Pierre Huyghe at Marian Goodman

Art in America, June, 2001 by Michael Rush

Pierre Huyghe, a 38-year-old French artist whose video installations are well known to international art audiences, had his first New York gallery solo at Marian Goodman. It was an auspicious debut. Two installations, both 2000, revealed startling depth and diversity on the part of an artist too often mistakenly called an "appropriationist." He is anything but.

The Third Memory is a dual-screen work based on the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery by a former teller, John Wojtowicz, who was after funds to help his lover, Ernest Aron, secure a sex-change operation. Wojtowicz and his helper, Salvatore Naturale, held the bank employees hostage for eight hours in one of the first crimes captured live on television. So compelling were the images that they briefly superseded Richard Nixon's renomination at the Republican National Convention; Nixon reportedly ordered the lights turned out at the bank so that television coverage could return to the convention. The robbery, which resulted in Naturale's death by police gunfire, went in front of the cameras again in Sidney Lumet's 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon, with Al Pacino as Wojtowicz.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, when Huyghe sees the Lumet film and notices that it was based on a real event. He tracks down Wojtowicz, paroled in 1979 and living with his mother in Brooklyn, and invites him to Paris, where Huyghe reconstructs the set from Dog Day Afternoon. Hiring amateur actors and outfitting them with exaggerated period wigs, Huyghe asks Wojtowicz to direct them in a reenactment of the crime as he recalls it. Hence, the "third" memory: the crime is performed for the third time in its very mediated history. Wojtowicz, now gray-haired and pudgy, took to the task with great gusto. "I'll kill you, you motherfuckers," he booms all too threateningly as he tells the actors what he actually said to the hostages 30 years earlier.

What makes Huyghe's piece fascinating is how he grapples conceptually and visually with issues of memory and identity. Two projections side by side on a wide white wall meld images shot with multiple digital cameras, mixing footage from the Lumet film with narrative segments of rehearsals for the reenactment, plus background shots of the film equipment, crew and backstage curtains. It is a nearly 10-minute symphony of images that seryes Huyghe's probing critique of media spectacle. He reminds us of the real life and death that were sensationalized in the TV camera's devouring gaze. Wojtowicz is no hero, but he becomes one in a perverse way as he performs for us the memory of his 15 minutes of fame. Very little of the Lumet film is used. Huyghe has too much energy and originality of his own to waste time on appropriation.

The other work in the show, 2 Minutes Out of Time, is an exquisite animated film with text by Huyghe about a digitally created girl who was made as a background character for a Japanese cartoon. "While waiting to be dropped into a story," the girl says of herself, "she has been diverted from a fictional existence and has become ... a deviant sign." Huyghe lets her tell her own story. Pastel clouds float above her head as she delivers a paean to living before disappearing into the ether. Full of pathos and wonder, this brief work (actually four minutes long) is a striking companion to the search for identity in The Third Memory.