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There are two works in this exhibition that, in different ways, nicely summarise the oeuvre of Philippe Parreno. In the first gallery, a short, grainy, hand-held film depicting a group of French schoolkids waving placards and chanting the slogan, ‘No more reality!’ acts as a kind of manifesto for the Algerian-born artist, with his perennial interest in ideas to do with fiction, enactment, and the construction of meaning. Secondly, scattered throughout the rooms are little stacks of power-adapters: connected together into stubby, slightly ungainly branching structures which end in a gently glowing safety-light, they’re perfect allegories for Parreno’s aesthetic as a whole – works that often feel slightly contrived and precarious, but that hopefully end up culminating in some moment of subtle enlightenment.
Certainly, a sense of obliqueness initially pervades the three main films on display. The first, ‘The Boy From Mars’, contains scenes depicting a strange, tent-like structure somewhere in a rainy tropical savannah, along with some roaming water-buffalo, and various bits of lighting and machinery. The next, ‘June 8, 1968’ – a much more epic and visually opulent work – portrays bystanders in period American dress standing respectfully to attention as a train chugs slowly forward. Only the final piece, ‘InvisibleBoy’, makes any kind of immediate sense, with its story set amid New York’s Chinatown about an immigrant boy who alone sees, or perhaps imagines, another sort of alien altogether, in the form of various, otherworldly creatures – who Parreno has represented by scratching directly onto the film stock, so that their glimmering, pulsating shapes seem to occupy, quite literally, a different plane of existence.
To decipher the first two pieces, though, it’s necessary to read the explanations in the catalogue (there are, provocatively, no wall texts). It turns out the buffalo-powered contraption was designed specifically for the film, in order to provide energy for the cameras which could then record the contraption itself – an exercise in circularity, essentially – while the train film is a re-enactment of the journey that transported the body of the recently assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy. Not that these particular interpretations are, perhaps, ultimately necessary. Programmed to play sequentially, so that the audience has to periodically move from room to room, the films together convey a powerful sense of reiteration and endless recurrence, seeming to suggest that meaning is never something to be resolved or neatly completed, but only perpetually chased after.