Subject to Display Handouts and Personal Notes

Chapter 3

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Divine Allegories

• She created a shrine that recognized and celebrated Saint Teresa of Avila called, Altar for Saint Teresa de Avila in 1984.
  • The altar represents a holy femelle hooded with a sacred garment and the beautification on a larger scale of its secret, enfolded organ of satisfaction and enjoyment (121).
  • It is a visual metaphor of femelle lust and sensuality enshrined in the frame of Catholic ritual.
  • Mesa-Bain’s creations draw upon Mexican American Catholic iconography and community-based art practices.
    • Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics have a negotiated respect for “white” iconography of virgins and saints that frame the core of the visual culture of Catholicism.
    • Mesa-Bain’s pieces attend to the extensive history of cultural relations between Europe and the Americas throughout Colonialism.
      • To González, this creative reappropriation of traditional imagery contributes to a decolonial imaginary that “repositions the gendered body of the mestiza through a critical transformation of the politics of display” (p. 162).
      • She pays critical attention to womyn’s place, especially mestizas within material and visual discourses of display, a political commentary in the form of symbolic and iconographic narratives, which are also autobiographical.
      • With her interpretation of Chicana Feminist practice, Mesa-Bains challenges familiar artistic divisions between tradition and innovation, and nonspiritual distinctions between linear and cyclical time.
      • Mesa-Baines attends to the social and ideological character of womyn’s interior lives.
        • “Partial, fragmentary, and suggestive, Mesa-Baines’s installations turn to the home altar, boudir, curiosity cabinet, harem, library, and garden as spaces of reverence and mourning, comfort, and desire, enclosure and preservation, knowledge and contemplation” (122).
        • She draws attention to spaces where individual attention is focused, everyday activities are choreographed or a part of a routine, and subjects are constructed: mirrors, tables, closets, inner shrines where artifacts are archived and knowledge about the femelle body is passed on or imposed.
        • Altar Installations
          • The tradition of Mexican domestic altars is rooted in the colonial history of the Americas, as Indigenous women combined their own spiritual practices with European Catholic icons to create ofrendas or offerings in their homes to honour their ancestors.
          • In joining other Chicana artists (Yolanda Garfias Woo, Ralph Maradiaga, Carmen Lopez Garza) in reviving and revising the genre of “altar-installation” as an act of anti-colonial cultural reclamation in recent decades, she integrates the personal and the political as well as folk and fine art traditions, both recognized by and challenging the art world through feminist and anti-racist installations.
          • Mesa-Baines distinguishes these more intimate and temporary memorial installations around the Day of the Dead festivities from more permanent and more public altars.
          • Mesa-Bains suggests that such syncretic practices are built around two interrelated tropes, resistance and affirmation: resistance to colonial practices and white racism, and affirmation of forms and rituals that “have sustained our culture in hostile environments” (hooks & Mesa-Bains, 2006, p. 118), such as the home altar tradition.
          • This is not a totally private expression, but by remembering the ancestors and precolonial history as well as the current context, the altar installations become collective and public statements that can be used to historicize issues like migrant labor.
          • In the 1970s, the Chicano civil rights movement in California incorporated a reestablishment of Mexican cultural traditions as an embodiment of Mexican cultural customs as a kind of critical opposition to an American imperative of assimilation.
            • The movement called for better educational opportunities and an adequate working environment as part of a long-term social and political mission to recover lost indigenous traditions and past.
            • Chicano/a artists worked across traditions from Mexico and the United States, focusing their attention on public discourse and activism through the production of theatrical performances, murals, paintings, films, and posters.
            • Mesa-Bains received her MFA in painting in 1966.
              • As part of an endeavor “to leverage aesthetics in the name of cultural politics,” artists created collaborative ofrendas in community centers and local gallery spaces in the early 1980s.
              • The difference between an altar and an ofrenda
                • Home altars serve as the permanent, ongoing record of a family’s life framed within a religious language of saints and other icons.
                  • They put multigenerational memorabilia on view.
                  • They provide a means of expression for an otherwise marginalized femelle community.

v Mesa-Bains constructs a new self by naming it.

v As González argues, domesticana, as a female rasquachismo, “transforms ‘female’ space from its traditional isolation under patriarchy into a public representation of a lived experience of Mexican American women” (132).

v What we experience here is multiple re-signification, where the mundanity of everyday things is transfigured.

• One can observe the intersectionality between gender and race, where material signs of cultural affiliation are gathered, such as in home altars.
• The dark-skinned patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, is often found on home altars together with family photographs and symbols of ethnic or national affiliation

v Example: Flag or relics from Mexico

• “For women, this symbolic, domestic, ritual activity provides the means to imagine a set of social relations to family, community, and even the divine, beyond the strict confines of the male-dominant church” (127).
• Her work both reclaims women as the original altar artists and honors invisible women icons as the subject of the altars.
  • Mesa-Bains (González, 2008) sees these reconfigured altars as reflective of a matriarchal and politicizing spirituality.
  • As González (2008) reflects, by blending two terms, Mexicana and doméstica (Mexican arts and crafts and household work), Mesa-Bains not only creates a new term, but rather, as González contends, Mesa-Bains creates a new signification, a new definition about the conflictive interstitial space created by the intersection of race, class, and gender.
  • She unlocks a new aesthetic space that recognizes the unique experience of a racialized identity and gendered labor.
• Ofrendas are nonpermanent offerings that are displayed during memorial festivals and events.
  • Ofrendas honor a single dead individual with objects that are associated with or dedicated to that person.
  • In Chicano cultural beliefs, the concept of impermanence plays a central role, from the acknowledgment that death is a fundamental component of life to an acceptance of the impermenance of beauty.
  • Owing to the fact that life is fluid and cyclical, life is celebrated in elaborate ceremonies that engage the past; the ofrenda last only a couple days before being dismantled, its objects and icons dispersed for another year (124).
  • Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio

v The ofrenda was initially exhibited in 1984.

v The exhibit appeared in the CARA/ Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmative travelling exhibition in 1991.

v The exhibit honored to a nonreligious icon of films through an “ornamental canonization” in the gallery space (125).

v Mirrors are the locus of rituals that celebrate beauty, where womyn are invited to examine and scrutinize their bodies as they get older.

v The installation included many intimate, personal objects, such as discarded tissues imprinted with lipstic kisses.

v An opposition of public and private life revealed the difference between a Mexican childhood and Hollywood stardom.

• “Placed on opposite sides of the ofrenda, the two groupings of artifacts suggested the conflicting conditions of an identity split between a Mexican heritage and a Hollywood career” (125).

v In order to devise a visual argument about the role of Del Rio as a key figure in Chicano history and in her own imaginary, Mesa-Bains developed a material rhetoric or topographical map of cultural and institutional affiliations rooted in symbolically charged artifacts.

v Scholar Tomás Ybarra-Frausto contends that the exhibit allowed the artist to “focus inward, exploring her feminine psyche ad generating an ancestry or lineage of women significant to her own life” (125)

v The simultaneously historical and hagiographic framework of the Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio indicates the duality of what Julia Kristeva refers to as “woman’s time,” which engages both cursive time (the time of linear history) and monumental time (the time of life cycles and private ceremonies) (127)

v Dolores del Rio is the source of both historical recuperation and mythological identification

v The spatial rhetoric of the work is combined with a temporal element of remembrance and tribute, acting as a striking ceremonial site for Mesa-Bains and her imagined spectators

v By transforming this historical figure into a glorified cultural icon, Mesa-Bains adds Del Rio to a pantheon of feminine role models with which she and other Chicanas can identify

v The Del Rio ofrenda is a symbol of elegance and an autobiographical mediation on beauty and aging.

• Mesa-Bains brought creative work from the domestic sphere, defiant of white Catholicism and patriarchy to public space of art gallery
• Mesa-Bains worked at a time when nonpermanent and site-specific installation art had gained mainstream acceptance as a legitimate art form.

 

Chapter 4 “Pepón Osorio: No Limits,”

• Analyzes Osorio’s efforts at uncovering the principles that structure spaces such as courtrooms, bedrooms, barbershops, living rooms, and prison cells.
• Drawing from his immigrant experience as a Puerto Rican in New York, Osorio communicates to his audience the dislocation undergone by himself and other transplants to new cultures.
• Osario experienced Displacement when he arrived in 1975 at the age of 22 from Sancture, Puerto Rico.
• He combines culturally specific aesthetic traditions with an analytical examination of US commodity culture.
• His early works trace the shared efforts of immigrants to make a home away from home while negotiating the seduction of consumption as part of the process of assimilation.
• He analyzes the politics of violence as the foundation for a series of works about material conditions, gender politics, cultural customs, and politics of masculinity. 
• His working method includes interaction and participation, discussion and collaboration.
  • He involves communities outside the art world, in his process of his production of his installations.
• In 1985, Osorio created and built the set for Cocinado (Cooking), which uses the story of a land rescue effort as a metaphor for the recuperation of Puerto Rican cultural customs and rituals (166).
  • Osorio designed his set design on the clever spontaneity of the rescatadores (rescuers), reflecting a time in Puerto Rican history when grassroots social movements of the 1960s laid claim to land rights of the rural dispossessed (166).
  • Los rescatadores de terrenos (rescuers of the land) built small dwellings or casitas on occupied territory, gaining ownership through squatter’s rights. 
  • Puerto Ricans occupied land that was considered otherwise lost to the aristocracy of a neo-colonialist government.
  • This activity of land rescue also privileged the rights of individual families and communities over those of greater political and financial organizations and systems.
  • The legacy of rescatadores is visible today in vacant lots in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
    • “Casitas are generally located in neighborhoods that witnessed massive population displacement in the past three decades and now suffer from extreme poverty” (166).
    • Casitas serve as a community space for public gatherings and social events.
    • They are a source of Puerto Rican pride in the otherwise anonymous space of the city.
    • The set for Cocinado consisted of elaborately decorated props, such as La Bicicleta (1985) (167).
      • La Bicicleta served as a microcosm of the island experience, boyhood fantasies, and artist’s religious upbringing
        • “Having been denied a national identity, Puerto Ricans never accept things as they are given to them…. They forge a self-identity by giving things a personal touch” (167)
        • “La Bicicleta further signifies a life wheeled from place to place: a life of transition, of immigration, of cultural diaspora” (167)
• Osorio focuses his attention on the spatial politics of neighborhoods and urban communities.
• La Cama (The Bed) (1987) was designed for an interpretive performance by Soto at the Longwood Gallery in the Bronx (167).
  • The installation portrayed two people and the broader story of their cultural heritage, economic class, religious faith, and social networks.
  • The installation Celebrated rites of passage from birth to death, from youth to adulthood, and from innocence to understanding.
  • Osario says that the prop was inspired by a personal dream where, fearfully hiding behind a tomb or deathbed, the artist waits to present Soto (his light-skinned future wife) to Juana (the dark-skinned maid who raised him as a child.
    • La Cama was an offering of physical splendor for the dead.
    • Catholic saints and virgins in that were framed in gold appeared as offerings on the pillows (169)
    • La Cama functioned symbolically to illuminate the artist’s interrogation into binary logics of racial identity and familial relationships
    • The black/white binary was repeated several times throughout the installation.
    • Pepón Osorio: “I realized the toys, the figures, that I was using in my work were not reflecting my skin tones. And that was when I began painting, out of anger, all of the different toys. You will see in a lot of the work that the toys have very dark painted skin-that I did myself.”
    • The plastic cigars on the headboard and the imaginary smoke symbolizes transcendence.
    • The shoes on the headboard represented the social network of men.
• Coco Fusco, New York-based artist and writer commented, “appreciation of Osorio’s oeuvre usually stops at the surface; viewers revel in or rail against its sumptuousness and presume a non-reflexive recapitulation of a ‘naïve vernacular cultural practice. Within a culture like that of the United States, informed by minimalist notions of elegance and a Puritan disdain for decoration, it is all too easy for even a highly calculated use of kitsch to be perceived as unselfconscious,” (170-2).
• El Chandelier (The Chandelier) (1988) was inspired by Osorio’s observation that, even in the poorest homes of New York’s Lowe East Side, it was possible to see shimmering glass chandeliers through the windows of otherwise drab interiors (170).

• • “To be ‘at home’ in the city is to be literate in the space of the city, to articulate a language of daily practice that is based on rhythms and regularities that form a routine” (165).
  • Osorio’s works are a reaction to effects of cultural displacement on Puerto Ricans living in and near New York City.

 

 

Chapter 5, “Renée Green: Geneaologies of Contact”

• This chapter examines Green’s minimalist installations and their capacity to call our attention to the ways in which history is recorded, power is consolidated, and memory is constructed.
• Installation art can perform critical social and cultural work.
• The majority of Greens’ works are installations, but she also publishes books, produces videos, and records sound.
• Her installations tend to include as much text as image.
• Green works genealogically to explore the activity and history of seeing as it intersects with the politics of colonialism and race discourse, with history and memory.
  • Genealogical approach to the past, which develops a tentative narrative from pieces of always incomplete evidence
    • Interconnected capillary lay out of facts that does not impose a necessarily or absolute order of things
    • Attempt to chart relations of bodies to structures of power through which they have been marked and controlled
    • Green offers a vision of the material effects and semiotic remnants of race discourse genealogically
• Every one of her works assembles, images, texts, or sounds from different historical periods to provide onlookers the opportunity to examine the concept of racial difference but also cross-cultural encounter as a set of broad social conditions that are reproduced over time
• Traditional historical approach to the past, which produces overarching explanatory narratives or general characterizations of a historical era
• Green calls for reflection on the connotations of race imbedded in ordinary objects, linguistic tropes, and artistic historical practices

Sites of Genealogy (1991)

• Installation at P.S. 1 Museum in Queens, New York, Green used the architectural components of the location of the installation to symbolically reference the relationship between darkness and lightness ascribed to interior spaces and skin color (207).
• Basement and attic were used to present the lack of and presence of luminosity
  • Thin wooden slats were nailed to the floor and hung like wooden blinds from the ceiling.

v Printed on each slat were lines from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, which described how the author took refuge in an attic to escape the sexual advances of her master (207).

v In the center of the attic, bounded by a horizontal lattice of white string (which created a boundary for the viewers to negotiate) were a chair, typewriter, desk, and huge pile of typing paper, and a tall ladder upon which a telescope was positioned, offering a view of the attic window to the horizon beyond

• It is unclear whether the bounded space signified intellectual confinement or the possibility of escape was not immediately obvious, and it could have indicted both.
• The objects suggested the tools of an explorer trapped in a restricted area, but with view to the wider world, limited by a world of narrow racial systems, saved allegorically by the telescope and typewriter

v A small engraving of Saartje Baartman was concealed behind a corner in another corner of the attic

• Saartje Baartman was a nineteenth-century South African Griqua womyn from Cape Town who was called the Hottentot Venus (209)

v Considered a curiosity by Europeans because of her large buttocks, she was brought to France by a resourceful doctor who exhibited her without clothes as a public attraction between 1810 and 1816.

v Baartman’s genitals, surgically removed from her body when she died, were exhibited in a glass jar in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for almost 160 years (209)

• Installation connected the materiality of color imbedded in ordinary objects and the rationale of typologies
• Glass jars downstairs and upstairs in Sites of Genealogy made reference to this type of display and to those museums that have consistently concealed an ideology of cultural superiority, which is often obscured and justified by scientific analysis and historical conservation
  • The random and casual manner of alphabetizing and numbering taxonomies in relation to the different contents in every jar succinctly expressed the equal senselessness of racial groups based on skin color
  • The subtle gradations between and black, and the material references used to make the distinction take her engagement with color beyond skin to the implied cultural and social hidden meanings assigned to material substances.

 

Color I-Color IV (1990)

• Green’s attention to color as a social discourse composed of an intricate interdependence of visual and linguistic signs also appeared
• Series of small-scale wall installations
• Color II- Green uses an aesthetic of scientific display, referencing conceptual art form the 1960s and 1970s (210)
• Color IV- Green’s taxonomies allow viewers to think about how race and color are mutually dependent on equally imprecise categories of seeing that nonetheless cause people to make uncompromising value judgments and eventually construct categories of racial difference
• “Such chromatic schemas might be of particular interest to an artist whose name is ‘Green’ but who is socially positioned in the United States as black” (213).

 

Neutral, Natural (1990)

• Green focuses on two words that are supposed to operate in a secure, neutral or untainted (natural) zone of color
• Five panels of gray paint were positioned against one wall beneath the caption “Neutral”- the “neutral” blend of black and white
• Panels were hung in a vertical spectrum from lightest to darkest with what seemed to be percentages of each color cleverly painted in the corners
• Next to these five panels, beneath the caption “Natural,” a tall wooden plank displayed a photograph of Angela Davis in her “natural” Afro hairstyle, and a list of words that are often prefaced by the term natural, including “law, philosophy, science, resources, selection” (213).
• This list connects concepts that have long been linked to race discourse, from evolution (natural selection), tobiological determinism (natural law) to financial and political concerns (natural resources) (214).

 

Import/ Export Funk Office (1992)

• In an examination of how Blackness is reflected, other than the evident manifestation of color, Renée Green’s Import/ Export Funk Office (1992) examines how Blackness, namely as portrayed in hip hop music, crosses national borders through interviews and primary research in an effort to understand how outsiders (non-Blacks in America) understand and decipher Black culture.
• Green’s ethnographic research methods move beyond the theoretical shifting of borders in cultural production to examine how Black culture, as a political identity, is constructed and the potential impacts of its reproduction.  
• The coded slang of hip hop culture like “fly,” and “buggin” installed on the wall and translated into German, displayed a real example of Blackness being lost in translation (229).
• The installation also comprised more than twenty-six hours of video interviews organized by the artist.
  • The artist’s interest in examining genealogies was demonstrated here in her records of her findings in metal shelves, books, and recordings, both audio and visual.
  • Green’s installation elicited thoughts of ancestry, interpretation, and reproduction of Black culture.

 

Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-97)

• This exhibit occupies an important place in the current retrospective of her work at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (MBA) Lausanne.
• Green’s preoccupation with time as a changing, constructed entity- a profoundly cultural experience structured by the intersections of personal and public narratives is one such element.
• In Renée Green’s exhibit, Partially Buried (1997), she seems to enact a turn toward the fictional and literary, and a narrative focusing on the epistolary exchange between four imaginary womyn, who also bear a resemblance to the artist herself.
  • This narrative is told in the shape of drawings and maps, frequently overlaid with text, the trademark banners, and a video integrating slow, entrancing film footage of Majorca, San Francisco Bay, and Manhattan with voiceovers of the four characters.

Seen (1990)

• Seen is about the social position of the black femelle body in the western imagination and physically allures the viewer into a play of reflections on the gaze and the subject-object distinction by encouraging hur/ him/ them to step onto an exhibition platform (possibly simultaneously a stage, a scaffold and an auction platform for enslaved people) where her silhouette is projected onto a screen behind her.
• Here, she tackles the figure of Saartjie Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, a young African womyn who was exhibited like a caged animal at European fairs at the beginning of the 19^th century (215).
• Rather than displaying images of Saartje Baartman, Renée Green creates a special viewing arrangement to explore Europeans’ perception of the African womyn’s body as exotic, strange or grotesque.
• Viewers are invited to climb onto a platform which conjures up both a stage and the platforms where slave auctions were conducted, while their shadow is projected onto a screen.  
• On the plates, texts describe Saartjie Baartman’s appearances on stage at Piccadily Circus in London, along with those of the famous singer and dancer, Josephine Baker who caused a sensation in the Paris of the 1920s, can be read, while one of her songs, “Voulezvous de la canne?” rings out.
• While standing on the platform, viewers are involved in the arrangement: from being “viewers” they are transformed into “exhibits,” and the distinction between self and the other, as well as that between the subject and object of knowledge, is destabilized.
• The physical discomfort that may be experienced at the point of the brief permutation between the positions of subject and object immediately alters the viewer’s understanding of Saartjie Baartman’s “place” in the mixing of archival images of modernity and colonialism.
• By looking through a hole in the center of the floor, the viewer is captivated in an intimate act.
  • The viewer’s gaze is returned in the image of an eye from the hole in the middle of the floor.
  • Seen remains a riveting, focused experience, even as we are tempted to dismiss it as a theoretical and artistic relic of its time.

Idyll Pursuits (1991)

• • Idyll Pursuit (1991) was one of Green’s first pieces to surface directly from a residency outside the United States, and discussed the concerns and problems surrounding her stay as a visiting artist in Venezuela by creating an installation that brought together colonial narratives and images exploring a utopian “exotic” in South American, incorporating her own image, which was taken during her time in Venezuela, among these.  
    • This could be interpreted as an early reflection on the practices of cultural exchange surfacing in the 1990s and the ways in which such a practice appears to both challenge and maintain the colonial narrative; her condition as a researcher and traveler within a specific context enabled rather than invalidated the validity of her conceptual interventions.
    • The centrality of the artist as a travelling, experiencing subject with a history and a relationship situated in the place she is working from has since become a commonplace of contemporary artistic vocabulary.
    • It is important to situate Green’s installations in the context of the debates around postcolonial theory, subjectivity, and identity that characterized the New York art world in the early parts of the previous decade.

    -0-0-0-

    Handout

Chapter 3

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Divine Allegories

 

• She created a shrine that recognized and celebrated Saint Teresa of Avila called, Altar for Saint Teresa de Avila in 1984.
• Mesa-Bain’s creations draw upon Mexican American Catholic iconography and community-based art practices.
• Mesa-Bain’s pieces attend to the extensive history of cultural relations between Europe and the Americas throughout Colonialism.
• She pays critical attention to womyn’s place, especially mestizas within material and visual discourses of display, a political commentary in the form of symbolic and iconographic narratives, which are also autobiographical.
• With her interpretation of Chicana Feminist practice, Mesa-Bains challenges familiar artistic divisions between tradition and innovation, and nonspiritual distinctions between linear and cyclical time.
• Mesa-Baines attends to the social and ideological character of womyn’s interior lives.
• She draws attention to spaces where individual attention is focused, everyday activities are choreographed or a part of a routine, and subjects are constructed: mirrors, tables, closets, inner shrines where artifacts are archived and knowledge about the femelle body is passed on or imposed.
• Altar Installations
• Mesa-Bains received her MFA in painting in 1966.
• The difference between an altar and an ofrenda
  • Home altars serve as the permanent, ongoing record of a family’s life framed within a religious language of saints and other icons.
  • Ofrendas are nonpermanent offerings that are displayed during memorial festivals and events.
  • Her work both reclaims women as the original altar artists and honors invisible women icons as the subject of the altars.
  • Ofrendas are nonpermanent offerings that are displayed during memorial festivals and events.
    • Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio (1984)
    • Mesa-Bains brought creative work from the domestic sphere, defiant of white Catholicism and patriarchy to public space of art gallery
    • Mesa-Bains worked at a time when nonpermanent and site-specific installation art had gained mainstream acceptance as a legitimate art form.

 

Chapter 4 “Pepón Osorio: No Limits,”

• Analyzes Osorio’s efforts at uncovering the principles that structure spaces such as courtrooms, bedrooms, barbershops, living rooms, and prison cells.
• Drawing from his immigrant experience as a Puerto Rican in New York, Osorio communicates to his audience the dislocation undergone by himself and other transplants to new cultures.
  • Osario experienced Displacement when he arrived in 1975 at the age of 22 from Sancture, Puerto Rico.
  • He mixes culturally specific aesthetic traditions with a critical examination of US commodity culture.
  • His early works trace the common efforts of immigrants to make a home away from home while negotiating the seduction of consumption as part of the process of assimilation.
  • He analyzes the politics of violence as the foundation for a series of works about material conditions, gender politics, cultural customs, and politics of masculinity. 
• His working method includes interaction and participation, discussion and collaboration.
  • In 1985, Osorio created and built the set for Cocinado (Cooking), which uses the story of a land rescue effort as a metaphor for the recuperation of Puerto Rican cultural customs and rituals.
  • Osorio focuses his attention on the spatial politics of neighborhoods and urban communities.
  • La Cama (The Bed) (1987) was designed for an interpretive performance by Soto at the Longwood Gallery in the Bronx (167).
  • Coco Fusco, New York-based artist and writer commented, “appreciation of Osorio’s oeuvre usually stops at the surface; viewers revel in or rail against its sumptuousness and presume a non-reflexive recapitulation of a ‘naïve vernacular cultural practice. Within a culture like that of the United States, informed by minimalist notions of elegance and a Puritan disdain for decoration, it is all too easy for even a highly calculated use of kitsch to be perceived as unselfconscious,” (170-2).
  • El Chandelier (The Chandelier) (1988) was inspired by Osorio’s observation that, even in the poorest homes of New York’s Lowe East Side, it was possible to see shimmering glass chandeliers through the windows of otherwise drab interiors (170).

• • “To be ‘at home’ in the city is to be literate in the space of the city, to articulate a language of daily practice that is based on rhythms and regularities that form a routine” (165).

• • Osorio’s works are a reaction to effects of cultural displacement on Puerto Ricans living in and near New York City.

 

Chapter 5, “Renée Green: Geneaologies of Contact”

• This chapter examines Green’s minimalist installations and their capacity to call our attention to the ways in which history is recorded, power is consolidated, and memory is constructed.
• Installation art can perform critical social and cultural work.
• The majority of Greens’ works are installations, but she also publishes books, produces videos, and records sound.
• Her installations tend to include as much text as image.
• Green works genealogically to explore the activity and history of seeing as it intersects with the politics of colonialism and race discourse, with history and memory
• Green calls for reflection on the connotations of race imbedded in ordinary objects, linguistic tropes, and artistic historical practices
• Sites of Genealogy (1991)
  • Installation at P.S. 1 Museum in Queens, New York, Green used the architectural components of the location of the installation to symbolically reference the relationship between darkness and lightness ascribed to interior spaces and skin color
  • Installation connected the materiality of color imbedded in ordinary objects and the rationale of typologies
  • Glass jars downstairs and upstairs in Sites of Genealogy made reference to this type of display and to those museums that have consistently concealed an ideology of cultural superiority, which is often obscured and justified by scientific analysis and historical conservation
  • Color I-Color IV (1990)
    • Series of small-scale wall installations
    • Color II- Green uses an aesthetic of scientific display, referencing conceptual art form the 1960s and 1970s (210)
    • Color IV- Green’s taxonomies allow viewers to think about how race and color are mutually dependent on equally imprecise categories of seeing that nonetheless cause people to make uncompromising value judgments and eventually construct categories of racial difference
    • Neutral, Natural (1990)
      • Green focuses on two words that are supposed to operate in a secure, neutral or untainted (natural) zone of color
      • Five panels of gray paint were positioned against one wall beneath the caption “Neutral”- the “neutral” blend of black and white
      • This list connects concepts that have long been linked to race discourse, from evolution (natural selection), tobiological determinism (natural law) to financial and political concerns (natural resources) (214).
      • Import/ Export Funk Office (1992)
        • In an examination of how Blackness is reflected, other than the evident manifestation of color, Renée Green’s Import/ Export Funk Office (1992) examines how Blackness, namely as portrayed in hip hop music, crosses national borders through interviews and primary research in an effort to understand how outsiders (non-Blacks in America) understand and decipher Black culture.
        • Green’s ethnographic research methods move beyond the theoretical shifting of borders in cultural production to examine how Black culture, as a political identity, is constructed and the potential impacts of its reproduction. 
        • The coded slang of hip hop culture like “fly,” and “buggin” installed on the wall and translated into German, displayed a real example of Blackness being lost in translation (229).
        • The installation also comprised more than twenty-six hours of video interviews organized by the artist.
        • Green’s installation elicited thoughts of ancestry, interpretation, and reproduction of Black culture.
        • Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-97)
          • This exhibit occupies an important place in the current retrospective of her work at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (MBA) Lausanne.
          • In Renée Green’s exhibit, Partially Buried (1997), she seems to enact a turn toward the fictional and literary, and a narrative focusing on the epistolary exchange between four imaginary womyn, who also bear a resemblance to the artist herself.
          • Seen (1990)
            • Seen is about the social position of the black femelle body in the western imagination and physically allures the viewer into a play of reflections on the gaze and the subject-object distinction by encouraging hur/ him/ them to step onto an exhibition platform (possibly simultaneously a stage, a scaffold and an auction platform for enslaved people) where her silhouette is projected onto a screen behind her.
            • Viewers are invited to climb onto a platform which conjures up both a stage and the platforms where slave auctions were conducted, while their shadow is projected onto a screen. 
            • While standing on the platform, viewers are involved in the arrangement: from being “viewers” they are transformed into “exhibits,” and the distinction between self and the other, as well as that between the subject and object of knowledge, is destabilized.
            • Idyll Pursuits (1991)
              • Idyll Pursuit (1991) was one of Green’s first pieces to surface directly from a residency outside the United States, and discussed the concerns and problems surrounding her stay as a visiting artist in Venezuela by creating an installation that brought together colonial narratives and images exploring a utopian “exotic” in South American, incorporating her own image, which was taken during her time in Venezuela, among these.