The uncanny world of Philippe Parreno
The artist’s solo show at the Beyeler this month includes
new films starring a black garden and a robotic Marilyn Monroe
By Louisa Buck. Features, Issue 236, June 2012
Published online: 15 June 2012
Philippe Parreno has been described as “permanently
moving”, and certainly his work, whether made on his own or in his frequent
collaborations with fellow artists, evades easy definition in its constant
exploration of how art can and should be experienced. The Algerian-born,
Paris-based artist is probably best known for two collaborative works, each of
which uses film to examine notions of portraiture and the representation of
individuals. Zidane: a 21st-century Portrait, made with the British artist
Douglas Gordon in 2006, is composed of footage shot from 17 different cameras
trained on the French footballer Zinedine Zidane during a match between Real
Madrid and Villareal. For No Ghost Just a Shell, 1999, Parreno and the French
artist Pierre Huyghe bought the copyright for the Japanese Manga character
Annlee, and then invited artists to make work in response to this off-the-peg
avatar. More recently, Parreno has been working alone, but for his solo show at
the Fondation Beyeler in Basel
The Art Newspaper:?Why did you choose to make a film about
Marilyn?
Philippe Parreno: It started with a little book that a
friend sent me of fragments from her notebooks—and what I liked was her
handwriting.
So you were attracted by her words and her writing, and not
her face or her image.
The book was published because this year people are
celebrating her death, and in my work I am interested in celebration. I was
interested in the idea of celebrating a dead person, of trying to portray a
ghost. Why are ghosts interesting? Because they are unfinished, heterogenous.
Marilyn Monroe represents the first time that the unconscious killed the
person—her image killed her. So we had to use an image to bring her back. The
film is the portrait of a phantom incarnated in an image. Or, to use a
neologism, an attempt to produce a “carnated” image.
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