www.egs.edu/ Pierre Huyghe, French artist and filmmaker speaking about reality and virtuality, narrative, projection and memory in a free and open video lecture for the students and faculty at European Graduate School Media and Communication studies department program in Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2008. Pierre Huyghe.
Pierre Huyghe, born 1962 in Paris, France, is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (1982-85). Employing folly, leisure, adventure, and celebration in creating art, Huyghes films, installations, and public events range from a small town parade to a puppet theater, from a model amusement park to an expedition to Antarctica. By filming staged scenarios-such as a re-creation of the true-life bank robbery featured in the movie Dog Day Afternoon-Huyghe probes the capacity of cinema to distort and ultimately shape memory. While blurring the traditional distinction between fiction and reality, and revealing the experience of fiction to be as palpable as anything in daily life, Huyghes playful work often addresses complex social topics such as the yearning for utopia, the lure of spectacle in mass media, and the impact of Modernism on contemporary values and belief systems.
He has received many awards, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums Hugo Boss Prize (2002); the Special Award from the Jury of the Venice Biennial (2001); and a DAAD Fellowship (1999-2000). Huyghe has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London and ARC, Musée dart Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006); Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2004); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2004); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000); and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000). The Public Art Fund commissioned Huyghe to create A Journey that Wasnt (2006), which included an expedition to Antarctica, a performance in Central Park, and a video installation at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Huyghe lives and works in Paris and New York. He is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery.
Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality. His work frequently mixes fact with fiction. In several projects, he has delved into the personal lives of subjects and actors in film.
His two-channel video The Third Memory (1999), first exhibited in a museum context at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, takes as its starting point Sidney Lumet's 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in the role of the bank robber John Wojtowicz. Huyghe's video reconstructs the set of Lumet's film, but he allows Wojtowicz himself, now a few dozen years older and out of jail, to tell the story of the robbery. Huyghe juxtaposes images from the reconstruction with footage from Dog Day Afternoon, demonstrating that Wojtowicz's memory has been irrevocably altered by the film about his life.
In 1999, in collaboration with Philipe Parreno, Hughye purchased the rights to a manga figure who they named 'Annlee' for $428. They invited other artists including Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce animated videos using Annlee. After a several exhibitions, they transferred the character's copyright to the Annlee Association-a legal entity owned by Annlee, thus ensuring her simultaneous freedom and death. No Ghost Just A Shell was exhibited at Tate Modern.