EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 155
sound designer Nicolas Becker, musician Agoria and others)
for the entire exhibition. At certain moments, two Disklavier
pianos, positioned on theloor under the “Marquees,” played on
their own, as though by an invisible presence.
IfDanny the Streetmade visitors feel as though they were
walking down an urban thoroughfare,Another Day with Another
Sun(2014), realized in collaboration with Liam Gillick, evoked the
parabola of a sun, from dawn to dusk. For this work, a spotlight
crossed the venue on a suspended track. he bright beam struck
the industrial columns and other architectural featuresof the space,
casting shadows resembling silhouettes of skyscrapers and bridges
on an expanse of white fabric hung from the ceiling.
As is typical with Parreno, the exhibition may be better
described as an event—with audiovisual stimuli unfolding over
the course of 100 minutes, in various staged scenarios—than
as a mere collection of artworks. Four videos were projected
on the white fabric, including the renownedMarilyn(2012), a
“portrait” of the late actress in which a robot imitates her hand-
writing and a computer reproduces her voice. Another projectedvideo wasInvisibleboy(2010-15), set in New York City; the
main character is a Chinese kid who imagines monstrous
igures in the narrow streets of Chinatown and in his home.
At HangarBicocca, the inal scene ofInvisibleboy, showing the
Manhattan skyline during a blizzard, merged with the shadows
cast on the screen by the artiicial sun overhead, theefect being
a blending of actual and imaginary urban landscapes.
he exhibition, curated by Andrea Lissoni (formerly of
HangarBicocca and now at Tate Modern), was titled “Hypothesis.”
As Parreno explains in a video interview, the title was meant to
echo that of his 2015 show at the Park Avenue Armory in New
York, “Hypnosis.” “I was interested in pushing a bit further what
I made in New York in order to produce a ‘hypothesis’ of what
an exhibition may be about,” he says. Indeed, the show—at once
a lyrical portrayal of an imaginary city, a dramatic event and a
gathering of works from throughout the artist’s career—expanded
the possibilities of the retrospective form.
—Federico Florianmen jostling about, engaged in some frantic competitive activity at
their feet that remains unseen and does not seem toit the rules of
any Western sport.
here were no wall labels in the galleries, but a 44-page news-
print magazine accompanied the show, reproducing many of the
images on display as well as others. It also featured an array of short
texts, borrowed and commissioned, that underline the impossibility
of any attempt to portray such an expansive area and even of con-
temporary travel reportage per se. he texts provide multiple lenses
(historical, architectural, geopolitical) through which the viewer can
begin to consider the images and their subjects.
As viewers made their way through the show and the publica-
tion, it emerged that—as with “he Great Unreal”—the works
are not always straight documents. Some, for instance, incorporate
images of objects found in the archives of theEthnologicalMuseum
in Berlin. In such works, the artists inserted—“repatriated”—these
objects back into their countries of origin by photographing them
against the travel shots, using the latter as backdrops. One image,
for instance, appears to show a preposterously large hammer stand-
ing in the middle of a snowy road; on close inspection, however,
one notices that a piece of thread encircles the handle and that
the tool is positioned against a photographic print of the land-
scape. Are such images corruptions of a true record, or a valid
attempt to improve and substantiate documentary work with
ethnographic insight, perhaps even taking on the dark histories
of ethnography itself? here is no easy answer to this question.
Such construction, or reconstruction, is central to Onorato and
Krebs’s practice, in which imagery and knowledge of the context
it illuminates combine to create the inal work.
—Aoife Rosenmeyer
MILAN
PHILIPPE PARRENO
HangarBicocca
Philippe Parreno’s survey exhibition at HangarBicocca suggested
an imaginary city. Urban elements—a downtown road skirted by
lashing signs, a skyline of skyscrapers, a quiet neighborhood illumi-
nated by moonlight—were conjured throughout the former factory
space, the works functioning as a massivesite-speciic installation.
Providing a main road through this city was the installa-
tionDanny the Street(2006-15)—a series of 19 of Parreno’s
“Marquees” suspended from the ceiling one after the other, at
diferent heights.hese dazzling sculptures, composed of plexi-
glass and lights, mimic movie-theater marquees or architectural
canopies and here marked a path for visitors to follow.Danny the
Streettakes its name from a DC Comics character: an anthro-
pomorphic roadway, male and “transvestite” (the stores lining
his streets are decorated with pink curtains and other “feminine”
accoutrements), that is able to teleport intodiferent cities. In
Parreno’s installation, the “Marquees” carried out a light and
sound show, their bulbslashing in patterns and their speakers
emitting an elaborate soundtrack (conceived by Parreno with
View of the
exhibition
“Philippe Parreno:
Hypothesis,” 2015,
showingInvisibleboy,
2010-15, 35mm film,
approx. 5¼ minutes,
at HangarBicocca.