Tag Archives: film

Lights! Camera! Philippe Parreno at Park Avenue Armory

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When you have a 55,000 square-foot exhibition hall like the Park Avenue Armory, you’ve got a lot of space to play with. French artist Philippe Parreno does so with some very beautiful lighting in a loosely timed exhibition structure that works as a conceptual frame for recent films. It feels like entering the belly of a mechanical, glammed-up 42nd-street-in-the-1950s whale. Neither it–nor that metaphor–are exactly coherent, but at least “H(n)ypn(y)osis” is fascinating to behold. Screens whir and click, pianos tinkle, music becomes drowned in ocean waves or city street noise (literally being pumped in from the outside streets), marquees blink, blinds shut, screens light, and bleacher seating begins its infinitely slow twirl.

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Installation view, visitors in front of piano playing itself

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Installation view during a lull in activity

Inside this vast space, the visitor is free to move about as he or she chooses. While something of an open-ended system of parts, moments of focus have been clearly selected. When I was there, two child actors entered together, drawing attention as they robotically began identical monologues in opposite parts of the vast hall, reciting dialogues from the perspective of Ann Lee, a Manga character Parreno ‘copyrighted’ years ago (this work is the result of a collaboration with Tino Sehgal). And of course, when the room darkens and a screen lights up, the crowd drifts toward it like a sea of minnows.

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The contents of the films and their tone varied–from a realistic meditation of the crowd that mirrored our positions as viewers in the audience to the imagined animated monsters of a young boy in Chinatown. The other films by Parreno on view are an animated manga version of Ann Lee talking to the viewer, a train ride mimicking that taken by the corpse of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and an uncanny reenactment of Marilyn’s life in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, which you gradually realize is being told not through her eyes but those of a machine.

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Installation view

That machine is the camera, ever-present in the exhibition as a whole. Parreno harps on the apparatus or lens by which the whole smoke-and-mirrors routine of film, and more largely of art, is made possible throughout–for example, in the exposed bulbs and wiring, the mechanical noises, and the simple drama of the lights going up and the show being over.

Up for one more week–through August 2. Make sure to allow yourself two hours to really see all of the different aspects of the exhibition. More images below.

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Installation view of video Anywhere Out of the World (2000)

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Installation view of film Marilyn (2012)

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Installation view of film Marilyn (2012)

Kentridge and “Le voyage dans la lune”

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In a nice round up of recent shows, Mira Schor likened the aesthetic of William Kentridge’s installation The Refusal of Time to early films by the Lumiere brothers, which I think is quite apt. It had me off in search of fellow pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès’s 1902 classic silent film, “Le voyage dans la lune” (Trip to the Moon), which I offer up to you here, for your viewing pleasure. It follows turn-of-the-century scientists on a trip in a cannon-propelled spaceship to explore the moon, which also deals with man’s desire for progress and knowledge, albeit in a fantastical rather than historical way.

An Expanded Take on Film: Cinematic Scope at Georg Kargl, Vienna

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The exhibition “Cinematic Scope” at Georg Kargl brings together the work of 6 artists who take a broad view of film, its aesthetics and presentation, in their artistic practice. In the work on view, projectors themselves become part of the medium or hanging flat screens adopt sculptural status. Above and below are installation shots of Wolfgang Ploger’s Texas Loud Texas Proud, where 16 mm film features text of the last words of executed Texas prisoners, illegible as it is projected on the wall but readable on the silkscreened film.

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It highlights the mediation of information and the technology used with subject matter that is distinctly different. Rather than as medium, the projectors become important as sculptural objects with the film strips exaggerating this effect by stretching from floor to ceiling.

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Tobias Putih’s Pre-projection takes film to its most distinctly sculptural iteration in the show, as it uses an enormous black pyramid to funnel an image onto the curve of a spoon on the gallery floor.

Manuel Knapp uses computer animation to create geometric planes of space which move and overlap to create spaces that seem almost three-dimensional. In this video projected onto the wall of a dark room, “film” as such seems irrelevant. The graphics form a moving sculptural element.

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Construction/Dismantling by Andreas Fogarasi centers around a never-realized architectural project, the three films surveying a desolate construction site, a temporary carnival, and the sweeping of a street. The most contemporary and quiet presentation, doing away with calls of attention to the means of presentation, never the less floats the three staggered screens and their content, demanding a consideration of them as objects.