Sunday, January 27, 2019

Operating Out of Bounds:

a comment on Huyghe's "un-bound-ing—un-box" methodology

Can you see the reindeer?

"When the doors are moving, there is no more threshold; there is no more inside and outside." —Pierre Huyghe

What I interpreted this to mean is my perspective; I am not dictating Huyghe's definition. I think he would agree that artistic philosophy is like an art in itself. The way I understand it, thinking outside of the box is phase 1; once this is done, one may work outside the box. For the open-minded artist, however, this is not enough; next, one must work against the very concept of the box's threshold.
In my opinion, that is the point when motives become questionable, because Huyghe's epistemology sets work as the means for entering a world (a means to an end), and sets the act of creating said world as the aforementioned work (an end in and of itself). Thus, his work becomes his walk into the world he creates. In simpler, non-artisan terms, the very act of making a project completes the experience, and an experience such as this cannot be done unless making the project.
Essentially, he is the only one who will experience his project since making the experience is the project, so nobody else can experience it the way he made it. The experience he gets from his projects is obtained only in doing his work, which is the act of constructing the project itself, though that would mean his experience is the project. Summed up, the world he creates is the world in which he works, and his work is the act of creating worlds in which he can work.
It takes real artisanship to justify this belief, but that is my opinion.

"I asked a composer to take the shape of this island and transform the shape into a musical score for a symphonic orchestra." —Pierre Huyghe

In this epistemology, one can believe that their work will achieve the effect which they aimed to, and nobody will question it or argue because there is no sense in questioning nonsense wherein no reason can be found. The artists achieve their goal, not by observing the effects of their work on the world, but by experiencing the very world they create. Unfortunately this way, few find such art very enjoyable, but most can at least find it interesting, though perhaps not in the way the artist intended.
Art is a very interpretive end, and media is the means to that end. How one interprets it is not for the artist to decide, but they may observe, and how one makes it is not for the interpreter to decide, but they may likewise observe. In Huyghe's case, both roles belong to the artist; he makes a world himself with an interpretation, leaving the otherwise interpreters no privilege of interpretive choice but their one duty which is solely to observe that world and do so only with acceptance for the artist's interpretation. It seems to me that what he delivers is a first-hand statement of the experience, so audience experiences it only second-hand.
Predestined meanings are seldom derived from observation alone. An interpretation is a decision by an individual, not the decision of the individual. If it does not yield so, it had not been so, but if it does, so it was.

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