Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe (MIT Press, 2012)

Pierre huyghe and Parallel Presents JULIE EWINGTON I was lucky. I was in Paris last year when Pierre Huyghe’s survey exhibition was presented at the Centre Pompidou.1 Seeing a generous body of an artist’s work is one of the greatest of European luxuries, though there it is treated as a necessity. I’d loved the few pieces by Huyghe I’d seen before, but what I’d not anticipated, walking into the exhibition more or less cold, was that within 10 minutes the ground beneath my feet would shift, almost magically. I was renewing my acquaintance with the ilm This is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004) when an elegantly attenuated dog, marked with bright pink, trotted past. I caught it on the periphery of my vision. At that moment the exhibition’s universe tilted – nothing was the same again. Ephemeral, temporal and performative forms are the most fugitive, as well as among the most important, in contemporary art – they still regularly slip the noose of understanding, despite the rich lexibility of digital documentation. (As curator Bree Richards recently remarked of performance, it seems ‘you really had to be there’.2) How wonderful, then, that Australian scholar Amelia Barikin has written such a thoughtful, attentive and sympathetic study in Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe (The MIT Press, 2012). It’s an exemplary account of the achievement of one of the most consistently fascinating contemporary artists, whose apparent catholicity in subject and media is here considered as a multifaceted exploration of the meaning and experience of time. The canine irruption that shifted my museum world in a moment is a marker of Huyghe’s method: he regularly installs multiple existing works from his repertoire together with new commissions. At Turin’s Castello di Rivoli in 2004, for instance, in an exhibition that Barikin notes preigured the Pompidou show, he convened a number of objects, videos, ilms, sound pieces and performances/actions, deliberately confounding visitor expectations of a static chronologically ordered display with the concatenating markers of time and place embedded in the assembled works.3 (The Pompidou exhibition will be restaged 5 8 Art Monthly Australia at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 23 November 2014 to 8 March 2015, but I’m betting that it will be, somehow, signiicantly different again.) If this sounds anarchic, in a context where order is normally highly conventionalised, that is Huyghe’s intent: works are most precisely chosen, juxtaposed and allowed to run in time spans that necessarily, but eventually randomly, overlap and intersect. How to describe this stimulating experience? As Barikin points out in her introduction, Huyghe, like Duchamp before him, is an ideas man – his Pompidou installation brought to mind Duchamp’s celebrated immersive surrealist exhibitions of 1938 and 1942. At the entrance one’s name was announced, loudly, by a dedicated performer; one found in the semidarkness a video playing on a large screen to a recumbent audience; and in all directions, but not symmetrically, temporary walls opened into spaces with sculptures or a written score or more videos. (That’s not to mention the ice and the igure skaters.) Above all, one had to be alert: this is what happens when the museum is tipped out of kilter. Early in her introduction, Barikin quotes Huyghe writing in 2000 about his ambitions: ‘The open present is open to any and all occurrences that might occur.’4 That is exactly how I experienced Huyghe’s exhibition, even though I knew full well that it was orchestrated. The lux was too rich to summarise, impossible to reduce to a single narrative. I found it intoxicating. And, like life, its evanescence was poignant. Apropos: in 1995 the artist Jeanne-Claude, speaking with her partner Christo, told an audience at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney that temporary works of art are even more precious because of their impermanence. (Sustained applause.) Thus the title of Barikin’s book, Parallel Presents, registers the challenges to conventional temporal order that Huyghe’s practice most crucially proposes. After the introductory text ‘In What Time Do We Live?’, telegraphing her core argument Pierre Huyghe, exhibition view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 2013 – January 2014; image courtesy the artist; photo: Ola Rindal Pierre Huyghe, exhibition view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 2013 – January 2014; image courtesy the artist; photo: Pierre Huyghe Art Monthly Australia 5 9 about Huyghe’s exploration of different aspects and versions of temporality, six meaty chapters develop the theme. Barikin has arranged them chronologically, examining Huyghe’s works more or less in sequence, but in each chapter she melds historical reference points with investigations of particular concepts, and at the end of each suggests where the reader will be taken next. Only a beautifully organised argument could make sense of this diverse oeuvre, and we see how, in her richly observant account – ‘thick description’, in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s famous phrase, and totally appropriate for ephemeral forms of art where photographs and even videos never sufice – how over time Huyghe’s work has been constructed through a series of interests and interrogations, to which he has returned many times. Each chapter may stand alone, therefore, and each is absorbing. In the irst on early work, which opens in the continuous present with ‘The year is 1984’, Barikin establishes how Huyghe confounds relationships between the artist and the museum, making it his (and our) playground rather than a temple, but on many occasions also staging actions in public spaces. Her precise discussion of Huyghe’s indebtedness to the Situationists is especially welcome, given their name is so often taken in vain, and via generalities. The second chapter, ‘The Open Present’, is crucial. Huyghe’s guiding passion is how to understand time, indeed temporality, in all its forms. His celebrated concept of ‘freed time’, ironically enough formalised in his registering of his ‘Association des Temps Libérés’ with the French state in 1995, is noted as ‘the cornerstone’ of his practice. Barikin writes about ‘freed time’ that: ‘it fused his disparate investigations into temporality … and it also laid the groundwork for future research.’5 For Huyghe, ‘the open present’ is ‘an enormous sieve that sifts through events and recycles the residue to feed itself … nothing is ever fully obliterated by the passage of time.’ This is heady and complicated stuff, philosophy in the studio, but in examining the implications of the concepts of ‘freed time’ and ‘the open present’ for later work, Barikin writes: ‘I propose that we consider Huyghe’s project more simply: as a means of iguring out how to address one’s place in history, of coming to terms with ontology as duration and experience as lux.’6 6 0 Art Monthly Australia This acuity is typical of Barikin’s conidence with the complex implications of Huyghe’s work. For instance, she recounts how in 1996–97 Huyghe’s passion for cinema became harnessed to considering relationships between ‘sound, image, language and temporality’, often in exacting explorations of what she calls ‘the formatting’ of events, the physical and conventional parameters of cinema and sound recording. One gem in this discussion is the extremely useful consideration of how Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ came to frame Huyghe’s practice, and his own reluctance to be corralled into this celebrated ambit. Barikin suggests that the prominence of relational aesthetics has diminished the understanding of Huyghe’s work: ‘The interactive qualities discussed by Bourriaud are symptoms of, not primary motivators for, Huyghe’s interrogation of temporary formatting.’7 Similarly, in the discussion of Huyghe’s working with codes and acts of representation, she details contradictory critical responses to The Third Memory (1999), a dual-screen work centring on the New York bank robbery commemorated in the 1975 ilm Dog Day Afternoon, arguing that this critical focus on the aesthetics of appropriation has skewed understandings that should remain open: ‘They must persist as inquiries wherein every answer is coupled with an ellipse.’8 The inal chapters examine the potential of utopias and topological systems, with their relevance to temporalities kept in mind. Her last sentence reads: ‘If structures can be folded they can also be unfolded and, most signiicantly, it is only once the creases of the past return to viability that a new form might emerge.’9 This sentence speaks to both Huyghe’s seriousness and Barikin’s generosity, but her position of critical independence also yields useful perspectives: in the dense and exquisite chapters on represented subjects (‘Figures of Speech’) and on the nation of the ‘Inside-Out Utopia’, Barikin teases out not only the artist’s philosophical positions but the rich interpretative literature surrounding his work. The book itself, published by The MIT Press, is 268 pages of sheer delight, physically quite beautiful. Its wellchosen images elucidate the argument, and it is supported by a substantial bibliography and good index. But despite, or perhaps because of, the book’s origin in Barikin’s University of Pierre Huyghe, This is not a time for dreaming, 2004, ilm stills; images courtesy the artist Art Monthly Australia 6 1 Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Follies, exhibition views, DIA Center for the Arts, New York, October 2003 – January 2004; images courtesy the artist 6 2 Art Monthly Australia For Huyghe, ‘the open present’ is ‘an enormous sieve that sifts through events and recycles the residue to feed itself … nothing is ever fully obliterated by the passage of time.’ Melbourne doctoral thesis, it wears its learning lightly. The writing is so lively, engaged as well as informed, that its bubbling brio carries one through the knotty discussions. Importantly, while the Pompidou published an excellent catalogue for the recent exhibition, this is the irst major book on Huyghe’s art to appear in English. Barikin chose to study Huyghe precisely because there were no books available in any language: ‘in the snowy winter of 2003, when I saw Streamside Day Follies at Dia: Chelsea, I thought it was amazing, largely because it entirely ungrounded me, I couldn’t place it anywhere. I frankly didn’t know how to negotiate it and that was extremely exciting. So I went downstairs to the bookshop and asked if they had any books on Pierre and they said no, there were no books on Pierre, in French or in English. I told the bookshop staffer I was going to write one and started the PhD a few months later.’10 Perhaps, after all, the traditional artistic monograph is appropriate for an oeuvre so philosophically driven. The ample text allows dificult material to be thoroughly elucidated, but Barikin’s splendid book is an argument for continued general, as well as scholarly, engagement with what might appear, at irst glance, to be inaccessible forms of contemporary art. Above all, Barikin’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious. Clearly, her delight in Huyghe’s often surprising propositional art has not abated, and by transliterating a practice grounded in European philosophical issues and social debates for Anglophone readers (and audiences) with such panache, she opens up this world to wider audiences. Global contemporary art is by no means as universally legible as some pundits claim. While French cultural theory and philosophy has strongly impacted on Australian intellectual and cultural life over recent decades, including on many contemporary artists, and while Australian scholars such as Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton and others have been among key interpreters of postwar French philosophical and theoretical texts, the French artists who inhabit this milieu have often remained at a shadowy remove, seen through occasional rather than in-depth showings, with honourable recent exceptions in the exhibitions in Sydney by Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager.11 With Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe, Amelia Barikin has given us a superb reading of a leading contemporary French artist who is working through, and engaging with, his intellectual and social milieu. She not only served her subject well but, in pursuing the improbable poetics of Huyghe, also brilliantly illuminates her own cultural and intellectual setting. 1. Curated by Emma Lavigne; 25 September 2013 – 6 January 2014. 2. Bree Richards, ‘TRACELIVE: ONE DAY ONLY’, Queensland Art Gallery blog, 8 May 2014, see http://blog.qag.qld.gov.au/trace-live/; accessed 2 September 2014. 3. Amelia Barikin, Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012, p.176ff. 4. ibid., p. 3. 5. ibid., p. 47. 6. ibid., p. 69. 7. ibid., p. 80. 8. ibid., p. 120. 9. ibid., p. 223. 10. Barikin irst saw Huyghe’s work at the MCA in Sydney in 1999: Remake, based on the 1954 ilm Rear Window, was included in the exhibition ‘Moral Hallucinations: Channelling Hitchcock’. Email to author, July 2014. 11. See, for example, the presentation of single major works, such as Christian Boltanski’s Chance at Carriageworks from 9 January to 23 March 2014, but more importantly Rachel Kent’s ine retrospective, ‘Annette Messager: motion / emotion’ at the MCA from 24 July to 26 October 2014, which builds on Messager’s previous showings in Australia and her presence in the National Gallery of Australia Collection; see Caroline Hancock, ‘Translating emotion: Annette Messager in Australia’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 271, July 2014, pp. 28–35. Amelia Barikin, Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012, 268 pages, US$34.95 Art Monthly Australia 6 3