LONDON: Pierre Huyghe at Lotta Hammer - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The new commercial release of Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho accommodate withs an air of perspicacity to Pierre Huyghe's 1995 video Remake, a shot-for-shot, line-for-line reenactment, in French of the emblematic 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. For this present to view the artist's first solo in London, Remake was showed by a series of video stills, each of which was framed with a corresponding pageant from the Hitchcock original. The spacing of the paired images upon the walls, which reflects the intervals between the sights as they occur in the original, signals the fact that Huyghe's interest in Rear Window lies with the overall configuration of the film. In the video, Huyghe's actors are bare mouthpieces for the script and deliver their lines emotionlessly. Instead of the original film's easy West Village address, the sinister activity, as observ from one side the photojournalist's lens, unfolds in a building beneath construction in a bleak housing shoot forward in France. The building's state of incompletion--indicative of transition as well as arrested development--is critical for Huyghe, whose other remake, Le Incivils (based upon Pasolini's Uccellacci e Uccellinl), was sited upon a real-estate development project in Italy that was abandoned during construction.

Also included in the exhibition was Huyghe's video Blanche-Neige Lucie (1997) which features Lucie Dolene, the woman who, in 1962 dubbed the part of Snow White in Disney's French version of the animated film. In the short, condensed video, we see the graceful Dolene, with a cherubic face and impeccable coif befitting a mature Snow White, humming "Some Day my Prince will Come" a canticle from the movie. This spectacle is undercut, however, by the subtitles running across the bottom of the guard which tell of Dolene's court battle with Disney for the distribution rights to her hold voice. Provocatively interweaving Dolene's singing with the written true copy Huyghe never lets us hear her actual speaking voice, which is a crooked way of suggesting that the actress cannot speak because Disney has stolen her voice.

Huyghe is among those artists who were drawing upon the visual and narrative power of Hitchcock and other filmmakers drawn out before the use of cinema as artistic material became commonplace. With Blanche-Neige Lucie, he uses the relationship between a cartoon character, a French actress and a multinational corporation to create a compound parable about voice, words and identity.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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