Pierre Huyghe June 24–October 19, 2010
Overview:
Noted French artist Pierre Huyghe uses diverse media—including
large-scale installation, public events, and video—to delve into the
uncertainties of representation and investigate how narrative models
affect our sense of reality. In the process, he moves through a variety
of creative fields, such as architecture, cinema, design, and music,
with an eye to their unique qualities and conventions.
Pierre Huyghe. Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing
Projects), 1994/2001. Gift of Howard and Donna Stone.
Huyghe’s 1994/2001 video
installation Les Grands Ensembles (The Housing Projects) is
featured as one of the many provocative works in the special exhibition Contemporary
Collecting: Selections from the Donna and Howard Stone Collection.
Shown in the Stone Film and New Media Gallery, the work presents a
fixed view of two residential towers in a bleak urban landscape, swathed
in fog at night. Lacking any signs of human activity, the buildings
appear to take on lives of their own as the video’s buzzing electronic
soundtrack, composed by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot, builds in intensity.
Windows in the two façades begin to light up rhythmically and with
increasing frequency, as if communicating in some sort of code. The
towers, which are actually models the artist created in a film studio,
do not represent specific structures but echo the architecture of French
government housing projects common in the 1970s. Set in the starkly
desolate landscape, the buildings recall the failures of Modernist
architecture’s utopian social goals. This familiar narrative, however,
ultimately gives way to the volley of lights, a mysterious cipher that
resists attempts at interpretation. Les Grands Ensembles
also introduces the artist’s engagement with forms of spectacle and the
cultural conditions that emerge from it. The flashing lights that play
across the façades of these buildings, repeated in an endless video
loop, seem to ask whether this is a stream of coded information waiting
to be translated or a deluge of vacant representation, a spectacle
pointing to nothing but itself.
Tomado de: http://www.artic.edu
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