Philippe Parreno’s Thenabouts: in tedium we trust

Boredom has many faces: we can be bored waiting for a bus, or watching a film; we can be bored when forced to be idle.

Detail from Philippe Parreno’s June 8, 1968(2009). From Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts ACMI.

Boredom has many faces: we can be bored waiting for a bus, or watching a film; we can be bored when forced to be idle or when forced to be busy with a pointless task. In fact the most pernicious forms of boredom are always when we are obliged to do something that demands a portion of our attention without engaging our interest, like listening to a predictable conversation at a dinner party or being compelled to attend some social event, especially anything that involves interminable speeches.

Such situations are the most legitimate and almost inevitable occasions of boredom because they are at once inescapable and invasive. Most other forms of boredom, however, derive more from our impatience or lack of capacity to be present wherever we are and to find interest in the world around us. In the starkest sense, this kind of boredom is a manifestation of wanting, which draws us away from ourselves and prevents us from simply being in the world.

The consumer and media environment that surrounds us makes people bored and restless by relentlessly holding out the promise of stimulation and satisfaction through consumption. One outcome of this culture is the rapid rise of obesity in the English-speaking world, but this is only the visible part of the problem, or rather a symbol of an equivalent and equally insidious mental and cultural bloating.

The remedy is to consume less: obvious and yet almost impossible for most people to envisage, after a lifetime of Pavlovian conditioning into equating consumption with wealth, success and happiness. We need to eat less food, buy fewer clothes and other products, and even be more sparing and selective in our exposure to culture. Here too, less is more: we learn more from careful and patient reading, listening and watching than from bulimic devouring of every available cultural product.

The antidote to boredom from overstimulation is a regime of limiting the rate of stimulus to which we expose ourselves. This can involve reducing our intake of media and even forms of high culture, above all seeking ones that are slower and deeper rather than rapid and superficial, which is the norm in the mass media.

Anywhere out of the world (1999). From the exhibition Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts ACMI.

Much of the best contemporary art is concerned with slowing down the frenetic and ­futile activity of the mind and inviting stillness and attention, although by the same criterion we can see that some apparently ambitious work is really only contributing to the caco­phony and drawing on a turbid reservoir of passions and illusions. One could even argue that a certain kind of ostensible aesthetic boredom — most prominently espoused by Andy Warhol — can act as a homeopathic remedy against the unquiet boredom that corrodes our ability to be simply present with our own experience.

Philippe Parreno’s work can at its best be considered in such a category, but does not always seem to be on-key: some of it has a quiet focus, but some is spoiled by a self-conscious pursuit of effect or other grating affectations.

The presentation of the work in the installation as I saw it at the press preview was not favourable. We had been given the impression the films would be shown in a live mixing, and perhaps this is achieved in the exhibition proper, but in the preview they were shown one after another. We watched for more than 2½ hours, which under the circumstances, and given there was no proper seating, seemed interminable.

The whole space is meant to be arranged as a kind of installation, but it consists of flashing lights down the opposite end of the long basement room at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and plastic inflatable fish filled with helium, but not to the extent of floating of their own accord. The staff tossed one of the fish up in the air every so often in a desultory way, and it would drift slowly back to the ground.

As an installation, it must be one of the feeb­lest I have witnessed; the Tate Modern in London has a massive Parreno installation in its Turbine Hall until April, and the Tate website speaks of “a spectacular choreography of acoustics, sound lighting, flying objects and film, each connected to the other and playing their part in a far bigger score”. If this is true, Parreno does not seem to have made the same effort for his Australian audience. The contrast between the suspended fish sculptures in London and our plastic inflatable versions speaks for itself.

The trouble is that while the projection of the films sequentially was extremely tedious — allowing plenty of time to meditate on boredom in all its many varieties — their presentation as a mix would be incomprehensible and would in fact replace slowness, which may be at least potentially beneficial, with confusion and distraction, which are inherently bad. The result would be like the way that Marina Abramovic’s classic performance videos were spoiled in their showing at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart by being presented simultaneously on monitors, instead of experienced, as they should be, in real time, with all their slowness, repetition and obsessive build-up of feeling.

The experience is not helped by the fact that the films are so disparate. One that was particularly interesting had a digitally animated figure, looking like a kind of alien, speaking to the camera. The figure explains to us that they are not a real character but simply a blank, a kind of digital template for a character, an off-the-shelf, cheap and entry-level piece of programming that has a limited potential for customisation.

Of course the existential vacuity represented by this digital character becomes a metaphor for human experience. The pervasive presence of computers in our lives invades our self-consciousness, just as earlier forms of technology did. We have countless metaphoric expressions drawn from machinery, cars, planes, and forms of media, and now computers lead us to think of the brain as hardware, for example, and what we learn as the software: a tempting but reductive analogy, since it elides the more difficult question of consciousness. And how many people think of themselves, without being aware of it, on the model of animated figures in games?

Detail from Invisible Boy (2010). From the exhibition Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts ACMI.

At the most annoying end of the spectrum was a film in which a young woman thrust her face close to the camera, wearing a party hat and repeating the same archly contrived story, gradually getting longer, about a substance that is supposed to induce feelings of love. The effect of the film, with its self-satisfied and condescending attitude to the audience, was exactly the opposite.

A short film about a Chinese orphan boy raised a couple of interesting questions. We were read a fairly convoluted account of the story behind the film, but in a sense that is irrelevant, since the film must speak for itself. On these terms, it was a suggestive and sometimes touching glimpse of a child’s vulnerability contrasted with the overwhelming and impersonal darkness of a great city.

In another film that was meant to be a sequel devoted to the child’s mother, we were mainly presented with what could, in other circumstances, have been beautiful and poetic footage of plants growing on a riverbank at night. Here it simply went on for too long with no clear shape or direction. Once again one felt that even this, if presented singly in the individual projection-room-style of a biennale, could have been more effective. But projected sequentially with other very different things, all of its filmic weaknesses were cruelly manifest.

Detail from The Crowd(2015). From the exhibition Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts ACMI.

Another piece showed a crowd of figures in an enclosed space, occasionally seen in longer shots, but mostly as close-ups of heads lit in lurid chiaroscuro. The figures are herded ­together in proximity and yet have no social ­interaction, an image of the dislocation of ­people in a mass society that is not a community. At the same time they are drawn to a light coming from above, to which they look up in adoration: a metaphor perhaps for the rebirth of religious zeal in societies that are suffering ­social breakdown.

The most successful and memorable work in the exhibition was devoted to Marilyn Monroe, a figure who for half a century has been a kind of cultural palimpsest: the original actress, talented, intelligent, tragic, is overlaid with ­Warhol’s adoption of her as emblematic of the way that the modern mass media turns celebrities into two-dimensional patterns akin to brands or logos.

Parreno has recreated the hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria that Monroe occupied in New York in 1955. The camera pans around the room while the actress’s voice describes its design and furnishings: wall coverings, sofas, desks, coffee-table, ornaments. And then the camera switches to a close shot of a fountain pen writing on hotel stationery: we seem to be watching Monroe’s own pen forming her own words in her own handwriting.

But the voice is disembodied and we do not see the hand holding the pen, for all is done through computerised robotic movements. The speech is synthesised from recordings of the star’s voice, and the handwriting robot has been programmed to reproduce samples of her script. As both voice and handwriting routines are repeated, we realise that something mechanical is going on, and this is confirmed as gradually the camera takes a longer view, progressively revealing parts of the illusion.

First we see bits of scaffolding, then gradually we are shown the mechanism holding and moving the pen. And then the camera pans out to reveal that the whole room had really been a set built in a studio. Marilyn Monroe, as it turned out, had not only been reduced to a brand in her own day, but could now be synthetically reproduced, mechanically cloned as it were; a reflection, perhaps, on the further reduction of the actor, in the mass media world, to a consumer product.

The ending was interesting from another point of view too, because it was almost cliched in its use of the trope of illusion revealed. But it was also significant in being one of the few clear endings in a body of films mostly with little sense of starting or finishing.

Watching Parreno’s lengthy and not always gripping body of work, I couldn’t help reflecting that Aristotle was on to something with his conception of plot as the basic structuring device for stories.

At least the Marilyn Monroe film conformed perfectly to his definition of an ending: an action that implies something before it but nothing after it.

Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne. Until March 13.