The following came in as a comment to an earlier post on Pierre Huyghe's "Annlee" project. I thought it was kind of dumb that Huyghe bought the rights to an anime character and then changed her physical appearance before making her available as "open source art." If the art dealt with branding why not use the brand you paid good money for?
I am a graduate student at NYU writing about Pierre Huyghe. [...] Considering how explicitly critical he is of the act of representing and defining, he sure is quick to outline what his work means. I recently attended his talk at the New School and fell asleep.
I don't know enough about Huyghe to know if his "rap" over-determines his art. Possibly that happened with the Annlee project. But I only wrote about the premise and one writer's take on it, not the exhibit based on the premise.

The only Huyghe pieces I know well were the ones at the Guggenheim in 2002, the film of high-rise apartment building lights blinking on and off to a techno beat and the disco dance floor playing Satie. I liked the building piece, Les Grands Ensembles, 1994-2001, quite a bit and the music by Pan Sonic and Cédric Pigot particularly wowed (Pan Sonic rules). We probably don't need Huyghe informing us "These subsidized public projects ended up being an architectural and social failure, They were a corruption of Le Corbusier's social and architectural Modernist theory" but I don't mind knowing that. He even tells us what we see with our own eyes: "Without beginning or ending, the two low-income towers dialogue in a strange Morse code given by the light of their respective windows, a blinking existence." Which saved me having to write that.

- tom moody 12-12-2004 7:38 pm




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