Green, Denise 1946–

views updated

Green, Denise 1946–

PERSONAL:

Born April 7, 1946, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; daughter of Richard James and Gladys Enid Green; married Bruce Wolmer, June 4, 1970 (divorced March 8, 1977); married Francis X. Claps (a physician), November 14, 1987. Ethnicity: ‘Australian-American.’ Education: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris, France, B.A., 1969; attended Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1968-69; Hunter College of the City University of New York, M.F.A., 1976.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—13 Laight St., Ste. 5, New York, NY 10013. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Visual artist as member of ‘New Image Painting’ movement. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, member of graduate faculty, 1997—. Exhibitions: Work represented in nearly 100 solo exhibitions and more than 130 group shows, including shows at Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; work represented in dozens of private and public collections around the world, including work at Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Australian National Gallery, Arizona State University Museum, and Milwaukee Art Museum; traveling exhibitions include ‘Resonating: Denise Green,’ U.S. European, and Australian cities, 1999; and ‘Denise Green: Affinities with Joseph Beuys, before and after September 11,’ German cities, 2003, 2006;

AWARDS, HONORS:

Member, Order of Australia.

WRITINGS:

Metonymy in Contemporary Art: A New Paradigm, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2006.

Author of or contributor to exhibition catalogs. New York correspondent, Art Monthly Australia. Contributor to periodicals, including Art and Australia and Art Press (Paris, France). Coeditor, Semiotext(e), 1980-83, and Heresiese: Feminist Journal on Art and Politics.

SIDELIGHTS:

Denise Green told CA: ‘My book contains three main sections. One part recounts my personal experiences in New York and how this led to the writing of the book. The second part presents a critique of prevailing discourses in art criticism, with particular emphasis on the legacies of Greenberg and Benjamin. I then outline my argument for an Eastern aesthetic framework through the introduction of the writings of A.K. Ramanujan, a major Indian poet, linguist, and folklorist who taught at the University of Chicago. The third section explores how this aesthetic operates in Indian and Aboriginal art, and how it is also present in my own work and that of other contemporary artists.

"Here is what led me into this book. In 1976 I made a return trip to Australia and visited a site sacred to the Australian Aborigines. This experience gave me the conviction that there is a whole aesthetic and way of looking at art, and a different meaning to this work, that is not within the Western opus. It is only within the last two decades that an Eastern cognitive framework has been available to Western thought through the writings of Alan Roland and A.K. Ramanujan. My book presents a new paradigm for looking at contemporary art, based on this Eastern way of thinking."