Pierre Huyghe, This is not a time for dreaming, 2004, Live puppet play and super 16mm film, transferred to DigiBeta. 24 minutes, color, sound, Photo: Michael Vahrenwald

Today, Pierre Huyghe's video, This is not a time for dreaming, quietly opens at the Portland Art Museum. Huyghe is perhaps most famous for his 1999 collaboration with fellow Frenchman Philippe Parreno, No Ghost Just a Shell, in which they purchased rights to an anime character and allowed her to have a brief existence through a series of collaborations with other artists before symbolically putting her to rest.

In This is not a time for dreaming, Huyghe revisits themes of unstable histories, reality vs. fiction, Modernist dreams and utopianism. Huyghe's video was commissioned in 2004 by Harvard University in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Carpenter Center, the sole building completed by Le Corbusier in the United States (and, interestingly, named after Harvard donors from Southern Oregon). Staged as a marionette show, Huyghe's film relays the history of the building and the process that Le Corbusier undertook in building the Carpenter Center, while documenting his own experiences in making this video.

Through December 31st · Portland Art Museum · 1219 SW Park Ave · 503.226.0973
Admission: $10 General, Free for members

2006 = the Puppet Show year for the art world!

Ive been going through Paul Klee's finger puppets at his eponymous museum's collection online... I think I'd like Matthew Barney better if he used puppets even.