Imagine two white doors, so gigantic — nearly 4 m tall — that you feel like Alice in Wonderland. Now think of them dancing on rails through an immense, vacant space, twirling as they go. This is Gates, an installation in French artist Pierre Huyghe's multimedia exhibition "Celebration Park," the

404 Not Found

---

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) show that marked the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris early this year before moving to Tate Modern in London. "Doors are something that define territory, right?" says Huyghe of his metaphor. "But as the doors are moving, and there are no walls, then what is inside and what is outside becomes very blurry."

Huyghe (pronounced, roughly, wheeg) revels in such border bashing. His work in photography, film, music, sculpture, architecture, puppetry, graphics and "events" defies the usual boundaries between the disciplines. And it probes other frontiers: contemporary ones like copyright and community, eternal ones like time and space, image and reality, and, yes, the meaning of art. "Being an artist means asking questions about the reality of existence," says the intense 44-year-old Parisian. He asks a lot of questions.

If that sounds like obscure French philosophy, consider this. In 2004, after Harvard University asked Huyghe for a work to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its visual arts center — the only North American building designed by modernist master Le Corbusier — Huyghe created a puppet show. That's right, marionettes on very visible strings. The idea was to compare the artistic conflicts Le Corbusier had with university authorities — the Mr. Harvard, Dean of Deans puppet is a threatening black specter — with similar problems Huyghe encountered in mounting his show. This is Not a Time for Dreaming is a film of the puppet show that evokes these two parallel experiences. The character Pierre: Artist looks very much like Huyghe, right down to his fashionable beard stubble and white tennis shoes.

Despite winning serious recognition (a special award at the Venice Biennale in 2001, the Hugo Boss Prize in 2002), Huyghe's work has a distinct playfulness. Indeed, the Tate show featured some stand-up comedy performances. For One Year Celebration, Huyghe invited several artists and writers to invent new holidays, and the resulting posters proclaim such whimsical additions to the calendar as Celebrate the Shoelace day (March 21) and &the Creation of the Ampersand day (July 6).

Yet discussing his work in the chic, spare Paris apartment cum think space he shares with graphic designer Francesca Grassi, Huyghe is all seriousness. In explaining that clever calendar, he launches into a discussion of what he calls "time protocols," raising questions about what an exhibition is ("Why should it last 11/2 months — why not 10 years or five seconds?") and what an artist does ("Am I just something that is for people's free time?"). He works hard to convey his ideas, at times folding his slim frame in two as he slides from the sofa to the floor, punctuating his more complex thoughts with "do-you-know-what-I-mean?" said all in one breath.

The time theme really gets him rolling: "Art is not part of the culture. Whether it should be is another big question. But it is part of the mainstream of entertainment." Is an artist then just another worker in the entertainment industry? "If I think that," and Huyghe is not exactly saying he does, "then how can I play with this format?" Warming to his own conclusion, Huyghe says: "He needs to be in the central place of discussion, not be on the side — or else he will be alone." Huyghe is far from alone. His work is mainly the result of an intense collaborative process with artists, architects, designers and musicians. His most ambitious collaboration, A Journey That Wasn't, combines documentary-style film footage of his 2005 voyage to Antarctica, an operatic translation of the trip set in New York City's Central Park, a sculpture of an island discovered on the venture, a musical score based on that island's topography — and an animatronic penguin. All this is Huyghe's attempt to produce a dark, cold, strange "equivalent" of his Antarctic "elsewhere." The result is very different from your basic travel documentary, which, as Huyghe points out, is usually shot from a stranger's perspective, edited heavily and presented as reality, when it obviously is not.

The son of an Air France pilot and a stay-at-home mother, Huyghe grew up in a comfortable Paris suburb. (He inserted the neat floor plan of his childhood bedroom into an architectural drawing of the Star Wars Death Star to create a 1997 print.) From the time he was a student at Paris' Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, his work has centered around the idea of "image." By that, he doesn't mean simply photographs, posters or films, though lots of Hollywood examples turn up in his conversation. "Image is imaginary," he says, "right?"

And to whom does the image belong? Celebration Park opens with a giant neon sculpture saying, "I do not own Tate Modern or the Death Star." Other neon signs, all beginning with the words "I do not own," follow, disavowing possession of such cultural icons as Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and John Cage's noteless musical composition 4'33", both of which, like the Death Star, figure in Huyghe's work. By calling these glowing white signs Disclaimers, the artist is saying that, in spite of copyright rules, no one really owns these works. They are part of our shared culture, subject to limitless reinterpretation.

Another neon sign says Huyghe doesn't own Snow White. And his four-minute film about Lucie Dolène, the actor who did the voice-over of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in its 1962 French version, further examines the blurry lines between art and artist. In Snow White Lucie (1997), Dolène faces a camera in an empty film studio and sings Some Day My Prince Will Come. In subtitles she explains how Disney continued to use her voice without permission, how she sued — and won. But at the poignant frontier between image and reality, memory and identity, Dolène recalls that when she gave her voice to Disney's animated princess, "I was Snow White ... it's my voice, but it doesn't belong to me anymore."

Of course, Huyghe's work is not to everyone's taste. France's Le Monde newspaper, rarely afraid to address complexity, conceded that his "Celebration Park" defied all definition. That's fine with Huyghe. "We all play the binary," he says, referring to the easy recourse of seeing things as black or white. "But we know that in life, such simplicity does not exist." Nor, fortunately, does it exist in the work of Pierre Huyghe. Do-you-know-what-I-mean?

• ANN MORRISON | PARIS
• French artist Pierre Huyghe creates serious inquiries from playful art