Pierre Huyghe was invited to Harvard University to create a work, so he elected to concern himself with the gestation of the Carpenter  Center for the Arts, located on the university campus. Le Corbusier was invited to Harvard in 1955 to develop an architectural project which would house an arts centre. José Luis Sert, himself an architect, and rector of the Faculty of Architecture, had been put in charge of the project, while Eduard Sekler would become director of the Center itself and write a book about the way the project took shape. Huyghe wrestled at length over how best to create the work he would produce, first pondering over presenting a classroom, before settling on the idea of a puppet theatre. At the outset, the piece was devised to be performed in an annex to the Carpenter Center building, designed by Le Corbusier. This shell-shaped pavilion, covered with vegetation, was designed by the French architect François Roche. Puppet theatre performances have been given here in front of audiences. An installation is today autonomously presented, but at certain moments it puts in a token appearance for this audience looking at it, though only at the end, when a narrator appears to comment on the event that has just taken place. Otherwise we hear just the music of Edgar Varèse and Iannis Xenakis – contemporaries of Le Corbusier – arranged by Joe Arcidiacono. From start to finish we see a series of playlets organized around the combined story of the invitation made to Huyghe and the earlier one made to Le Corbusier. Several characters make up the story which juxtaposes past and present realities, and the dreamlike and angst-related factors associated with the creative process. Mr. Harvard, cutting a very large, angular figure, dark and monstrous in appearance, straight out of an Expressionist painting, appears now and then, creating an invasive and disturbing atmosphere. Then, taking it in turns, the real protagonists of the action, as it took place yesterday and today, appear – Le Corbusier, Sekler, Sert and Huyghe, as well as the two coordinators seconded to Huyghe's project, Scott and Linda. A large and friendly red bird comes and pecks at the stage now and then. In addition to a concrete building, of the sort he liked making, inspired by the actual movement of students in the university courtyard, Le Corbusier had imagined that, in time, birds would drop enough seeds on the building to eventually cover it with greenery (an idea which Roche and Huyghe borrowed in the plant-covered pavilion they conceived and made). In this puppet play, Huyghe essentially describes the gestation of his project, similar to Le Corbusier's, scenes full of frankness, producing empathy, in which one sees the two artists turn by turn troubled by the hold of the place, the difficulties of the path chosen, the moments of stasis peculiar to creation, and the hunches which occur. Each one has set-tos with the institution; this is when Mr. Harvard appears, menacingly. At times they both daydream at the foot of a tree; Huyghe collapses under bundles of paper and boxes of files as he undertakes his research around the project. Towards the end, the red bird re-appears, dropping a seed on the top of the building, and vegetation invades the site, something which Le Corbusier, who had died in the meantime, would never see in his lifetime. From Harvard to Bird, the trail of creation and liberation, both peculiar to the gestation of a work, is drawn. This is not a Time for Dreaming underscores the paradoxes of artistic praxis, grappling with dream and reality. Institutions, history, the place itself, the twists and turns of the culture and environment specific to the place, as well as the different personalities who make a work come into being are all summoned. Huyghe steadily carries out such re-creations of facts that make it possible to discover other parameters of reality and history. The characters are more present, in so much as the abstraction created by the puppet figure creates a natural empathy in the spectator. The puppet is moved by people, and this is something that the figure of Mr. Harvard reverses, authority being represented here by a monstrous abstract figure. The puppet lends the figure an archetypal character, linking him to human history and its inherent and recurrent dramas. So the puppet in a way depicts the impossible, and the superhuman and incarnates a supernatural and surreal power. Mr. Bird pushes this characteristic as far as it can go and incarnates the magic and saving powers of nature. More than the theatre of actors, the puppet theatre makes room for the dreamlike. So it is not surprising that Huyghe had recourse to this in this work, which, more than any other, deals with the ins and outs of creation.

Chantal Pontbriand
Translated by Simon Pleasance