_

Condensing the inclusions and exclusions of curatorial choice, the disclaimers attend to the structural and ethical questions of ownership, and mark moments in Huyghe’s career. The disclaimers change according to the exhibition venue and national language, a cliche of floating signifiers anchored by their appropriation of context. Huyghe cites the circuitry of his oeuvre, showing past works through miniature references. Dwarfed in a large space, the palm-sized video screen of Snow White, Lucie, is purposefully eclipsed by Huyghe’s massive “Gates” (2006)–ceiling-high doors twirling slowly across the gallery, pausing occasionally to seal off the exhibition space. The equally miniscule video A Smile Without a Cat (2002) and the poster of No Ghost Just a Shell (1999) allude to the lives of Annlee, a secondary anime character purchased by Huyghe and Philippe Parreno and distributed to frequent collaborators and friends. As an empty signifier situationally displaced and refilled, the collaborative exercise spawned diverse Annlee animations with characterizations ranging from prancing disco queens to menacing specters. A digitized exquisite corpse, Annlee’s girlish face is illuminated and extinguished in Cat’s inaugural fireworks celebration just as each characterization prolongs and ends her identity.

Such brief markers in “Celebration Park” question how an artist responds to his own oeuvre within the format of a mid-career retrospective. How far can one scale down the signifier of a work while legibly representing and reinventing past works? How can one animate–a la Broodthaersian institutional play–rather than archive an ongoing and developing practice? Questions of ownership and fiction are favorite keywords decorating any write-up of Huyghe’s work. It seems that Huyghe has taken it upon himself to toy with narrating and representing his work, thwarting its potentially institutionalized reification.

Huyghe’s experiments extend conceptualism’s administration of aesthetics and institutional critique. Working through the apparatuses circumscribing artistic operations, he reimagines and narrativizes the institutional ownership of spaces (whether suburban, arctic, or architectural) across various temporalities. Other videos in “Celebration Park,” shown in black boxes, render such institutional experiments with increasing levels of theatricality. In a work commissioned by the Harvard University Art Museums, “This Is Not a Time for Dreaming” (2004), Huyghe produced a crystalline puppet theatre show cycling back and forth between Le Corbusier’s tumultuous experience designing the art department’s building and Huyghe’s own struggles with the commission in a magic-realist narrative of institutional control and aesthetic alternatives. Replete with an origami Dean of Deans (an archetype of all Harvard deans, resembling a Harry Potter Dementor), a shape-shifting building representing numerous changes to Corbusier’s blueprints, and puppets of curators, Le Corbusier and Huyghe revisit modernism as a fantasy set amid minimalist, Beckettian landscapes and anthropomorphic flora, grafting past romanticized dreams of aesthetic revolution onto the images of present-day negotiations with institutions.