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It is the standard procedure, when visiting someone in central Paris, to ask in advance for the door code that allows you into an antechamber from where it is possible to buzz your host’s apartment I always forget this So it is that I find myself on the street, separated from the studio of one of the most exciting artists of the era by the width of a door and my own logistical incompetence The neighbouring crèche gives me short Parisian shrift I consider how embarrassing it might be to shout ‘Philippe Parreno! Philippe Parreno!’ when the man himself emerges, smiling at my predicament I tell him that I was rebuffed by his neighbour; he explains that she was only attempting to disguise the fact that the kindergarten is Parreno’s own clandestine ideas factory, in which the superficially motiveless creative activities of the unwitting children are, at the end of the day, gathered up as R&D for new projects   The joke is a good one because, to co-opt the cliché, it is not entirely implausible in the context of Parreno’s radical, witty approach to creative practice He is an artist who has spent his career challenging received notions of how art should be made and experienced Foremost among his principles is a kind of communalist approach, appreciable in the two defining characteristics of his work The first is his disdain for the notion of artist as individual genius and his embrace of collaboration (with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Hans Ulrich Obrist and many others) The second is his relegation of the discrete objects in an exhibition to mere constituent parts in a wider network of relations   The exhibition is the work of art, much as in the case of opera we accept that the individual performances – of music, of set design, of the actors – should be appreciated collectively rather than in isolation We might think of Parreno as a choreographer, leading visitors through immersive, theatrical environments in which events take place according to a script or score This was in evidence during Parreno’s extraordinary