PHILIPPE PARRENO with Charles Eppley by Charles Eppley
MUSEO JUMEX | OCTOBER 26, 2017 – FEBRUARY 11, 2018
I initially encountered the enigmatic artworks of Philippe Parreno (b. 1964) as a first-year graduate student of contemporary art history at Stony Brook University. His video piece Anywhere Out of the World (2000)—part of a collaboration with Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962), wherein the artists together purchased, distributed, and enlivened a stock manga character, Annlee, through digital, cinematic, and other means—was emblematic of a contemporary moving-image practice situated between formats and ideologies, as well as divergent modes of analog and digital representation and spectatorship. Parreno’s work is often contextualized in the frames of cinema and theater, and a convergence of the “black box” with the “white cube” through large-scale video environments and architectural installations. As a burgeoning scholar of sound and new media art, I was drawn to his hybridized media forms, particularly as they challenged and expanded visual regimes of museum spectatorship.
Parreno’s conceptual works, at some times playful and wryly imaginative, at others, deeply personal or carefully detached, are infamously distributed across formal and institutional boundaries. His stylistically inclusive and structurally permutational mode of art-making is based on a repurposing of forms and an acute sense of self-awareness. Representative of the diffuse, likely impossible-to-define, paradigm of “contemporary practice,” Parreno’s work has come to symbolize a broader transformation of the artist into something—anything—other than a maker of objects. In the past, Parreno has referred to himself as less an object maker than an exhibition producer, a view from which this interview begins, but which is set aside to explore other topics such as yeast colonies, puppeteers, music, disease, recuperation, automatons, and cephalopods. Our discussion was initiated around two of Parreno's most recent exhibitions—The Yeast and the Host at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and The Marquis and the Sisters at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis—and conducted on a brisk December morning in New York City.
Charles Eppley (Rail): I know that you’ve done a lot of interviews recently, and I don’t want to retread too much of that territory. I’d rather just have a conversation about what you’ve been doing recently. You have an upcoming exhibition at the Museo Jumex, which is your first in Mexico, and another at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. I believe that you also have an upcoming exhibition in Berlin as well?
Philippe Parreno: Yeah, in Berlin at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum, at the end of May.
Rail: I was actually in Mexico City at the time of the Museo Jumex opening, but wasn't able to go. I was on vacation. Perhaps instead of going through the whole spiel about how your medium is the exhibition apparatus—you know, that’s been done in other interviews, why don’t we just get into it and talk about what you’ve done in Mexico.
Parreno: The Museo Jumex exhibition is called La levadura y el anfitrión (The Yeast and The Host). It’s sort of an attempt to create a weird dialogue between a microorganism and a human person. I started to do something a bit like this in China this summer at the Rockbund Art Museum. The idea is to run the timeline of the show—the order and appearances of events in the space—not through a machine, but through a weird interaction between a yeast-like life that lives in a bioreactor and a host, or a person hosting the visitors and playing piano and deciding to play visual sequences. The dialogue produces something that is, well, it’s not like a John Cage chance thing, but it’s more of a non-periodic loop, you know? The events are determined by chance, but they will never repeat themselves.
Rail: The concept of non-periodicity reminds me of writings on music by the French composer Pierre Boulez, who I know that you have read—
Parreno: I have read Boulez, yeah.
Rail: It’s a phrase that Boulez used to describe his own piano music. The piano is a trope in your work, within both the films and installations, such as in H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS (2015) at the Park Avenue Armory. In that work, some of the piano material had that very non-periodic quality—when nothing is repeated, only continuing.
Parreno: Yes, absolutely, Boulez was a super big influence. You know, Boulez classically made some pieces, where just to turn the page of the score, it was an influence on the way you play the music. So, yes, the structure of The Yeast and The Host has to do with that, but it’s the first time that I have really used a player. I thought about it many times, through a metaphor of the dhalang—you know the dhalang? The dhalang is a performer in Indonesian opera, a person who is literally hosting an audience, but also plays a puppet show, manipulates a puppet, is a puppeteer. He’s also the guy who produces the voice, and is the conductor of the orchestra, the ensemble of instruments. I have always been fascinated by this kind of character—he’s sort of interesting. I thought about this when I did the exhibition Anywhen (2016–17) at Tate already. Maybe the show should be run by such players, so to speak. I don’t know what to call them—hosts, in the case of Museo Jumex; puppeteer? The player of the show?