanings shift because of the context in which they find themselves. Listening to you speak about traveling, I was recalling an essay that Kobena Mercer wrote on your work, where you talked about the idea of dépaysement, how travel produces a certain estrangement that opens our eyes. Certainly, when I’m traveling in a foreign context, what I like about it is it wakes me up. In a different language, something like a shampoo bottle can seem fascinating as I’m trying to determine the ingredients. [Laughs] The most banal is made strange.

Green: The different iterations through time, and how different audiences and perceivers might interpret or read something—those things are still unfolding. What was sparked, I think, from the the essay by Kobena, relates to thinking about our own genealogies, for example; that’s something that may be affecting how we feel in the world, and there might be a lot of unknown elements there: the mysteries of your background, things that might be partially known and partially buried. These things affect how you move through the world.

In Camino Road, one of the significant aspects is that I attempted to write the book in Spanish, and then it was corrected… [laughs] and when it was reprinted, it was corrected again. I wanted it to be in Spanish and in English, and I wanted to experience it myself, to try to write the book in Spanish, thinking about people like Samuel Beckett, for example, writing in French. I’m interested in these kinds of wishes and desires of being able to cross over, to pass through some other kind of way of being, experienced through language as a form of travel. There’s a lot more that can be said about it. I’m still thinking about a lot of these things now, especially with this exhibition, with these different works existing together to be revisited. They spark all sorts of things for me, combined with things that have happened during the interim; I’m still digesting.

Rail: Speaking less about actual physical travel, but more, shall we say, about mental travel, I want to highlight your writing, because you’ve written so much. There’s Camino Road, which you wrote in both Spanish and English, and there’s also Other Planes of There, the volume of your selected writings, which is around 500 pages. How does writing fit into your practice? You’re always writing.

Green: I am. I’m writing every day. And I’m drawing every day. So, I’m doing both. It’s all intertwined in terms of how I’m perceiving the world and living. Language, images, sounds—they’re all crossing for me. This exhibition has been interesting to make, partly because it has allowed me the possibility to see the different forms, to revisit them, like with the early paintings, very tactile and handmade. Even the handling of the language, with the rubber stamping, reminds me of the interconnectedness of these different approaches, how I tried to deal with them at different moments, and I continue this with the “Space Poems.” But I can revisit these works too; it’s not as if once you’ve made something, it’s dead. It’s just this constant possibility of approaches depending on your frame of mind at a particular time.

Rail: Do you write by hand?

Green: I write by hand in my notebooks. I also use my computer a lot; I write on my phone. It depends on the time of day, what I’m doing. I have my own systems for where I’m placing things so that I can find them again.

Rail: You said you’re writing, you’re drawing, but you’re also reading a lot.

Green: I would connect the reading, the drawing, and the writing together. I’m doing all of them simultaneously. I can’t really stop. It helps me get through the day.

Rail: What are you reading right now?

Green: I’m usually reading several things at the same time. I’m teaching, so I’m always rereading. For example, Chromophobia by David Batchelor, is on my syllabus, and I like the fact that different people choose the books that are on this syllabus, and I get to reread them. Someone chose Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, so I’m rereading that. I recently finished reading a whole cycle of novels by Joan Silber; I really liked The Size of the World. I’m always reading a combination of fiction and nonfiction. I just finished reading a book by Vivian Gornick from 2002, called The Situation and the Story. I read a novel at the beginning of the year called Mecca, which I thought was quite interesting, by Susan Straight. I would recommend that. That went interestingly well with thinking about LA and the beginning of the year. Those are some things I’m reading.

Rail: You brought up pedagogy and teaching. Thinking about Harun Farocki, whom you mentioned, teaching was always really important for him. And for you, it’s also been this through line, right?

Green: It’s amazing. It has. I didn’t decide, “Oh, I want to be a teacher.” My whole life I’ve been exposed to educators, and I started to teach other people when I was still a child, how to do things or how to read, things like that. I was a tutor. I’ve always been doing it. I enjoy it very much.

Rail: I would say that’s part of your practice. Part of your extended practice would be the pedagogical: the workshop or the class.

Green: I would phrase it like this: I’m trying to create a space for reciprocity. I’d like to create that possibility, where people can have agency and develop their ways of thinking, to be able to share and have other people to talk to.