The work of Philippe Parreno, the Algerian artist who lives and works in Paris, blurs the boundaries between art and its surroundings, loosening the coordinates which fix the artist, the image and the image’s visibility. Through a process of
"This generic, colourful Christmas Tree is one of the kind that you can find in Buddhist countries. It has got nothing to do with the religious event. Instead it is a time marker, a decorative object. A fragment of an urban landscape, a feeling of suburbia, that mimics this weird plant that grows in the winter and dies in January.
I used to believe that the smell of freshly cut grass was a seasonal smell. Autumn was the season during which trees lose their leaves; winter came with Christmas gifts and sometimes snow. The season of freshly cut grass simply worked on a shorter cycle, so it was more frequent than the others.
I used this type of tree as inspiration for my piece, Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it's an Artwork and in December it's Christmas. I see the Christmas tree in the living room – and I'm talking about real ones, with their smell of pine needles that fall onto the wood floor – as like the geraniums on the balcony and the sticky stuff that you could sometimes see at the base of a plant's branch. Nature flows like piss in a child's bed. It always finds a way to erupt in domesticity."
Philippe Parreno (born in Oran, Algeria in 1964) loosens the coordinates which fix the roles of the artist, the image and the image’s visibility. Through a process of non-authoritarian creation he allows for new narratives to unfold where actual and fictive time and space bifurcate and confront one another. In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), his feature film made in collaboration with Douglas Gordon, 17 movie cameras placed around a stadium follow Zinedine Zidane throughout one football match.
Most recently, Parreno has embarked on a series of individual retrospectives, at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and, most recently, at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College, New York. His first solo exhibition at a UK public institution runs at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 25 November 2010 – 13 February 2011. Philippe Parreno lives and works in Paris.
Text by Donatien Grau
