WORK SURVEY PIERRE HUYGHE

Displacements combines six highlights from the audio-visual work by the French Pierre Huyghe from the 1999-2003 period. The artist, who is active in the domains of film, video, photography, sound, animation, sculpture, design, sound work and architecture, investigates the narrative structures within the popular culture. In his videos he also stresses the ambiguous relationship between fiction and reality and between memory and history.

Pierre Huyghe (1962) lives and works in Paris. He has gained international prominence for works that explore the convergence of reality and fiction, memory and history. Incorporating film, video, sound, animation, sculpture, and architecture in his diverse works, the artist intervenes in familiar narrative structures to investigate the construction of collective and individual identities in relationship to various forms of cultural production. Huyghe is interested in both reading and making possible multiple, subjective reinterpretations of incidents and images that shape our realities. Through such retranslations, Huyghe offers a way for his characters and his viewers to take back control of their own images, their own stories. His work was shown, o.a., in the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Venice Biennale, Manifesta and the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou, Paris).

Displacements   39’
on Fri, 24 Oct 2003 20:00

Blanche-Neige Lucie by Pierre Huyghe 4’ 1997
35 mm, colour, English spoken, French subtitled, 4’, 1999 This film is a chronicle of the French voice of Snow White. In an empty film studio Lucie Dolène sings Someday my prince will come as her story appears in the subtitles. In a radio interview Lucie Dolène had announced that she would sue Disney Voice Characters with respect to the rights to her interpretation. She won the case and following this she could dispose of her own voice again. By reading her complaint, with our own inner voice, as it were, we find ourselves in the same position as Lucie Dolène who is singing Snow White, with this difference that she is interpreting a fictitious character.

Ann Lee "Two Minutes Out Of Time" by Pierre Huyghe 4’ 2000
Video, colour, English spoken, 4’, 1999 In 1999 Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights to a Manga figure from a Japanese agency specialised in designing characters. This character, by the name of Annlee, did not have a future until it was bought by Huyghe and Parreno. She had been designed to join whatever story, but she hardly had a chance to survive any of them. The gesture of the artists made Annlee and her computer file available within the framework of an extended art project, by the title of No Ghost Just Shell, in which artists could adopt her and supply her with a story. In this film Annlee speaks in the voice of a little girl about a race with cyber creatures, which might be living in the ether someday.

The Third Memory by Pierre Huyghe 10’ 1999
Video, colour, English spoken, 10’, 1999 Similarly to the film Dog Day Afternoon by Sidney Lumet Pierre Huyghe reconstructed the events which played on 22 August 1972, when John Wojtowitz robbed a bank in Brooklyn, New York. Whereas the fiction of this film was based on the scenario and the acting achievement of the actor, Huyghe’s account renders a version of the facts which stays more true to the real situation. This film is an attempt to contain an image of this event from the memory of the genuine author, simultaneously as an actor and a commentator of his own deeds. Not as much the motives which led to the attack, but rather the troubled relations between the actor in the film and the genuine author get attention in this work.

Ann Lee "One Million Kingdoms" by Pierre Huyghe 7’ 2001
Video, colour, English spoken, 6’, 2001 In this film on the acquired Manga character Annlee Pierre Huyghe makes her walk over a lunar landscape, talking with the electronically modified voice of Neil Armstrong during his direct coverage of the first lunar landing. The text she quotes, blends in the historical quotes of the astronaut with fragments from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Armstrong’s words make Annlee move over a fluctuating landscape, from which mountains, craters and mountain rims arise and disappear, depending on the soundwaves of her voice.

Block Party by Pierre Huyghe 6’ 2002
Block Party 16 mm, colour, English spoken, 6’, 2002 - 2003 The image shows two faces of the story of hip-hop music, which submerged in the seventies in the New York outskirts of The Bronx. Two vinyl records are turning on a turntable. On the one hand the soundtrack is heard of three decades ago, on the other the voices of musicians today. The turntable is mounted at the foot of a block in the Bronx. It is the end of a Block Party, a ghetto party centring on hip-hop. In the same image those artists are brought together who stood at the cradle of this musical genre.

Les Grands Ensembles by Pierre Huyghe 8’ 2001
Video, colour, non spoken, 8’, 2001 Les Grands Ensembles is a recreation of an urban landscape in the late seventies. In a permanent twilight zone two living project towers enter into a dialogue with each other in a strange code when the television sets illuminate inside the rooms. During the film subtle, almost imperceptible variations occur. These multiple changes continue without genuine progress. They create an image which is experienced as a pause in time. The film treats a situation without any progress or finality. The living project was supposed to be temporary but it ended up as permanent. As a result the film takes the shape of a permanent interlude.