Huyghe has been working with time-based situations and site-specific installations since the early 1990s. His works consist of forms such as objects, films, photographs, drawings, music, fictional characters, and full-fledged ecosystems, in effect treating exhibition and its ritual as an object in itself.
Role playing In
Blanche-Neige (1997), Huyghe revealed the face and story of
Lucie Dolène, the French voiceover artist whom
Walt Disney hired to do the French language version of
Snow White. When Disney subsequently reissued the film and used Dolmen's voice without her permission, she sued the company for the right to own her own voice. Huyghe's film is a simply edited headshot of Dolène recounting her experience in her unmistakable (to French ears) voice.
Blanche-Neige was a more pointed followup to
Dubbing, (1996), in which Huyghe screens
Tobe Hooper's film
Poltergeist but focuses his camera on the fifteen actors who have been hired to do the French voiceovers rather than the projection of the film itself, which is only visible to the actors. In 1999, Huyghe and fellow French artist
Philippe Parreno turned this idea of the subjective performance of language into the body of a fictional character by purchasing the rights to a manga figure whom they dubbed "Annlee". They then invited other artists including
Liam Gillick,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster,
Pierre Joseph, Mélik Ohanian,
Joe Scanlan, and
Rirkrit Tiravanija to produce various works utilizing the character Annlee, the sum of which became the traveling group exhibition
No Ghost Just A Shell. After several exhibitions, the character’s copyright was transferred to the Annlee Association—a legal framework drafted by
Luc Saucier, which established Annlee as a legal entity while prohibiting future commercial or artistic use.”
Fiction, memory, and place Huyghe's two-channel video
The Third Memory (1999), commissioned by
The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and later exhibited at the
Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris, 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.
Streamside Day Follies (2003) was commissioned by the DIA Art Foundation, New York, and involved the integrated relationship between three locales: a fictionalized community in the Hudson Valley that is launching an equally fictional neighborhood festival; a film verité that captures the proceedings of the fledgling festival; and DIA's former Manhattan exhibition space. The exhibition entailed the regular creation of a fourth space in which the fictional community, the film, and the gallery would converge. Huyghe accomplished this by designing four walls suspended from motorized tracks that were programmed to intermittently organize themselves into a darkened enclosure in which the
Streamside Day Follies film would screen. When the film was finished, the walls would disperse. ''A Journey that Wasn't
(2005) was commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and entailed similar intersections of a fictional place, a film, and live convergence. As a film work, A Journey that Wasn't'' juxtaposes a sailing expedition from Tierra del Fuego in search of an uncharted island off the coast of Antarctica, with the recording (and re-recording) of its symphonic score at the
Wollman ice rink in
Central Park. The symphonic score was composed by Joshua Cody and featured guitar soloist
Elliott Sharp.
The Host and the Cloud (2010) is a feature-length film that was shot entirely within the dormant building that had housed the National Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions, Paris. The rambling, melancholy, somewhat sci-fi narrative is structured around the celebrations of
Halloween,
Valentine's Day, and
May Day. The film's premier at
Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, was accompanied by several of Huyghe's
Zoodram sculptures, elaborate aquariums featuring exotic sea creatures that are not unlike the captive human ecosystem depicted in
The Host and the Cloud. For dOCUMENTA(13) (2012) Pierre Huyghe created
Untilled (2011–2012), a compost site within a baroque garden, a non hierarchical association that included a sculpture of a reclining nude with a head obscured by a swarming beehive, aphrodisiac and psychotropic plants, a dog with a pink leg, and an uprooted oak tree from
Joseph Beuys’
7,000 Oaks, among other elements.
Untilled was ranked third in
The Guardian's Best Art of the 21st Century list, with critic
Adrian Searle calling it a "wondrous work" and "an elegy for a dying world".
Biotypes Huyghe created different 'biotypes', sculptures combining living and non-living matter. One of these was his work
Untitled (2010-13), which was shown at
documenta 13 in 2012. == Notes ==