cover #20 philippe parreno

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Philippe Parreno, no more reality, 2024, engraved limestone, Purple Residence at Melides Art, Portugal Philippe Parreno, heliotrope, 2023/2024, installation view at the Pola Museum of Art, 2024, courtesy of the artist and esther schipper, photo Andrea Rossetti Philippe Parreno, heliotrope, 2023, metal, optical mirror, servo drive, and cables, installation view from Philippe Parreno’s “voices” at leeum museum of art, seoul, 2024, courtesy of the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, pilar corrias, gladstone gallery, and esther schipper, photo Andrea Rossetti

 

 

 

Philippe Parreno, no more reality, 2024, engraved limestone, Purple Residence at Melides Art, Portugal

Philippe Parenno, membrane, 2024, concrete, metal, plexiglass, led, sensors, motors, microphones, and speakers, installation view from Philippe Parreno’s “voices” at leeum museum of art, seoul, 2024, courtesy of the artist, Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, pilar corrias, gladstone gallery, and esther schipper, photo Andrea Rossetti

interview and photography

by OLIVIER ZAHM

 

The French artist Philippe Parreno has redefined the exhibition experience as a contemporary ritual, bringing voices, sounds, and data to the heart of his creative process. Blurring the line between reality and fiction, language and sensation, memory and artificial intelligence, the exhibition becomes a spectral entity in itself.

For this issue on magic, we invited him to reactivate “No More Reality,” a 1991 video of kids protesting on the street. He engraved the words on a quarried limestone at the Purple Residence in Melides, Portugal.

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — The world of magic has been excluded from the field of contemporary art. For our generation, contemporary art is either a social commentary, meta data on art itself, or an intimate and internal obsession. The connections with enigma and mystery have been broken.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — For our generation, science fiction served as a source of wonder, amazement, or anxiety. In particular, there was the influence of cyberpunk literature, which questioned our perception of reality and asked this central question: what would happen if technology fell into the wrong hands? It could perhaps create a different or frightening world.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you link science fiction and magic?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Science fiction and magic both involve the creation of alternative realities, altered states of consciousness, illusory environments, paranormal experiences, and other phenomena. On one side, we have the world according to Marcel Duchamp and, on the other, the world according to Philip K. Dick, who for me was the ultimate writer.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is magic the invention of worlds and the rejection of science?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — This is essentially what the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux suggests with his idea of “worlds beyond science,” hypothesizing a future inaccessible to science, an imaginary future developing outside the progress of science. This is very different from science fiction, which always presumes the evolution of the world in line with scientific progress. Magic might be the imaginative world of science fiction without science — a world where science becomes problematical. Maybe this aligns with the idea of magic.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Unless it becomes possible to reconcile the worlds of science and magic, thanks to today’s incredible scientific advances… Do you have examples of magical things?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — As a student at the Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, I was struck by the writings of Carl G. Jung, especially on what he calls “synchronicities,” those coincidences in daily life that surprise us, deeply resonate with meaning, and defy any rational explanation.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Synchronicities are the simultaneous occurrence of two events that have no causal link but are intimately connected — for instance, thinking of someone just as they call you. This happens often and forces us to accept the idea of invisible phenomena or forces.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Yes, one must eventually encounter the idea of magic. For me, this came through pop culture and comics, particularly the works of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore. These two comic-book creators, within the realm of pop culture, are like magicians who lead us to abandon strict scientific rationality and explore inner worlds and alternate realities. Magic involves the power of words, which is crucial for me because I work with the voice. Alan Moore’s key phrase is: “The beginning is the word.” At the start, there is the word, the beginning of the spell. This all slowly began to make sense to me in the 2000s. I started understanding what a ritual is and imagining exhibitions as rituals.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How does an exhibition become a ritual?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — This happens from the moment an exhibition is more than a display of objects — when it aligns with life rather than just being a static presentation, when it reflects the space and time from which it originates, and when it becomes an experience in itself.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Is art synonymous with magic?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — When you draw Batman stories, as Grant Morrison does, it’s easier than when you create an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. [Laughs] But it’s true that we didn’t think like this in the ’80s and ’90s. Even fashion wasn’t viewed in terms of rituals or ceremonies. But there has always been something occult in my art practice. Very early on, I read Terence McKenna’s books on psychedelics and shamanism. Some of his ideas are utterly delirious, of course, but some are very contemporary.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Today, philosophers are starting to take an interest in magic, a field long excluded from philosophy because magic was seen as being outside the domain of concept, system, and even language.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — I’ve talked to you about Federico Campagna, who wrote a book precisely on this, entitled Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. In this book, he shows how magic today stands in opposition not to the idea of reason, but to information: magic is about leaving the world of information, a world entirely devoted to data.

OLIVIER ZAHM — From the moment everything becomes data, it can be visible and transparent — but also calculated and manipulated. What opposes the world of magic, then, is not reason, nor even what is visible or hypervisible through information, but what he calls the ineffable: what cannot be said or put into information, but which nevertheless exists. In this sense, there’s a contrast between those who believe there is only information — thus manipulation and calculation — and others, the artists, who bring forth worlds that are not stated or calculable. For you, is the artist on the side of the ineffable?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Yes, the artist is on the side of the ineffable, not on the side of language, artificial intelligence, or the great language models. The fear of artificial intelligence is precisely the fear that everything will become language, resulting in transparency and control. Art is on the side of the physicality of space and time, the unspoken, illusion, manipulation. An exhibition is also that: a ritual, a scenario with objects and visitors in a time and space. Art, like magic, deals with the ineffable and the appearance of phenomena that synchronize in space and time.

OLIVIER ZAHM — These phenomena are not calculable a priori, nor entirely predictable, nor certain.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Yes, they are apparitions and ghosts.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Every artist is a magician in the sense that they manipulate illusions or appearances. Painting is like that: if you get too close to the canvas, you see a chaotic, formless aggregation of colors and brushstrokes and pictorial gestures. Then you step back, and you begin to see a hand gradually emerging, with the delicate transparency of skin. There is a magical aspect to it. It’s not just about mastering the material.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Yes, it’s about an organization of the real in space and time until the form appears. That’s the magic trick, according to Marcel Duchamp’s little equation: “A guest + a host = a ghost.” Both are needed to produce what he calls the “ghost,” the form. It’s a negotiation between the guest and the host. The form is the ghost. The same goes for our bodies, our physical appearance, which is as much a spectral phenomenon as a physical reality. So, what interests you about the idea of magic in relation to the contemporary?

OLIVIER ZAHM — Last winter, I went through a personal crisis when I saw the violence in Palestine, children crushed under bombs every day, just like the witches burned, and then the terrible silence from the art and fashion worlds. I went through a dark period and started rereading Georges Bataille to try to understand the link between art, literature, and evil. This led me to an interest in Gnostic currents in the first and second centuries and Christian heretical movements. Long story short, I thought that, faced with the current darkness of our world, perhaps we need to turn to other resources. The world of intellect, progress, and rationality, and even the supposed engagement of the contemporary art and fashion worlds, was collapsing before me. I know it sounds naive, but I was in shock. I thought about magic. Could it be a resource, if not a solution? Not magic as an escape into a supernatural or paranormal world, but as another way to interpret reality. What if magic isn’t the dark, evil world it’s been made out to be, but rather a more intimate relationship with the world in its physical and spiritual reality, in its animal, plant, cosmic, and metaphysical dimensions? A silent world, secret, far from the constant noise of images and words that claim to describe, inform, and warn, but seem to plunge us into true darkness.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — It’s really the crisis of language! Today, language can no longer produce reality. It produces as many explanations as counter-truths, as many realities as fictions. It’s as if words no longer have an effect. It’s as if words are no longer heard.

OLIVIER ZAHM — As if language as a whole has died.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — There is a sort of reversal between reality and fiction. When language speaks of reality today, it’s no longer correlated with anything. On the other hand, what was fundamentally fictional is tending to become more and more real. From this perspective, it’s not a bad idea to look into the anti-language of magic to try to see more clearly.

OLIVIER ZAHM — So, let’s talk about your recent work. Can you tell me the idea behind your work Membrane, the luminous tower placed on the roof of the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, where you had your retrospective? It looks like an electronic totem.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — I worked with James Chinlund, a film production designer with whom I’ve collaborated for a long time. He became successful, went to Hollywood for big productions like Planet of the Apes, Batman, and Spider-Man, but we never stopped working together. What interests me about collaborating with him is that his job is to produce fictional worlds. I told him, “We’re going to produce a fictional world, and it will take the form of a tower.” The tower is 15 meters high, and it represents the diegetic space, the narrative space, the event space — the site where fiction can take place.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And what happens in this tower? It’s quite mysterious.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — In this vertical, one-dimensional world, with two moving, luminous rings, lives a faceless, nameless, and bodiless creature — a cybernetic creature to which I gave 42 sensors and 42 sensations. Its sensors are connected to everything it perceives in its immediate environment — for example, changes in temperature, atmospheric pressure, telluric waves, the magnetic field, etc. There are luminous rings that move, rise, and fall based on what the creature perceives. It has no eyes, no face, no head, but it’s an ultra-sensitive being. I correlated all these sensors like a frequency modulator. It captures signals, and we modulate them, creating sound variations. In a second phase, I gave it a voice, that of Korean actress Bae Doona. It’s important that this tower has no vision. It doesn’t know what this city is. What really interests it are all the things we don’t feel.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It remains formless. You didn’t want to make it an android, a semblance of a human, but it’s still a being of speech whose murmur and sound can be heard in the exhibition.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — You can hear its language. It doesn’t say much, but it murmurs. Occasionally, some words escape. We created a fictional language, which is then transferred to the exhibition. I create a fictional language, while in the outside world, languages and dialects continue to disappear.

OLIVIER ZAHM — All these sensors make it seem like an electronic octopus generating a strange, organic sound. The museum comes alive.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — I needed to introduce temporal events into the museum space. Since the 19th century, the museum has been an encased space disconnected from the outside world, an isolated space with constant temperature, constant light, no noise, no variables, etc. Creating contemporary art consists of accepting the parasitic flows surrounding us and letting them inform the exhibition.

OLIVIER ZAHM — This is your inheritance from Jean-Luc Godard: when a plane flies over in a film scene, it covers the dialogue, like in Weekend. But you go as far as creating a new language with these parasitic messages.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — I realized that putting all this collected data together creates a kind of hypersensitive creature capable of informing itself. So, I had the idea of giving it a voice, a ghostly voice, and creating a language for it.

OLIVIER ZAHM — How do you construct a language from this collected data?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — To create a language, I had to imagine what the tower might say if it could speak — as if I were the tower. So, I created a text imagining what the tower might say, alone and isolated in the middle of this city. The language is a classic subject-verb-object structure. The text I wrote was translated into this new language, creating correlations between what the tower senses and certain keywords.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Does the tower gradually learn this language?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — Yes. But we have given this creature six months, the duration of the exhibition in Korea. Then it will reappear in Basel, and it will say a bit more. After that, it goes to Munich, but I’ll change the voice. I’ll use the voice of a German television announcer who specializes in public information. By professional contract, she is committed to only state facts, not a single word of fiction, because her speech must be “credible.”

OLIVIER ZAHM — The tower’s cables are like tentacles or the web of cables in a city. It’s quite crazy to think that a city, like houses and buildings, is completely wired on every level.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — It’s a brain. It has a bit of a “superhero” side in the tradition of those great magicians of chaos like Grant Morrison or Alan Moore.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Has the human voice always interested you? I remember in the early ’90s, you imitated Jean-Luc Godard’s voice in some works or just for your friends. What fascinates you about the voice? Is it the presence without the body? Are you interested in the charm of the voice or in its mystery?

PHILIPPE PARRENO — What interests me is the acousmatic voice — that is, the voice whose source is unknown. It’s just a sound seeking to embody itself. However, it’s the voice that carries subjectivity or produces subjectivity. When you give an object a voice, as I did with The Speaking Stone, it becomes a subject — it enters the world of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. I did that a long time ago. The stone is a speaker. I placed it in a children’s workshop where they had to draw it, but they didn’t know whether to draw the stone or what it was saying. And so, it produced quite strange results. Because once an object finds a voice, it starts to exist in our human space in a slightly dangerous way. It floats with us. We enter an uncanny domain.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And the voice is also revelation. All prophets have heard a voice, and from there, they believed they were connected to higher forces.

PHILIPPE PARRENO — The voice is prophecy, anticipation, spells, magic. The voice has always fascinated me. My next book is actually called Voices. It’s a collection of spoken words and a catalogue of all my works with voices, starting from the early ’90s — like the video of the protest where children are marching in the street with signs, shouting, “No more reality!” — which is also a spell.

END