Celebration Park
Pierre Huygue
Celebration Park
Tate Modern
5 July - 17 September 2006
Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't, 2005
Super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound; TK min
Filming in Central Park : Public Art Fund
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Photo: Pierre Huyghe
Copyright Pierre Huyghe
The Tate Modern gives us a pronounced opportunity to explore the celebratory aspects of a selection of Huyghe’s work, from the nineties to the present. We go, for example, from viewing a small screen interview with the original voice of Snow White, Blanche Neige Lucie (1997), in a room with large white dancing doors, to hearing the slow-wind scene shift music of his more recent large screen puppet musical, This is not a time for dreaming (2004), an exploration of his struggle to satisfy a commission from Harvard University. Renowned and reaffirmed as a politically motivated artist, the Tate gives us ample space here to explore the various faces the notion of celebration adopts in the many social collaborations that make up his oeuvre.
Huygue’s films in this exhibition are no less than epic, both in subject matter and logistic scale. His film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), brings together footage of his own journey through Antarctica in 2005 that ran with a declared mission to find an albino penguin, and footage of the orchestral re-enactment of this voyage on Central Park ice rink. A Journey that Wasn’t reaffirms the co-existence of chance and control in his childishly willed adventure, with the double narrative of the diary and the orchestral piece building up loosely science-fictional connotations. The aural and visual pomp and circumstance of the band to a night-time backdrop are stunning. Their sense of effort, occasion and unison strongly reflects the collaborative force behind what was a 24-hour a day survival operation through deserts of ice. The gap between the gravity of this situation and its inherent pointlessness is the gap where Huygue endorses celebration. This is the point at which we start to lose ourselves in a cinematic experience of the layered narrative.
Leaving the exhibition, stills of Huyghe’s films stick in my head, but only from the most outlandish, the most surreal and the most celebratory parts. These images are taken from the points at which each film broke away from a single potential narrative, the points at which there were more questions than there were answers. Model design plan infrastructures fall to the ground at a whim, plants grow at an abnormal rate, children wear animal masks, celebrating their immersion into a new socialised land redevelopment programme, wind is caught in a large plastic bag from a cliff face and orange jacketed men trawl tragi-comically through white landscapes.
Celebration Park
Tate Modern
5 July - 17 September 2006
Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn't, 2005
Super 16mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound; TK min
Filming in Central Park : Public Art Fund
Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris
Photo: Pierre Huyghe
Copyright Pierre Huyghe
The Tate Modern gives us a pronounced opportunity to explore the celebratory aspects of a selection of Huyghe’s work, from the nineties to the present. We go, for example, from viewing a small screen interview with the original voice of Snow White, Blanche Neige Lucie (1997), in a room with large white dancing doors, to hearing the slow-wind scene shift music of his more recent large screen puppet musical, This is not a time for dreaming (2004), an exploration of his struggle to satisfy a commission from Harvard University. Renowned and reaffirmed as a politically motivated artist, the Tate gives us ample space here to explore the various faces the notion of celebration adopts in the many social collaborations that make up his oeuvre.
Huygue’s films in this exhibition are no less than epic, both in subject matter and logistic scale. His film, A Journey that Wasn’t (2006), brings together footage of his own journey through Antarctica in 2005 that ran with a declared mission to find an albino penguin, and footage of the orchestral re-enactment of this voyage on Central Park ice rink. A Journey that Wasn’t reaffirms the co-existence of chance and control in his childishly willed adventure, with the double narrative of the diary and the orchestral piece building up loosely science-fictional connotations. The aural and visual pomp and circumstance of the band to a night-time backdrop are stunning. Their sense of effort, occasion and unison strongly reflects the collaborative force behind what was a 24-hour a day survival operation through deserts of ice. The gap between the gravity of this situation and its inherent pointlessness is the gap where Huygue endorses celebration. This is the point at which we start to lose ourselves in a cinematic experience of the layered narrative.
Leaving the exhibition, stills of Huyghe’s films stick in my head, but only from the most outlandish, the most surreal and the most celebratory parts. These images are taken from the points at which each film broke away from a single potential narrative, the points at which there were more questions than there were answers. Model design plan infrastructures fall to the ground at a whim, plants grow at an abnormal rate, children wear animal masks, celebrating their immersion into a new socialised land redevelopment programme, wind is caught in a large plastic bag from a cliff face and orange jacketed men trawl tragi-comically through white landscapes.
posted by Claire Nichols at 8:19 PM
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