The viewer put to the test of "one shot" : Around Philippe Parreno's films

Abstract

During the 2013 retrospective of Parreno's work at the Palais de Tokyo, a DVD containing two films by the artist was distributed with the purchase of an admission ticket. The packaging stated that the films would be erased after the first viewing. This ambivalent "gift-withdrawal" was the occasion for a subjective questioning of my status as a "viewer", a consumer of art. The analysis of the films shows how the artist reverses the double heritage of M. Duchamp's single machines on the one hand, and A. Warhol's icons on the other, to the field of the visual technologies of the Society of the Spectacle. The figure of Marilyn, seized as a trans-historical motif floating between Annunciation, star and ghost, highlights the constancy of the project of the image, over the course of historical and technical developments: to designate the unrepresentable of death.

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