Less than two years after his monumental takeover of Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the French artist Philippe Parreno has once again been given the rare opportunity to utilise a massive, though decidedly different, space - The Park Avenue Armory - to realise his latest creative vision. The rather curious result is ‘H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’ (pronounced ‘hypnosis’), an exhibition that finds Parreno continuing to work in tune with his 1990s origins and relational aesthetics. Most of the characteristics that have come to define Parreno’s prior work seem to be present in ‘H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’ , from his inclination for collaboration, to the involvement of ‘usual suspects’ - Pierre Huyghe, Tino Sehgal, Nicolas Becker, Mikhail Rudy, Darius Khondji, and Hans Ulrich Obrist among them - to his fondness for incorporating later, modern, and contemporary classical composition, and also the very multi-media nature of his art.
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Armory Artistic Director Alex Poots, and Consulting Curator Tom Eccles, ‘H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’ is, conceptually, thematically, and in execution, unmistakably the kind of work we’ve come to expect from and identify with Parreno. It is a distillation of sorts from his milestone Palais de Tokyo exhibition in which his preoccupations with the relationship between space and the experience of art as manifested or affected by built architecture, the traditional art exhibition employed as a medium in and of itself, and the unique power and agency of the inherently immaterial human faculties of imagination and memory, were explored. Here these preoccupations play out within the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the main open space of the Park Avenue Armory (as opposed to the 200,000+ square foot labyrinth of Palais de Tokyo) and it is this transition in both the scale and layout of available space that becomes one of the decisive factors in determining how the installation manifests.
At the Armory, Parreno has honed in on a specific stretch within the Drill Hall that runs from its interior entrance to its far wall, wherein an assembly of light sculpture installations - 26 imaginatively-designed marquees - demarcate something akin to a theatrically minimal and phantasmagoric boulevard. This forms the skeleton of the entire exhibition, and is collectively titled ‘Danny the Street.’ Before strolling down this familiar yet exotic, richly evocative ‘boulevard,’ visitors are ceremoniously ‘christened’ into Parreno’s play space as they pass under a wide, lone, antique marquee which ably sets a mood and narrative for what’s to come - at once nostalgic, melancholic, haunting, even touching - as it evokes a glamour mostly long gone.
A perpetually rotating platform rising out of the ground called ‘Bleachers,’ meets visitors at the other end of the boulevard. It is from this vantage point that those attending ‘Hypnosis’ will likely witness, or more aptly, ‘inhabit’ most of the musical, composition-like multi-media ‘performances’. Amongst other things we experience sound, manipulated dialogue, music emanating from hidden speakers and ceiling windows that open and close to let in or shut out daylight from Lexington Avenue outside. Also present is ‘Anywhere Out of the World,’ one of a series of works revolving around a Japanese manga character named Ann Lee that Parreno bought with Pierre Huyghe in 1999. A troupe of girls performing as Ann Lee (and directed by Tino Sehgal) interact with visitors and the ‘Bleachers’ platform itself, surrounded by alternating screens on which the exhibition’s films are shown.
This being a trademark Philippe Parreno production, visitors are constantly compelled to experience the physicality of the exhibition and its components, and to cognitively soak in its sounds and images. Space has been exploited to the extent that - purposefully or not - it calls attention to itself at the expense of the properly materialised portion of the exhibition, transcending the traditionally segregated dimensions of viewer and artwork. And what of the subject matter that all of this labour presumably aims to allude to? Much as the exhibition’s title manages to not quite so subtly squeeze in a repeat of the initials ‘NY’, all of the films in some way involve New York City in their storylines, and at times the sounds of life (or traffic) on Lexington Avenue can be heard pouring into the space. The bulk of ‘Hypnosis’ is expressed through the supposedly never-repeating cycles of lights and sounds in ‘Danny the Street,’ which is simultaneously so competent at richly and emotionally evoking a specific context - that of Broadway and the 1920’s - as well as a general human experience. On a base level it also succeeds at physically being what it is - a giant assembly of mechanical equipment and technology, confounding attempts at any definitive conclusion.
‘H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’ seems to elicit both the human and machine simultaneously. Despite this, each of its components stubbornly maintain their singularity as distinct and established mediums, while successfully working collectively to project something larger than the sum of their parts – it is in this that we find the installation’s true ‘hypnotic’ quality.
