(Un)Masked: Pierre Huyghe

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

(Un)Masked: Pierre Huyghe

Posted by Arts Curated at 5:51 PM

Pierre Huyghe’s film The Host and The Cloud reflects his personal interest in examining human existence under slightly altered conditions, looking at the roles they assume and behaviors in which they engage. To effectively survey the range of human experience in an aesthetic environment charged with art-historical meaning, Huyghe shoots his film at the Musee National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris on Halloween, Valentines Day, and May Day. Huyghe’s actors partake in both directed and improvised actions, negotiating the ins and outs of the Museum. With the museum as a fixed stage, Huyghe's themes of recreation and the obscured division between reality and fiction produce different outcomes depending on the day, the actors, and director’s objectives. Huyghe transforms his actors into masked psychedelic performers whose appearances transgress narrative expectations of the self and embrace fictional alter egos. Despite this “experiment in excessive visual confusion,”[1] as Frieze aptly describes it, Huyghe’s film elicits a particular psychological sentiment with which viewers can associate.

To more effectively communicate this psychological atmosphere, Huyghe conceals a selections of his characters in LED-lit masks, as exhibited on the gallery models, to instill a sense of being both hidden and visible, seen and unseen. These masks, artificial, abstracted light on a geometrical structure, represent characters, humans. Huyghe asks his audience to consider how these mass-produced objects come to symbolize humanness through their own emotions and personal reactions. Is it the viewer, Huyghe questions, that activates and humanizes otherwise inanimate, static objects?

Positioning the masks across the floor of the gallery demands an immediate confrontation, unavoidable interaction with these masks. Because viewers must directly encounter these masks, they must both instill a personal interpretation upon them as well as consider their own mask and identity.