OTH E R PL A N E S OF TH E R E

Selected Writings | RENÉE GREEN

O T H E R P L A N E S O F T H E R E​

Introductory Essay by G L O R I A S U T T O N​
Selected Writings | RENÉE GREEN

duke university press Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States
of America on acid-free paper ♾
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Arno Pro by
Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-
in-Publication Data
Green, Renée.
Other planes of there : selected writings /
Renée Green.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5692-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5703-2 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Green, Renée. 2. Art, American—20th
century. I. Title.
n6537.g693a2 2014
700—dc23
2014007341
front cover art : Renée Green,
Archipelago in Parts, 2011–. Courtesy
of the artist and Free Agent Media.
back cover art : Sites of Genealogy,
1991. Installation view. P.S.1 Contem-
porary Arts Center, Long Island City.
Photo: Tom Warren. epigraph on
p. v is from Sun Ra, The Immeasurable
Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose,
compiled and edited by James L. Wolf
and Hartmut Geerken (Wartaweil:
Waitawhile, 2005).
duke university press gratefully
acknowledges the support of the
humanities, arts, and social sci‑
ences fund at the massachusetts
institute of technology, school
of architecture and planning,
which provided funds toward the
publication of this book.
 For my father Friendly Green Jr.

For my brothers, Greg Green and Derrick Green.

For my distant friends, Karim Aïnouz,

Minsuk Cho, and Joe Wood.

OTHE R PL A N ES OF THE RE

The displaced years

Memory calls them that
They were never were then;
Memory scans the void
And from the future
Comes the wave of the greater void
A pulsating vibration
Sound span . . . bridge to other ways and
Other planes of there . . .

Sun Ra
​“Other Planes of There”
Saturn, 1964
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS
Other Planes, Different Phases, My Geometry, Times, Movements:
Becomings Ongoing 1
Remarks on the Writings of Renée Green, by Gloria Sutton 19

GENEALOGIES
1. Sites of Criticism: A Symposium. Practices: The Problem of
Division of Cultural Labor. Statement (1992) 35
2. Discourse on Afro-­American Art: The Twenties (1981) 42
3. I Won’t Play Other to Your Same (1990) 53
4. What’s Painting Got to Do with It? Representing Gender and
Sexuality in the Age of Post-­Mechanical Reproduction (1990) 57
5. From Camino Road (1994) 64

CIRCUITS OF EXCHANGE
6. Open Letter #1: On Influence (1992) 73
7. Open Letter #2: Another Attempt (1993) 78
8. Collectors, Creators, and Shoppers (1994) 83
9. Peripatetic at “Home” (1995) 89
10. Free Agent Media / FAM (1995) 94
 11. Situationist Text (2001) 99
12. Introductory Notes of a Reader and “A Contemporary Moment”
(2001) 103

ENCOUNTERS
13. Trading on the Margin (1991) 119
14. Democracy in Question (1991) 128
15. Notes from a User: L’informe (1996) 134
16. Spike Lee’s Mix: Calculated Risks and Assorted Reckonings
(1996) 141
17. Compared to What? (1998) 152
18. Notes on Humanist and Ecological Republic and Lac Mantasoa
(2000) 156
19. Other Planes of There (2004) 163
20. Archives, Documents? Forms of Creation, Activation, and Use
(2008) 176
21. On Kawara’s Solutions to Living (2010) 191

POSITIONS
22. “Give Me Body”: Freaky Fun, Biopolitics, and Contact Zones
(1995) 197
23. Dropping Science: Art and Technology Revisited 2.0 (1995) 210
24. Site-­Specificity Unbound: Considering “Participatory Mobility”
(1998) 225
25. Slippages (1997) 230
26. Affection Afflictions: My Alien/My Self, or More “Reading at
Work” (1998) 256
27. Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae (2001) 271
28. Beyond (2006) 289
29. Place (2006) 297
OPERATIONS
30. Sites of Genealogy (1990) 309
31.
VistaVision: Landscape of Desire (1991) 312
32. Tracing Lusitania: Excerpts from an Imagined Prototype (1995) 317
33.
Secret, Part 1. Practiced Places (1992–1993) 320
34. Secret, Part 2. Scenes from a Group Show: Project Unité (1993) 323
35.
Inventory of Clues (1993) 335
36. Eighteen Aphoristic Statements (1994) 340
37. Collecting Well Is the Best Revenge (1995) 346
38. The Digital Import/Export Funk Office (1995) 354
39. Wavelinks Transmitted amidst “Dangerous Crossings”: Reflections
in 2006 (2000, 2006) 364
40. Standardized Octagonal Units for Imagined and Existing Systems
(2002) 375
41. Sound Forest Folly: Intermediary Units of a Variable Number
(2004) 379
42. Why Systems? (2004) 381
43. Relay (2005) 388
44. Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates. Thought
Experiments: Warm-­up Notes (2005) 392
45. Climates and Paradoxes (2005) 396
46. Why Reply? (2007) 403
47. Now It Seems Like a Dream (2007) 408
48. Imagine This Wherever and Whoever You Are (2008) 411
49. Come Closer: Prelude to Endless Dreams and Water Between
(2008) 419
50. Come Closer (2008) 422
51.
Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009) 428
 Plate Captions 453
Publishing History 463
Curriculum Vitae 469
Index 491
 AC K NOW L E D GM E N T S

My acknowledgments will inevitably be incomplete. A glance at the index

accompanying this volume will indicate to the curious name seeker those
with whom I’ve been in conversation through time. Too long a list to name
here, but I continue to be grateful for the sustenance of varying kinds I’ve
received from these participants.
I thank Alex Alberro for the initial invitation to compile a selection of my
dispersed writings into a single unified language volume. The process of a
book’s coming into existence can be a surprisingly long and circuitous one.
I thank Kobena Mercer for prompting me to move these words and Fred
Moten for encouraging me to share my initial manuscript with Ken Wisso-
ker. Ken’s immediate enthusiasm and that of the manuscript readers al-
lowed this book to grow to the measure I’d imagined. My warmest gratitude
extends to everyone I worked with at Duke University Press ( Jade Brooks,
Jessica Ryan, and Amy Buchanan) who’ve made the publishing process for
this volume such a lovely one.
For her incisive and informative introduction I thank Gloria Sutton. I
thank my friends through time in different parts of the world for existing.
Special thanks to all of the editors who invited and commissioned writ-
ings, as well as to all of the curators and institutions who invited me to pro-
duce works that in the intricate process of working, thinking, and feeling
led to these writings.
I also thank mit ’s School of Architecture + Planning for its hass Award,
as it has allowed the book to be lavishly illustrated.
Among the various efforts to animate these words while waiting to pub-
lish them I wish to heartily thank the Reading Performance Workshop
participants who gave life to the manuscript with their voices and perfor-
mances in San Francisco back in 2010.
 Unless stated, all works and images are by the artist and Free Agent
Media.
Other Planes of There is dedicated to my families: the Green family, the
Cochran family, and the Anguera Phipps family.
And sin duda, perennial love to Javier Anguera Phipps, without whom,
to again quote Sun Ra’s words, “Nothing Is.”

xii Acknowledgments
I NTRODUCTORY E SSAY S
R e n é e Gr e en

Other Planes, Different Phases,

My Geometry, Times, Movements
Becomings Ongoing

When I look at the many shelves of books in my library and focus on the
section of books and catalogues in which my work resides, the titles and
covers all look interesting in their own way, yet I continue to search. I don’t
find what I’m looking for, it hasn’t been made, yet I can imagine something
other than what I’m finding. I return to the manuscript of this book you
now read. I think about the vast breadth and varying depths of the events
and encounters throughout my life as an artist and as a writer as I select
what to give you at this time. I don’t think of this as the definitive book of
my work, as I’m still alive, writing and working, “wondering as I wander,”
yet there are some combinations and words I’d like you to be able to read,
which I haven’t yet read elsewhere. For that reason I feel compelled to give
you these words.
A note to myself: “A certain boredom with ‘artist’s books’ and ‘artist’s
writings.’ What about writing? What about one’s perspective as it is in-
formed by living and thinking and feeling and enacting? In this case, to
enact living and thinking and feeling as an artist. Can I think of examples?
And beyond. Ongoing becomings. Limiting classifications challenged.
More paradoxes of democracy. Letters of all kinds.”
I find these words written on a notebook page. What sparked these?
What chasm am I indicating? What other writing can I imagine? What have
I attempted to write differently? What is constricting about the categories
I mention? What do these connote in contrast to another kind of writing I
imagine and attempt? These questions are followed and elaborated in this
book.
 There are many years, dates, and addresses inscribed in my filled note-
books—my most consistent companions on all of my travels, along with
my journals, which differ in function. A source to which I return. Part of a
working process. A reference to what I’ve made and written. The notebooks
contain a running internal dialogue in relation to my work as an artist with
what is encountered in the world; questions, reflections, ideas, and indica-
tions of works and transmutations to come. As a prelude to Other Planes of
There, I offer these recent transmuted excerpts as one way of telling a story,
for example, “Other Planes, Different Phases, My Geometry, Times, Move-
ments: Becomings Ongoing.”

. . .

Fluidity and Architecture: Time Flow, Change-­Acceptance as Its Condition;

Space Variation; as in Music—Moveable Parts or Units/Notes, Sounds—­
Composed + Improvised
I like architecture because there is in it the knowledge of building some-
thing up, as well as tearing something down—quite literally. That is its his-
tory and its practice. Ruins may be romantic fragments that archaeologists
and poets can mine to learn about past humans. Living architecture means
an acceptance of ruin to come. This differs from the historic notion of art, as
matter made timeless, meant to last, an illusory wish, yet this somehow per-
sists. We see the persistence of this wish at art auctions, a wish that art and
money could mean something real and permanent rather than speculative,
illusory, and fleeting. But with architecture and art, as with music, there is
a plan, drawings, a score, based on what was designed or composed, some-
thing that can be reanimated by someone else at another time in another
space. Passed on to the living. One dream of “conceptual art,” at least that
of Sol Lewitt’s.

. . .

When reading particularly about art, sometimes it seems that the twentieth
century ended in the 1960s. In terms of any hopes and dreams. Afterward
everything that followed became post- or neo-­. Strange to be born in and
grow up in a time that appears to be an extension of something perceived
to have been authentic.
If one carefully reads what was published during the years even from

2 Introductory Essays
one’s birth to the present, what can be discovered can astonish, as well as
satisfy nagging curiosity, temporarily. The ah-­ha! effect. Speculative puzzle
parts click into place, for a moment.
The story I have to tell is an artist’s story. This becomes the story of many
people through time. It is a growing seed.

. . .

1959: Steve Lacy reads Lao Tzu; The Way (Tao) emerged based on Witter
Bynner’s translation; 1967: First song written of a six-­song cycle. 1979:
Quintet recorded the full version.
Mom and Steve Lacy were born in 1934. And Joan Didion.
The premiere issue of The Wire (Summer 1982) reprinted the interview
between Brian Case and Steve Lacy, “The Spark, the Gap, the Leap,” from
Melody Maker (7 April 1979).

. . .

I go deeper into the works and words of artists. After art? Steve Lacy, for ex-
ample. Chris Marker, for example. Yes, both born in the twentieth century,
living into the twenty-­first century, and both now physically dead. Yet the
works amaze still.
And me, having lived forty years in what was called the twentieth cen-
tury and having also lived twelve more in what is called the twenty-­first cen-
tury? Who determines what anything is called or designated in the present?
What is this clutching onto memories about?
. . .

Reading Phillip Lopate’s expanded edition of Writing New York: A Literary

Anthology compels me to think of a version of such a book that would in-
clude authors I imagine would make it more interesting—or excerpts of
some of the included authors that could differ; more interesting for me, of
course. I like the book. I bought the book, yet I like imagining another book.
It would include Samuel Delany, Muriel Rukeyser, Joe Wood, Lynne Till-
man, and more. It too would span time. Jimmie Durham would be included.
Different people who were here but are gone, as well as those who return—
these people would be included. Every-­goodbye-­ain’t-­gone people will be
included. “Will” means a future project. While writing I’ve convinced my-

Other Planes, Different Phases 3

 self. Perhaps it will be broader than what’s conceived of as “literary.” Words.
Phrases. Sentences. Works. Sounds. Music. Graphics. Images. The Mix.

Raymond Gervais and Yves Boulaine: It was more a social situation than
a musical one finally?
Steve Lacy: Yes. The fact is that the participants were becoming mean.
At the beginning, they were very grateful and nice, and after a
while they became mean. I don’t know why.
RG and YB: Wasn’t it because you were destroying your status as a
well-­known professional musician, on a pedestal?
SL: Yes, something like that. Even so, I don’t regret it. It was really
good for us and for them too. And it was better for us, because
they didn’t continue. That’s what is really artificial and it’s the rea-
son why I don’t give many lessons. If I continue for twenty-­five or
thirty years, the others are only passing through.1

Following the path of one’s changing thoughts and works through the
traces, the writings, as well as the returns and deeper and further explora-
tions and ripenings. Oneself as another through time.
We do so many things now with our little portable computer interfaces,
from Facetime conversations between Prague and Somerville to making
little movies, printing texts and images, texting across the room during dull
lectures, presentations, or meetings, occasionally with images. We can do
many things, yet we can’t break the screen-­distance barriers. We can use
additional lenses and microphones to create higher definition representa-
tions. We can transmit, yet this is not the same as touching a person or a
distant place or thing. Our kisses remain on the tiny screen, leaving blurry
marks. No skin contact. No Videodrome yet.

. . .

To be american + artist in different centuries and decades and years.

Issues, wishes, acts. A search. The Making of Americans, Stein. A realization/
realizations. The Recognitions, Gaddis. Morrison’s complete oeuvre. Going
beyond/exceeding/excess. Newness, oldness, and everything in between.
Portugal, Pocahontas, pilgrims, pioneers, pirates, pyrotechnics, Pyrrhic vic-
tories. to articulate this complexity + to simplify. To concen-
trate. To compress. To code. To compose. In a form.

4 Introductory Essays
Intro 1.1 The Live Creature, from Space Poem #1, 2007.
Double-­sided banner, 32 × 42 inches.

Discovering the recent past, that is, what is designated as the twentieth
century. Designations, assignations, for example, the Anthropocene. Ac-
cording to? Compared to? what ? Yes, precedents, but again, According
to? Compared to? what ? Or Incomparable? Beyond category?

. . .

“There is a discourse about the arts, rarely written and at times unspoken,
which is neither that of historians so deeply tied to time and space nor that
of critics concentrating on personal views about the arts or on contempo-
rary judgments about whatever it is that they see. It is the discourse of sen-
sibilities affected by the excitement of visual impressions, it is the discourse
of love.”2
Rereading Ellison. Yardbird Reader, volume 5. Lewis Hyde. Jimmie Dur-
ham. Michael Dorris.
Revisiting, rereading, rethinking, encountering freshly.

Other Planes, Different Phases 5

 After having lived in Mexico, Europe, and California.
After having lived thirty years more since first encountering their words.
After having lived through various demarcations of time.
After having lived through times during which events happened.
Now living through times that continually reverberate with the residue
of past events, even if these are forgotten rapidly and selectively remem-
bered/commemorated, which is the way of humans, it seems.
Both “newness” and “oldness” being claims. Made by someone.

. . .

Although I always paid rent in New York and exhibited in the United States,
from 1991 to 2003 I worked primarily outside of the States; I supported my-
self touring, or the artist’s equivalent of such: working with galleries and
with curators on every continent, something that became possible differ-
ently in the 1990s with the global capital spreads, the changing forms of
circulation and ways of imagining access in contrast to the former Age of
Three Worlds, designated as having ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin
Wall and communism.
In 2003 I moved to Santa Barbara, California, after having lived and
worked in Vienna since 1997. The U.S. war with Iraq began in March 2003. A
right-­wing politician elected in Austria came into office in 2000. The World
Trade Center in New York was hit in 2001.
Perceptions of any nation, as well as how to be an artist, were in a state
of flux, which preceded that moment and which hasn’t abated. These writ-
ings gathered in Other Planes of There reflect one person’s encounters dur-
ing many shifts.
. . .

Around me I have many books collected during the twentieth century. I

didn’t keep many things besides these, a little vinyl, digital recordings, and
things in storage that I’d made back then. I kept replacing my recording and
computer equipment every few years. These are still operational.

6 Introductory Essays
After California

As I’m finally really no longer living in California, waking up from years of

another dream, I look at the dreamlike ice and snow and sunlight from my
windows in Somerville. With more of my unpacked collected notebooks
and books amassed over the years within reach, I can now reflect differ-
ently about these past years, places, people and how it feels now to recall
any of this.
Coming closer and distanciation are linked. To assert that something is
over before it has even been told is a tendency, it seems. No one else will
tell these particular stories if they are not written, appearing somewhere,
legible, to be recognized by someone. An anthropocentric someone, pre-
sumably.
I find this in my notebook: “Letters—sending messages in writing be-
tween people over distances and through time—are often necessary for sur-
vival, yet most have forgotten this need.”
Thinking about the Anthropocene in relation to art, culture, and tech-
nology, even these three conjunctive elements can be rethought, with
people whose ideas and work I enjoy engaging, living or dead.
the need : for poetry, song, letters—missives, correspondence back
and forth, reciprocal exchange, open letters—pre-­blog rants, manifestos,
et cetera; encountering and imagining these now, as there is a wish for them
now. All that fills the time span from 1959 to 2013. The desire to express and
to feel continues.
fragile chance : Having the chance, the opportunity to read and
think one’s own thoughts. This in itself is huge. To sit undisturbed in one’s
own room, wherever that may be. To be free of laboring for another. Stu-
pendous! Freedom and the Anthropocene, how will it work? How will work
function?
some people : For June Jordan, who collaborated with Buckminster
Fuller but who was not credited by Esquire magazine in 1964. For Chris
Marker, Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari, Félix González-­Torres, Michel
Foucault, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Joanna Russ,
Lynn Margulis, Greg Bear, plus additional references piled in a stack by my
bed. Make a list and put the books away.

. . .

Other Planes, Different Phases 7

 In relation to the combination art, culture and technology we can think
about investigating, to continue Deleuze’s and both Félixes’s thoughts
about new notions of placement, production, and originality; in relation to
the plane of sensation (composition of art/percepts), the plane of imma-
nence (philosophy/concepts), and the plane of reference (science/func-
tion/functives).
We who have certain propensities to be artists, for example, who think
about life in many ways, who respond in various ways with “forms of orga-
nized complexity” to other “forms of organized complexity” in science or
in philosophy.
Quoting, naming, listing in hope of a resonance beyond oneself, a power
stronger than itself, reaching beyond the quotes, the names, the lists, the
things, through time. That’s a wish. A dream. Enacted in made things. Not
deferred. . . .

. . .

From inside.
How something is composed.
Analyzing Sol LeWitt (MoMA, 1978). Captions and images. Selections.
Structure.
I’m happy my book is called Other Planes of There. It was also the name
of my last exhibition with Pat Hearn Art Gallery (phag ), 2000. February?
March? It was cold.
I think we remember Henry James, in part, because of the writings he
allowed to remain, as well as via some he didn’t control, additional note-
books. He burned many papers. He attempted to compose the life that con-
tinued, or that was found, via conflagration.
Historicizing my formation: twentieth-­century dreams of wholeness +
the fragmentary post- ______s.
Emerging from a murky interdisciplinary jewel-­studded swamp or glis-
tening fog of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s into another plane of where/
there. Perspectival and kaleidoscopic. Sky, mountain, sea, underwater,
views, sounds, sensations transmitted and to transmit. Cellular planes.
Synaptic sparks. Muriel (Rukeyser), Berenice (Abbott), June ( Jordan), the
Tonis (Cade Bambara and Morrison). Their needs and our needs. Intersec-
tions. Imagined. Felt.
Finding things and reading them.

8 Introductory Essays
 Reading in the “anthropocene.” Composing in the “anthropocene.” Just
combine any activity you might have with the notion of “anthropocene,”
as you understand it and experience what takes place. Anything special?
What does the combination affect/effect? Does it move beyond opinion
to become a concept, sensation or function? What does the combination
generate?
“Philosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a non-
philosophical comprehension just as art needs nonart and science needs
nonscience.”3

Afters—Ongoing Becomings

Questions: What will be saved (retained), transmuted (retained, recog-

nized), understood (recognized)?
What happens to artists in the United States, depending on where they
are from—the elaborate genealogy constructed, dismissed, or ignored—
and how they circulate in the Americas and elsewhere in the world? Many
interesting cases. Formations of many combinations and combination
people . . .
While musing on the writer John Updike, after noting the prevalence of
his name on book blurb endorsements in my library yet facing a vacuum
when I attempt to recall any of his words as a novelist, I’m reminded of an
endemic North American mode of a particular type, that has since spread.
Something connected to Warhol or the 1960s and old ideas of celebrity
linked to one’s name being present, like an advertisement. An advertise-
ment of what, though? A self? Wasn’t there a book by Norman Mailer, an-
other writer who emerged in the 1950s, with a title like Advertisements for
Myself? Easy enough to find out online now.

. . .

Thinking about 1993 in 2013 seems to be of more interest to those who

weren’t conscious of that year in any particular way then, or who weren’t
born yet, more than it interests me now. I don’t hold on to the past, yet I
contemplate it and continue to flow. The title of Paul Bowles’s autobiogra-
phy, Without Stopping, makes poignant sense somehow. Who can ever “re-
member” what others want to know? Who can ever “deliver” what others

Other Planes, Different Phases 9

 claim to “design,” that is, the many cultural events in metropoles around the
world, like Berlin or New York or Cairo or Abu Dhabi? I prefer to pursue my
own ideas and what I’m developing; to work with a constellation of people
who resonate with these processes, whatever these become wherever this
can take place. As Billie Holiday once said when being welcomed “back,”
“They never ask you where you’ve been.” Much is always going on, whether
or not it is mediatized. Some were amazed to read about Billie Holiday’s re-
lationship with Orson Welles in the book Lady Sings the Blues, but why were
they surprised? That’s my question. What do people imagine life is in rela-
tion to how it continually unfolds?

. . .

Geopolitics in retrospect. What appealed to me in my encounters with

Europeans in Cologne in the early 1990s was the way the people I met each
had their own spaces where they worked at what they chose to do: in offices
and galleries that were efficient and functional looking, with tables that
could be cleared for meetings and conversations. They determined their
own pace and the content of what they were doing. Agency appeared in
abundance. There was also a person born in the United States of Palestinian
and Lebanese descent, a key participant and analyst, who introduced me
to his perspective of the scene. The ability to seriously engage with all as-
pects of art and thinking, all day every day, and being able to walk to gather
for socializing in a bar, the Grüne Ecke, was to encounter what seemed
like a missed time, something that had occurred before my birth in New
York at the Cedar Tavern but that was taking place in the present around
current themes by people from different parts of Germany, with a strong
Hamburg sector, as well as a Schwäbisch aspect, and other locations; some
from the London vicinity, occasional North Americans from New York and
L.A., maybe one assimilated German Turkish person, one Swiss person,
who was gay, in a hetero-­dominant and macho environment—and, am I
leaving out anyone? Oh yes, expatriate former Israelis. But no one else of
the present Combination People, not yet, beyond my female self. Why do
I use descriptions reflecting nations, regions, cities, ethnicity, gender, or
sexual preference, yet not class? That was the mode of designating people,
even if unstated, at the time in that place in that art milieu, by these sorts
of distinctions.
When I later moved to Berlin I was introduced to other locations that

10 Introductory Essays
appeared, from my 1993 New York perspective, to have been from what I’d
imagined to be a vanished bohemian time, at least a decade gone in New
York. Sometimes with a scary neo-­Nazi edge. I was warned to stay away
from Alexanderplatz at night by an Italian friend, back then.

. . .

Returning again and again to what I’ve gathered, to write this introduc-
tion. In this room in New York and in my rooms in Somerville and in Cam-
bridge. My spaces to contemplate and to create. All of them with windows
to stare out of, or to watch the light filter in and out of. Paths and genealo-
gies of affinity are appearing with these ongoing becoming returns. “Repe-
tition and difference.” “Refraction and diffraction.” Contemplation, time
and space, plus resources to live allow these. All artists, philosophers, scien-
tists, and people attempting to use the power of their agency have needed
resources to allow continuous creation. Resources include being in a body.
Being alive. Being conscious. Not being enslaved.

. . .

I made a film in 2009, Endless Dreams and Water Between, calling out to my
dispersed loved ones. To Jimmie Durham, for example. Across waters. To
islands and between.
1993 indeed. I think Jimmie was then the same age as I am now, fifty-­
three. I’m rereading his book, A Certain Lack of Coherence. His name is big-
ger than the title on the cover and on the spine, making it seem that the title
could be Jimmie Durham and the author could be named A Certain Lack of
Coherence. Interesting.
He was born in 1940, I read on the book’s back cover, and graduated
from the Ecole des Beaux-­Arts, Geneva, in the visual arts. This means some-
thing different to me now than it did in 1993, as I’ve been many times dur-
ing the past years to Geneva and I’ve worked there and continue to work
with colleagues there.
I noted by the price tag, £11.95, that I’d bought the book in London. It
was copublished with the Institute of International Visual Arts, Iniva. Actu-
ally, what appears on the cataloguing page is: First published in 1992 by
Kala Press. The isbn numbers list both hardcover and paperback versions.
It has a catalogue record from the British Library. The book was published
under the Arts Council of Great Britain’s Publishing Franchise for Iniva

Other Planes, Different Phases 11

 and in collaboration with the Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-­
Arts, Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels, with the support of the Flemish
Community, Belgium.
1993. That was the same year Jimmie and I were both in the muhka
show in Antwerp. The same year that my work, a massive installation en-
titled Inventory of Clues, was mysteriously “lost.” Lost “clues” in Belgium.
Curious. The same year a gallerist in Antwerp, who I met just once, told
me that I needed to better manage my affairs. The same year a curator from
London approached me about perhaps doing a Phaidon monograph, but
first it was necessary to see how the Jimmie Durham monograph would do,
commercially, and then later we could revisit the discussion about my pos-
sible monograph. I heard nothing more.
Yes, 1993.
In Los Angeles I had a solo exhibition that year at moca , World Tour. I
moved that year to Berlin on a daad fellowship. A time of transitions in
Europe and throughout the world, only a few years after the Berlin Wall had
come down. Many things followed and continue. Other Planes of There pro-
vides one person’s view of some of what happened since then.
Now the New Museum in New York is producing a show with 1993 as its
premise. My work will be included. What is wanted of 1993 in 2013?
. . .

After a 1995 conference held in London at the ica and cosponsored by

Iniva, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, I decided I wanted to
radically shift the focus of how I was working and how the work could be
perceived. It became evident to me that I needed to focus more specifically
on time-­based media, as well as on different forms of diffusion, placement,
and contact. I’d been working with these forms previously, but I’d initiated
this shift for myself in 1994 with the invention of Free Agent Media, which
I launched with the publication of my novel and video Camino Road in
Madrid at the Museo Reina Sofía. I’d already produced works using video
and sound and I wanted to push this further into filmmaking and digital
modes. There were several reasons. My visceral reactions to ways of being
positioned was a definite indication to me that I needed to find a way of
working more suitable to the varied dimensions of creation I wanted to
express. As language and sound have always been aspects of my ways of
thinking and creating, as is indicated in many of the discrete works I’ve

12 Introductory Essays
made, I wanted to be able to animate in a simultaneous yet contrapuntal,
layered way, visually and aurally. To bring the parts together into one form.
I also found it irritating to keep speaking to a public on panels. I wanted to
be able to show a clip of a film, something that had already been thought
and formed, with images and sound and movement. I needed to shift, and I
did. I wanted to create in a form that others could respond to without need-
ing an intermediary. A popular form that could also be erudite, containing
worlds, with kaleidoscopic potential. A form that didn’t require a docent.
The tour was contained within the form itself, if a tour was desired. Each
percipient following their own mental path, with its myriad associations,
while encountering a composed form in a space, whether on a tiny screen
or projected in labyrinthine rooms.
I’d been primed for this most of my life. From childhood tv studio ex-
periences and appearances, through my studies of photography and its
history, to courses in video and film in New York that I took after work-
ing day jobs, as well as having grown up with an electronic engineer, my
father. Once I’d made the decision to shift I had a little help from friends
who were already working in the field of film and video. My first exhibition
in which I used time-­based media extensively was in 1992, Import/Export
Funk Office at Christian Nagel Gallery in Cologne. Why I made the con-
scious decision in 1995 was related to the lag in terms of recognition of the
fact that I was continually growing and becoming, exceeding the categories
then used while attempting to classify my work, which used installation as
a format, within which were videos, films, still photos, prints, books, audio,
computers, and sculptures, which entailed attention to specific formats, as
well as to different relationships at play between these and the percipient’s
attention. Besides, as one person said, I was a “one-­woman diaspora,” physi-
cally on the move in addition to moving between forms. “Issues of identity”
were never appropriate as a sole container, yet various attempts were made
to squeeze what didn’t fit into this or that mold. It never worked. An excess
of slippages. Yet there are lots of books and catalogues that have been pro-
duced by many, attempts of all sorts, as attested by my shelves. The residue
of curious times and movements of art and culture throughout the world
during the past two decades.
P.S. Jimmie Durham lives in Europe, and it is said he will not return to
the United States. The same is said of Adrian Piper. I hope they live hap-
pily ever after.

Other Planes, Different Phases 13

 . . .

Another trajectory I followed in writing this book has been to explore the
writings of artists. Including the two above. I include a range of artists from
different disciplines within the arts. This has been an enjoyable endeavor. I
can imagine writing a book on these interests. My favorites. Most are dead
and are introduced by others. For the living, their own introductions are
sometimes brief. Sometimes they are longer. After all of the words included
in this book I don’t wish to add too many more. My wish is to suggest some
planes it’s been possible to move along, to traverse. My perspective on this
changing earth in this changing life. Some artists thank those it’s been pos-
sible to have good conversations with in different decades. I echo this sen-
timent. Another feels remorse: “If only I could take my words back: If only
I could have spoken.” He also refers to things that still can’t calmly be dis-
cussed. I feel no remorse, but his reference to things that still can’t calmly be
discussed continues to resonate. I am back here in this place, called at this
time North America, surrounded by ghosts, still writing and communing
with these distant friends, relatives, and ancestors, sending my voice across
the waters and through time to the loved ones.
To write retrospectively requires distance. I’ve been too much in the
midst of the soup of life to gain this perspective consistently. But perhaps
I’m moving into another phase as time passes, no matter how intertwined
the various aspects of inhabiting the earth continue to be. It can take some
time, as I can attest, to grasp this, beyond an intuitive inkling, no matter
how educated one is. “Educated fool”: what song lyric does that phrase
come from? Yes, Curtis Mayfield, “Don’t Worry”: “Educated fools from un-
educated schools . . . don’t worry, I say don’t worry” (echo effect).
Music is embedded in my mind and in my life. This emerges in various
ways throughout this book, including its title, borrowed from Sun Ra. I
value those who came before me. I give respect. Finding and remember-
ing their songs and music is one way, particularly as I come from a family
of generations of musicians and artists. I learned respect from the elders to
value what came before me and what exists beyond me. We can be dissimi-
lar and interested and respectful. Why should anyone or anything or any
place be the same?

. . .

14 Introductory Essays
For me, musicians have always provided examples of ways of being an art-
ist in the world, beginning in Cleveland with my mother, Gloria Simpson
Green, a vocalist and pianist, student of modern music, experimentalist,
teacher, and choir director; her friend Francis Cole, a relative of Nat King
Cole who was a harpsichordist and versatile pianist, accompanying my
mother’s singing as a youth; also known as Dr. Cole, professor of music at
Queens College; my grandfather Steve Edward Simpson, a tenor and pia-
nist with a vocal quartet; his brother, my uncle Jimmie, who was a pianist
in Detroit; my brother Derrick, a vocalist and musician, lead singer of the
Brazilian band Sepultura; as well as many other talented musicians in the
family. But despite the search for models, finding a way to be a visual art-
ist diverged from their paths, as well as the one I was on as a vocalist; I was
always a combination being, a singer who also made visual art and wrote.
My mother’s brother Steve E. Simpson Jr. is an artist and writer, but he
didn’t play music, although I did find jazz magazines of his. He counts as
an early model. I’ve searched for models who’ve worked as artists in any
aesthetic and creative form and who have also used words. It’s been chal-
lenging to find combination artist models; thus my interest in artists from
different times and places who seem to have these various inclinations con-
tinues. We exist.
I’d wanted to write this introduction in a fresh and breezy manner, like
Langston Hughes did in The Big Sea or like Duke Ellington did in Music Is
My Mistress, but I found myself back to facing a burden. I remembered what
Greg Tate, musician, writer, and editor of Everything but the Burden: What
White People Take from Black Culture, told me once, which was to revisit
Toni Morrison’s books. At the time I remember questioning his reasons for
advising this. I can’t remember exactly what he said, beyond the fact that
this was necessary as there’s something we need there. Eventually I took his
advice; while living in California, in San Francisco, and feeling very distant
from the warmth of conversations with New York friends, I began reading
every novel. I had stopped reading her books after Beloved. I remember
being in Berlin when Jazz came out. I didn’t feel like reading it. I wasn’t in
the mood then. That was in 1993. But by 2006, in San Francisco, after nearly
four years back, living in the United States, far from all that had previously
been familiar, amid many changes in the world, I was ready to dive into
Toni’s words. Greg was right. Paradise was deep .
While in California I also gained sustenance reading George E. Lewis’s

Other Planes, Different Phases 15

 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The aacm and American Experimental
Music. I note what I learned and continue to learn rereading George Lewis
and listening further to the music since 2008, but now with more awareness
of the divergences and discoveries that occur differently for artists than for
musicians, yet linked to related sentiments for agency regarding the art and
its diffusion. This is some of what I write about in Other Planes of There.
Unlike aacm (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians),
I thought about how an individual experimental artist who is a woman and
of the black North American mixture can thrive. I mentioned inventing
fam as a dream collective operation while in Berlin in 1994. Going it alone
in the world can be pretty lonely, and the work requires more than one per-
son, as an observant friend from a Swiss collective of the 1990s suggested.
But beyond that, in 2008 I was curious to think further about artist forma-
tions and the making of an experimental artist in America (North, Central,
and South). Yes, and all of the adjectives attached based on birth and his-
toric designations, but I wanted to also focus more specifically on ways of
becoming and being an artist in the world now, amid continual changes.
My notion of “combination people” began to develop when thinking of
what doesn’t fit any standard narrative for the development of an aesthetic
experimentalist born in the United States and how there are actually no
standard narratives, even if some formations have been shared. Reading
A Power reinforced that observation.
I’d like to convey that there remain things to know and to acknowledge
that are still difficult to calmly discuss, as Jimmie Durham says; or diffi-
cult to more broadly recognize, such as a claim to multiple histories and
a willingness to accept the range of participants in shaping these, despite
the immensity of words circulating and despite the passages of time. Yet I
take hope in words from aacm participants describing their journey with
the Association, that I use as an analogy to suggest my broader motiva-
tions in collecting some of my words here. Muhal Richard Abrams: “I be-
lieve in something bigger than I am as a musician [artist].” Adding on to
that thought, Shaku Gyo Joseph Jarman says, “Regardless of what we’ve
gone through, we’re still a part of the power that’s stronger than itself. Even
though all of the primary elements may shift, and even maybe one day the
name changes, it’s still there forever, it’s plugged into history.” A compelling
point Lewis asserts as one reason he wrote his book and which I echo: “to
encourage younger African American artists [and combination people] to

16 Introductory Essays
Intro 1.2 Animation Activation: Reading Performance Workshop, Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 17 April 2010.

see themselves as being able to claim multiple histories of experimentalism

despite the histories of erasure, both willful and unwitting; and to reassure
young black artists [and combination people] that if you find yourself writ-
ten out of history, you can feel free to write yourself back in, to provide
an antidote to the nervous pan-­European fictionalizations that populate so
much scholarship on new music [on new art].” I’ve made bracketed addi-
tions to these quotes as a way to stretch the potential of ongoing becomings
and a power stronger than itself, as I can imagine these.

. . .

Other Planes of There moves in the directions I’ve continued to move in, as
the titles of my two retrospective exhibitions, Ongoing Becomings and End-
less Dreams and Time-­Based Streams suggest.
In this book are words describing different kinds of encounters and
interactions. Encounters, in the most optimistic sense, take place between
a perceiver and perceived works, events, and places. Ideas, sensations, and
emotions may be stimulated, perhaps sparking others ideas, during these
moments of encounter. Other Planes of There contains writings that pro-
vide intimations to my works, written works that include essays, fiction,

Other Planes, Different Phases 17

 film and audio scripts, and those that exceed a category, as well as writings
that approach the works of others. I consider interactions to take place with
people, differently than encounters. Some of these are also written about
and included. This is not a memoir meant to describe a life, but is rather an
attempt to suggest a scope of writings from a selection of primarily pub-
lished writings, written in different parts of the world at different times
during my life as an artist between the years 1981 and 2010, in relation to
different works—considered in an expansive sense of the word—made by
myself or made by others.
This book is divided into five sections: Genealogies, Circuits of Ex-
change, Encounters, Positions, Operations. The subjects of the sections
each contain writings that span stretches of time and locations, yet share
a relation.

Notes

1. Steve Lacy, interview by Raymond Gervais and Yves Bouliane, “On Play
and Process, and Musical Instincts,” in Steve Lacy, Conversations, ed. Jason Weiss
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 71.
2. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 227.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1994), 218.

18 Introductory Essays