Paper short abstract:

Models and meditation on site-specificity in the practices of Ralph Lemon, Stephen Prina, and Renée Green.

Paper long abstract:

Models are sets of postulates that elicit particular behaviors and create discursive statements. I examine the canonical work partially buried by Renee Green by considering that work as a practice of modeling. Green interrogates an archive which has disappeared– in the absence of an original work (Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Shed,) which is a story told through what remains, the film becomes the model.

I figure how Renée Green models herself [ie.., her body, her works, & exhibitions the building or site] and the CCVA _in relation-_ to one another. What kind of transfer is created and how is the artist modeled in the encounter by doing that project? Could I write Green’s practice as a kind of “Black annotation,” to utilize the scholar Christina Sharpe’s term? Or is it one of the Moten’s ‘ensembles’ or Bhabha's ellipses? Recesses and other interstitial spaces.. vestibules, etc. that might be sites where one would encounter […] ellipses, evidential silences, or as Green says, archival “lacunae.” This emerges from the study is a complex interaction of architectural and exhbitionary or performance space and the space of the book.

The photographs in choreographer Ralph Lemon’s book Come home Charley Patton comprise a book-as-exhibition format that compliments the performances in the book. Lemon speaks of 'abstraction' in developing the pieces, by musing on the non-site and the quality of vernacular American architecture and landscapes. With the forensic quality of city streets photographed empty, the fragmentary nature of the photographs relates to Benjamin’s reading materialist histories.