In 1492, the Spanish scholar Antonio de Nebrija published one of the first books dedicated to a vernacular European language, Gramática de la lengua Castellana (Grammar of the Castilian Language). He dedicated the book to Queen Isabella I of Spain, writing in the text’s prologue that “language was always the companion of empire,” making the codification of Castilian crucial in the country’s ruthless crusade against indigenous populations of the Americas1. In the centuries that followed, Nebrija’s assertion proved prescient. Violent campaigns of expansion were soon accompanied by a systematic dismantling of culture — carried out not only by soldiers but by cartographers, anthropologists, linguists, and amateur scientists. Their claims to “objectivity” often reinforced racist hierarchies under the guise of scientific fact.
Since the 1980s, American artist, writer, and educator Renée Green has used the building blocks of knowledge — color, language, and other observable factors — to question the presumed objectivity of fact, particularly in anthropological narratives emerging from centuries of colonialism. Her first solo institutional exhibition in New York, “The Equator Has Moved” at Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York, focuses on Green’s considered, highly conceptual dismantling of the racism and misinformation that plagues the historical and scientific record from nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and the United States.
Green came of age as an artist and academic in the long shadow of American conceptual art. Before her notable exhibitions of work in the early 1990s at PS1 Contemporary Art Center and Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop, she was a student at Wesleyan University and the Whitney’s prestigious Independent Study Program, later working at the Wadsworth Athenaeum to catalogue the donated collection of artist Sol LeWitt. Like her peers Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser, Green’s research-based, site-specific installations — an art-making practice referred to by Alexander Alberro as a “methodology of citation” — were often categorized under the critical movements of the 1990s — neo-conceptualism, multiculturalism, and institutional critique — even as her work eluded those labels.
Dia curator Jordan Carter eschews many of these early works and easy classifications: the early installation works Sites of Genealogy (1990) and Commemorative Toile (1992–93) that put her on the proverbial map are notably absent. One of her other best-known works — 1992’s incisive archive/video installation Import-Export Funk Office — is included in the exhibition as The Digital Import/Export Funk Office [CD-ROM Brochure] (2011), a digital print that appears on paper as the “liner notes” for the project in both English and German. Instead, Carter focuses on a specific mode of inquiry and subject matter to guide the exhibition — the narrative of exploration and colonial expansion — as showcased by the inclusion of two rare sculptural installations exhibited for the first time since their 1991 debut at New York’s Pat Hearn Gallery. Both the first and last work one sees in the venue, Peak (1991) serves as the exhibition’s mission statement: a precariously arranged wood monolith erected to mimic the once-impossible summits of Everest and Denali, and a blue flag labeled “OLYMPUS” flying above a black-and-white Ansel Adams photograph of a mountain range. This is a condemnation of both the colonial nature of scientific exploration and of the American turn toward land art, implicating both in their need to control the natural, indigenous lands of the Americas from Manifest Destiny to Robert Smithson’s earthworks. In the next gallery, Pigskin Library (1991) presents an imagined mise-en-scene of President Theodore Roosevelt’s campsites during his 1909 expedition to Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan to collect samples of plant and animal life for the nascent American Museum of Natural History. File folders of taxonomical findings spill out of a small tent as John Philip Sousa’s 1890 march “The Corcoran Cadets” — an ode to the capitol’s militia drill team — plays, further linking the Western world’s “scientific” observations of the African continent to regimes of power and subjugation.
As Green’s art showcases, this campaign of violence still reverberates through our modes of knowledge-creation and communication. Adapting the semiotics of Saussure and Derrida, the artist argues that our perception of signs is shifted by bias, whether this is through the uneasy classification of colors as “ugly” in Color IV or binaries imbued with colonial power dynamics — subject and object, darkness and light — in Which? (both 1990). Green’s “The Equator Has Moved” both dismantles and reconfigures a visual grammar drawn from the dark heart of the empire, asking its audience to reconsider the structures of knowledge they may have accepted as neutral or natural.