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#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)
 

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