Philippe Parreno

In the last ten years Philippe Parreno has developed an oeuvre that he defines as belonging to a humanistic philosophy of proximity. He arranges environments in which the hierarchy between the creator and the spectator evaporates. In doing so, he reverses the relationship of the consumer and the producer, and the viewer becomes the protagonist of the work. In his 1995 exhibition L'Etablie (Workbench) at the Esther Schipper Gallery, Cologne, Parreno invited people to come to the gallery to work on their hobbies, assembly-line style. In so doing, he integrated them into his usine à nuages (factory of clouds), namely, a great assembly line of weekend hobbies, the omnipresent industry of leisure and "free time." Let's Entertain includes two works by Parreno. Speech Bubbles (1997) is a mass of cartoonlike three-dimensional white speech bubbles trapped against the gallery ceiling. Unmarked and floating in our real space, these bubbles act as a kind of frozen narrative waiting for the visitor to inject this vacuity of language with meaning--our prerogative as protagonists in a story. The white cloud created by the bubbles changes the nature of the architecture in which it is contained, suggesting a slick, high-tech environment that wouldn't be out of place on a science fiction film set. Parreno is also producing a new video installation (2000), based on a pastime from his childhood, that will confront a vision of nature within the context of utopian dreams embodied by a 1970s housing project. A static shot of a tree swaying in the wind in front of such a complex serves as a backdrop for a running text. Resembling movie credits, this commentary written by Parreno becomes a reflection on film codes as well as a sweet analysis of the social and political statements grounding modernist architecture: a "dolce utopia." His work was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale.