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Review of Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere,

Out Of The World

(with reflections on a post-relational art)Palais de Tokyo

13 avenue du Président Wilson Paris on view through January 12th, 2014

Could my soul be dead? Is it then that you have reached such a degree oflethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness?

-Charles Baudelaire, Anywhere Out Of The World

Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of

The World

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Relational art is dead. But its waggish ghost, le grand vide, is on full flaunt.

My cognitive encounter with Philippe Parreno’s vast but fey exposition

Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World was anything but otherworldly.

Rather, I related to it by way of a psychic thump into an obtuse obstruction.

That might sound peculiar, given the blow up relational art is treated to here

(to the scale of 22,000 square metres), but it is precise.

With the officially sanctioned support and celebration of relational

dematerialization (celeb-commodified into a brand - and co-opted by the

star-state-socio-economic system that is its life blood) the relational aesthetic

(established by Nicolas Bourriaud1 now director of the École Nationale

Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) is no longer an idealized mode of art activity

that (supposedly) accepted the full range of all human relations as art in

opposition to private objects and spaces. No, that shamanistic idea is now

exhausted and has turned cold and cynical. With relational officialdom

(other current prime examples being Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective at Le

Centre Pompidou, the Dia Art Foundation sponsored Gramsci Monument by

Thomas Hirschhorn, and Tino Sehgal’s win of the Golden Lion for the best

artist in the International Exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in the Venice

Biennale) an exploration of the full range of all human relations is clearly

untenable - and human intimacy pays the price.2 The obscurantist artist as

1 Artists included by Bourriaud under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics include: Rirkrit Tiravanija,Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, Henry Bond, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe.2 Actually I thank Parreno for sprucing up the Plais de Tokyo and lowering the ceilings.

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catalyst - by means of flighty creations of intentionally stuplime3 works that

fluctuate between sculpture, music, film clips and small Fluxus-like events -

has turned the successful relational artist into star-impresario-entrepreneur: a

very specific, limiting and quasi-domineering human relation. Coupled with

lame fun-house-laboratory4 work based in an aesthetic paradigm of

aloofness that is so cool it verges on cold, the relational art star (now draped

in mystification) is placed firmly back at the center of things and torn away

from artworks that create a social environment in which people come

together to participate in a private/shared activity that is open-ended,

interactive and resistant to closure.

The inherent detachment of pretentious work-in-progress post-medium

practice, shorn of any deep commitment to medium specificity, seems to

inscribe this condition of superficiality on the artist, yet guarantying a

circular commercial success: a truly Mephistopheles-like metaphysical

situation. It is interesting to note that Claire Bishop has suggested that such

work “seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory:

rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual

reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.”5

Underlying this aim was once a miasmatic ideal that questioned linear and

hierarchical structures and sought to replace them with atmospheric loose

structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This ideal

3 In her chapter on “ Stuplimity” from Ugly Things , Sianne Ngai offers this term as a necessary reaction tonew, primarily postmodern, objects of analysis, a term that acknowledges stupidity and boredom as part ofthe sublime expression connected to the postmodern art experience.4 curators promoting this “laboratory” paradigm include Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van derLinden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud5 Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" October (Fall 2004, No. 110) p. 52

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(similar in part to Bruno Latour’s Actor–network theory) suggested a

consideration of the enlargement of the audience's normal participation; both

in regard to the spectators ocular aptitude to instigate variations in the

perceived optic, as well as her capability to produce kinetic and aggregate

exchanges on or within the work of art itself.

Of course this was – and continues to be – the basis of Kinetic Art.6 Indeed

Kinetic Art ideals7 play an unacknowledged, but important, part in relational

aesthetics by pioneering the unambiguous use of movement and by

fashioning links between science, technology and art relating to the notion of

the environment. This linking set the stage for whose relational artist, like

Parreno, that blur and hybridize traditional categories and genres.

This historical link was well exemplified by Palais de Tokyo’s last mega-

show, that of a precursor of Kinetic Art and Op Art,8 founding member of

G.R.A.V. (Visual Art Research Group): Julio Le Parc. Le Parc incorporated

kinetic/optical research notable for its immersive attributes given its

realization on an architectural scale.

6 Simply stated, the term kinetic means the study of the relationship between moving bodies, hence the termKinetic Art is usually used to describe either three-dimensional mobiles or constructions which move ineither foreordained or unplanned ways.7 Artists increasingly aimed in this era to evoke possibilities within the imagination of their audience and toengage their active participation and to release art from its previous obligatory fidelities to the hypotheticaland material status quo.8 Much of the disappearance (Popper), de-definition (Rosenberg) and de- materialisation (Lippard) of the artobject that went beyond Modernism (Burnham) in search for a total art (Henri) developed out of the visualspectator's participation called for in viewing Op Art: a hard-edge geometrical movement which flourishedin the early-1960s (largely inspired by various optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp) in the work ofJesus-Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley, the GRAV group, and others.

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The work increasingly became a co-operative production of the operation

between the object d'art and the viewpant,9 as the viewpant is enabled to

sense the various spatial possibilities the shifting work suggests.10 In terms

of artists of the 1960s working in this new expanded-field, a great example

is G.R.A.V. (Groupe de Recherche d'Art) (Research Art Group), a group of

eleven artists who picked up on Victor Vasarly's concept that the sole artist

was outdated.11

As the blending between the artist and spectator took on greater and greater

emphasis during the period of the late-1960s new forms of aesthetic

immersion opened up. It is precisely in this blending that the question of art

as ambiance arises.12 With both Op Art (which is kinetic in that op situations

employ optical illusion which effect an appearance of motion) and Kinetic

Art (both conceptual descendants of the shifting perceptions initiated in 20th

century painting with Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism) the artwork

9 My term for viewer participant. Joseph Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances , LAP LambertAcademic Publishing (2009) p. 5610 For more on this see Frank Popper’s book Art - Action and Participation, where he shows (withparticular reference to post-kinetic research) the convergence and specificity of the notions of environmentand creative participation which combined to form the principal direction of art research in the theoreticaland practical domains. In Art - Action and Participation, Popper found that mixed-media expressions thatinvolve all the senses, are conducive to the more complete involvement of the spectator and that scienceand technology can act as creative stimulants.11 G.R.A.V. was active in Paris from 1960 to 1968. Their main aim was to merge the individual identities ofthe members into a collective and individually anonymous activity linked to the scientific and technologicaldisciplines based around collective events called Labyrinths. Their ideals enticed them to investigate a widespectrum of kinetic and optical effects by using various types of artificial light and mechanical movement.In their first Labyrinth, held in 1963 at the Paris Biennale, they presented three years work based on opticaland kinetic devices. Thereafter they discovered that their effort to engage the human eye had shifted theirconcerns towards those of spectator participation; a foreshadow of interactivity. On April 19, 1966 GRAVcreated Une Journée Dans la Rue (Day in the Street) in Paris where they invited passing participants toinvolve themselves in various kinetic activities such as having them walk on uneven blocks of wood and/orexperience a distorted world by wearing elaborate distorting spectacles. Their agreed dissolution inNovember 1968 was based on their recognition that it was impossible to maintain the rigor of a jointprogram.12 The term ambiance used here follows Frank Popper's definition of the artistic environment as a meetingground of physical and psychological factors which implicate the spectator's inherent participation in theart's fulfillment in a delicate, atmospheric way. (Popper, F., 1975)

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under consideration is no longer merely a categorical system but

increasingly a relational aesthetic act.

In Parreno’s version of playful poetic relational art (as louche stage set

design)13 spectators take up consecutive positions inside faux displays in

hopes of detecting emotion within the shifting time frames. That means a lot

of waiting around - as the dead time has its due. Indeed, the boredom of dead

time and empty space seem dominantly linked here, as various pauses and

visual lines of sight offer themselves up from within the vast void, lending

equal weight to contrary and incompatible angles. Particularly at Pierre

Huyghe’s exhibition, one at times feels like one is waiting for a bus. This is

the dominant emotion: a fearful sense of oppressive disempowering

indecision where one hesitates to leave a boring situation out of concern that

one will miss something delicately interesting that is coming along any

minute now. But when it might become interesting, is never clear. (It never

really does.)

This idea of placing the audience in loose and shifting time and points-of-

view was once envisaged as the basis of forming community,14 but when

institutional wealth and power intervene, one cannot but help but coolly

watch this detached mode of art fall feebly into a bottomless pit of hubris,

enabled by the internet and its narcissistic social technologies.

The sad irony of this is the good intentions, based on the 1960s-70s

humanist lost dream of the decline in the art object's sequestered, fetishistic 13 In response to a carte blanche invitation, Parreno devised his exhibition with the notion of the exhibitionas a medium in its own right.14 See Popper, F. 1975. Art - Action and Participation. New York: New York University

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standing as object d'art. But dematerialized linked relations have now turned

de-humanist, superficial and a little cliché robotic. Hello Edward Snowden.

Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of

The World

After the Snowden revelations, what is required in art today (particularly in

Europe, it seems to me) is a radical art of non-relational freeing, an art of

loosening the audience (at least symbolically) from the relational model of

databases with their relational classifications and procedures. In this new

non-relational or post-relational context, Parreno’s once breezy mischievous

art of ambiance has now become top-heavy official art that functions in a

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domineering relationship15 to the (rather passive) audience. The need for a

post-relational aesthetics seems evident to me, and I shall return to the idea

below, for one might ponder just where do we go after the death of relational

aesthetics. But as Charles Baudelaire says in his poem N'importe où hors du

monde : "Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!"

("N'importe où!n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!")

Parreno views the exhibition as a postdisciplinary medium, an event/object

in its own right, an experience whose every possibility he seeks to explore -

and I take him at his word. In Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World there

were flicking lights (that resembled Le Corbusier lamps) that

choreographed/corralled me through the network of vast galleries on three

floors. Parreno’s choice of a Jumbotron (a/k/a Jumbovision a/k/a

Jumbowank) a huge-screen digital-visual technology typically used in major

commercial intersection like New York’s Times Square and in sports

stadiums and concert venues immediately makes my point about forms of

relational power. As does his installing an overwhelming huge wall of

blinding white light located behind the reception desk. It assaulted my

retinas as I had to passively submit to wait in line for the privilege of visiting

Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World.

15 By exposing the public’s actions and external choices to authority where events are measured in terms ofobjectification (to some extent), and thus to the participation of the public in more or less advanced formsof control and reification.

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Installation photo taken by the writer of the blinding white light wall behind the reception desk

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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of

The World

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A player piano taking up a vast room playing Petrouchka by Igor Stravinsky

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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of

The World

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Installation photo taken by the writer of automaton video on the Jumbotron

For me the choice of a Jumbotron as vehicle for exhibiting a collection of

Parreno’s rather undemanding and almost flippant video clips, such as a fake

protesting throng of school children shouting and waving banners in support

of "No More Reality”, could even be, if I wanted to be nasty, theorized as a

form of relational aggression16 (also known as covert bullying), a type of

social aggression in which harm is caused by damaging someone’s psychic

relationship to themselves via the other. This was almost so, as Parreno

appeared to try to intimidate me with his display of empty grandeur;

signifying luxury, mystification and wealth. As I will explain below, this ties

16 Relational aggression is defined as a type of aggression that is intended to harm others throughmanipulation of their social standing.

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into relational data mining, the data mining technique for relational

databases and the need for a post-relational art.

Such bogus grandiosity by the puppet master is encountered over and over

through the extravagant exhibition of objects, such as human-less player

pianos, one taking up an entire room (there are a total of four player pianos,

all playing Petrouchka (1911) by Igor Stravinsky). This spurious grandiosity

is especially evident in the form of some of his video soundtracks,

soundtracks that call to mind the worst moments of sham solemnity and

kitsch romanticism found in the epic space opera franchise Star Trek. Recall

to your mind, if you dare, the most pretentious moments of such films: when

the enemy star craft is ominously lurking behind some corny dark star while

preparing its devastating attack on the good guy’s Enterprise. While such

bombastic relations with the visitor seem a ludicrous hypocritical

inconsistency within relational aesthetics (and laughable) I am certain that it

will not harm Parreno, for Parreno is now a celebu-artist and so peu importe

qu'il le fasse. To be fair, at times I was nodding in accord with this freedom,

and in the next moment I was aggravated, shaking my head wondering how

it all ties in together. But I like to have my prejudices exposed and

challenged and it seems that this exhibition did just that.

For close to three hours I explored. There was a mammoth room full of his

blinking marquee light sculptures, his marquees electric tiaras, based on

landmark cinemas and theatres. These light sculptures are particularly

unimpressive yet still suggestive of relational aggression, as they call to

mind a tender opposite: the melancholy light sculpture Untitled, (North) by

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1993).

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, (North), 1993, 12 light strings 22 lightbulbs each, extension cords,

porcelain, as installed at Milwaukee Art Museum.

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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of

The World

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Again it must be recalled that Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s by

taking the exhibition as an art medium in itself,17 thus gaining the attention

of curatorial practice, so I think that my critical observations of the

installation as relational aggression are pertinent. He conceived this show as

a scripted space where a series of events unfold.18 That is why relational art

as a medium is dead (to me). It has unfolded. By taking up where Kinetic

Art left off concerning the element of scripted areas where limited physical

motion is expected of me within a controlled public (seemingly) space. This

meant a desired decline in the art object's sequestered (some would say

fetishistic) standing as an object d'art. But thanks to Mr. Snowden, I have

realized that I do not want that anymore. I want a psychic escape from

cybernetic-like19 circularity and causality that surveys me and links and

groups me together with masses of others. I want contemporary art that

sequesters - one that encourages and honors my private feelings and

thoughts.

I believe what that means for art is a post-relational, post-de-materialized

personalized art object that can be lived with over extended time. Such a

17 Parreno has supposedly radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as acoherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works.18 From the PR: “Philippe Parreno orchestrates his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo along the lines of adramatic composition where the spectral presence of objects, music, lights, and films guide and manipulatethe visitor’s experience, offering a journey through his works, both old and new, transforming thismonologue into a polyphony. Philippe Parreno plays with symbols, words, and sounds, to alter the visitor’sperception of the space. His meticulously mastered script metamorphoses the building itself into a quasi-living, perpetually evolving organism, into an automaton.”19 As pointed out by John Johnston in his The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and theNew AI, a special feature of cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems primarily based on the ideasof Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964) is that they explain processes in terms of the organization of the systemmanifesting it (e.g.,the circular causality of feedback-loops which enables cybernetics to elucidate complexrelationships from within—useful in formulating a creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within a psyche and between the psyche and the surrounding environment).

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post-de-materialized art seems timely,20 as now, due to offline computer

processing, a new flexible and malleable aspect has been brought to art

production. This has been exemplified recently by curator Ronald Labaco,

with his show of computer assistance art Out of Hand: Materializing the

Postdigital at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.21 That kind of

computer assistance malleability results in the post-relational art object that

still places an emphasis on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices as

being temporary effects of processes of negotiation between subjects,

contexts and their relations.

So for me, post-relational art is that contemporary art that builds upon the

legacy of relational aesthetics, but where off-line non-relational digital

processes take precedence over traditional relational aesthetic concerns. So

this is art now, more often than not, connected to digital art production

where the computer code sets the conceptual rules for a physical production.

I have identified this post-convergent and post-relational trend in 1999 as

one of viractuality.22 23

20 However, as historical precedent, in 1954 Yaacov Agam began to undertake research into what he calledtransformable structures (the equivalent of paintings and reliefs) and transformable objects (the equivalentof sculpture) where the spectator was obliged to take up successive positions in front of the reliefs in orderto discover the sequence of changing lines, forms, colors and structures which offered themselves fromdifferent exclusive angles. Agam himself pointed out that all his works are in fact transformable, but hereserves the term in particular for those in which the basis of the transformation lies in being able to modifythe pictorial structure; for example in the 1953 piece, Nuit. He extended this premise immersively with hisTotal Picture Environment Salon at l'Eysée in Paris.21 Out of Hand is mainly a design show with an aesthetic point to make. It defines the “ postdigital” style asalgorithmic baroque. But that is only one option.22 Joseph Nechvatal, 1999 PhD thesis Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances . Published in book form withLAP Lambert Academic Publishing, in 2009, p. 5623 Christiane Paul, in her seminal book Digital Art , discusses my concept of viractualism on page 58. Oneof the images she chooses to illustrate that section of the book is my painting entitled the birth Of theviractual (2001). Joe Lewis, in the March 2003 issue of Art in America (pp.123-124), discusses theviractual in his review Joseph Nechvatal at Universal Concepts Unlimited.

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The post-relational art object shows us that a lacunae world of incessant

transmutation has emerged in art that correspond to how we now live: in an

open area of vast connecting links we want out of. The keystone of the post-

relational art is that virtual producing rule-based computer technology has

become a significant means for making and understanding contemporary art

and that this brings us to a place where one finds the merging of the

computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This

blending of computational with the object indicates a subsequent emergence

of a new topological cognitive-vision of links between the computed virtual

and the uncomputed corporeal world. Thus this is not a simple return to hand

made art but a technological art that respects human individual imagination.

So we must consider now that, in contrast to our frenzied data market

surveillance culture,24 that which trains us to fear the atrocious eyes of outer

perception, a protracted gazing at a post-relational art object could

encourage the development of noisy exchanges25 based on the individual

intuitive eye in conjunctive contact with an abundant optical-mnemonic

commons (not cloud)26 that shares a sensibility for building personal

freedom assemblages; new modes of organization of the individual-

24 For example take the fact that now under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, is theblandly named Utah Data Center, being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immensesecrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept,decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellitesand zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms ofcommunication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches,as well as all sorts of personal data trails - parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, andother digital transactions. It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness”program created during the first term of the Bush administration, an effort that was killed by Congress in2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. For more on this trend seeJames Bamford’s book The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping onAmerica. Anchor (2009)25 My interest here is in post-relational art objects that challenge and sometimes exchange the hierarchy offigure and ground (figure and abstraction) through struggles with noise.26 The term “cloud” is often generally used to describe a data center’s functions. More specifically, it refersto a service for leasing computing capacity.

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collective from which all could benefit. Of course the post-relational aspect

is what allows art to construct unstable distinctions between subjects and

objects that embraces the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces; from the

infinitude of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality. The question is:

how do artists and dealers and critics prevent the market from eliminated

that quality from art?27

Certainly globalization is all about world space, so noisy post-relational

aesthetics must be thought of in terms of spatialization: dimensions, areas,

and territories. What space does post-relational art clear and what space does

it clog? How does the post-relational art object function as an attractor for a

gazing-commons and as a repellent in the monstrous era of global data

mining and the digital surveillance state? How can post-relational aesthetic

thought help us to think and live differently within our smooth and surveyed

spaces through art? How can we live more intently and intensely in our

imaginary cosmos of pleasure rooted in the non-closure of a post-relational

aesthetic? Perhaps by not ignoring the differences between the intimate and

the political, but on the contrary, by showing how these differences resonate

together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in the words of Gilles

Deleuze: planes of consistency from which new art concepts can be formed.

We must address the palpable question of what is art’s responsibility of

resistance in a post-Snowden world? Perhaps surprisingly, for me the answer

is to be found within the challenge of a noise style based in the cultivation of

27 One artist putting considerable effort into redefining the post-relational aesthetic market, for me, is HalMcGee. He proposes a personal form of communication in his audio art, seeking two-way reciprocalpersonal correspondence that bypasses an essential flaw of the internet forum system of communication,and it's inherent detachment.

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invisibility.28 So I want to argue here for a style of post-relational art of logo

invisibility - and the importance that should be given noise aesthetics for the

post-relational art object.

The principle of constructing patterns of infinite becomings through noise is

perhaps inherent in avant-garde artistic tradition values. But a post-relational

art, I think, should be considered in terms of noisy invisibility not ontology.

This is so as deviating from the regularities of visible normality of relational

art provides new sources for artistic production. Certainly, the values of

relational art have always been interfering with the channels of artistic

production and reception - and these values are responsible for expanding

the forms and definitions of art itself. But like in nature, noise as post-

relational art object plays a productive role in the invisible life of a system

when it stresses becoming-imperceptible.

Joseph Nechvatal

Paris 10/26/2013

28 Perhaps this should not be surprising given the hidden complexity of a basic internet transaction is amystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip throughhundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrivesacross the street.