October 19th, 2007
A time for Dreaming
Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition, “Celebration Park,” begins with an ironic disclaimer in wall-sized white neon light: “I Do Not Own Tate Modern or the Death Star,” updating the show’s previous Paris incarnation disavowing the artist’s ownership of the Musee d’Art Moderne and, of course, the Death Star. Exploring the apparatus of narrative production in a society of the spectacle, Huyghe–the most significant French artist on the international contemporary art circuit–implicates and questions his solo show at Tate Modern even as his name is stenciled across its facade.
The disclaimers persistently disavow ownership throughout the exhibition, denying Snow White, Modern Times, Fictions, and 4′33″ even as they cite film, music, literature, and visual art, questioning the agency of the artist over the wholeness of a work. These allusions are structural conceits in a long history of authorial distancing from production (John Cage’s 4′33″ [1952] silencing composition in favor of environmental surround sound; Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinthine fictions snaking out of narrative singularity) as well as social commentaries on the diffusion of subjectivity in the industrial age (the machinic dehumanization of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times [1936]). These are apt thematic companions to Huyghe’s video, Blanche-Neige, Lucie (Snow White, Lucie, 1997), where Lucie Dolene, the voice of the French version of Disney’s Snow White, sings tunes from the cartoon while subtitles address Disney’s unauthorized reuse of her voice and Dolene’s happy-ending lawsuit. The disclaimers also hint at works excluded from the exhibition: for instance, Silence Score (1997), where Huyghe retranscribed 4′33″ for a flute, and Death Star Interior (1997), where the floor plan of a child’s bedroom was superimposed onto Star Wars’ unholy mothership.
Condensing the inclusions and exclusions of curatorial choice, the disclaimers attend to the structural and ethical questions of ownership, and mark moments in Huyghe’s career. The disclaimers change according to the exhibition venue and national language, a cliche of floating signifiers anchored by their appropriation of context. Huyghe cites the circuitry of his oeuvre, showing past works through miniature references. Dwarfed in a large space, the palm-sized video screen of Snow White, Lucie, is purposefully eclipsed by Huyghe’s massive “Gates” (2006)–ceiling-high doors twirling slowly across the gallery, pausing occasionally to seal off the exhibition space. The equally miniscule video A Smile Without a Cat (2002) and the poster of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999) allude to the lives of Annlee, a secondary anime character purchased by Huyghe and Philippe Parreno and distributed to frequent collaborators and friends. As an empty signifier situationally displaced and refilled, the collaborative exercise spawned diverse Annlee animations with characterizations ranging from prancing disco queens to menacing specters. A digitized exquisite corpse, Annlee’s girlish face is illuminated and extinguished in Cat’s inaugural fireworks celebration just as each characterization prolongs and ends her identity.
Such brief markers in “Celebration Park” question how an artist responds to his own oeuvre within the format of a mid-career retrospective. How far can one scale down the signifier of a work while legibly representing and reinventing past works? How can one animate–a la Broodthaersian institutional play–rather than archive an ongoing and developing practice? Questions of ownership and fiction are favorite keywords decorating any write-up of Huyghe’s work. It seems that Huyghe has taken it upon himself to toy with narrating and representing his work, thwarting its potentially institutionalized reification.
Huyghe’s experiments extend conceptualism’s administration of aesthetics and institutional critique. Working through the apparatuses circumscribing artistic operations, he reimagines and narrativizes the institutional ownership of spaces (whether suburban, arctic, or architectural) across various temporalities. Other videos in “Celebration Park,” shown in black boxes, render such institutional experiments with increasing levels of theatricality. In a work commissioned by the Harvard University Art Museums, “This Is Not a Time for Dreaming” (2004), Huyghe produced a crystalline puppet theatre show cycling back and forth between Le Corbusier’s tumultuous experience designing the art department’s building and Huyghe’s own struggles with the commission in a magic-realist narrative of institutional control and aesthetic alternatives. Replete with an origami Dean of Deans (an archetype of all Harvard deans, resembling a Harry Potter Dementor), a shape-shifting building representing numerous changes to Corbusier’s blueprints, and puppets of curators, Le Corbusier and Huyghe revisit modernism as a fantasy set amid minimalist, Beckettian landscapes and anthropomorphic flora, grafting past romanticized dreams of aesthetic revolution onto the images of present-day negotiations with institutions.