MUSAC presents the first - event� in Spain by the French artist Pierre Huyghe
Exhibition Title: A Time Score
Artist: Pierre Huyghe
Curators: Agustín Pérez Rubio & Marta Gerveno
Coordination: Melissa Dubbin, Sophie Dufour
Venue: Halls 1, 4, 5 & 6, MUSAC
Dates: May 19th - September 2nd, 2007
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: A Time Score. Conceived as an even where different ways to exhibit unfolds as a performance (Toison d´Or), a celebration (A Smile Without A Cat, Streamside Day), a puppet play (This Is Not A Time For Dreaming), a concert (L´expédition Scintillante, Act 2. Untitled (Light Show)), a journey (A Journey That Wasn´t), a book (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote Of La Mancha by Pierre Menard), or even a videogame (Atari Light), whereby a new and different cartography reveals, enabling visitors to embark on a journey through the past and future of his career, where collective subjectivity, copyright, and especially his commitment to the idea of non-linear time, arise as ture navigation vehicles.
A Smile Without a Cat (Celebration of AnnLee´s Vanishing), 2002. With Philippe Parreno
In 1999, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights to an anodyne schoolgirl from K-Works, one of the two Japanese companies specialized in the production of characters for Manga and animated films: they are factories that produce stories that serve as testing grounds for the characters, who are a cumulus of special powers and energies, weapons, recurrent phrases, physical attributes and physiological profiles, that is, traits that are to define not only a particular character´s personality, but also his possibility of fitting into the situations created by the writers and his eventual salvation. The Frenchmen´s acquisition was christened with the name AnnLee and the reasons she was selected were simple: Except for her melancholy face and her sadly bulging eyes, AnnLee lacked absolutely everything. She had no special attribute, no characteristic costume, or patented phrases, or weapons, or superpowers; she was conceived as just another extra, like a walk-on in a comic strip, which condemned her to non-survival, either by death or oblivion. Hence the first page of the well known project No Ghost Just A Shell was written. After that, Huyghe and Parreno contacted other artists to invite them to work in an organized manner with, on or from 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 ceded the rights to and image of AnnLee for them to redesign her, provide her with a voice, some psychological capacities, one or several bodies, or a context in which to develop. The idea was not to create a new fiction, but to consider the character a sign that had been freed from copyright and that would henceforth be capable of expressing her own nature and reality, in short, to extend her narrativity. She became a contemporary fable of collective authorship, with ever increasing chapters, which ended with the legal transference of the rights to AnnLee herself, and the celebration of her removal from - the kingdom of representationâ€? as a sign with the launching of fireworks on Miami Beach, Florida, in December 2002. Huyghe and Parreno called this event A Smile Without A Cat because of the scene from Alice in Wonderland in which the Cheshire Cat´s smile remains after its disappearance. Undoubtedly, by buying her, the artists participated in the economy of copyright, but by making this purchasing act public and elaborating it in their works, they broke the art world´s silence.
Un petit bout de reel, 2007
It is essential that at some part of this event we tie a knot, that somewhere here we make a seam to obtain a meaning. When we have made the first one we will be able to make others that will help to articulate this celebration. Pierre Huyghe will show us how to sew, to make seams with the three tools of his work: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, for what not only Huyghe, but also our human discourse is about is stitches and sewing.
In this learning the art of knotting we begin with the triple knot, where the three categories will be represented as three circumferences and all are joined to all; and we call that union, that knot, A piece of reality, a piece where AnnLee and Snow White´s French voice lives, a mirror, where on one side AnnLee is reflected and on the other is Lucie Dolène.
Blanche-Neige Lucie, 1997
Blanche-Neige Lucie 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. In Huyghe´s film, she appears in it singing - Someday my Prince Will Comeâ€?, telling 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, - 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…â€?
This Is Not A Time For Dreaming, 2004
In 1959 Harvard University decided to endow the Visual Arts Department with a new building that would symbolize the intellectual aspirations of the university. For this reason, and upon a recommendation by Josep Lluis Sert &then dean of the Architecture School&, they hired Le Corbusier, who on his first visits to the campus fixed his attention on the circulation pattern of the students when crossing the diagonal paths of the garden. Unable to build in the garden itself, he decided to put the garden in the building, filling the cornices with greenery and installing a ramp that would cross the building diagonally. However, the project was not successful owing to problems between the architect and the institution itself, which in 1963, when the architect had already died, finally opened the building. The long and conflictive negotiations with the administration about the creative process were related in the book written by Eduard F. Sekler.
In 2003 Pierre Huyghe was invited by the curators Linda Norden and Scott Rothkopf to produce a work to commemorate the building´s fortieth anniversary. In his visit to its archives, the artist noticed that some of Le Corbusier´s original ideas had disappeared, so Sekler´s book was to be what defined Huyghe´s final project: a puppet show where both stories are told as one and whose protagonists are Le Corbusier, Huyghe, Sert, Sekler, the two curators of the project, a spectral figure named Mr. Harvard, and a red bird &- knotâ€? and - seamâ€? between both times& that picks up a seed in Le Corbusier´s Harvard and lets it drop on the same building in the times of the French artist, suggesting the garden of that original idea of the Carpenter Center.
Music regains a central role: excerpts were played from Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) and Edgar Và rese (1983-1965), two composers with strong historical and conceptual ties to architecture and Le Corbusier himself. Xenakis, composer and architect of Greek nationality, joined the Le Corbusier studio in 1948. They were both authors of the Philips Pavilion at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958, along with Và rese, who presented his Electronic Poem amplified over the 425 loudspeakers distributed throughout the pavilion. The composer-architects fervently believed in the - enveloping� particularity of both arts in the sense that they must be inhabited: music permitting the construction of a space in which to unfold and architecture freezing space itself. And Pierre Hughe draws on both to scrutinize and musicalize, to create the score of a story &stories& that have to do with architecture.
Streamside Day, 2003
In 2003 Pierre Huyghe celebrated the opening of a new suburban residential area in FishKill &on the banks of the Hudson River, New York& the place of residence of a new community of nomads who exalted nature, which he called - Streamside Knolls�. The planting of a tree was the prologue to an event intended as a commemoration called Streamside Day, which included a parade, music, costumes of animals for the children, a barbeque and lots of green cotton candy. The recording of the event gave rise to a film by the same title, which was included in the exhibition at Dia Art Foundation: Streamside Day Follies.
For the project he drew on sources as direct and paradigmatic as the city Celebration in the state of Florida, promoted by the Disney company on the land adjacent to Walt Disney World. As time passed, and the population grew, the company gradually ceded the control of the city, in spite of the fact that many of its businesses still occupy the main buildings. Recently, many residents have requested that the community be incorporated by Osceola County, in whose territory it is located. With Streamside Day, Huyghe reproduces the same system of creating reality, where the staging of the fiction &which is a festive event& embodies the step preceding the existence of Streamside Knolls.
Furthermore, the project itself clearly introduces us to the way the French artist has conceived - the exhibitionâ€? to this day. The very institution that promoted the project, Dia Art Foundation, has long been involved with artists who have been synonymous with rupture as regards exhibition protocols -let us consider, for example, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. However, whereas others were more interested in space, Pierre Huyghe, like other creators from his generation, focuses on the temporal aspect. Thus, Pierre Huyghe´s exhibitions might be in the form of a journey, a book, a magazine, an association or even a day of celebration: a temporal -though not spatial- monument common to all cultures.
Atari Light, 1999
Founded in the United States in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Atari Inc. is considered the founder of the video game industry thanks to Pong and its home version, Tele-Pong. Its inventor, Ralph H. Baer, engineer for a subcontractor of the American Defense Department, got the idea long before: in 1951 he had already been interested in the possibility of using television sets for something other than following the commercial programmes. He proposed the experiment to the company for which he worked building television receivers. Many years had to pass until, together with an engineer named Bob Tremblay, he started to build the - brown box� &as the first console was called& that included the Pong game. The basic workings were very simple: two white rectangles facing each other on a black board that were moved up and down and a small square or ball that bounced off these rectangles and the upper and lower edges of the screen making a repetitive sound; each time one of the adversaries, who controlled one of the two confronted rectangles, let the ball pass, the other player won a point.
In absence of copyright some countries marketed versions of it by the name Telematch, either trading in television sets that had it included in their own circuits, or becoming a work of art: in 1999 Pierre Huyghe created a modern version of Pong that is hung from the ceiling and that he calls Atari Light.
Yo no poseo El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 2007
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 pathsâ€? &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.â€? 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.â€?
A Journey That Wasn´t, 2005
A Journey That Wasn´t may be 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 Antarctica on the vessel 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 who lived in an unknown island not recognized by the cartography, and which had arisen as a result of global warming and thawing.
In October of that same year, Huyghe transformed New York´s Central Park into a nocturnal polar landscape where an orchestra, an island and a white penguin coexisted. The event was titled Double Negative and the composition of the music was done by Joshua Cody, who transcribed the cartography of Terra Incognita into musical notation.
Both events take place at the same time if we ignore the linear measurement of time and enter into the Borgian - garden of forking pathsâ€? or non-linear time: October or February, night-time or daytime, black or white, negative or positive, or both sides of a mirror that we enter like Alice. There is no fiction: - In all fictions, every time a man faces diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in that of the nearly inextricableâ€? Pierre Huyghe - simultaneously chooses allâ€?. With A Journey That Wasn´t the French artist, like Borges, proposes the possibility of visualizing a - temporal labyrinthâ€?, to write a new page without discarding the previous one to make possible a journey to the south that leads us to die in the past:
L´expédition Scintillante, Act 2. Unitled (Light Show), 2002
This infinite journey, which does not end in A Time Score, does take us to one of its possible pasts L´Expedition Scintillante: A Musical, an exhibition held at Kunsthaus, Bregenz (Austria) and conceived as a musical in three acts. The very markedly vertical spatial arrangement &each of the acts was represented in each of the building´s three floors designated for the show& made reference to musical, and definitively temporal representation, which we know as - scoreâ€?, breaking entirely with linearity and welcoming temporal simultaneity.
The - musicalâ€? −the exhibition− took the spectator on a - polar expeditionâ€?. Situated on the second floor, or in the second movement, there was a white box whose inside irradiated a cold light and some music, the Gymnopédies (1988) by Satie, orchestrated by Claude Debussy, which was clearly intended as a concert for penguins. As in Streamside Day, he had once again staged a fiction, before the reality to come, a script for a film to be shot, a score of a concert to be performed.
The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote Of La Mancha, by Pierre Menard, 2007
- Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixoteâ€? 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 himâ€? […] - Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard […] could exhume and resuscitateâ€? the work. Pierre Huyghe, with Francesca Grassi and Karl Nawrot´s help, will make the existence of Pierre Menard´s masterpiece real and - visibleâ€?.
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