PHILIPPE PARRENO

Theghosts of Parreno’s past projects come back to haunt this new series ofglow-in-the-dark posters that depict previously aborted works. Theposters must be exposed to light before the imprints become visible inthe dark, gradually fading away only to reappear when re-exposed tolight. The posters show quasi-objects - forms that do not exist on theirown but depend upon the conditions of the exhibition to appear.

Theimages bring to the surface of the conscious mind precisely the thingsthat it could not tolerate. Their slight radioactive decay energizes thephosphor, emitting a glow. The imprints of never realized works,failures and unfulfilled desires, were left behind in excess. Theycannot be truly qualified as artworks as they were originally rejected.They are the heterogeneous; the pushed back; the soiled; the abject; thegutter; the filthy; the snot; the scum; the excremental; thestercoraceous; the dross; the ragged; the eliminated; the pulverized;the ruined; the fermented; the spoiled, the decomposed; the negligible;the slag; the scoria; the putrescible; the rotting; the turd; thedejection; the evacuation; the sewer; the discharge; the release...

Risingto prominence in the 1990s, Parreno has earned critical acclaim for hiswork, which employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture,performance, drawing and text. He has radically redefined the exhibitionexperience by conceiving his shows as a scripted space where a seriesof events unfolds.

Parreno used this format for the recent exhibition, Dancing around the Bride at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which is currently on show as The Bride and The Bachelors atthe Barbican, London. For this show he has acted as metteur-en-scène(orchestrator), using temporal and spatial sequencing to activate theartworks of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, RobertRauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp.

At his current solo show at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Parreno presents Marilyn (2012),which premiered last summer at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel. For thisfilm he conjured up Marilyn Monroe through a phantasmagoric séance in asuite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, where she lived in the1950s. The film reproduces Marilyn Monroe’s presence by means of threealgorithms: the camera becomes her eyes, a computer reconstructs therhythms of her voice, and a robot recreates her handwriting.

PhilippeParreno lives and works in Paris, France. He has shown in a series ofmajor solo exhibitions at Garage Center for Contemporary Culture,Moscow, Russia; Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland; SerpentineGallery, London, UK; Hessel Museum, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; KunsthalleZurich, Zurich, Switzerland; and Musée National d’Art Moderne, CentreGeorges Pompidou, Paris, France.