Pierre Huyghe
"Pierre Huyghe" by Leah Sandals, Spring 2007, pp. 86-87
“Celebration Park,” Pierre Huyghe’s first solo exhibition in Britain, might have worked better if it had switched entrance facades with the Kandinsky exhibition that was showing concurrently at Tate Modern. Given that Huyghe’s grandiosely ambivalent art skates around questions of authorship, copyright, fiction and the structure of cultural institutions, such a switch could’ve been valid. The idea also provides a useful comparison, for where Kandinsky celebrated the spiritual in art, Huyghe’s non-painterly abstractions of architecture, text, light and sound seem to lament (and, in dialectic form, celebrate) the unspiritual in art and culture—as one of his earlier works paraphrases it, the “no ghost just a shell” phenomenon.
Set amid neon wall texts, video installations, administrative documents and collaborative poster projects is the central object in “Celebration Park”: a large set of doors that twirl through the main gallery space. They’re massive; viewers’ heads only come up to keyhole height. At one end of their trajectory, the doors rest against a wall. At the other end, they temporarily seal off the main entrance to the room. Because of Huyghe’s continuing interest in the museum and copyright, the twin functions of doors—separation and access—strongly evoke the dual functions of such institutions.
The institutional critique is echoed in This is not a time for dreaming (2004), a video starring marionettes that tells the story of Huyghe’s being commissioned by Harvard University to do a project celebrating its Le Corbusier–designed Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Rather than experiencing the freedom popularly ascribed to artists, Huyghe feels weighed down by the expectations of the commissioners, by architectural restrictions and by the troubled history of the building’s development.
Another video riffs on the conflation of humanity and nature. Streamside Day (2003) documents a Huyghe-initiated community parade, barbecue and concert celebrating a new American suburb, complete with children in animal masks. It can be read as wonderful fantasy or as horrible nightmare; most likely it is both.
Levity is provided by a collaborative poster project documenting various artists’ ideas for new celebratory days; examples include an eighth day of each week, a weather-celebrating day that cannot be cancelled due to weather and a day honouring the humble shoelace.
Such forthright humour is a welcome break from the sad something raspingly breathing beneath the white facade of Huyghe’s well-polished doors. It provides some hope, as one exits the exhibition, of a few small, cheeky, tenuous things left to cheer.
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