online: 19 december 2010 modified: 12, 13, 18, 19 december 2010 12 december 2010 widening media perceptions
of Philippe Parreno at the Serpentine Gallery, London
...an old fashioned journey on a perhaps derelict railroad through rural USA made surreal by photography of huge magnification and vastly amplified and clarified audio recording...
...now change to a setting in Chinatown perhaps with dragons and solitary kids and repetitive haunt music until nothing is as it was... mostly at night... in atmospheric partial light as if in a horror movie but... baffling at first...
...weird and unnecessary addition to all this... against climactic sound and shaky people-like figures composed of sparks or something other... [actually, i learnt later, of scratched images on all-black fully exposed film stock superimposed on realistic images] and it ends abruptly with a solitary child moving in near darkness... un-frightened and un-reacting to all this
what begins as a sound-only film projected on whitest of walls (almost blinding or vision blurring) until faint images of the word 'reality' ... and chanting faces... in rapid montage of sounds and spaces repeated... repeated...
the impression as a whole is of being in so foreign a vision of the previously known that it is unrecogniseable
The Boy from Mars... an exaggerated title for a near night scene in water meadows... in approaching darkness with water buffalo... and eventually and slowly light sources appear in the evening storm sky as if of unidentified aircraft... arriving and descending like helicopters after which a series of illusions... reminiscent perhaps of space movies or any other attempt at conscious strangeness...
...now a few of the lights arrive into a white or black decor at which... to earthquake-like sound... and faked tree wind... and the buffalo now sipping lake water and sinking into swimming posture with only head and nostrils and horns above water surface...
...now faked heavy rainfall... with loud thunder and lightning... and unrecognisable shots of lit industrial buildings or structures with lights and reflections in water... and slow song in distance as we sit into darkness...
(my) second or third viewing of the landscape film (from front of moving train:}
...people (paid or otherwise induced to) stand still alone... or in groups... alongside the track as if natives of a strange land in which we trespass...
[i learnt later it was a re-enactment of the train that carried the coffin of Robert Kennedy... and perhaps the silent standing people were impersonating those who may have been watching the funeral train of a murdered celebrity of the 1960s?]
...police cars... and people in colourful clothing... and complete stillness of posture... as we progress to magnified click-clacks of wheels on discontinuous rails reminiscent even of the moving sand hill of Francis Alys...
...had the gallery not been closing i could have written much more of this description... but probably this is enough to inform those who may come across this writing...
next morning:
woke to all these as signs of new extended perception now wider (and no longer narrowing as was the classic cine camera and magnetic microphone) to herald new history of widening human condition...
'if you look through the camera you can't see the whole... you have to choose a part'
this sequence of only slightly-edited and barely intelligible live notes as (semi-bewildered) i wrote my impressions of what i was seeing and hearing and otherwise experiencing as powerful illusions.... or gallery-as-movie... indicative perhaps of a change in our thought-to-be familiar world of... (changed human condition... as beyond historical life... yes life as described so profoundly by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition)?... so what does it mean asks the voice of someone other... this is imaginary or not real in an old sense... it never happened like this... or like this is an edge... or unsaid... it's not meant as explanaton... is this new culture beginning?...
...and this is white space, or is it silver?
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