Artist:

Renée Green (born 1959, Cleveland, OH, USA; lives and works in Cambridge, MA).

Description:

Begin Again, Begin Again is a roughly forty-five minute single channel video. It is also the title of Green’s solo exhibition at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House,  Los Angeles.

Begin Again, Begin Again “is an attempt, in her words, to “think with” the eponymous West Hollywood house built by the Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler in 1922. Designed to facilitate an experimental and communal lifestyle, the building gave rise to the California strain of modernist architecture. The film begins with a deep rumble of a voice announcing, “Begin again. Begin again. Begin again,”where every “again” is a little more electric and each beginning has a little more weight. Teal seawater tumbles over the camera. The voice tallies every year from Schindler’s birth in 1887 until the film’s own making in 2015; shots of the house and surrounding nature are punctuated by archival footage of twentieth-century commercial and military activity. Green makes the past feel strangely close. How, the film asks, are Schindler’s words and buildings differently experienced 60 years after his death? How can time dilate lives?”–Andrew McNeely, CAA Reviews, 2015

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