In Paris last fall, critical attention crystalized around exhibitions by two darlings of the French scene and relational aesthetics, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. The overlapping exhibition dates unconsciously led to a sort of implicit comparison in the analysis and method of viewing, indeed even creating a rivalry between what the first-named artist had on offer at the Centre Pompidou and that of Philippe Parreno, which filled the halls of the Palais de Tokyo.

Both artists brought an intense impression of spectacle and sense of event to bear with their retrospective monographs. Each generated different, albeit strong, sensations while presenting his own particular aesthetic; but in the end, both targeted the same goal of creating a sense of community and a rather new, meaningful feeling of belonging. Clearly, in such a project, the account of the works and their experience is mediated through a particularly self-mythologizing kind of writing: the meta-account revisits prior knowledge of and discussions about the pieces in order to renew perspectives and so pronounce a new critical fate. This is accepted absolutely by Philippe Parreno whose exhibition “as automation” has a rhythm that unfolds as it follows the visitor on his or her progressive discovery of the art. Although equally true of Huyghe, such self-lionization is less frankly proclaimed; chance encounters might occur during a visit, but the artist’s work and his canonical narrative, haltingly and circuitously laid out, give the viewer a sense of writing his or her own story. This is an illusion that fails in the end.

Pierre Huyghe’s first major assertion lies in the decision to install his world in the framework of the previous exhibition dedicated to the work of Mike Kelley. Whether a position of modesty, allegiance to a Master or a frank reverence for the institution itself, the decision remains ambiguous and sets the tone for what follows. In this predetermined architectonic ambiance, the viewer finds – with nostalgia that only increases along the way – some of the artist’s most iconic images: these range from the mascot-headed figures to Atari’s pong, which is transposed to the ceiling (and one may play if so inclined). It is not so much the presence of these works that sharpens the appetite for this retrospective as the possibility of events and activities. In fact, a swarm of bees inhabits the exhibition (at a low ebb as winter came on, though the public awaits their return), along with ants, three aquariums occupied by hermit and miniature horseshoe crabs, a figure whose face is covered by a sort of luminous book, a skater on black ice, and finally Human, the pink-pawed whippet whose photograph invariably accompanied reports of Documenta 2012 in Kassel. The crowd arrives, wanders around, appears and disappears, following a script in which the viewer is not a hero, but merely a privileged witness. One must be present at exactly the right moment or risk having a disappointing visit to the exhibition, desperately waiting for one or other of the characters to appear, and contenting oneself with works that have paradoxically become more anecdotal than those longed-for presences, which in the end prove not quite so decisive. This gap between the supposedly unpredictable nature of events and the viewers’ wait is one of the first stumbling blocks that Pierre Huyghe proves unable to overcome while he carefully manipulates the strange segregation of the initiates into those who have seen, and the others, who can only hope to see. So, is the feeling of community thus founded on exclusion, or – rather – on selection as a kind of election as either witness or excluded-viewer? Is this the disaffected and cynical epilogue to the critical fate of relational aesthetics, appearing here in all its crudity and elitism? The experience takes on a peculiar intensity for those able to see everything – works and events – and a perplexity for those for whom the exhibition takes a turn towards the more traditional arrangement of various works. Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective delicately manoeuvres towards a reading centred on the search for a feeling of belonging to a community through the creation of parades, processions, celebrations, holidays, expeditions, and more or less fantastical narratives. In this work, Pierre Huyghe doesn’t positions himself as a guru, nor does he adopt sectarian structural principles though the exhibition nonetheless ends up generating that perception by its awkward segregation of initiates from mere believers.

Philippe Parreno has favoured a more programmatic and colder environment (going as far as a literal iciness in some unheated rooms). It is completely automated at some points and moments, a tempo that is characteristic of Anywhere Out of the World. Progressing through it, however, is no less physically and perceptibly intense as the body slowly becomes pitted against the immense, nearly empty spaces, barely punctuated by the presence of a work. Although heightened by scarcity, everything is there in this encounter. The sound of powerful rainfall in a staircase, a bookcase masking a hidden room, a concert of epileptic neon signs, Marilyn Monroe’s writing: Parreno painstakingly controls the viewers’ progress. Furthermore, he borrows his baseline from Stravinsky’s Petrushka (a love story about a puppet), bending to musical nomenclature in order to manage the pace of his viewers, who gradually become enthusiasts. Rather than being, like Huyghe, a priest of his own faith, Parreno is his show’s guide; his spirit singlehandedly reigns over it, but in a more fantastical way. Omniscient to the point of manipulation, Parreno has shown a singular obsession with spirits and the effects of phantom presences from his earliest works (a display of school-children bearing signs with the slogan “No More Reality,” 1991) to the meta-work that makes up the present exhibition. Rather than engaging in an indexing of his work, one programmatically reconstiuted a posteriori, Parreno picks up on one of the older components of his practice and multiplies its effects. Where Huyghe doesn’t take on directing his viewers (as one might direct actors), Parreno guides his followers’ footsteps. Scripting bodies, he carefully manages the traces of the experience and concretizes his community of initiates. Thus, after having taken in a pulsating version of Petrushka as performed by neon lights (Danny La Rue, 2013), the viewers move on to the next act as they approach the light emanating from a corridor, thus forming a line of backlit bodies that physically becomes a revelation image (by entering into the light). The silent, silhouetted procession leads to another chapter: automatic doors – in risky operating condition – open onto nothing: a film projected in front of a dirty snow bank, a speech by a young girl playing the character of Ann Lee. The viewer thus finds a certain freedom of action before the artist once again takes charge. Essentially videographic, this journey into the sprawling bowels of the Palais de Tokyo harbours the recreated works with brio. Zidane, Portrait du XXI^e siècle (2006), a cinematographic opus created with Douglas Gordon and first presented in cinemas, is multiplied by as many cameras as initially were required to make the portrait of this football player. All of them being fixed on Zidane for the duration of a football game (about ninety minutes), they never filmed the action, only the icon. Immersed in the hypnotic music of the group Mogwai, the viewer wears him or herself out before the single screen, held captive by the image despite the arid restrictiveness of the whole process. Once blown apart into almost twenty screens, the film takes on a whole other dimension, becoming more engaging to the gaze and the reception of images, allowing the viewer to do his or her own editing of the flux that somehow manages to make the central character even more active. After an initial monolithic, monumentalizing, sighting of the subject, the film gains a powerful, fantastical and magnetic dimension by becoming an installation. This retrospective exhibition allowed Philippe Parreno to perfectly metabolize his works and let him lend them an exponential sense of their potential while keeping them active. The atmosphere reigning at the Palais de Tokyo is that of an ecosystem in which each work becomes an organism and in which the viewer operates like an essential flux and not a simple testimonial anecdote whose function is to render an account of the event. Although Parreno makes no use of relational artifices, the viewer fits into his proposition perfectly and can feel his significance in the meticulous apparatus. What works astoundingly well in the almost literary, chapter-based progression is the way the viewer can move through it freely, turn back, drive the plot forward, or change his or her mind as he or she gradually gets used to Philippe Parreno’s rhythms and means. A freedom the viewer enjoys less – paradoxically – in the work of Pierre Huyghe.

If Parreno managed to formulate a hybrid and dynamogenic exhibition, masterfully re-orchestrating the issues in his work while offering a panoptical vision of his process, Pierre Huyghe seems to have arrived at a stumbling block. The feeling that emanates from the experience is that of a bygone moment, a profound nostalgia for the processes that have reached their epilogue. Already perceptible in his last films, the latent disenchantment has become blunt elegy. It’s the end of an age, and one person’s ghosts are already inventing a new world while the other bemoans its loss and celebrates its last living traces.

Translated by Peter Dubé

Bénédicte Ramade is an art critic, specializing in contemporary art with a concern for nature and ecology. Since 1999, she has been on the editorial staff of the magazine L’oeil and has also written for many magazines, including Parachute and Zérodeux. As an independent curator, she looked at the artificializing of nature in Acclimatation (Villa Arson, Nice, 2008-2009) and has shown ecological interpretations of recycling in REHAB, L’art de refaire (Espace EDF, Paris, 2010-2011). A lecturer at Université Paris 1 – La Sorbonne, she recently completed her doctorate, which focused on Infortunes de l’Art écologique américain.