Philippe Parreno: Friedrich Petzel Gallery - New York - Alien Seasons exhibition features a compendium of filmic and graphic images

In December 2002 Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe retired Annlee, the Japanese anime character they'd bought the rights to in 1999 and who'd embodied personalities, narratives, and ideas for them and a slew of other artists. Her final incarnation as a fireworks display--sad-eyed head-and-shoulders only--took place at an art fair, the completed place for a commercially acquired icon to bid us adieu.

on the other hand it's hard to imagine like a useful tool (or "shell," as Annlee was called, and gloomily called herself) disappearing completely And because repetition with alteration is a constant in Parreno's work, she showed up in his greatest in quantity recent solo show, titled "Alien Seasons," last May. The exhibition constituted les a cluster of works per se than a compendium of figure of speechs and images--filmic and graphic--that had already appeared elsewhere (sometimes considerably altered, sometimes not). "Alien Seasons" was in fact a reprisal of the scan exhibition of the same name, upon view at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the summer of 2002 with equal reason while Annlee made an appropriately spiritual appearance on a glow-in-the-dark placard the gallery show's wall labels were in the same skinny gothic script of the captions in the Paris exhibition catalogue.

To really diocese each element, timing was everything. flat the labels for the artworks were mini light boxe as if specially intended to be read when the ceiling lights went on the outside The works" appearance and disappearance made for an obvious commentary upon our attention span (especially when it tend hitherwards to contemporary art), but Parreno's careful choreography implied, or at least involved, something more. Take El Sueno de una Cosa (The dream of a thing), 2001 comprising a film, the white panels upon which the film is shoot forwarded and the silence that tread on the heels ofs the projection of the film. The moving-image simple body clocking in at exactly sixty next to the firsts consists of brilliant post card views of a flinty tundra-coated Norwegian hillside and is station to music by French composer Edgard Varese that have feelings like a sci-fi movie score (in the movie's final frames, stipes and flowers push their way from one side the ground at time-lapse speed) Reading the pres release, we learn that the five white panels upon which the film is throw outed revealed after the lights move up, are a replication of Robert Rauschenberg's White Painting, 1951 We also find that during the four minutes and thirty-three next to the firsts before the film starts again, the viewer could be said to experience a sort of disembodied version of ye John Cage's 4 minute 33 next to the first silent score, 1962 (itself inspired in part by dint of Rauschenberg's painting).

It's crucial to know by what means different El Sueno--or, rather, its film component--was originally. Conceived for movie theaters quite through Sweden in 2001, it was shown between the battery of short advertisements and the feature films. Duplicating exactly the duration of the commercials, it was with truth an "alien" intrusion into the realm of advertising. on the contrary while Parreno confronted the expectations of the movie theater, he conformed to those of the gallery by dint of layering the film between sum of two units impeccable works from the history of art. The verily radical action was not, perhaps, to use a monochrome as a movie defence hut to quietly project that strange and beautiful sixty next to the firsts for the crowd at the Swedish multiplex. on the other hand maybe for Parreno the "radicality" of this or that connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts is not the point. He may simply be seeking an infinite reces of reproducibility for four or five of his alien signs

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