Formats
Anthologies
98
Audio
308
Catalogues
438
Clothing
23
Editions
37
Ephemera
78
Literary
49
Monographs
179
Posters
299
Video
40
Zines
144

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. Suzanne Hudson and Agnes Martin: Agnes Martin: Night Sea
  3. Bas Jan Ader and Jan Verwoert: Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous
  4. Mark Leckey and Mitch Speed: Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
  5. Arnaud Gerspacher: The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Artist as Ethologist
  6. Elizabeth Legge and Michael Snow: Michael Snow: Wavelength
  7. Kodwo Eshun and Dan Graham: Dan Graham: Rock My Religion
  8. Craig Burnett and Philip Guston: Philip Guston: The Studio
  9. Sonja Ivekovic and Ruth Noack: Sanja Ivekovic: Triangle
  10. Walker Evans and Oliver Richon: Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner
  11. Sarah Lucas and Amna Malik: Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel
  12. Sharon Lockhart and Howard Singerman: Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat
  13. Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Tom Holert: Marc Camille Chaimowicz: Celebration? Realife
  14. Michael Archer and Jeff Koons: Jeff Koons: One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank
  15. Peter Fischli, Jeremy Millar, and David Weiss: Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go
  16. Hollis Frampton and Rachel Moore: Hollis Frampton: (nostalgia)
  17. Stefan Gronert and Sigmar Polke: Sigmar Polke: Girlfriends
  18. Helen Chadwick and Marina Warner: Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court
  19. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron: Treacherous Transparencies
  20. Anna Dezeuze and Thomas Hirschhorn: Thomas Hirschhorn: Deleuze Monument
  21. Michael Newman and Richard Prince: Richard Prince: Untitled (couple)
  22. Beatrice von Bismarck: The Curatorial Condition
  23. Shawn Serfas: Inland
  24. Ruth Buchanan: Where does my body belong?
  25. Richard Birkett: Donald Rodney: Autoicon
  26. Sarah Cook, Germaine Koh, Mark Miessen, and Yulia Startsev: Germaine Koh: Weather Systems
  27. Russell Miller: magnum: Fifty years at the front line of history
  28. Making Art Global, Part 1 The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  29. Stephen Wetzel: [PAUSE]
  30. REARVIEWS VOLUME IV
  31. To Spoil the Party, To Set Our Joy Ablaze
  32. Mieke Bal: Exhibition-ism: Temporal Togetherness
  33. John Akomfrah and Johanne Løgstrup: Co-existence of Times – A Conversation with John Akomfrah
  34. Susan Schuppli: Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence
  35. Samuel Roy-Bois: Not a new world, just an old trick
  36. Boris Groys: Logic of the Collection
  37. Stefanie Hessler: Prospecting Ocean
  38. Larissa Hjorth, Sarah Pink, Kristen Sharp, and Linda Williams: Screen Ecologies
  39. Luis Camnitzer: One Number is Worth One Word
  40. Benjamin H. Bratton: Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution