Description
Product ID: | 9781846382130 |
Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Series: | Afterall Books / One Work |
Title: | Pierre Huyghe |
Subtitle: | Untitled (Human Mask) |
Authors: | Author: Mark Lewis |
Page Count: | 96 |
Subjects: | History of art, Art & design styles: Postmodernism, Individual artists, art monographs, Individual artists, art monographs |
Description: | Select Guide Rating An examination of Pierre Huyghe''s post-apocalyptic Untitled (Human Mask), which asks whether our human future may be one of remnants and mimicry. 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. |
Imprint Name: | Afterall Publishing |
Publisher Name: | Afterall Publishing |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2021-05-18 |