Huyghe is so helpful in interview form.
George Baker:
Is a “relational aesthetic” about a reformulation of a political project? Is it instead about an avoidance of the term political? Or is it a kind of pragmatism or realism that we face here–a realization that false political claims for artistic practices were made in the 1980s, and one must not falsely claim immediate political functions for cultural or aesthetic projects?Huyghe:
Your last point is key. And it should apply as well to critics and historians. It is obviously difficult to define oneself after a postmodern 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 must be recognized and that produces a fragile object.
And this is why I have had some problems with the last two Documenta exhibitions. A false claiming of the political. It is a huge problem when the “political” becomes a subject for art. For me, Buren is a political artist. It is a practice that is political, not the subject or the content of the art. Politics is not an apple that you paint in order to legitimate the fact that you paint. That is a moral issue.Baker:
You are interested then in a politics of form?Huyghe:
Always, what is crucial is not the arrangement but the rules of arrangement.
-excerpt from an interview in October, MIT Press Journal, Fall 04, on the occasion of Streamside Day Follies at the Dia.
In our ‘society of the spectacle’, in which what we experience as everyday reality more and more takes the form of the lie made real, Freud’s insights show their true value. Consider the interactive computer games some of us play compulsively, games which enable a neurotic weakling to adopt the screen persona of a macho aggressor, beating up other men and violently enjoying women. It’s all too easy to assume that this weakling takes refuge in cyberspace in order to escape from a dull, impotent reality. But perhaps the games are more telling than that. What if, in playing them, I articulate the perverse core of my personality which, because of ethico-social constraints, I am not able to act out in real life? Isn’t my virtual persona in a way ‘more real than reality’? Isn’t it precisely because I am aware that this is ‘just a game’ that in it I can do what I would never be able to in the real world? In this precise sense, as Lacan put it, the Truth has the structure of a fiction: what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the truth on whose repression social reality itself is founded. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
from Freud Lives!
From BAMPFA:
On January 18, 2007, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presented New Media & Social Memory, a public symposium to discuss strategies for preserving digital art at at time when digital technologies are evolving and becoming obsolete at an astonishingly rapid pace. While focusing on digital art, the symposium also addressed larger concerns about the long-term conservation of our increasingly digital culture, including how we decide what digital content-from websites to video games-are worth saving. The full day included presentations and panel discussions by leading experts in the field of digital preservation.
Excited or scared?
Here is a shaky (but audible) video recording of approximately 3/4s of Huyghe’s lecture, shot by myself and Heather Lawson.
From ATC:
Abstract
Note: This lecture is co-sponsored by the California College of Art and the French Consulate and will be presented at CCA’s Timken Auditorium in San Francisco, 1111 Eighth Street, from 7-8:30pm witih reception following.
Beginning with an introduction to the Association of Freed Time, this talk by Pierre Huyghe will focus on time based projects and exhibitions, scripted situations, and the construction of scenarios. While presenting his work, Huyghe will discuss a variety of methodologies, taking into consideration the exhibition as a form, the formats of representation as exhibition venues (theater, cinema, books, newspapers, parks…), placement and timing, the ‘becoming image’ of things, the exhibition versus the show, the principle of equivalence. Representation as a performative means, the activation of space, the rules of the game. Comedy, the recent mainstream attraction, celebration and celebrity.
Bio
Pierre Huyghe, born in Paris in 1962, lives in New-York and Paris. Huyghe explores the territory of reality and fiction, creating a site of convergence for interpretation, representation, and transformation. His work incorporates film, objects, and staged events such as celebrations, puppet shows, and musicals to address how we construct and translate experience. Although the final artwork often takes the form of a projected image, Huyghe’s primary interest lies in the production of situations. Since founding the Association of Freed Time in 1995, Pierre Huyghe has sought to introduce new paradigms to the art exhibition by extending its temporal mode.Since 1994 he has mounted solo exhibitions at institutions including the Tate Modern - London, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC - Paris, Carpenter Center - Cambridge, Dia Center for the Arts - New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - New York, 49th Venice Biennial (Pavillon Français), Musée d’art contemporain - Montréal, CentreGeorges Pompidou - Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art - Chicago, Kunsthalle - Zurich, Museum of Art - Santa Monica, Wiener Secession - Vienna. He also contributed to Whitney Biennial - 2006, Documenta 11 - 2002, 48th Venice Biennial - 1999, Manifesta 2, European Biennial ofContemporary Art 1998, and to many other group exhibitions and festivals. Awards : Hugo Boss Prize, 2002, Special Award, Venice Biennial 2001, DAAD, Berlin, 1999-2000.
L’Association des Temps Liberes (The Association of Freed Times)
A Permanent Construction Site
Remake
Blanche Neige Lucie (Snow White Lucy)
No Ghost Just a Shell
The Third Memory
This Is Not a Time For Dreaming
L’Expedition Scintillante, A Musical
L’Expedition Scintillante, A Light Show
A Journey That Wasn’t
Streamside Day
“Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to discuss?” I ask.
“God, yes,” says Tony. “Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.”
Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me. “I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo,” he adds, “a serif.”…
NY TIMES January 22, 2007
By MATT RICHTEL
Correction Appended
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 21 — The XXX industry has gotten too graphic, even for its own tastes.
Pornography has long helped drive the adoption of new technology, from the printing press to the videocassette. Now pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.
They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.
Hollywood is dealing with similar problems, but they are more pronounced for pornographers, who rely on close-ups and who, because of their quick adoption of the new format, are facing the issue more immediately than mainstream entertainment companies.
Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming.
“The biggest problem is razor burn,” said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director.
Ms. Daniels is also a skeptic. “I’m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,” she said. Continue Reading »
QUESTION:
It’s an irony of history that at this moment young intellectuals, coming from the middle and upper classes, call themselves proletarians and say we must join the proletarians. But I don’t see any class-conscious proletarians. And that’s the great dilemma.
CHOMSKY:
Okay. Now I think you’re asking a concrete and specific question, and a very reasonable one.
It is not true in our given society that all people are doing useful, productive work, or self-satisfying work-obviously that’s very far from true - or that, if they were to do the kind of work they’re doing under conditions of freedom, it would thereby become productive and satisfying.
Rather there are a very large number of people who are involved in other kinds of work. For example, the people who are involved in the management of exploitation, or the people who are involved in the creation of artificial consumption, or the people who are involved in the creation of mechanisms of destruction and oppression, or the people who are simply not given any place in a stagnating industrial economy. Lots of people are excluded from the possibility of productive labour.
And I think that the revolution, if you like, should be in the name of all human beings; but it will have to be conducted by certain categories of human beings, and those will be, I think, the human beings who really are involved in the productive work of society. Now what this is will differ, depending upon the society. In our society it includes, I think, intellectual workers; it includes a spectrum of people that runs from manual labourers to skilled workers, to engineers, to scientists, to a very large class of professionals, to many people in the so-called service occupations, which really do constitute the overwhelming mass of the population, at least in the United States, and I suppose probably here too, and will become the mass of the population in the future.
And so I think that the student-revolutionaries, if you like, have a point, a partial point : that is to say, it’s a very important thing in a modern advanced industrial society how the trained intelligentsia identifies itself. It’s very important to ask whether they are going to identify themselves as social managers, whether they are going to be technocrats, or servants of either the state or private power, or, alternatively, whether they are going to identify themselves as part of the work force, who happen to be doing intellectual labour.
If the latter, then they can and should play a decent role in a progressive social revolution. If the former, then they’re part of the class of oppressors.