Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day,
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 23 February to 15 May; review
#2
'What is to be done?'
was the question ringing in everybody's ears in hollow tones
following the Communism exhibition held at Project
in Temple Bar, Dublin, in January and February this year. This
was a show that brought the dialectics of aesthetics and ethics
to the fore and invited the audience to contemplate past, present
and future alternatives to our contemporary world. Ever since
the 1960s, when the creation and reception of works of art began
to be concerned in a major way with social change, we have grappled
with utopian ideas of one sort or another, with activist art
springing from racial and sexual politics, and with the ideas
explored in the wake of institutional critique. Grudgingly or
not, most people would agree that the revolutionary days of
1968 and their aftermath have dissipated, and thus the
tone of the Communism show was necessarily balanced although
teetering on the edge of ridicule: the juxtaposition of a re-enacted
Dadaist performance by Lali Chetwynd and Goshka Macuga
with a Lenin impersonator reading a speech in German, or the
totally uninhabitable maquette of a commune by Klaus Weber,
seem to sum up the out-dated term that is 'Communism' in our
times. Our contemplation of the death of this term leads us
eternally to the question quoted above, and judging from the
public's response to Susan Kelly's installation which posed
Lenin's question (a roaming questionnaire shown as part of Communism),
everybody and nobody has the answer.
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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
|
It would seem that nowadays a world
filled with four billion people and free trade complicates our
ability to comprehend alternatives or improvements. While the
status quo of neoliberalism may be abhorrent, it is fairly firmly
entrenched, and for artists such as Pierre Huyghe it is rather
a question of utilising or subverting its forms nowadays to
produce a new reality. For this reason, Streamside Day
by Pierre Huyghe, now showing at IMMA, provides an entanglement
of reality and fiction that could be one artist's fantastical
response to Lenin's question / lamentation. In a recent interview
in October magazine, George Baker explicitly demanded
that Huyghe define his political position, asking if it is "a
realisation that false political claims for artistic practices
were made in the 1980s, and [that] one must not falsely claim
immediate political functions for cultural or aesthetic projects?"
To which Huyghe replied that "It is obviously difficult
to define oneself after a post-modern period where we all became
extremely self-conscious and aware about the consequences of
our actions. This is why conclusions should be suspended but
the tension should remain. There is a complexity that should
be recognised and that should produce a fragile object."[1]
When this film was originally screened
at DIA:Chelsea, New York in 2003, it was billed to be a "celebration
and a resulting film work," placing some emphasis on the
initial event that was Streamside Day. Huyghe advertised
for participants to take part in a celebration to mark the creation
of a new suburban settlement on the Hudson River in upstate
New York called 'Streamside knolls'. For this the artist designed
the framework for the day, including a parade with animal costumes,
a flautist and trucks, along with a feast consisting of such
American classics as hotdogs and corn on the cob and a Streamside
day cake. The activities were then set in motion without a script,
recorded by the artist and projected as the second part of the
film and titled 'A Celebration'. The film is shown in two parts:
the first is called ‘A Score’ and the second ‘A
celebration’; the former title could be a reference to
the influence that John Cage had on the early Happenings of
Alan Kaprow and the concept of setting in motion a social sculpture
as one would a work of music. The second part of this film was
shot in documentary style with a progressive and consistent
narrative that seems to span the length of a ‘perfect’
day, of which we are the posthumous spectators. The children
are the main characters in this pageant that is packed with
corny references; the flashing lights of a parked police car
serving as disco lights is a case in point. Initially there
is a saccharine sense of the comfortable middle-American ideal
- people from many different backgrounds moving to a new settlement
and celebrating as every new migrant community in America does
- by holding a parade. But other factors serve to complicate
this which are, unfortunately, not so evident in the piece as
it is presented at IMMA today. In its original
form the installation was called Streamside Day Follies
and was presented within a temporary-looking folly-like structure
that would slowly arrange itself before each screening of the
film in a mournful or graceful movement (on wheels) and slowly
deconstruct itself afterwards. A folly is usually an ornamental
building and not functional at all - in contrast with the houses
that are being built in Streamside knolls which are soon to
be inhabited by families.
At rest the panels that made up this
projection room blended with the white walls of the gallery
space, but on the reverse they were an iridescent green that
created an emerald-city effect when the 'folly' was in place.
This construction and deconstruction of the projection-room
folly is reminiscent of the constant flux of the building site,
the evolving nature of which has great significance in the oeuvre
of Pierre Huyghe, in particular what he defines as the permanent
building site ('chantier permanent'). In his project of the
same name, he documented the many half-built buildings surrounding
Naples and Rome that circumvented tax legislation by never reaching
completion. These buildings are often constructed in their owners'
spare time without proper plans or an architect and their significance
for the artist is their open-ended or never-ending nature; they
exist with the sole purpose of being eternally created. To some
this would appear to be a frustrating undertaking, a sort of
Catch-22, but this dialogue between the finished narrative and
the open-ended text allows for endless possibility.
The fragile object that is the work
of art as defined by Huyghe is not explainable in terms of public
or private space but in terms of the ways in which we make use
of them. We are afraid that the totalitarianism of a communist
regime or the conspiracy of business interests will lead to
some Orwellian nightmare, but we wonder if the cultural sphere
is the correct venue for these fears. While we try to figure
these things out, people are getting on with living and appropriating
spaces and creating new realities from spectacles. The
film twists our modern commercial understanding of celebrations
too, as this is one which, rather than being appropriated by
business for the sake of product sales, has been created from
day one in a modern vernacular. By way of explaining his
fascination with commercially appropriated celebrations, Huyghe
has spoken about Hallowe'en, which he sees as a celebration
that has lost its significance for the many people who have
no idea that it was originally an Irish pagan feast that sits
uncannily close to the Christian All Soul's day and the Mexican
Day of the Dead. Streamside Day attempts to create a
feast that examines the 'pagan' in our contemporary situation.
Streamside Knolls is a private development
and an instance of private and commercial interests moulding
our civic space. The privately built public or civic environment
has recently become a major feature of life in Ireland, the
IFSC development being a case in point, while in America it
is much more common. These private or public-private ventures
are currently seen as the modern face of progress. However,
as the sole objective of the dialectics of progress, to use
Marxist terms, is the maximisation of profit and the intensification
of control, we must be suspicious of the celebration of such
acts as depicted in Streamside Day. With this film
Huyghe tackles these issues head-on; for the artist it doesn't
matter who is creating the civic space, it is rather a question
of how the inhabitants appropriate that space.
 |
|
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
|
At DIA the projection was accompanied
by plans on the wall for a community centre for the Streamside
settlers created in conjunction with the architect François
Roche. Of all of the arts, architecture is the one that is the
most consistently utopian, although in these terms Huyghe has
managed to touch on one of its more negative nerves by referencing
the 'architecture as entertainment' ethos that is inherent in
the word 'folly'. This is one instance of the tension that the
artist spoke of in the October interview. That is not
to say that an absence of functionality is negative in general,
but in this instance we are supposed to be contemplating the
new homes of a new settlement, and thus a tension is created
between the functionality of the housing and the wistful nature
of the design for the community centre. This community centre
is to be built in the heart of the forest near the settlement:
"...forest of myths, of origins, playing out the complexity
between what is within, without, on the edge in various movements.
Its layout would mix human activities with wild fauna, domestic
fauna like a fold between a here and now situation and a naturalist
artificial construct." The concept of this community centre
almost literally references the Garden of Eden: "One must
imagine a portion of territory in a cage, not like a zoo but
like a place where the animals within are the same as those
without, although domesticated."[2]
One gets a sense of this concept of
a forested idyll from the woodland creatures and the fawn that
tentatively explores the settlement in the first part of the
film, ‘A Score’. This ‘Score’ seems
to lay out the sentiment of the film as a whole; it is allegorical
rather than literal and is less consistent in terms of narrative
structure than the second part of the film. In contrast with
the second part, which was unscripted and has the air of a documentary,
this first part uses more emotive and formalist camerawork.
The almost overwhelming forest, which is contrasted with the
children standing before it, seems to engulf and yet bolster
up those who approach it. At IMMA, the audience can make the
association between the forest and the architectural drawing
on the wall outside of the projection room, as the small children
are depicted in both, their size contrasted diminutively. The
drawing seems to literalise Huyghe's interest in the Baroque
fold, another of the artist's anti-teleological gestures that
was just one of many in the repertoire of the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze.
It is a pity that the piece is not doing
the rounds in its earlier 'DIA' form.
The projection of video work since the
1990s has left us with a legacy that submits the viewer to a
passive position not unlike that which we take up before a painting.
Streamside Day in its original form would circumvent
that position, as the audience had to move around in order to
take up their temporary place before the projection. The plans
for a community centre for the inhabitants of Streamside were
an important means of engaging with this video and added to
the open-ended nature of the work. At IMMA, the projection room
is completely fixed and traditional, although the walls have
been painted a very dark green with reference to the forest;
thus we have been returned to our traditionally passive role
in relation to the artwork. The only reference to the architectural
plans for the community centre is a drawing outside of the projection
space without explanation. In Dublin we have been presented
with the scaled-down version of a portion of a more complex
project, and the spatial nature of the work is lost, placing
much more emphasis on its temporality.
Sinéad Halkett
