Mad stuff
I watched a DVD of Hi, Mom! the other day while staying at a friend’s house in San Francisco. That morning, I’d been to the SF MoMA and seen two shows, each devoted to conceptual art: one hard-core, the other a selection of new acquisitions, which (because of universal acquisition patterns) tended to be conceptual art oriented. "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" featured anything artistic that the public had to get literally involved in: it might be Valie Export’s 1968 Tap and Touch Cinema event (out on the street, men feel her breasts through a strap-on box; the resulting video has subtitles of Theory talk), or it might be some living artworks by Erwin Wurm (San Franciscans get on a white plinth for a minute and balance some oranges and brooms, and it’s a sculpture). The acquisitions exhibition, "Passageworks," would have passed quickly out of my mind if it weren’t for the inclusion of an installation from 2000 by French artist Pierre Huyghe.

Al Pacino
Huyghe’s work — entitled The Third Memory — really entertained me. I usually can’t care less about photos and texts arranged in grids, or videos, but there was a lot of weird human interest here. The work is about John Wojtowicz, who held up a bank in Brooklyn in 1972 and whose story was the basis for the script of Sidney Lumet’s 1975 movie Dog Day Afternoon. It’s just a collection of documents and films. But they all happen to be riveting, and one of them Huyghe actually made himself: a reenactment of certain scenes from the real robbery. For example, at one point you might be seeing, on one side of a split screen, a very stout, very white-haired Brooklyn-accented oldster performing: that’s actually Wojtowicz, who’s been out of prison for several years now. In a sleazy modern French TV studio, he’s ordering low-rate actors playing bank staff to put their hands up. At the same time, on the other half of the screen, a young Al Pacino orders highly experienced Hollywood actors playing bank staff to do the same thing.

The title The Third Memory refers to the supposed creation made from two different types of memory — those that are real on the one hand (the robber’s own subjective sense of what happened to him) and fictional on the other (the movie’s construction of events). The result is a third type of memory: cultural-mythic (all of us, kind of — all our heads now accommodating this rich myth of lowlife goings-on in early-’70s New York). Along with the film, there were framed news photos of Wojtowicz telling off the cops outside the bank and being arrested. He looked thin and handsome — in fact, uncannily like the young Al Pacino.

There were also news photos of Wojtowicz’s real male wife, looking strikingly pretty, like his impersonator in the movie, Chris Sarandon (first husband of Susan), and Wojtowicz’s female wife, looking pretty fat, like the fat actress who played her (if you haven’t seen the film, one of the twists in it is that the hero has two wives: one male, from those days’ version of a civil ceremony, and one female). We are also treated to the whole of an episode of a 1978 Jeanne Parr TV show, where Parr interviews Wojtowicz in prison. He is chubby and plain, in sharp contrast to his haunted good looks a few years previously. (He tells Parr: "If you’re a man, you take responsibility for your actions.") Parr also interviews Wojtowicz’s male wife, who’s now become a woman and makes a living as a prostitute. (Q: "Do they know you used to be a man?" A: "No!")

I didn’t learn anything or feel different about anything, but I found everyone’s changing appearance and their accounts of their desperate actions compelling and moving. I have two angles on this work. It doesn’t make anyone "think" in the way that In Cold Blood or even Dog Day Afternoon does. Sidney Lumet’s film is fabulously rich in emotion, full of tenderness, violence, love, tears, loss — and all this is imbued in the very texture of the film. While Huyghe’s artwork is as numb and blank as any bit of conceptual art always is, just because of the deliberate limitations of the form. And I’m slightly depressed by the exploitation by an excruciating French relational aesthetics man-boy (you can see Huyghe being interviewed on YouTube) of a sad real guy and his loser life story. Hollywood certainly exploited him too: Lumet’s movie distorted his experience, and he was paid very little. Pierre Huyghe allows him to say what he wants, and yet where the movie has genuine richness and impact on every level, Huyghe’s installation is shallow: all it does is line up untransformed documentary content: newspaper photos, headlines, TV shows, plus short bursts of the movie. The split-screen film that Huyghe made himself is far too desultory to ever require another viewing (desultoriness being deliberately built-in for pious or intellectual reasons is still desultory). But I can honestly say that I was drawn in.