Fraught Times:
The complete title of the work is: "Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it's an Artwork and in December it's Christmas".
We are dealing with the idea of timeframe. But this is not the idea of time in the sense of time-based media. The whole idea of time can be explained with a greater degree of lucidity and much better metaphorical game-playing. Connected to play with the length of time we might engage with something. Now this in itself is not a new concept yet the formal crisis that result from trying to address the time factor without using traditional time-based media such as film, tape slide or narrative.
There has been discussion of the failure of radical European movements being a result of their focus upon the occupation of space rather than time. Some now see this as their main error and certainly heir downfall.
It could be said that we have moved into a period of distorted earnestness. Where the desire to play with time has destabilised the formal properties of the art. Certain things have become hard to read because they are only being read into the present. Remember this has nothing to do with time-based ideas alone. Rather we are faced by a much more disturbing set of doubts. How can you get hold of time? How can it be possessed and played around with? These are not the desires exclusive to art but are somewhat different from the most superficial form of quotation that used to pass for postmodernism.
The tree has to look like a regular Christmas tree, it is in fact a generic colourful Christmas tree. One of these Christmas tree you can find in Buddhist countries. It is a Christmas tree that has nothing to do with a religious event. We are dealing with a time marker and with a decorative object, a weird plant that grows in the winter and dies in January. It is a fragment of an urban landscape, a feeling of suburbia.
I used to believe that the smell of freshly cut grass was a seasonal smell. Autumn was the season during which trees lose their leaves; winter came with Christmas gifts and sometimes snow. The season of freshly cut grass simply worked on a shorter cycle so it was more frequent than the others. Nature flows like piss in a child's bed. It always finds a way to erupt in domesticity. For a long time the only nature exhibit I was exposed to was the empty lots of housing estates, the Christmas tree in the living room (and I'm talking about real Christmas trees with their smell of pine needles falling to the wood floor), the geraniums on the balcony and the sticky stuff that you could sometimes see at the base of a plant's branch. I learned later that it was honey made by aphids; we called it forest honey. (Have you ever seen bees in a forest? Stupid! Euh, let's me think, yeah you are right). There was also an adopted sparrow, clouds of June beetles, the public pool, ski slopes, camping grounds, white mice crushed under human footsteps, and guinea pig squeals when you opened the fridge door.
The Christmas tree is a time monument.
All the decision making has to acknowledge the fact that the tree has to be as permanent as a aluminium sculpture, it has to resist to the weather but more than that, in July the tree has to look fresh, as if it has just been decorated. There is empathy for the newness that comes with this type of object. A decorated Christmas tree always looks new because that is what it celebrates... The method will consist of enlarging a fully decorated Christmas tree with a magnifying effect almost to a cinematographic scale.
The 2.8 meters high blown up effect Christmas tree will be made of painted and cast aluminium to give a realistic look. It will be manually painted. All religious Christmas displays will be banned, the largest palette of colours will be chosen. The snow covering the branches of the tree will help us to simplify the shape of the tree by avoiding the details of the pine spines.
The tree will be painted in green; the shadows will be painted as well. To render the glittering and reflecting effect of the snow we could use the roughness of sand casting, and traffic paint will be used - reflecting white paint, the one used for road surface marking - in order to render fresh snow. The snow is an important element of a sculpture that wants to play with the season. The ornaments will be chromed and coloured. The entire tree will have a different Christmas ornaments, garlands and tree toppers.
As part of the "Fraught times, For Eleven Months of the Year it's an Artwork and in December it's Christmas", a series of publications will be edited in place of a catalogue. I will like to ask different authors of children's book to write the story of a Christmas tree that refuse to be burned or recycled at the end of the Christmas period and runs away. He goes in the forest were he is seen as a fake by the others, hangs out in cemeteries or in cities but always get rejected by all the real trees and ends up being a public sculpture in a park.
The book will be read during as series of workshops. This is the way the sculpture will inscribe itself in the city, through a fairy tale read to kids and can become public.
Philippe Parreno, Paris December 3rd 2007