Iman Issa on the Violence of Renée Green’s Upholstery Fabrics
‘Green’s installation doesn’t exist to serve as evidence of well-established narratives’
‘Green’s installation doesn’t exist to serve as evidence of well-established narratives’
I have always thought that the power of Renée Green’s Mise-en-scène: Commemorative Toile lies in assigning intention to objects that are usually treated as mute remnants from the past. The artist printed typical 18th-century French upholstery fabric with violent scenes of enslavement and then covered furniture and wallpaper with it. The fabric is foreign to its context, not because it portrays an under- represented history, nor because it switches this history around by exchanging its players’ roles (for example, by portraying blacks lynching whites), but because – regardless of its accuracy – it refuses to read history nas something in the past. Green’s installation doesn’t exist to serve as evidence of well- established narratives, nor does it accept a distance from the present by virtue of being a ‘mere’ display. It is alive and wilfully screams its own difficult-to-decipher messages. It does this using the walls, plinths and polished floors on which it is placed – a space from which we would least expect such a flow of pulsing, intentional speech to emanate, but which seems perfectly fitting for it.
Published in Frieze Masters, issue 7, 2018, with the title ‘Artist's Artists’.
