The Third Memory, 1999

2 video projectors, 1 synchronizer, 1 monitor,
15 digital images (60 x 80), 2 videos, 16:9, PAL,
colour, stereo sound (Eng.) 9’46”
Co-produced by the New Media Department,
Centre Pompidou, The Renaissance
Society at the University of Chicag


The Third Memory is presented in the form of a display of heterogeneous documentary and fictional elements making it possible to gauge the different gaps that have been formed between the reality of a news item as experienced by its author and the cinematographic spectacle derived there from by the Hollywood economy. Like a police reconstruction (of a crime, say), a situation and an event are re-enacted, re-performed, using a method involving the reappropriation of representations (of film and the media in this instance), which Pierre Huyghe has been exploring in his work for several years now. What is involved here, and what is the chronology of the facts? On 22 August 1972, in Brooklyn, New York, at 2 p.m., there was a bank hold-up, during which hostages were taken by the two men involved, John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturile. When it was all over, Sal Naturile was dead and Wojtowicz had been arrested. The motive for this crime, as revealed by the media which gave the event wide coverage, was to finance the surgical operation (a sex change) wanted by the man with whom Wotjowicz was in love, Ernest Aron. An article published in Life Magazine would subsequently inspire Sydney Lumet to write the script for a film, which would end up as Dog Day Afternoon, eventually released in 1975, with Al Pacino in the lead role. Twenty-seven years after those events, Pierre Huyghe asked John Wotjowicz to reconstruct the heist and thus make rectifications to Lumet's fictional rendering, in which Wojtowicz failed to recognize himself. A new film was shot in a studio, with the author of the hold-up re-enacting the situation and commenting on it, based on the way he recalled it. Pierre Huyghe thus gave John Wojtowicz a chance to reconstruct a truthful version of his story and his image, which had been confiscated from him by the imagination and production of somebody else, and permitted him to “have his say and become the actor of his own memory”. In a first room, the installation consists of a double projection on a screen wall, the editing of which deals with an excerpt from Lumet's film, documents from that period, the 1970s, and the reconstruction of the events in a studio by Wojtowicz, filmed from different angles and directions, and at times talking straight at the camera; in a second room, posters are affixed to the walls, along with press clippings and a video showing a television programme dated 25 January 1978, the Jeanne Parr Show, with Wojtowicz in a linkup from his prison cell, and Ernest Aron, who has turned into Liz Debbie, on the set. This whole complex and precise construction, split into two areas of reconstruction and documentation around one and the same event, constitutes an exhibition in its own right. Pierre Huyghe steps up the number of exhibits and pieces of evidence and mixes true with false, by putting the account of the prime witnesses at the very hub of the reconstruction. Memory itself becomes subject to interpretation by the very fact of its updating. At the heart of this anamnesic device lie truth, history, identity and representation. By repeating the event, Pierre Huyghe gives what has already taken place a second chance: he reconstructs “the possibility of what was”, and borrows the words of Giorgio Agamben, “Memory gives the past back its possibility,” if not its truth. Huyghe often uses film to question memory, in the form of remakes and interpretation. Memory is carried by the body, for it is the body of memory: in pieces like Remake, The Ellipse, Snow White Lucie and Dubbing, it is the body of the film actors which gives the past its possibility. What affects us in The Ellipse is not so much that Bruno Ganz reconstructs a time-frame that the cinematographic code had spirited away, and stolen as much from the actor as from the viewer, but that 27 years after The American Friend, he says to us: I'm still here, here and now, with my story which is also your story, made up of make-believe and reality mixed together. This third memory which Pierre Huyghe talks about adds to the memory of facts and their interpretation by way of fiction, the memory of the present body which talks and reports, which expresses its truth and lays claim to being the author thereof. What is the author of the crime? What is the body of the crime? The motive for the crime is the identity switch (changing sex costs a great deal of money; it is changing life): the author of the crime is the body of the crime; it is the person who risks his life. When you put your life at risk, you must not make things up, because this life and its story belong to us in the most private depths of ourselves. This is what Pierre Huyghe expresses by doing away with himself as the author in The Third Memory; reconstructing the story is like reconstructing the body in the surgical sense of the term; it is re-establishing it in its original form, it is repairing the damage that chance (illness, accident) or nature (being born a man and being a woman) have made the person undergo. It is a contestation of its representations and its funny goings-on. Film doctors and adulterates bodies as is shown by Dubbing, made in 1996, where we see (at last) the bodies behind the voices of the French version of an American film (one body talks for the other), as also comes through in Snow White Lucie, where a body is dispossessed of its voice by the entertainment industry. Restoring the word to the body, reappropriating its story, relativizing the event, these are the challenges which Pierre Huyghe assigns to his art. Getting back to production and not confining oneself to exploitation, this is perhaps his political agenda.

 

Françoise Parfait

Translated by Simon Pleasance