Pierre Huyghe

MUSAC presents the first “event” in Spain by the French artist Pierre Huyghe

Pierre Huyghe, one of the artists who have most profoundly influenced creative practice in the past decade, presents his first solo show in Spain at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Under the title A Time Score, the show, conceived as an event, includes both projects that the public will recognize and new productions, whereby a new and different cartography unfolds, enabling visitors to embark on a journey through the past and future of his career, where collective subjectivity, especially copyright, and his commitment to the idea of non-linear time, arise as the true navigation vehicles.

Pierre Huyghe (Paris, 1962), representative of the French Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennial and winner of the Hugo Boss Prize 2002, showed his Celebration Park at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and London’s Tate Modern in 2006 before holding his first solo exhibition in Spain at MUSAC, which comprises projects that have been established as pieces that are fundamental for approaching the artist’s oeuvre —Atari Light Pong, This Is Not A Time For Dreaming and A Journey That Wasn’t—, as well as new productions. They are all intended to celebrate a large event what renders the cartography with which to overview the past and future of Huyghe’s career, where ideas on collective authorship, copyright and non-linear time stand out as authentic protagonists, which could doubtlessly be traced to his earliest experiences in life and art.

During his adolescence, Pierre Huyghe took part in activist cultural movements such as Punk and Anarchy. After finishing secondary school, he enrolled at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, where he focused on video editing, photography, design and set design. During the early 80s he began to explore Situationism and public art, and he produced some of his earliest works with the also French artist Claude Closky, known for works addressing the hyper-consumption of advertising symbols. His first projects therefore took on the form of street posters, which he still makes today for some of his events. After finishing his studies, he came into contact with other young French artists such as Xavier Veilhan, Pierre Joseph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, with whom he has conceived numerous projects throughout his career. These first indications of collaborationism were to embody one of the fundamental pillars of the construction of his identity as a creator: “collective subjectivity”.

“I…”: collective subjectivity Over the last decade, the question of collective subjectivity has become all the rage in artistic discourse, specifically in that pertaining to relational art and group projects that reconsider the collective utopias of the 60s as a reaction to the profound discontent with authorship and the monumentalization of artistic objects during the 80s. The collective impulse soon became visible in the artistic practices of creators such as Tiravanija, Parreno, Gonzalez-Foerster and Pierre Huyghe, whose career has been a constant celebration of the “I/We” in detriment to the antagonistic “I/You”; of the “Plural I” instead of “Singular I”.

In 1995 Moral Maze was held at the Dijon Consortium. It was a group show organized by Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, which ended up turning its participants into a social reality, Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Xavier Veilhan founded La Association des temps libérés [The Freed Time Association]. They proposed to extend the duration of the exhibition operation —which led to the association’s first meeting— and become the departure point of a series of projects of indeterminate duration, such as the reopening of a provincial movie theatre or the recovery of an abandoned house. Likewise, Anna Sanders Films was created, a film society including other collaborators such as Charles De Meaux, which has published a magazine and produced projects such as Boy from Mars (2003) by Philippe Parreno, Atomik Park (2003) by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Snow White Lucie (1997) and The Third Memory (2000) by Pierre Huyghe.

Nevertheless, the collective element has not only been a form of practice in Pierre Huyghe’s work, but also its storyline. It is fitting to recall that in 2003 Pierre Huyghe produced Streamside Day Follies for the Dia Art Foundation. This was a production accompanied by the celebration of a festive event and the foundation of a new community called Streamside Knolls. The footage of this event, made by the guests —who inaugurated a new urban settlement in Fishkill, New York, next to the Hudson River—, is part of the film Streamside Day Follies. Streamside Day, in which Huyghe invented a ritual celebration for a new suburban community. The production involved the collaboration of a photographer, a singer, draughtsmen and writers.

“… I do not own…”: copyright In some way, collaborative creation and therefore collective authorship leads us directly to one of the central features in the work of this French artist: copyright, a controversial issue applicable to any artistic expression we may address and to which we could devote pages and pages. In any case, one could outline the personal way in which Pierre Huyghe, alone and/or in the company of others, “plays” with determination, while not aiming to erase or eliminate the original author, but to offer the opportunity of extending the story’s narrative capacities.

One of the most memorable cases in the artist’s career in this respect is No Ghost Just A Shell. In 1999, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights of a Manga character from K-Works, one of the two companies in Japan specializing in the production of characters for Manga and cartoons. Her name was AnnLee, and she was an anodyne schoolgirl conceived as just another extra. From there, Huyghe and Parreno contacted several artists to invite them to work in an organized way with, on, from or starting with the character: González-Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija, Pierre Joseph & Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, François Curlet, Mélik Ohanian, Anna-Lèna Vaney, M/M Paris, Joe Scanlan, Lily Fleury, Richard Philips, Henri Barande, and Angela Bulloch & Imke Wagener were some of them. They released the rights and image of AnnLee so that others could redesign her, give her a voice, psychological capacities, one or several bodies and a background through which to develop. The idea was not to create a new fiction, but to consider the character as a symbol that had been liberated from copyright and could thereafter be capable of expressing its own nature and reality, in short, extending its narrativity. It then became a contemporary fable of collective authorship, with an ever growing number of chapters —one of which, One Million Kingdom (2001), is part of the MUSAC Collection, and has already been shown at the museum—, that ended with the legal transference of the copyright to AnnLee herself, and the celebration of her disappearance —or death— as symbol in December of 2002 in Miami (A Smile Without A Cat) and the exhibition organized by Benjamin Weil at the SFMOMA. To be sure, by purchasing the rights, the artists participated in the copyright economy, but by making this act public and elaborating on it in their works, they interrupted the art world’s silence.

Besides this group project, Huyghe’s artistic production includes other more personal projects along the same lines and focusing on the film industry, such as The Third Memory (2000) and, especially, Snow White Lucie (1997), which revolves around the figure of Lucie Dolène, the woman who dubbed the voice of the leading character of the classic Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in its French version. She appears in it singing “Someday my Prince Will Come”, with her face framed by her silver hair. Through Hyughe’s video she tells us how Disney repeatedly used her performance of this song without her permission, and how she ended up suing the company and finally winning the case. Dolène explains that “when I gave that character my voice I was Snow White, but when I see the movie today I get a strange feeling. It’s my voice, but it’s as if it no longer belonged to me, but to the character and the story…”

“… The Garden of Forking Paths”: non-linear time Fictions (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges, is perhaps one of the most representative books of the work and style of this universal Argentine. It includes some of his most famous tales –though calling them tales, for lack of a more appropriate term, is just a way of designating this masterful and suggestive mix of erudition, imagination, ingenious, intellectual profoundness and metaphysical concerns. Of all those included, there is one, The Garden Of Forking Paths, that could very well be a meeting point and dialogue between both worlds, Borges’ and Pierre Huyghe’s. “The garden of forking paths” —says the tale— “is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose theme is time; this recondite cause prohibits its mention. To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it. That is the tortuous method preferred, in each of the meanderings of his indefatigable novel, by the oblique Ts’ui Pên. (…) your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.” And he adds that in the work of Ts’ui Pên —the true protagonist of Borges’ tale— all endings occur; each one is the departure point for other forks. “In some, the paths of this labyrinth converge; for example, you arrive to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another my friend.”

With this material it is easier to understand the French artist’s “forked” career, or the apparently “contradictory” artistic labyrinth in which he occasionally seems to submerge us, and specifically, to return to what we took as a departure point: the need for a collective subjectivity wherein to celebrate the polyphony of voices inside every one of us, our acts, stories and realities. This may be a tool for understanding works such as This Is Not A Time For Dreaming (2004) and A Journey That Wasn’t (2005).

In This Is Not A Time For Dreaming two times converge, 1959 and 2003, in addition to two characters whose meeting seems impossible in linear time. In 1959 Harvard University hired the famous architect Le Corbusier to design a building for the Visual Arts Department, to create a symbol of the university’s intellectual aspirations. However, the project did not progress because of problems between the architect and the university administration. The building was finished in 1963 when the architect had already died. In the year 2003 Pierre Huyghe was invited to produce a work to commemorate the building’s 40th anniversary, and the artist encountered the same difficulties the architect had during the production of his project. The two of them appear in the video as puppets in a theatre watched by an audience, presenting their projects and struggling against a ghost-like character who presents all sorts of problems and difficulties for them to carry out their ideas.

A Journey That Wasn’t is perhaps the production that best reflects the French creator’s intricate conception of time. In February, 2005 Huyghe, with other artists —Francesca Grassi, Alexandra Mir, Xavier Veilhan, Jan Chung and Q. Takeki Maeda— embarked on a journey to the Antarctic on the ship Tara –the same one used by the explorers of polar lands Jean-Louis Etienne and Peter Drake. The mission was to investigate the rumour about a strange creature, a sort of albino penguin that lived on an unknown island off the map that had emerged due to global warming and thawing. In October of that same year, Huyghe transformed New York’s Central Park into a polar landscape where an orchestra, an island and a white penguin coexisted. The event was titled Double Negative and the music was composed by Joshua Cody, who transcribed the cartography of Terra Incognita into musical notation. The filmic journey takes us to other times, future and past, within the career of the French artist, and this is exemplified by the exhibition at the Kunsthaus of Bregenz, L’Expedition Scintillante. A Musical (2002), where the artist explored the plan of an expedition to polar territories —recovered for MUSAC through that disconcerting box of light and smoke that sounded like the Gymnopédie Satie orchestrated by Debusy and which represented Act II of the musical—; or Terra Incognita/Isla Ociosidad (2006), a project of the architecture studio R&Sie(n) —François Roche, Stéphanie Lavaus, Jean Navarro, Camilla Lacadée, Clarisse Labro and Julián Blevarque— together with Huyghe, which creates “another” reality of the island where the albino penguin lives. With A Journey That Wasn’t, like Borges, he proposes to us the possibility of viewing a “temporal labyrinth”, writing a new page without undoing the previous one to make possible a journey to the south that leads us to die in the past.

“I do not own The Garden of Forking Paths”When in 2006, at the exhibition Celebration Park held at the ARC and the Tate Modern, he expressed in neon letters “Fictions ne m’appartient pas” [I do not own Fictions], he seemed to be making a public statement of intentions: the non-possession of Fictions, the denial of fiction. By stating at MUSAC that he does not possess “the garden of forking paths”, he is actually accepting the open-endedness and continuity of his production, by applying the non-linearity to “reality” full of infinite and expanded realities: “In all fiction, every time a man is faced with diverse alternatives, he opts for one and eliminates the others; in that of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts —simultaneously— for all of them. He thus creates diverse prospects, diverse times, which also proliferate and fork.”

THE PUBLICATION (OR EVENT ON PAPER): THE QUIXOTE BY PIERRE MENARD “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is another of the tales included in Jorge Luis Borges’ book Fictions. The story begins with a critic’s protest against the omission in a catalogue of the French writer named Pierre Menard, whose major achievement was writing, in the nineteenth century, the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters and a fragment of the twenty-second chapter of the first part of Quixote. The chapters are the same, every word and every comma, as those written originally by Miguel de Cervantes. Nevertheless, the narrator realizes that they are not copies. “He multiplied the drafts; he corrected tenaciously and tore up thousands of hand-written pages. He didn’t let anybody examine them and he made sure that they did not outlive him” […] “Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard […] could exhume and resuscitate” the work. Pierre Huyghe, with Francesca Grassi and Karl Nawrot’s help, will make the existence of Pierre Menard’s masterpiece real and “visible”.

Pierre Huyghe
A Time Score
Kuratoren: Agustín Perez Rubio & Marta Gerveno