Other Planes of There: Selected Writings by Renée Green (review)

When contents pages read like a text in themselves, this must reveal something about the quality of the author of the book. This anthology of selected writings by Renée Green is certainly extremely rich and in a way a work of art in itself, which makes it hardly possible to write a concise review of it. Yvonne Rainer, herself a choreographer and filmmaker, describes Green’s “far-reaching social and political interests” in her blurb on the back of the book as having “led her into taking on the roles of artist-curator-archivist-historian-exhibition designer and, perhaps most unusual, adventuress-traveler.” This layered description of Green’s activities gives a good indication of the scope of the book. Apart from introductory essays by Green herself as well as Gloria Sutton, the texts, which span a period from 1981 to 2010, are divided in five sections: Genealogies, Circuits of Exchange, Encounters, Positions and, the longest one, Operations. Even when read chronologically as I did, it still feels at all times refreshingly nonlinear. What turns reading this encyclopedic book into a dense exploratory adventure is the wide range of subjects and the different styles of writing that Green administers, from deeply academic to storytelling or almost indexical.

The title Other Planes of There not only alludes to this layered condition but is also the title of an exhibition and installation. This double use, or maybe better reuse or retake of work, whether it is written or made, is a constant as Green clearly lives with her oeuvre and likes to revive its different components over the years in changing contexts to test out their ongoing but also changing agency. The idea of the encounter and following from this interaction in all its disguises is thus central. It is exemplified in the importance of the idea of the Contact Zone that Green introduced in her 1994 symposium “Negotiations in the Contact Zone” at The Drawing Center in New York. In her introductory essay Gloria Sutton discusses this “watershed” moment when Green organized a dialogue between cultural producers and cultural critics on the issue of art as theoretical critique and the similar but simultaneously different methodologies of both groups. This is just one example of how Green constantly questions and interrogates not only her own work but also the conditions in which it is generated: when, where and with whom. Her critical engagement is apparent in amongst others her essay “Why Reply?” (2007) on “participation of any kind in relation to international cultural events (ICEs), as well as more generally . . . the question on why engage, discuss, respond, or question.” Green poses a question that seems central to her work: “How to acknowledge the beauty and power of intellect, details, specificity, and precision in the aesthetic process rather than consider these aspects as extraneous?”

Sutton starts her essay with a quote from Green during the Contact Zone symposium on the importance of moving outside of someone’s comfort zone and the knowledge of one or more other languages “to enable a rethinking of established notions.” Green has certainly traveled and lived throughout the world, most notably extended periods in Vienna and Portugal, and speaks several languages as well as using myriad media ones. As Sutton states, the book Other Planes of There is in itself another “contact zone” in which established notions are provoked and rethought by exposing them to different contexts.

While reading the book I remembered having run into Green’s work on several occasions and in different places, to start with in Antwerp in 1993 when it was a Cultural Capital of Europe. Green took part in one of its central exhibitions, “On Taking a Normal Situation . . .” and republishes in this anthology the text she wrote for it under the section “Operations.” She also muses in her introductory essay about the fact that the massive...