Shop > Monographs

#15069

Pierre Huyghe: Untitled (Human Mask)

Artist
Pierre Huyghe
Writer
Mark Lewis
Price
$25.95
Date
2022
Publisher
Afterall Books
Format
Monographs
ISBN
9781846382130
Size
15 × 21 × 1.2 cm
Length
96 pp
Genre
Criticism, Film/Video
Description

Pierre Huyghe’s 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask) combines images of a post-apocalyptic world (actual footage of deserted streets close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of March 2011) with a haunting scene of a monkey working in an empty restaurant wearing a human mask and a wig. She’s a girl! The flat, emotionless almost automaton state of the mask and the artificial glossy hair topped even with a child’s bow, suggests that she, the monkey, might be a character from Japanese Noh theatre. But there’s no music. Instead Huyghe’s film evinces the terrifying possibility that our own, human, future might just be one of remnants and mimicry; that the deserted streets of Fukushima and the monkey’s recognizable, alienating chimeric performance is all that might survive us. Untitled (Human Mask) presents a pluperfect world with extinction the endgame for a civilization that cared little for the present, dreaming only of a future that inevitably and necessarily could not include it.

  1. Pierre Huyghe: Untitled (Human Mask)
 

Related Items

  1. Dara Birnbaum and T.J. Demos: Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
  2. Bas Jan Ader and Jan Verwoert: Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous
  3. Arnaud Gerspacher: The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Artist as Ethologist
  4. Mark Leckey and Mitch Speed: Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
  5. Kodwo Eshun and Dan Graham: Dan Graham: Rock My Religion
  6. Craig Burnett and Philip Guston: Philip Guston: The Studio
  7. Sonja Ivekovic and Ruth Noack: Sanja Ivekovic: Triangle
  8. Walker Evans and Oliver Richon: Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner
  9. Sharon Lockhart and Howard Singerman: Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat
  10. Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Tom Holert: Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife
  11. Michael Archer and Jeff Koons: Jeff Koons: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank
  12. Peter Fischli, Jeremy Millar, and David Weiss: Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go
  13. Stefan Gronert and Sigmar Polke: Sigmar Polke: Girlfriends
  14. Helen Chadwick and Marina Warner: Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court
  15. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron: Treacherous Transparencies
  16. Anna Dezeuze and Thomas Hirschhorn: Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument
  17. Shawn Serfas: Inland
  18. Ruth Buchanan: Where does my body belong?
  19. Richard Birkett: Donald Rodney: Autoicon
  20. Sarah Cook, Germaine Koh, Mark Miessen, and Yulia Startsev: Germaine Koh: Weather Systems
  21. Russell Miller: magnum: Fifty years at the front line of history
  22. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  23. Stephen Wetzel: [PAUSE]
  24. REARVIEWS VOLUME IV
  25. To Spoil the Party, To Set Our Joy Ablaze
  26. Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism
  27. Mieke Bal: Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness
  28. Susan Schuppli: Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence
  29. Samuel Roy-Bois: Not a new world, just an old trick
  30. Boris Groys: Logic of the Collection
  31. Stefanie Hessler: Prospecting Ocean
  32.  Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams: Screen Ecologies
  33.  Luis Camnitzer: One Number is Worth One Word
  34. Benjamin H. Bratton: Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution
  35. Elizabeth A. Povinelli: Routes/Worlds
  36. Anne-Marie Duguet, Jérôme Neutres, and Bill Viola: Bill Viola
  37. Toril Johannessen: Supplement 3: The Invention and Conclusion of the Eye
  38. Valérie Blass
  39. Kaari Upson: 2000 Words
  40. Kon Trubkovich:Leap Second