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From: blp Category: Art Date: 14 August 2006 Time: 01:05 PM Review: An art review for a change. Pierre Huge presents some huge videos made with huge budgets in what, for a young, little known artist, is a huge huge space, as big as that afforded to modern masters such as Kippenberger and Beuys recently. In the biggest of all these big rooms, big huge white doors move about. In an adjacent room, a wall drawing shows a tiny child next to a huge huge tangle of some sort. As if to reassure us that all this hugeness isn't some sort of takeover bid of our psyches, it's all interspersed with some huge neons giving off an unearthly go and telling us about all the things Huge doesn't own: I don't own Tate Modern or the Death Star, I don't own Snow White, Fictions ne m'appartientent pas, if I've got the French right, which I probably haven't. There are also some cutely democratic suggestions for days of celebrations from Huge's often equally huge relational art friends: Andy Warhol day, I love aliens day, weather day &c. It's all absolutely immaculate and makes you feel like Huge, like Philip Parreno, is some fine art crossover to the world of design and its cutely immaculate publications on sale in Magma bookshop. The 3 videos have seamless production values, which continues this designy impression and two also have designy elements, like illuminated spheres and ironically cute nature pictures. Two of them I found hard to like: a trip to the antarctic or arctic, intercut with a sort of extravagant recreation of the antarctic landscape in Central Park accompanied by an orchestral performance and an illuminated sphere at night in the polar region, attracting penguins; an extravagant puppet show taking place on a US Uni campus, recreating both a modernist building from the campus and Huyghe's own architectural add-on, in which the puppet show takes place, or allegedly takes place. Worlds within worlds within yeah yeah. The other I found it hard to dislike - perfect nature shots with implausible assortment of cute animals, one a bambi dear, which heads into a new housing development and into starkly empty house, gives way to immaculate blond little girls moving to the same house, then going out into sublime nature, reversing the dear's trajectory. After that there's a day of celebration for the housing development with locals wearing seriously cute animal masks and costumes and lots of elements you imagine only a relational artist could have come up with: multicoloured donuts, a simple play area for kids, composed of cardboard boxes painted green and white. As night falls, another big linen sphere, a balloon this time, lights up in the sky. A good day is had by all. We sort of forget how hideous the housing development is. Suddenly Huyghe's devotion to immaculate finish looks different and more (deliberately) problematic. He knows how to make things that feel good aesthetically and he knows this is not necessarily a force for good. He seems to manipulate our emotions on purpose to show both how easily something better than the housing development could have been made in its place and how that really might not have been enough in itself, even if we were inclined to accept that it was. Well, that's partly what I took from it. There's a lot going on here I think. Some of it's interesting, some of it's maybe a bit trite. Like, in all these videos, there's this representation thing going on, things stand in for other things. Nature vs whatever. That doesn't seem so interesting.