Edition Detail

In December 2010, The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned Renée Green (born 1959 in Cleveland, Ohio) to create a permanent “Media Lounge,” as MoMA had no space for ongoing display of its media and performance collection. Green created the Media Bichos – a work, a space, a migratory intermediary system – which is accompanied by Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho).

Following a trajectory that has run through most of the work Green has produced, the Media Bichos created for MoMA continue an exploration of forms of relation to spaces and locations that can be traversed and temporarily inhabited – including one’s own body – and the kinds of experiences that can take place in these spaces.

Media Bichos were conceived as an intermediary modular system that can exist in expandable and contractable forms which function as an intermediating structure and space altering device. Several interfaces are considered: that of a perceiver’s traversal and pausing; that of the various electronic immanations encountered via screens, that include audio and computer devices; staggered banners that are suspended and are visually animated by how the perceivers “read” these and extract meaning from combined sign & symbol systems while moving through the space.

Each Media Bicho structure is constituted by panels of wooden frames, cladded with varied textiles; the panels are especially hinged to allow innumerable possibilites of shape, arrangement and color configurations.

The double-sided color banners that constitute Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho) reference the radical aspirations of Modernism, inviting different readings of this history, albeit in conjunction with worldwide specific, divergent, and combinant Modernisms, and what lay beyond. Functioning as a space-demarcating work, Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho) continues Green’s engagement with language, knowledge transmission and recuperation, complex histories, color, split attention, and perceptual movement.