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Pierre Huyghe,
One Million Kingdoms,
2001.
Video installation with sound, 00:07:00, Dimensions variable.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased by exchange with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Edythe Broad, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Nicki Harris, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou,.
2002.14.
© 2004 by Pierre Huyghe. All rights reserved..
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Pierre Huyghe questions the very definitions of time, memory, and engagement in his numerous artistic endeavors, be they installations, photographs, site-specific works, or community projects. Often using film as his primary source material, he dislocates it from the cinematic space of the movie theater, and in his installations refashions it to extend the narrative space of the film through formal and conceptual strategies. Huyghe, for example, has restaged Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and inserted into Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) a scene only implied in the original editing. In The Third Memory (1999) he juxtaposes Hollywood's fictionalized Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) with an account of the true event of the bank robbery it was based on as related by the burglar himself. Huyghe's work implies that in our media-saturated culture psychological and cinematic projections blur, and events in lived experience inextricably merge with televisual experience to produce a kind of “third memory.”
Expansive terrains in which memories, scenes, and their significance can be inserted, Huyghe's projects allow for infinite points of entry and mutations of meaning. One Million Kingdoms (2001) is the most recent in a series of animated films in which a Japanese anime character, the brooding young girl AnnLee, is inserted into various dramas. Here she is dropped into a lunar landscape that is mapped out and developed in correspondence with the rises and falls of the narrator's voice—tinny, at times labored—digitally derived from a recording of Neil Armstrong. The stories of the first moon landing, in 1969, and of Jules Verne's 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth have been conflated here in a conspiracy theory of the faked and the fantastic. Armstrong's first words, “It’s a lie,” prompt AnnLee, as she moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating terrain, in which mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise and fall according to the intonations of the narrator's voice. His words blur the fictional and factual, using language that derives from distinct genres and centuries—Verne's work of fiction and Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin's presumably true transmissions of their experience during the landing of Apollo 11’s lunar module. Thus the landscape of AnnLee is a shifting terrain determined by utterances, which chart both the real and the imaginary.
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