Tonight I went to the opening for French artist Pierre Huyghe's 2004 film This Is Not a Time for Dreaming, at the Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th Street.
I first saw Pierre Huyghe (Hue-wee) in 2003 at the Guggenheim Museum, in an installation that featured a film and a sculpture. The film showed two buildings enveloped in fog, and I remember thinking that it was beautiful and moody, the passage of time marked by lights flickering on and off in the windows. The buildings were apparently 1970s French housing projects. To quote from the Guggenheim's exhibition literature, "'These subsidized public projects ended up being an architectural and social failure,' explains Huyghe. 'They were a corruption of Le Corbusier's social and architectural Modernist theory.'"
In 2005, of course, riots broke out in these housing projects.
Morning Edition, November 30, 2005 · Some analysts blame recent rioting in France on the discontent and alienation fostered by bleak housing projects on the poor outskirts of French cities. The location and architecture of public housing can contribute to a sense of isolation and hopelessness among young French people of Arabic and African origin.
Le Corbusier was the forefather of the modern high-rise, low-income apartment complex, and he is an abiding interest of Huyghe's. This Is Not a Time for Dreaming is a 24-minute film based on a puppet musical, and it explores the creation of architect Le Corbusier's only building in North America, The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.
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