Biographie

Pierre Huyghe was born in 1962 à Paris. After an artistic cursus at l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris from 1982 to 1985, he had his first collective experience as part of the Frères Ripoulin. This group, active between 1984 and 1988, consisted of 6 painters: 3carrés, bla+bla+bla, Manhu, Ox, Closky and Piro Kao, Pierre Huyghe's pseudonym. They were characterised by painted poster collages posted in the street, a practice not unlike that of Jean Faucheur, another pioneer in this field, and which led them to show their work at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in January 1985.

Almost a decade after this formative experience of how the art world operates, Pierre Huyghe made himself known once more with a series of works dealing with the fictional world and the film industry's conditions of production.
In 1994, he proposed Remake, a 100-minute film that reproduces Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window
shot by shot. In 1997, with Blanche-Neige Lucie, Pierre Huyghe revealed the face of Lucie Dolène, the French voice of Walt Disney's Snow White, following her lawsuit with the US giant of animated film. The dubbing process inspired him again in 1996, with Dubbing.

He also works on photography, with the works Rue de Longvic in 1994 in Dijon or Little Story in 1995 in Amsterdam. Pierre Huyghe uses existing urban furniture (bus shelters or signs) to exhibit images. He emphasises the principle of contextual mise en abyme, a notion that is found consistently throughout his work.

In 1995, he founded the “Association des Temps Libérés”[1], which brought together all of the artists from the Moral Maze exhibition that was held in 1995 at the Centre d'Art le Consortium de Dijon, featuring Douglas Gordon, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Carsten Höller, among others. The purpose of this gathering was to “develop unproductive periods for thinking about free time and the elaboration of a society without work” and took the form of public meetings, conferences, publications, parties and so on. Pierre Huyghe thus laid down the bases of his thoughts on the exhibition context and his need to redefine the conditions of presentation of works.

In 1996, in collaboration with Philippe Parreno he created a fictive character named Anna Sanders, which he first brought to life through a magazine. The following year, this imaginary heroine lent her name to a production company, “Anna Sanders Film”, whose objective is to accompany the production of artists' films.

After having received a scholarship for the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 1998, he again collaborated with Philippe Parreno in 1999 by purchasing a female manga heroine, the character Ann Lee, from a Japanese design studio, sold in the form of a digital file. As with Anna Sanders, Ann Lee became an empty shell that 18 guest artists were to appropriate. The overall project took the name of “No ghost, just a shell”[2] and was completed in 2003 with the purchase by the Van Abbe Museum de Eindhoven of the series of 28 works produced within this framework.

In 2000, he produced Third Memory, a 10-minute video, reinterpreting a news story from 1974 and the film that it inspired, Dog Day Afternoon by Sydney Lumet. Pierre Huyghe rediscovers John Wojtowicz, both the protagonist of a failed hold-up and also the inspiration for the character played by Al Pacino in the 1975 film. Wojtowicz thus becomes the central hero of Pierre Huyghe's video. He is put back into a model bank and surrounded by extras, who, at his indication, reactivate the events of 1974. In this “third memory”, then, a permanent interplay is set up between the memory of the known facts and the fiction that they engendered.

The work of Pierre Huyghe was awarded the special jury prize at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

At the Centre d'Art de Bregenz in 2002, Pierre Huyghe invested the building with a project entitled L'expédition scintillante, inspired by a book by Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition was designed like a fragmented fiction, of which each separated element allowed an imaginary situation to be recreated. On the various floors of the exhibition space there was a boat made out of ice that melted as changes were made to its controlled microclimate, a model mountain accompanied by original music and lighting and a black ice-skating rink. These elements prefigured a future expedition to Antarctica.

In 2003, at the DIA Center in New York, Pierre Huyghe devised Streamside Day Follies, an exhibition and 26-minute video based on an imaginary community and its rites. Seemingly empty at first glance, the gallery becomes animated and five moving walls appear at regular intervals to form a cube on which the video is projected. The latter begins with a bucolic, almost unreal landscape, before following the initiatory journey of a family within a community whose rules are defined by the artist. Pierre Huyghe was inspired by “gated communities”, groups of guarded residences typical of Northern America, and the social and architectural utopias of the 19th century, for example, that of Proudhon, as well as the polished, seamless worlds of animated films.

Harvard University invited Pierre Huyghe on an artist's residency in 2004. For this occasion, he devised the project This Is Not A Time For Dreaming, a 24-minute film in which he relates the parallel between his experience of commissions and that of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, invited in 1955 to construct a pavilion dedicated to the arts for this same university. Pierre Huyghe builds a model of the site and puppets to personify the various protagonists and perform his fiction. The only representation of the show was filmed in November 2004 and presented the following year at the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon.

In February 2005, the expedition that had been envisaged at the Centre d'Art de Bregenz became a reality: Pierre Huyghe went to sea in the company of five artists, in search of an island at the edge of Antarctica. In October 2005, this voyage was transformed into a show, accompanied by a symphonic orchestra at the Wollman ice-skating rink in Central Park, New York. The combination of these two filmed experiences then constituted a 26-minute film A Journey That Wasn't, presented for the first time at the Whitney Museum of New York. For the artist, reality is better captured through fiction than it is by an objective account.

In 2006, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris hosted Celebration Park, a retrospective exhibition of Pierre Huyghe's work that allowed him to experiment with his desire to recontextualise the characteristics of the exhibition, by proposing, for instance, a break with the unity of time, with a three-week long prologue.

For the occasion of the Sydney Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2008, Pierre Huyghe devised A Forest of Lines, a 24-hour event that transformed the Sydney Opera House into a maze of greenery, in which visitors must find a folk singer. Once again, he manifested his conception of performance as a medium in its own right, and as a means of reactivation for the future.

Laetitia Rouiller

[1] Translator's note: the name seems to be a pun on the “Association de Temps Libre”, which is a name sometimes given in France to associations that organise retirement and/or youth activities. (Temps Libre = Free Time; Temps Libérés = Freed Time). [2] In reference to the well-known manga Ghost in the Shell, by Shirow Masamune, first published in 1989.