Moving Pictures Highlights Overview
ROBERT SMITHSON
VITO ACCONCI
MARINA ABRAMOVIC
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
PETER FISCHLI/DAVID WEISS
ANN HAMILTON
ANDREAS GURSKY
SHIRIN NESHAT
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD
KARA WALKER
RINEKE DIJKSTRA
OLAFUR ELIASSON
PIERRE HUYGHE
GABRIEL OROZCO
INIGO MANGLANO-OVALLE
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The Third Memory, 1999. Two-channel video installation with sound, 00:09:46, dimensions vary with installation. Edition of 4. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Partial and promised gift, The Bohen Foundation. 2001.131
PIERRE HUYGHE

Pierre Huyghe questions the very definitions of time, memory, and engagement in his practice. Often using film as his source material, Huyghe dislocates it from the cinematic space of the theater and refashions it in his installations to extend the narrative space of the film through formal and conceptual strategies. His two-channel video projection The Third Memory takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972. The robbery became the subject of Sidney Lumet's film Dog Day Afternoon (1975), starring Al Pacino as the misguided robber who dominated television news during the crime. For his project, Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell his story. The compelling result is a "third memory," neither a pure recollection of the original event (if such "purity" is ever possible) nor the "second memory," as depicted in the film. As Woytowicz recounts a story which is no longer his alone, notions of reality and fiction, the imagined and the documented, become inextricably intertwined.

In Pierre Huyghe's One Million Kingdoms (2001), a voice maps out unexplored lunar terrain. The voice belongs to a Japanese Manga character named AnnLee, for which Huyghe, along with artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno, purchased the copyright in 1999. Featured in previous works by the three artists, here this brooding young girl speaks in a voice that is an electronically altered version of the astronaut Neil Armstrong's communiqués from the first moon landing; the text she recites conflates Armstrong's historic utterances with excerpts from Jules Verne's 1895 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Armstrong's words prompt AnnLee as she moves from place to place on a constantly fluctuating landscape, in which mountains, craters, ridges, and outcroppings rise and fall according to the sound waves of his (her) voice.