Endless Dreams and Time-based Streams

Book excerpt: The term "time-based art" is ostensibly a well-known construct by this point, encompassing video, audio and performance work but not textiles or other objects. Yet Renée Green, whose complex installation art has long troubled easy oppositions such as public/ private, center/margin, and history/ fiction, complicates the idea of time-based art as well, recycling the otherwise "static" elements in her vibrant multimedia environments from year to year, thus mobilizing a more expansive notion of the "time-based" to situate her practice in history. Conceived for Green's 2010 exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this volume appraises the intellectual complexity of Green's ever-evolving art.