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Witness and presence in the work of Pierre Huyghe

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Abstract

The relation between “presence” and “representation” is an age-old topic in the arts, but it is further complicated in our time of advanced media conditions. Pierre Huyghe is one artist who has consistently addressed questions of presence and representation throughout his artistic oeuvre, including the role of the witness within it. Considering the sophistication of Huyghe’s work with regard to the riddle of presence in the realm of contemporary means of representation, the artist’s work is taken as a case study for a broad range of artists exploring related topics within the arts and the media. This paper argues that art that interrogates the question of presence within the context of contemporary media culture—from Marina Abramović to Stelarc, Jeffrey Shaw to Julia Scher—asks for being interpreted through presence theories developed within the field of media studies in addition to methods of art theory and criticism. Accordingly, Huyghe’s work is productively related to one such theory, namely the YUTPA model by Caroline Nevejan, which theorizes the interrelated concepts of natural, mediated, and witnessed presence.

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Notes

  1. Oxford English Dictionary online, s.v. “witness”. Accessed on 15 March 2011.

  2. An early and by now classic book on the virtual personae we create in cyberspace is Turkle (1995). On the concept of the cyborg, see Haraway (1991).

  3. Armstrong spoke the following legendary words when he set foot on the moon: “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”.

  4. The textbook Art since 1900 is divided into two volumes, one for art from 1900 until 1945, and another for art since 1945. While it is justifiable to not discuss media in the visual arts before 1945, when the term ‘media’ was still only in use within the field of advertisement, it becomes problematic in the second volume on art in the postwar period.

  5. For a list of research sites on presence theory, see Nevejan (2007), p 277.

  6. I analyzed this work in depth in an unpublished paper on Huyghe, Sjoukje van der Meulen Remake vs. Readymade (2003), in which I argued that Huyghe mobilizes the remake as a medium in a critical response to Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made, which has lost its conceptual strength in the age of advanced media conditions.

  7. More precisely, Chantier means building site in French, and Barbès-Rochechouart refers to the area around a subway stop with that name to the North of the city.

  8. “Huyghe représente des gestes quotidien… et les expose dans la rue, sur les lieux même où la photographie a été prise: réduisant ainsi à presque rien l’écart existant entre l’image et son modéle, entre le moment de la prise de vue et celui de l’exposition, il invente une sorte de différé quotidien, une image directe”. Bourriaud (Bourriaud 1996a, b), p. 49.

  9. In the 19th century Aristotle’s idea of the three unities are turned into a law for theatre. Aristotle himself, however, only formulated the way in which time, place, and action are the determining factors that help shape a (staged) event and are thus important for establishing the difference between reality and fiction.

  10. For the graph and its explanation, see Nevejan (2007), pp. 242–243.

  11. In a conversation with the author, Huyghe confirmed that he had the construction activities re-enacted. Sjoukje van der Meulen, conversation with Pierre Huyghe, Paris, September 2002.

  12. Huyghe stresses this also by rotating the square and the buildings in the photograph about ninety degrees in relation to the actual building site: the whole scene, then, is not only temporally manipulated but also in a spatial sense.

  13. In Time Delay series the artist presents a variety of scenarios for video cameras, recorders and mirrors in various constellations spread over one or two rooms to investigate the interrelations between natural, mediated and witnessed presence (Graham 1979).

  14. In Gallery Marian Goodman in New York, the newspapers articles were hung unnoticeably in the corridor leading up to the space where the double-screen video projection was shown. The pedagogical clarity of the presentation in The Centre Pompidou was lost. Even worse, in the Guggenheim Museum, the work was integrated into a video program, and nothing left of the indispensible part with the printed news media.

  15. Huyghe succeeded in figuring out John Wojtowicz’s address in Brooklyn, where he has lived since his release from prison.

  16. In a conversation I had with the artist in Paris (2001), Huyghe explained and elaborated on his original idea of mise-en-situation.

  17. This crucial newspaper article is reprinted in Huyghe (2000), p. 73. The sentence I am referring to can be found in the second column, and reads as follows: “I estimate the movie 30% true even though it states: this movie is based on a true incident that occurred in Brooklyn, NY”.

  18. One of the best synopsis of this show is Rajchman’s exhibition review in Art in America at the time itself, especially in combination with Rajchman;s discussion of Lyotard’s entire intellectual work in a memorial of the French philosopher after his death in an essay for the journal October. See Rajchman (1985), pp. 110–17, and Rajchman (1998), pp. 3–19.

  19. Liliam Gillick writes a critical response to Claire Bishop’s essay in a later issue of October, in which he attacks her reading of relational art and his own work. He also rightly points to the many factual errors in her essay. I attended the opening of Traffic; wrote the first review on relational art in The Netherlands, and have followed the development of relational art and its critical reception ever since in both Europe and the US. Thus, I was equally disturbed by the multiple mistakes in Bishop’s essay and her inadequate readings of many artworks (especially of Tiravanjia) and Bourriaud’s ideas. See Gillick (2006), pp. 95–107; and van der Meulen (1996), p. 55.

  20. In his analysis of classic films and other media, Bismuth has shown how to infiltrate and interrupt existing codes of meaning in culture at large. The same goes for Douglas Gordon in his early work such as his notorious appropriation of 24 h Psycho (1993).

  21. Another work to mention in regard with a new ethics is Huyghe’s relatively early video projection, Show white (1997), in which the artist also interrogates deeply ethical questions as a result of the result of the tension between natural presence and mediated presence in a rather touching manner. Show White is a documentary about Lucie Dolène, a woman who ‘gave’ her voice to the French translation of Walt Disney’s movie on the same fairy tale. Dolène sued Disney for abusing her voice when the company did not give her the proper royalties for the distribution of a new edition of the film. Dolène’s motivation to go to court, however, had to do with ethical issues of privacy and ownership rather than money. What is at stake in this work, then, are fundamental issues of property rights in the age of advanced media conditions. We have learnt from John locke a long time ago that property and property rights have something to do with ourselves, with our own existence, our physical body. A question such as Dolène’s as to whether or not our own voice (or image) also belongs to our property, in other words, is an ethical challenge of the media society in which we are living today.

  22. It must be said that at the time itself Bourriaud was not the only one who pointed through both texts and exhibitions to the historical precedents in the 1960s such as Fluxus while arguing that we need to address new contemporary conditions. See, for example, Bart de Baere, This is the Show and the Show is Many Things (Ghent: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1994), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Take me (I’m Yours) (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1995), or my own introductory text for the exhibition of the first International Curatorial Training Program at the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam. See van der Meulen (1995).

  23. I heard the next critique of relational art within the line of negative criticism in the US on the CAA conference in Chicago (2010), where Jennifer Stobb attacked Bourriaud and relational aesthetics in her paper “Anti-art, Non-event: The Situationist Inverse of Relational Aesthetics”. While Stobbs argued convincingly that Bourriaud does not sufficiently recognize the legacy of Guy Debord and the situationists, she (like Bishop) failed to understand the deeper motivations of relational aesthetics in the 1990s as a distinct phenomenon of the 1960s artistic movements such as Fluxus and the Situationists.

  24. Cultural critics have attacked Buadrillard’s provocative statements because his media perspective avoids to address any circumstance or relevant background, and is seen as immoral because he ignored the reality of people dying in this event. Huyghe’s work escapes such criticism because of his inoffensive topic of a journey.

  25. Huyghe, A Journey that Wasn’t.

  26. Another artist with whose work Huyghe seems to engage in an intense artistic dialogue is Robert Smithson. This is not the place for an in-depth analysis of the interrelations between Smithson and Huyghe, but it is clear that Huyghe’s project in the antartic relates to Smithon’s The Spiral Jetty in many ways. Both artists went to a distant place to produce their art within raw nature, far from the cultured artworld, and both then brought a representation of the work back into civilization. Issues of presence and representation, or site and non-site in Smithson’s terminology, are at the heart of both works. It is also notable that in the work of both artists the idea of process, or the making of the work as a temporal event, is crucial. In an essay on The Spiral Jetty of 1972, Smithson describes in great detail the proces of finding the right location for his work, the journey to that place, the making of the work with tons of basalt blocks and earth and big trucks. Smithson also emphasizes in text and image (i.e. in films about The Spiral Jetty) the importance of experiencing “the fluctuating scale” (not just the size) of the work while walking on it—natural presence, our own physical body, in that particular space in Utah at a certain time, is thus central to the work. Finally, the work of both Smithson and Huyghe has an intermedia character in the sense that they both use a wide variety of media to represent the work and experience it in different ways.

  27. See http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue7/journeythatwas.htm.

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  1. Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago, 305 Henry Hall, 935 W Harrison Street, Chicago, IL, USA

    Sjoukje van der Meulen

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van der Meulen, S. Witness and presence in the work of Pierre Huyghe. AI & Soc 27, 25–42 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-011-0330-x

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