'Thenabouts' - Interview with Philippe Parreno at ACMI (2016)

 

In 1996 the French curator Nicholas Bourriaud put together an exhibition called Traffic. In the catalogue essay he coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ (RA). He later expounded on this in his book Esthétique Relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics), in which he referred to the new trend of art which considered “the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”. RA works responded to the spatial specifics of the venue in which the art resided. The artwork and the viewers’ experience of it were indivisible. Time also became an ingredient in the mix. Artists such as Maurizio Cattalan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller and Pierre Huyghe were all included in this new concept.

French conceptual artist Philippe Parreno rose to prominence during the 1990s. In true RA fashion he describes himself as “less an object-maker, more an exhibition producer.”  Along with contemporaries, Huyghe, Gillick and Douglas Gordon – with all of whom he has occasionally collaborated – Parreno is interested in the exhibition as art object. Sound, image, time, movement and space, as well as the participation of the public who visit the exhibitions, are intrinsic elements of his work. Parreno and others have fundamentally shifted our notion of exhibitions. The exhibition itself has become Parreno’s medium, and he explores the possibilities of it as a unique entity, rather than as a disparate group of works assembled together. Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall is presently the venue of Parreno’s mighty Hyundai Commission, which features, amongst other things, soundscapes, cephalopods projected across screens and large, plastic fish that float amongst and above the crowd.

Thenabouts, now showing at Melbourne’s ACMI, is a retrospective of Parreno’s  filmic work, screened together for the first time in Australia. I joined him in ACMI’s conference room and we spoke about some of the films in the retrospective.

In 1999 Parreno and Huyghe purchased the copyright for a Japanese Manga character, ‘Annlee’, for $400. In a project called No Ghost Just a Shell (1999 – 2003) they made ‘Annlee’ available to a number of artists, free of charge, who were permitted to use her in their work in whatever way they wished. She, therefore, became a symbol of artistic collectivity. “We had set her free,” Parreno says, “from her fate and from her purpose.”

Two of the films, June 8, 1968 (2009) and Marilyn (2012) deal with historical figures, but in ways that question the nature of memory and the reliability of recorded history. I asked Parreno if he  feels that history is a construct. “Yes. And time is an abstraction. The past is conditioned by the future, which is invented all the time in the present."

June 8, 1968, is a short film shot from a train that glides through an American landscape. As Parreno explains, “it is presented in the point of view of the dead [the assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy], lying in the carriage. The people in the landscapes look at the camera - ideally, they should be projected to the same size as the viewer. It was shot on film, not digital, so the figures are made of light, not data. They are spectral. The mise en scene shows how America was moved and affected by the events."

Marilyn is a haunting work that unfolds gradually. The camera tracks through a set replicating a suite at the Waldorf Astoria where Marilyn Monroe once resided. Her disembodied voice describes the furniture and décor of the rooms; she writes on hotel stationary in close up. It is only at the end of the film, as the camera pans back, revealing that the ‘character’ of Marilyn has, in fact been ‘played’ by a programmed machine. The effect is quite sinister, I tell him. He nods in agreement. “I was fascinated by Marilyn's actual handwriting”, Parreno tells me, “and there is a lot, actually, in existence. It took a year to recreate this handwriting, using a lot of random and specific data. Marilyn's actual voice was mapped onto the voice of an actress."

Another film depicts a routine journey by a prostitute through a nighttime park. The sky appears formidable and threatening, glowing orbs drift earthward; the sound of an airliner rips across the sky; she eats a meal of noodles from a takeaway box. There is no denouement - this is clearly a fragment of a larger story that exists outside the parameters of the film. There is a claustrophobic sense of her predictable nightly grind. The attention to detail becomes almost nightmarish: a close up of the reeds around a lake, trembling in the night wind, becomes almost unbearably poignant. In its concentration on the incidental life going on around the protagonist it rather reminded me of both Charles Laughton's cinematic masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Roman Polanski's study of psychological disintegration, Repulsion (1965). “I conducted twenty interviews with Chinese prostitutes in New York”, Parreno tells me, “I tried to be in their skin. I noticed their despair; the one coat that they always wear; the void, the absence; the way that they would not look at people directly. That kind of thing."

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) is the collaborative project Parreno made with Douglas Gordon. It premiered out of competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It is a unique ‘documentary’ which follows footballer Zinédine Zidane through an entire match at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. "Originally”, says Parreno, “I wanted every one of the 50,000 spectators in the stadium to be provided with a camera, so that we would have every possible variety of angle and position to work with. That proved impossible. So we settled on just 17 cameras. I had recently looked at the portraits in the Prado in Madrid and I wanted to get some of that feeling in the imagery on the film. We coordinated the live footage from a van outside the stadium. It was a very long process. It took six-months to edit the footage."

I asked Parreno about the importance of collaboration within his work. "Art is a conversation”, he says, “and we need it. We never stop the conversation. Douglas (Gordon) and Liam (Gillick) are friends of mine. We begin with a dialogue about defining a thing. We establish a point of view around an object that is not existing yet. We explore the possibilities. But then it gets to a point where you think: Do we even need to do it? Because it already exists in our minds."

Would he ever consider working with mainstream cinema in the future, I ask. "Yes. Ever since the Zidane project I have been considering this. But an area that I would like to explore is the specificity of cinema and the expectations of the viewers who come to see the film. The viewers manifest a sense of collectivity. I would now like to go the other way around, and produce something where maybe some games can be played to subvert this audience expectation."

I was keen to discuss the film directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and David Lynch, who have been an influence on Parreno.  "Pasolini, was an artist who worked over a number of dimensions - writer, poet, political commentator and film director, and this was always very inspiring to me. I very much like Accatone; Uccellacci e Uccellini and, in particular, Salò, which exposed the audience to images in such an uncompromising and wonderful way – that film is such an extraordinary statement! And David Lynch is an artist whose strangeness belongs to everybody. We all share in his strange vision and we feel it in our bones." I say that I think he uses abstract sound in a similar way to Lynch: very deep, growling and thumping sounds, for instance. "Yes, the kinds of sounds that you feel in your chest. They are very powerful."

I ask Parreno how he would describe his relationship with the audience? "I don't call them the audience, but, rather, the public. And I don't think of the public at all. They represent a 'floating attention'. They produce a collectivity. They enter the space, but space floats, and time floats. They witness a moment of form, which is held for a while, and then is taken away. But there are also the 'between moments' that exist between imagery, and these are important also, because they don't quite know what it is."