Courtesy Free Agent Media and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

Renée Green, still from "Endless Dreams and Water Between" (2008). DVD, 74 min.

March 2009 Reviews

Hans Hoffmann

R. H. Quaytman

Peter Rostovsky

Josephine Taylor

Alex Bag

Kirsten Stoltman

Bia Davou

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Superflex

Anna Barriball

Holy Inspiration: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Art

Robert Graves George Sand

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In 1969 a group of Native Americans occupied Alcatraz, reclaiming it as their "rock with a rainbow inside" that could heal tribal members. This important moment in the struggle for land rights is marked in Renée Green’s ambitious and profuse show, "Endless Dreams and Water Between," with a campaign postcard declaring ALCATRAZ IS NOT AN ISLAND, collaged onto a map of the San Francisco Bay. Elsewhere, the American artist’s videos, films, banners, and maps probe the real and imagined treasure of islands as powerful sites of escape, indolence, contestation, and isolation. In the central eponymous film (produced in 2008), four fictional women, all island inhabitants, agree to return to the slow "actual matter" of writing letters to each other to relate their watery dreams. Each discusses George Sand’s book Winter in Majorca (1855), which detailed her miserable sojourn and was later heavily footnoted and contradicted by Robert Graves. Hinged on cumbersome and overwritten voice-overs, neither the footage of their islands nor the women’s personalities become fully distinctive. The characters seem to have wandered in from a topographical Ph.D. that really wanted to be a novel. The show’s most rewarding and refreshing aspect is the extraordinary poetry of Laura Riding (Graves’s lover and muse), inscribed on banners hung from the ceiling: "The body swimming in itself / is dissolution’s darling..." These word islands — "vision in a tidal hand" — conjure speculative imaginings much more effectively than the long-winded and dispersed filmic narratives. This is a smart feast, but a disjointed one, with too many foods spread over too many tables and sound leakage between the rooms undermining rather than enhancing the associative meanings.

"Renée Green" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.