Not many artists can claim two consecutive major retrospectives in museums in Paris and London. Pierre Huyghe is working on the most significant mise en scène of his entire career. A continuing story told in various chapters, Celebration Park uncovers the complex key to his oeuvre.
A set of posters sent by third parties calling for new holidays serves as an introduction to Pierre Huyghe’s Celebration Park. Yona Friedman wants a day celebrating animal intelligence, Doug Aitken asks for a day in celebration of silence, Tacita Dean a day of obsolescence, and Joe Scanlan calls for the creation of an “Openday”, an eighth day open to anything… A pile of golden agendas sits imposingly in the middle of the posters. Their pages break down the duration of the exhibition into seconds. Pages and moments amassed together erect a monument to “freed time.”
At the end of the 1990s, Pierre Huyghe started an association in order to promote this activity: “for the development of unproductive time, for reflection about free time and the elaboration of a workless society.” One thinks of the 364 non-birthdays in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the installation of new events into everyday life, and the clandestine practice of poaching an already drawn-up, official calendar. In the museum, the arrangement of these announcements and this mass of freed time is light-handed, almost marginal. Even so, it is the source code for Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition. Celebration Park is a temporary spatial state of affairs, brought to fruition in different forms in Paris and in London and elaborated as an overflowing or an insertion, the continuation of a real, dreamt exterior, or one yet to be fulfilled.
This moment is that of the exhibition as Pierre Huyghe has endeavored to redefine it since the early 1990s—often with the support of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster and Philippe Parreno. In contrast to the strict institutional critique carried out by artists since the late 1960s, he does not consider the exhibition—the canonical format for practicing the appreciation of modern and contemporary art—an outmoded form. On the contrary, it is a matter of persisting with it, even if it means reinventing to such an extent that its edges are abolished. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, published in the catalogue on this occasion, the artist explains: “Exploring the format of the exhibition outside of its closed doors. It’s a question of placement; one has to make it more performative. An exhibition might be a television series, an opera, a theme park, it has to be able to reappear elsewhere and why not in the dominant formats (styles, modes of thinking…).”
The itinerant Celebration Park—which opened in February at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris with a Prologue (February 2-26), then extended into the first movement of the exhibition (March 10-May 14), and will finish this summer at the Tate Modern in London (July 5-September 17)—is, in this way, symptomatic of the artist’s lasting belief that a space is only moribund when it is closed.
Theme park
Paradoxically, however, the park, a place of fantasy, of recreation, but also of closure, has nurtured into Huyghe’s latest project. “Via the park project, I would like to facilitate the production of a group of pavilions and events, like a universal exposition, which would be built around given or invented realities that can keep playing off each other. […] Getting back to the production of a universal exposition, each pavilion is conceived for a particular object of presentation; in contrast to the museum’s verticality, and in contrast to a theme park set-up, there is no directional schema for the group of pavilions. Instead, it’s something that relates to the organic arrangement of singularities,” the artist continues in his interview.
In London, as in Paris, Celebration Park is still in the study stage, he acknowledges. But his very adoption of its title hints at an archeology of the exhibition. One has to look back retrospectively in order to understand it. It traverses the evocation of two of its most popular forms: the universal exposition and the theme park. Where the first model is concerned, it’s worth noting that the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, which is hosting the first two movements of Celebration Park, was built for the universal exposition of 1937. London’s identity remains linked to the first universal exposition in 1851, and the legend of the cathedral to the industrial revolution: the Crystal Palace.
We should also recall the catalyzing role the universal expositions played over the past two centuries. Retrospectively and prospectively, the theme park continues to draw the underlying frame of the modern and contemporary city. In his classic Delirious New York (1978), Rem Koolhaas considered Luna Park and Coney Island’s Dreamland as the observation round for New York urbanism. More recently, French philosopher Bruce Bégout visited Las Vegas, a theme park made into a city, as if it was the confirmation of our reality.
But Huyghe’s signs for Celebration Park evoke more than the simple horizon of fun and entertainment. “Je ne possède pas le Musée d’art moderne ni l’étoile noire” (I do not own the Musée d’art moderne or the Death Star”), “I do not own Snow White”, “I do not own 4’33””, “Fictions ne m’appartient pas” (“Fictions doesn’t belong to me”): the white neon signs that punctuate the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne and the Tate Modern evoke different appropriations by the artist over the past ten years, from John Cage’s Silence (Silence Score, 1997) to the story of Lucie Dolène, the voice of Snow White who was deprived of her rights by Disney (Blanche Neige Lucie, 1997). These signs, or Disclaimers, as the artist has termed them, capture the his various appropriations, while leaving them free. The ambivalent form of the Disclaimers recalls Ann Lee, the Manga heroine that Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased in 1999 from a Japanese design agency. Several years later, she became the first emancipated fictional character. The artists returned her rights to her. In the meantime, the pixel superstar was passed from author to author (Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Pierre Joseph, Rirkrit Tiravanija…), and personalized the utopia dear to the 1990s through a collective form and history, written and told from different perspectives.
The politics of authorship that tormented Ann Lee remains one of the central axes of Pierre Huyghe’s work. His latest exhibition is not an exception to the rule. For three weeks, the Parisian prologue let the inanimate author do the talking, as if left hanging. Whereas the neon Disclaimers on the wall were both the trace and the absence of any signature, Pierre Huyghe appeared casually in the guise of an avatar: a lifeless marionette behind a door that opened with irregular rhythm. Then, new life breathed into it. The closed doors now moved in the air. Suspended on tracks traversing the nave of the museum, they follow a choreography traced from the steps of two dancers.
Pierre Huyghe’s avatar comes to life and appears in the lead role in This is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004). Invited by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the site, the French man responded with this filmed opera in which marionettes serve as supports for a double discourse. During a moment of confrontation with his hosts, he mingles his reflection about his own practice with the turbulent genesis of Le Corbusier’s only building in the United States. One of the master’s last buildings, the work had been seriously modified over time in discussions with those who commissioned it, including the architect José Luis Sert, who worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier prior to World War II and became the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The show unfolds in a theater Huyghe designed as a growth out of the Carpenter Center. The building nestles itself into another, it takes advantage of its hospitality in order to prolong its functions and its fictions. The architect’s doubts, torments and intuitions are layered with those of the artist in a mise-en-abyme delimited by the vision of the puppeteers’ hands.
The prologue serves as epilogue. Spoken by a professor in a learned tone, the final text refutes any notion of signature: “I am just a narrator. When I speak or use the term “I” this does not mean anything other than narrator. I am not the writer, or the author, or the initiator of this project.” How does one fulfill a commission and where does one situate the question of the author within this process? Built on a complex narration, yet opting for the archaic form of the puppet theater, which distances itself from a cinematographic format, Pierre Huyghe’s film offers, not without melancholy, a re-enchantment of the figure of the author at the center of a collective memory and accomplishment.
Fictive realities
Following on the example of cinema, architecture—which is collaborative work par excellence—offers Huyghe fault-lines and chinks into which he can insert himself. Huyghe’s work has an affection for the figure of the insert, whether one recalls l’Ellipse (2004)—a triple projection into which the artist reintegrated footage of a trajectory originally cut from the montage of Wim Wenders’ American Friend—one considers the more playful Death Star interior/inner chasm and corridors & chambre (1997)—his proposal to add a child’s bedroom into the heart of the Death Star, the Empire’s headquarters in Star Wars—or one returns to the theater nestled into the heart of Le Corbusier’s building in order to shelter the tale of its construction. In Sleeptalking, John Giorno tells the tale of Sleep (1963); in Silent Score (1997), the imperceptible noises in John Cage’s recording of silence (4'33") were replayed with a flute. As for Ann Lee, she walked on a moon remodeled out of the voice of Neil Armstrong (One Million Kingdoms, 2003)…
Huyghe’s preferred landscapes (Hollywood and European cinema, the legend of the Underground) are platforms to be linked together, irrigated, and extended. The destruction of the great narratives of post-modernism has long been achieved, and Huyghe’s work is looking toward something else: no longer narratives, but scenarios. The artist’s avowed interest for the “fan fictions” phenomenon—a practice in which film, television series, or book buffs find in their preferred universes fertile ground for the development of new episodes they insert into the reality of the original fiction—intersects with his attraction for Philip K. Dick’s Science Fiction. Huyghe’s work resonates with the latter’s interrogations and fascinations: “What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.”
In Paris, as in London, Huyghe’s Celebration Park becomes the site of these “universes of the mind”, were they to be accomplished. The doors to the museum literally float in space (Gates, 2006). As for the walls, they were initially animated during Huyghe’s 2003 exhibition at the Dia Foundation in Chelsea. Coming in from all four corners of that space, the suspended walls offered, for the duration of the projection of a film, a clearing in which visitors made up a fleeting community of spectators, linked by the scenario of Streamside Day.
Melancholic expeditions
Streamside Day, which is absent from the Paris episode, but presented in London, dates from a few months prior to This is Not a Time for Dreaming, and composes an architectural diptych with the latter: the dreams of the father of modernism on the one hand, utopian North-American suburbia on the other. A fable about the urban middle-class, Streamside Day anchors itself in the inauguration of a housing development built on the edge of a forest near the Hudson in the midst of archetypal nature. Opening with pastoral resurgences from Walt Disney’s universe, Streamside Day could be the extension of Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1965) in an era of themed housing developments. But whereas Graham maintained his conceptual rigor and the distance he inherited from the documentary tradition, Huyghe’s film goes a step further. He does not remain at the stage of a symbolic analysis of vernacular American architecture; he proposes the insertion of a new episode into its very heart, the writing of its rites of passage and transmission.
As a documentary about the first annual celebration of the housing development, it also seeks to be the framework for future ones. Instigated and filmed by Huyghe, the ceremony reveals themes of migration and the environment through the guise of a street fair. Children parade in animal disguises through the village, and play with houses made out of cardboard boxes. Then, on a stage in the middle of the development, the promoter and mayor make a speech before a folk singer sings the hymn to the city, accompanied by the revolving lights of police cars.
Nostalgia inherent to a ceremony that ends with a teenage movie anthem (Streamside Day Follies); Ghostly displacement of doors in the museum space (Gates); Disillusion and despair of a dying, modern architectural legend ( This is Not a Time for Dreaming); What explains the intrinsic melancholy of Huyghe’s Celebration Park? If Huyghe’s work holds within it the possibility of pursuing already existing foundations, it also regrets the impossibility of a still-virgin territory.
Exhibited in Paris and London, A Journey that Wasn’t(2005) reverberates like the wish to overcome this frustration, to undertake a journey in which exoticism would prevail over déjà-vu and cartography. “This expedition originates in the postulate that somewhere there exists a new and uncharted island which a singular and unique creature inhabits. We have invested zones of non-knowledge and we are giving ourselves the means to verify their existence,” proclaims the introductory voice-over to the short film accompanying the project. This film shows the polar expedition the artist undertook with some of his friends aboard the research ship Tara in 2005.
Stuck in the ice, the group wanders along a white horizon, from which emerge the coasts revealed by its melting. Installing their base camp, the men set up a light station whose pulsing rays convert the topography of the island. This language is meant to attract creatures living in the surroundings. While the image of the glaciers meld with those of a show that takes place on the ice-skating rink in Central Park, in the heart of New York, the forms of the island resonate in the form of a symphony dictated by its own topography. The singular creature, a white penguin, stands stock-still watching a show that merges the symphony of a city and the narrative of an expedition.
Other equivalences surface in the Paris and London exhibitions. The project for a pavilion designed by R&Sie architectural agency (Isla Ociosidad Pavillon: Prototype, 2006), cut out of sheet aluminum, its volume erected using a system of weights, culminates the documentation of the new territory Huyghe has baptized Idleness Island. Almost hidden in a corner, the white penguin (One, 2005) softly beats its wings in the museum. The exhibition as the dream of an imagined and verified elsewhere.
Opening
