Irish Arts Review

The Boy from MarsAuthor(s): Christina KennedySource: Irish Arts Review (2002-), Vol. 27, No. 1 (SPRING (MARCH - MAY 2010)), p. 128Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25654741 .

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COLLECTIONS_

CURATOR'S CHOICE

The Boy

from Mars Christina Kennedy selects a work by Philippe Parreno from the collection at IMMA

1

1 PHILIPPE PARRENOb.1964 Still from THE BOY FROM MARS 2003 35mm film transferred to High Definition video, Dolby Digital 5.0 stereo with musical score by Devendra Banhart, edition 3 of , 11 min 0 sec Collection Irish Museum of

Modern Art Purchase, 2007

Philippe Parreno is part of a highly influential generation of artists that

emerged in the 1990s. His work

questions notions of time, reality and rep

resentation and has developed from a

wide range of sources including art the

ory, philosophy, science fiction, popular

culture and film.

The film The Boy from Mars (2003) com

prises a series of slowly unfolding

THIS IS A SCIENCE FICTION PASTORAL, 'AN ODE TO LIGHT AND EXTRATERRESTRIAL VISITATION',

moments, 29 frames, in 11 minutes and

40 seconds, where the long intense focus

of each frame of necessity captures the

oblique beauty of random images that

happen to occupy it. Parreno's approach

addresses reality without hierarchy, yet the

result possesses a heightened almost mysti

cal significance. The film is a chain of

dream-like images of mountains, stars,

clouds and water buffalo which might be a

paean to nature.

However what may appear arbitrary

comes from a highly artificial impetus in

which every detail of every scene is the

product of a complexity constructed by

the artist. Central to the film is a building,

called Hybrid Muscle, which was designed

by Parreno in a game-like collaboration

with French architect Fran?ois Roche. The

setting is a remote location near Chiang

Mai in Thailand. The building was created

as part of The Land Foundation, a collabo

rative project started by friend and fellow

artist RirkritTiravanija in 1998 as an art

research workshop for visiting students

and as an alternative site for living and

building without ownership. The making

of The Boy from Mars is the story of a film

that produced a building and the story of an architecture that provided the scenario

for a film.

Hybrid Muscle suggests an otherworldly

pavilion both primordial and surreal, a

UFO which has landed in an unknown

tropical landscape. It is a hybrid of science

fiction film-set and geodesic, eco-designed

shelter. The slow ambulations of an albino

water buffalo, harnessed to a pulley system

for an hour a day, provide all the building's

power needs including that required for

the shooting of the film.

Philosopher Simon Critchley1 describes

Parreno's films as about the happening of

an atmosphere, an evocation of space, of

tone, in which the artist, by tracking mate

rial particulars, returns authority from the

author/artist to the contingent massiveness

of nature. Historically, we associate such

artistic deference to nature with 19th-cen

tury Romanticism. Interestingly, this

thought is further nuanced by the artist's

rendering of the film's Thai landscape with

qualities of radiance and lambency which

recall the metaphysical landscapes of

Casper David Friedrich or the hyperrealist

'facts' of the painted world of luminist

American painter Fitz Lane.

However, this is a science fiction pas

toral, 'an ode to light and extra terrestrial

visitation', proposes Critchley. There is no

Martian boy but an orange glow subtlely

alludes to the Red Planet, a warm light

which flickers and intensifies bringing cer

tain elements to the fore especially as dusk

becomes night.

The Boy from Mars, ends with a song writ

ten and sung by Devendra Banhart, from

which the film takes its title.

Christina Kennedy is Senior Curator: Head of Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

1 Puppet or a God? On Philippe Parreno's

Films', Simon Critchley, Philippe Parreno (2009).

128 IRISH ARTS REVIEW I SPRING 2010

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