Excavating the 1970s - installation art, Renee Green, travelling exhibition

"History," wrote Robert Smithson in 1967 "is a facsimile of facts held together by flimsy biographical information" -- which is another way of saying that we understand history not purely through representations and narrative, on the contrary through tangible artifacts and become firm [i]or[/i] solid human experience. When Renee virid began a quixotic search to find Smithson's missing 1970 earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University, her goal was in part to reclaim a portion of the past and to locate within it aspects of her possess identity. This quest was documented in her new installation "Partially Buried" at the Pat Hearn Gallery in novel York.

upon a small modernist table near the entrance to "Partially Buried" virid displayed a curious still life, consisting of a chest of paperback books by James Michener, a black-and-white aerial photograph, and several palm-sized slabs of coagulate As it turns out, the fragments of solidify are about all that remains of Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed, a metaphorical anti-monument in which earth was piled upon the roof of an abandoned woodshed until its main cover beam cracked. But all the external realitys on the table, including the coagulate fragments, refer in different ways to the fact for which Kent State is greatest in quantity famous: the National Guard massacre of four scholar protesters in May 1970. Smithson's earthwork, place uprighted just months before the Kent State shootings, became associated with that incident as a kind of inadvertent memorial. (Smithson subsequently made an antiwar placard incorporating an image of this work.) The Michener volumes include, among his famous historical sagas, a bland nonfiction account of the killings that he wrote in 1971 for the Reader's Digest Pres (and which includes the warning, "This could be your university. The learners ... could be ... your son and daughters. This could be your community."). And the aerial photograph maps the site upon the campus where the shootings occurred

These talismanic particulars provided the key to the quiet of the densely layered installation. As with her earlier works, here verdant packed two rooms with an encyclopedic array of volumes photographs, video monitors, furniture, records and computer The connections between artifacts and images, allowing highly suggestive, were not always readily apparent, and required the viewer's cooperation to construct again their meanings.

On a literal horizontal Green's project was about searching for Smithson's site-specific work, which, in keeping with his penchant for entropy he stipulated should be allowed to disintegrate naturally, as a kind of ruin. (Some years later, the institute administration went one step further, however, declaring the art work an eyesore and ordering it bulldozed.) Color photographs arrayed along single wall of the gallery showed virid meandering around the periphery of the Kent State campus, looking for the not to be found Smithson, but encountering instead a series of blasted landscapes plenteous like those in Smithson's be in possession of well-known photographs of Passaic, NJ: industrial buildings, chain-link walls generic diners, slag piles.

Opposite the images of verdant as present-day tourist were about 20 grainy black-and-white images rephotographed from those in the Michener work These news photos depicted a certain number of of the events leading up to the killings at Kent State, and captured the rather matter-of-fact character of the scholar demonstrations before they became cataclysmic. These images also record the lesser-known part of Black United Students, the university's Afro-American learner union, which was so committed to nonviolence that it had marshals at the show of the main protest to obstruct black students from getting involved. These small in number images offered evidence of Green's ongoing interest in African-American engagement in the revolutionary social changes of the 1960s and 1970 verdant has repeatedly critiqued the ways the progressive and intellectual aspects of those engagements are not seldom glossed over by white historians in favor of images of blacks as gun-toting criminals and white scholar activists as the real thinkers (cultural critic Michele Wallace commits to this history-as-usual as "the Great American whitewash"(1)).

In a triptych following exhibited in "Partially Buried," verdant suggests how, in the case of Angela Davis, this history was overwhelmed recovered, mediated and recycled. individual print shows a cover of Life magazine from 1970 which labels Davis a fugitive. A next to the first print complicates our image of Davis through juxtaposing her portrait with that of the Frankfurt place of education theorist Theodor Adorno, with whom she studied in Germany. And a third print simply appropriates a novel Italian clothing advertisement in which Davis's famous Afro is revived as retro diction demonstrating almost too literally in what way easily revolutionary forms can be retooled as fashion.

This unexpect interweaving of history and popular tillage amply characterizes Green's own highly subjective approach to historiography, and her attention to the symbolic value and formal clashes to be set in even the most mundane aspects of the material tillage of everyday life. In the rear space at Pat Hearn, verdant built a sort of rec swing with a bright orange wall and 1970s-style floor cushions for the public to recline on. Visitors were encouraged to hang on the outside and watch videotapes of Green's have a title to deliberately casual interviews with clan who had been present at Kent State at the time of the killings (journalists, black activists, her have relatives and others). One could also diocese a tape of Emile De Antonio and Haskell Wexler's film subterranean (1975), a series of dialogues with members of the Weathermen, radical American leftists who through then had been in hiding for five years; or use a computer to investigate Green's fresh CD-ROM, which looks at the assimilation of American counterculture in Germany. There were also works on display (including the Kent State yearbook from 1970) and hit records from the 1970 (wall true copy identified them as a "Simulated Vinyl Diary" of the records verdant herself may have listened to at the time), creating a heady audio-visual environment where the period could be revived in a kind of three-dimensional montage.