Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day,
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 23 February to 15 May
Amidst a forest heavy with insect noise and
seemingly outside of historical time we come across an idyllic
scene of a young fawn, a rabbit, an owl and a raccoon innocently
going about their business. Other than a thundering waterfall,
this is all sunlight through leaves, babbling brooks and twitching
noses: a rather saccharine nature, then, not wild but tamed,
and purged of death, violence and decay. The colours are overstated
and the animals pose harmlessly for the camera in this fabulous
setting straight from the wonderlands of Disney.
We follow the fawn to where the forest meets
the barren earth of an incomplete suburban housing development.
This is the frontier of a different territory - partitioned,
well managed and privatised; in short, Middle America - but
the time that marks out this territory is the same as that of
the fabulous forest; it is a temporality where memory, reality
and history converge in fiction. As Huyghe says, "We are
in the year 01, the beginning of a story which you are already
a part of. Between the mountains and the Hudson River, a village
is forming in the forest. Families are moving in, construction
of streets and houses is almost complete, gardens are growing,
and soon the playgrounds will be filled." This 'story'
is as pre-historic as the forest, because it begins again by
restaging a mythic past in the present in spectacular form,
and so tells the same old story.
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Pierre Huyghe; Streamside day,
2003, event, mixed media, film and video transfers,
26 minutes, colour and sound: courtesy of the artist
/ Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris / Irish Museum
of Modern Art
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As the fawn makes its way along deserted streets,
we switch to a family en route to their new Streamside home;
and whilst fawn easily becomes cuddly toy in the hands of a
child, momentarily, as the two blond-haired young daughters
dither at the edge of a Romantic forest, a transition is made
in the other direction, from Disney fable to the older, darker
tales of the brothers Grimm. And as the girls confront the towering
foliage of the Urwald, a spectre emerges: one associated
with the nostalgia for a communal being fused under a common
image, to be regained through the restoration of mythic and
organic origins; or more precisely, one that sanctifies the
tribal territory as the mythic source of vitality and displaces
the responsibility for tribal conflict to the impersonal play
of 'organic' forces.
This spectre is familiar enough, but here
its darkness is short-lived. The second half of the video, A
celebration, develops from this mythic core, as we observe
the inaugural Streamside Day festival, with speeches
from the 'town supervisor' and 'economic developer', a song
from the town 'bard', children and adults dressed as animals;
dancing, donuts, burgers and a fire engine. It has been claimed
that Huyghe is fascinated with "communal rituals as an
agent of change, growth and the evolution of society."
But, although running through this celebration there are the
residual elements of rituals and desires played out at the edge
of nature (evident, above all, in the activities of the children),
these desires are overridden by the spectacular images representing
this nature. And, as spectacle, the celebration is as much predicated
upon an accumulation of capital as it is some nebulous communal
ambience. We witness the development of 'communities' that are
"as much the recognition of marketing concepts as they
are the building blocks of the public sphere." (Rachel
Thomas) So, we should be wary just what type of 'growth' and
'evolution' these communal rituals are agents of. If the principle
of communal self-preservation, which should lead "by its
own force to the desideratum of happiness," becomes a fetish
the community remains infantile. If the suburban 'pioneers'
become spectators of their own desires, they renounce the development
needed to find their satisfaction in lived experience and develop
false needs instead, which are satisfied in a world of real
images: "For one to whom the real world becomes real images,
mere images are transformed into real beings - tangible figments
which are the efficient motor of a trancelike behaviour."
(Guy Debord).
The world as spectacle induces 'trancelike
behaviour' that detracts attention from the group interests
and power relations crossing social rituals and the production
of representations. But who is in a trance? The characters in
the celebration are actors or members of the public invited
to participate: they know they are taking part in the fiction
of their own representation, and hence, their alienation, which
would be increased by the transformation of lived experience
into spectacle, seems rather stretched. To what extent then
does Huyghe second-guess the Situationist claim that art is
incapable of expressing anything but alienation? Does an audience
that participates in the structures of its own representation,
but does so only in a fictional environment, simply pre-empt
its own alienation? The artifice of the event was surely understood
by the participants from the start; but is it so immediately
apparent to the audience of the video who perceive it as a documentary?
Huyghe returns art to the status of the "fictive
language of a non-existent community" (M. Rasmussen) and
this fiction is precariously maintained in that 'non-place'
of film, somewhere between real time and represented time. This
position of film makes it a suitable medium for spectacular
representations, of course, but it also offers the creative
possibilities which allow Huyghe and his collaborators the attempt,
similar to the surrealists, to re-consecrate human relationships
vis à vis the poverty of the spectacle. He does not,
however, re-consecrate art as the privileged vehicle of representation:
for all that Huyghe's 'connective images' have been said "not
to represent the world, but to place us at once within and outside
the processes by which we visualise and construct our realities,"
he still seems suspicious of art's capacity to articulate the
elements of an authentic life.
A common belief is that artforms developed
through direct, nonalienated interaction will not reproduce
divisions of labour prevalent elsewhere; that they will return
social relations to an exchange between producers, not commodities.
But Huyghe seems aware that these forms of interaction must
pass through the assorted fictions of representation, making
community itself a commodity to be consumed by the members of
that community, and as such these forms all too easily participate
in the organisation of social passivity. Again like the surrealists
and their practices of 'free' representation, the attitude that
posits art as the privileged means for fantastic enactments
of community would likely be a welcome component of spectacular
consumption; "the aim [of the latter] being that the proletariat
should move only to the extent required for the contemplation
of its own inert contentment, that it should be rendered so
passive as to be incapable of anything beyond infatuation with
varied representations of its dreams." (Jules-François
Dupuis).
This 'infatuation' is evident in the Streamside
community members as they determinedly celebrate their dreams,
all the while committed to an "absolute valorisation and
preservation of the present moment." (And certainly, this
proletariat, if it is worthy of the name, is not moving anywhere:
as to the 'contemplation of its own inert contentment', we might
recall that the invitation to the public to participate made
much of the food and spectacular events that would be available,
as well as, simply by virtue of being a renowned artist, the
'unquestionable' benefits of HuygheĠs collaboration with the
community.)
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Pierre Huyghe; Streamside day,
2003, event, mixed media, film and video transfers,
26 minutes, colour and sound: courtesy of the artist
/ Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris / Irish Museum
of Modern Art
|
But although Streamside day refuses
to lay claim to the representation of an authentic life, it
does not then participate fully in the spectacle. Like the two
young girls, it dithers at the edge of fact and fiction. It
mediates both through its own structures, privileging neither,
but showing rather that each must pass through the other for
it to be known at all. How effective such mediation can be as
a means of either deciphering 'our systems of social exchange'
or 'exposing reality' is an open question. Yet the subtle complexities
of HuygheĠs narrative structures undermine the fictive spectacle
as much as they do the authentic fact, and for this reason his
work cannot be dismissed as just another politically tame practice
'spiced up' by its description within Situationist terminology
(we must remember, however, that there is a more general problem
in aligning institutional art practices with the Situationist
belief that art had to be realised outside its institutions
in a creative, everyday life: that, in the words of Guy Debord,
"[only] the real negation of culture can inherit culture's
meaning. Such negation can no longer remain cultural.
It is what remains, in some manner, at the level of culture
- but it has a quite different sense.").
Streamside day
seems to have more in common with the activities of Laibach
(a subgroup of Neue Slowenische Kunst), who, rather than attempting
a critical or ironic distance from their subject matter (i.e.
the inherited state ideology of the post-Communist Balkans)
- seeing irony in particular as not so much a threat to the
system as 'the highest form of conformism' - instead make an
excessive identification with it, thereby showing the 'obscene'
other side of this ideology and suspending its efficacy (Misko
Suvakovic). This would mean that Huyghe's celebration of contemporary
folklore and tradition and the recurrence of spectacular communal
rituals would be a more radical form of art praxis than
it appears, at work in the most unlikely place.
Tim Stott is a critic based in
Dublin.
