Anywhere Out of the World

At irregular intervals, a procession of children crosses nearly all the mega-screens in a Palais de Tokyo completely taken over by a single-artist exhibition for the first time in its history.

The exhibition is a “blank canvas” but also a retrospective on Philippe Parreno, the French artist who stepped onto the international stage in the 1990s. The choir of children obsessively repeats just three words in unison,: “No more reality”. It is a 1991 work and more than an attempted synthesis it is an obsessive underscoring of the key concept and drive behind the artist’s work strategy.  

To occupy and immaterially appropriate the 22,000 square metres of what is an iconic contemporary art venue was quite an undertaking in itself. In Parreno’s case, the strive to deconstruct is even more obvious with the monumental entrance completely redesigned with one of his Marquee(s), a mute structure-sign composed only of industrial lights. The Plexiglas structure on the exterior is drawn from a series commenced in 2006 and other works occupy the huge basement.

In creating a real (but fake) theatre hall, Parreno has rethought the functions of the Palais de Tokyo, starting from the ticket office, and immersed visitors in a glaring backlight production in which only the silhouette of every figure – attendants, visitors and officials – appears.

This marks the beginning of a cinematographic experience with neither script nor actors. Visitors encounter an astonishing and lucid vision of the other world, and pass from magical realism to being plunged into a bizarre choreography that wipes away all previous exhibition experiences. One illuminating work is the kinetic and minimal structure entitled How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance? (2013) for which a stage is installed in the large rotunda and the only sound is made by the steps of the Merce Cunningham dancers.

In the Palais de Tokyo, Parreno has set out a continuum of installations conceived and produced throughout his artistic career, now re-proposed through the filter – or more probably the spectre – of collaboration and he reactivates the line of research shared with other artists in an all-absorbing approach for the occasion. Even the architecture is, in this way, reinvented and on a monumental scale provides a model by which to “gauge” and perceive all the situations played out.

Fifty-eight lights function with devastating intermittence and shatter it only to construct an uninterrupted route recomposed by rhythmic and effective music. Every darkened space is governed by reprogrammed and rhythmic lights. A secret bookcase, Dominique Gonzalesz-Foerster’s La Bibliotheque Clandestine (2013), is masterfully cut into a wall and swings open to reveal a splendid garden.

Inside it, John Cage’s drawings of the stones of the Ryoanji Temple are coupled with animal ones by Merce Cunningham. This is a re-proposition of an exhibition held at the Margaret Roeder Gallery in 2002, in an apparent reminder that art has come through more traditional media and remains effective. Visitors are immersed in a technological mausoleum governed by robots and fortuity. Little does it matter whether this is the apotheosis or the waning of the relational aesthetic since, not without irony, we are haunted by the ghost of past projects. This light reveals a merciless face lift in a place not even imagined by the founders of the Palais de Tokyo, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerôme Sans, an attempt to erase the signs of passing time from the factory of meaning.

On show are Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Randall Peacock and director of photography Darius Khondji. It is not difficult to draw a parallel with the season’s other retrospective on Pierre Huygue at the Pompidou, who partnered Parreno in No Ghost Just Shell. In this daring project, the two artists bought the rights to the Japanese manga Annlee and placed her in the exhibition context, clearing a path for the notion of non-auteurship. It is the most successful work in the exhibition, an accurate metaphor of the hiring of concepts for ad hoc contemporary use.

until January 12,2014
Philippe Parreno. Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World
Palais de Tokyo, Paris