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.
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