THE BHOPAL CASE

the Yes Men, BBC
2003, 5 min 51 sec

On November 29, 2004, an email comes in to DowEthics.com, our fake Dow Chemical website. (See also the long and twisting story of how that website came to be, and how it came to be often mistaken for the real thing. Hint: it was Dow’s fault!)

The email, from a staffer at BBC World Television, is asking Dow Chemical whether a company representative could come in to discuss Dow’s position on the 1984 Bhopal tragedy—on Dec. 3, the catastrophe’s 20th anniversary, and just 6 days from then.

We can hardly believe our eyes. If it’s real, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to say, in front of 350 million people (the viewership of BBC World, according to our email invitation)… well, something. And that something, if we decide well, could change the lives of thousands of survivors of the 1984 tragedy, and maybe millions of others. But if it’s fake….

We’re pretty sure it’s fake, actually. We decide it’s a police trap, an irresistible honeypot that will get us into a place where the police can easily nab us (as if they couldn’t just find us at home). There’s no evidence for this theory, but it’s easier to believe it than to believe the actual truth: that we’re headed into a golden opportunity to do something so valuable, so useful, that if we flub it, we’ve really flubbed huge and will probably regret it intensely for years.

Knowing underneath our useful paranoia that it actually is most likely real, we act accordingly. We write back and let the BBC know—to their immense surprise—that Dow would be absolutely delighted to appear. We let them know that the BBC’s “usual spokesperson” will be in Paris on Dec. 3, so could we do it there? Andy is already living in Paris, for one thing. For another, we figure there will be a lot less scrutiny of the “Dow representative” at a subsidiary office in France than at the big central HQ in London. It’s settled: Mr. Jude (patron saint of the impossible) Finisterra (earth’s end) will represent Dow on Dec. 3, in less than one week.

THE THIRD MEMORY

Pierre Huyghe,, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, The Bohen Foundation.
2001, 11 min 03 sec

Using time, memory, and the texture of everyday experience as his mediums, Pierre Huyghe conflates the traditional dichotomy between art and life. Working in an array of cultural formats—from billboards and television broadcasts to community celebrations and museum exhibitions—he reformulates their codes and deploys them as catalysts for creating new experiential possibilities. A mode of perception that lies in the interstices between reality and its representation is the subject of his two-channel video, The Third Memory (2000), which reenacts the 1972 hold-up of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet’s acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Almost 30 years later, Huyghe provides a platform for the heist’s charismatic mastermind, John Wojtowicz, to relate his version of that infamous day in a reconstructed set of the bank. However, rather than clarify the personal history that Hollywood wrested from him, Wojtowicz appears to have been heavily influenced by the film, a testament to the inextricable merging of real events, the distortions of memory, and the mediating power of popular culture.

The tension between fact and fiction is also at play in One Million Kingdoms, a work conceived as part of the collaborative project No Ghost Just a Shell, in which a manga character named Annlee is inserted into multiple artistic contexts. In Huyghe’s animation, this adolescent girl wanders through a shifting lunar topography and, speaking in a digitally synthesized form of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s voice, delivers a narration blending the actual transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission with excerpts from Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth. Annlee appears as a translucent outline, an empty cipher for creative interpretation. Yet at the same time, she is literally the author of her own environment: the mutating features of the landscape through which she walks are generated by the inflections of her own voice. Huyghe’s own experience provides the starting point for This is not a time for dreaming. The film documents a puppet show that tells the parallel stories of the modernist architect Le Corbusier’s commission to design the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, and Huyghe’s own commission to create an artwork to celebrate the building’s 40th anniversary. Shifting back and forth in time, the narrative weaves together historical and contemporary events with fantastical elements, in an allegorical representation of the struggles and compromises inherent in the creative process.

Co-production: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Service Nouveaux Médias and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. With the participation of: Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris; Myriam and Jacques Salomon; Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains

This installation contains footage from the motion picture Dog Day Afternoon (Warner Brothers, 1975), directed by Sidney Lumet, and from The Jeanne Parr Show (CBS, January 25, 1978).