This is Not a Time for Dreaming

Pierre Huyghe, This is not a time for dreaming, 2004, Live puppet play and super 16mm film, transferred to DigiBeta. 24 minutes, color, sound This is Not a Time for Dreaming (super 16mm film, 24 minutes, color, sound) originated as the central cinematic event within an ambitious project exploring the creation of Le Corbusier s one and only building in North America. The film is a portrait of a situation and is constituted by the build-up of an organism, of which architecture is only one component. Huyghe moves in and out, around the entire entity and presents us with a story of the relationship of the artist to a given context. The film is based on a puppet musical which fuses the fantastical and historical, transforming a process of historical research into a reconfiguration of the present, and featuring musical compositions by Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varese, who collaborated with Le Corbusier on a pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition. Conceptually relevant to a whole history of Huyghe s work which has addressed narrative structure, temporal process and conditions of representation and interpretation, the film This is Not A Time for Dreaming goes beyond the story of the construction of Le Corbusier s building --the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard -- to highlight the choices involved in its creation, the complex conditions of its production, and the relevance to the artist s parallel process of exhibition-making itself . As Huyghe says, The difficulty in coming up with an idea became the idea . In the brochure This is Not a Time for Dreaming it is explained: The long negotiation with the [Harvard] administration around the creative process [of the Corbusier commission]... gave birth to a book by Eduard Sekler. .... Sekler s book then contributed to the writing of a puppet musical, placing the two situations [ the architect s turbulent misadventures and the difficulty of the artist meeting the expectations of a commission ] in parallel. Each protagonist is portrayed: Le Corbusier, Sert and Sekler, an abstract figure representing Harvard, the two exhibition curators, Linda Norden and Scott Rothkopf, Pierre Huyghe, and a red bird. Le Corbusier was hoping that the seeds naturally brought by the birds would grow and cover the Carpenter Center s terraces with greenery. An autonomous structure covered by vegetation was built to house the show. This tumor is an architectural proturbance of this modernist dream, a monstrous vision of the spontaneous vegetal growth. -- from the brochure, This is Not a Time for Dreaming , 2004