Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

2. The Politics of Representation: Archive and Memory in the Work of Renée Green

Photography in Site-Specific Installation Art Fragments and ephemera from the past are gathered in an installation. Small pieces of crumbly concrete are arranged under a glass vitrine that is set on a simple white table along with a map and some paperback books. Music of the 1970s plays on a boom box, and black-and-white photographs of 1970s protesters are hung on the walls (figure 2.1).1 Videotapes play on monitors alongside a collection of vinyl albums and a turntable. The narrator of one video relates the following event: The girl watched the news and waited anxiously, often. That’s part of what she recollects of childhood. Waiting. Seeing the running text of news reporting students shot at Kent State moving across the bottom of the tv screen. tv programs were interrupted and her mother was late returning home from there. Across the street, kids played Jackson 5 45s and Sly Stone. The girl smoothed her bedspread and checked for order. Finally her mother did arrive, but she can’t remember now what either said. It was May 4th, 1970. (Video transcript, Partially Buried) The girl’s memory recounted in the film Partially Buried is the artist’s memory , which is then dispersed into the broader collection of objects and recordings that constitute the installation Partially Buried in Three Parts produced in 1996–1997. These vestiges of the 1970s are all connected with Robert Smithson’s site-specific earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed and the shooting of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. In this piece, Green examines the connections between personal memory, photographs, docuT WO thepoliticsofrepresentation ARCHIVE AND MEMORY IN THE WORK OF RENÉE GREEN THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 73 ments, and artifacts. This is a work of installation art that takes as part of its subject matter the documentation of a previous work of site-specific art and the historical context of which it is a part. Partially Buried in Three Parts asks questions about documentation and its relationship to memory and history. This chapter argues that, in many of Renée Green’s pieces, she uses the arrangement and examination of photographs and photographic media as a way of addressing issues of history and memory through the format of the archive. Green’s work connects to conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, which utilized serial structures and was interested in scrutinizing systems of representation and language. It is already well established that Robert Smithson ’s work is a precedent for site-specific installation art such as Green’s, but one could include as well Marcel Broodthaers’s and John Baldessari’s work as well. The artists who were included in the Artists Space exhibition, such as Adrian Piper, Christopher D’Arcangelo, and Louise Lawler, are also precedents for this type of work in installation art in that they ask the viewer to be active readers of the work and its situation. Green’s archival practice brings together issues of photography and sitespecificity .2 Analog photographs bear the touch of light and shadow available at a particular time and in a particular place. Photography has a specificity to it that, as we have seen, connects it to those site-specific installations built in place in spaces and structures, such as PS1 or Gordon Matta-Clark’s old house. Like these works, the photograph is an index. In the writings of Roland Barthes, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler, the photograph is revealed, however, to be not just a simple document or index but also a complex of cultural codes and beliefs. Roland Barthes helped develop this more nuanced understanding of photography by considering the image from the perspective of the person who looked at it. Barthes tried to determine how the viewer would go about understanding the image. In his chapter “Rhetoric of the Image,” Barthes teased out the various messages in a photograph and argued that viewers of photographs are in fact readers of images. Hal Foster linked works interested in “site” beginning in the 1960s with Minimalism: These developments constitute a sequence of investigations: first of the material constituents of the art medium, then of the spatial conditions of perception, and then of the corporeal bases of this perception—shifts marked 74 FRAMED SPACES in Minimalist art in the early 1960s through conceptual, performance, body, and site-specific art in the early 1970s. Soon the institution of art could...