Corbusier On A String

On a balmy afternoon last month, French artist Pierre Huyghe stood in front of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts with the building’s designer, the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Double parked along Quincy Street sat a limousine and out of a nearby truck spilled props and other movie-making equipment. A militia of gaffers, grips, special effects technicians and camera operators matted down Harvard’s primly manicured grass as they scurried around, barking into walkie-talkies and cell-phones. It was a scene more fitting for the back lot of a Hollywood studio than it was amidst the respectable brick and ivy of the Harvard campus.

When architectural luminary Le Corbusier first visited Cambridge 45 years ago this fall, he came to begin work on a home for the practice and instruction of the visual arts at Harvard. With his characteristic black glasses sitting upon his beaked nose, Corbusier’s arrival marked not only the birth of a significant piece of the modernist architectural canon, but also a significant—and to this point, unparalleled—moment in Harvard’s historically tenuous relationship with contemporary art and architecture.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, however, Le Corbusier had not returned with visionary ideas for the Harvard campus. Instead, he required some attention from Huyghe. If there were any incongruity to be found in the situation it was not due to the architect’s diminutive size—reincarnated some 35 years after his death as a foot-tall marionette, his strings slightly tangled. Instead, it came from Huyghe’s own parallel role as an artist brought to Cambridge in a similar attempt to redefine the University’s relationship to contemporary art.

This past year the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts hit middle age. In response to what may be an impending identity crisis, the University has thrown the concrete building a series of birthday celebrations. Following on a recent historical exhibition about the building is this “puppet opera,” which weaves together narratives of the building’s commission with Huyghe’s own experience working with a university patron given to bureaucratic excesses.

Harvard University Art Museum curator Linda Norton and graduate student Scott Rothkopf have commissioned Huyghe to respond to Harvard’s most beloved, if not emblematic work of architecture. Their charge: to consider the con temporary and future impact of this eclectic Modernist monument.

It’s a prescient challenge for Huyghe, a rising star in the art world. He arrives at Harvard following the receipt of a prestigious Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum in 2002 and representation of France at the Venice Biennale the year before. While his previous films and multi-media installations have touched on the legacy of Corbusier-inspired Modernism—and, most often, upon its idealistic failure—Huyghe, who is in his early 40s, was, like most of the students who inhabit the Carpenter Center, born only after the building’s completion. In response, his film at once reconstructs the story of the building’s conception while layering on his own experiences of working on this most unusual commission.

At the centerpiece of the project is a historically-inspired “meta-opera” filmed in situ within an “architectural extension” that has taken shape between the Carpenter Center’s pilotis. A 20-minute film version of that production—complete with Hollywood-style special effects—will be screened in the auditorium during the opening night. It will then continue its run in the upstairs Sert Gallery until April 17 of next year. A multifaceted and unusual project, Huyghe’s film is the result of a similarly complex and atypical interfaculty collaboration involving the Harvard University Art Museums, Graduate School of Design, and the Visual and Environmental Studies department (VES).

FORTY YEARS ON THE RUTE TOURISTIQUE

When the University’s 1957-8 Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts recommended to President Nathan Pusey that Harvard launch a formal program in the arts, then-Dean of the Graduate School of Design, Josép Lluis Sert (also reincarnated as puppet) recommended Le Corbusier for the job. The building, built to house the nascent VES department, was to become a laboratory for creativity and a catalyst for the understanding of art at Harvard. The Carpenter Center as synthèse des arts was a utopian challenge for Corbusier, whose recent and no less idealistic project of designing a home for the fledging United Nations had fallen prey to the horns of bureaucracy.

When Corbusier arrived at Harvard to discuss his commission in the fall of 1959, America dealt yet another disappointment: the Carpenter Center, tiny at only 57,000 square feet, would be located not in Harvard Yard, but on a postage stamp-sized lot across the street.

Unable to put his building in the Yard, Corbusier tried to bring the Yard into his building. The striking ramp that bifurcates the building both laterally and vertically—“un rute touristique,” as Corbusier named it—would make clear to visitors the importance of the practice of art within the Harvard community.

This sidewalk, which lifts off the street and wraps through the building, was to become a link for students between the historic Georgian Yard and a planned expansion beyond Prescott Street, in the direction of downtown Boston. In the years since, however, Harvard has expanded in other directions, geographically and academically, in part marginalizing the building’s dual purpose of providing pedestrian connection and bringing the visual arts to the center of the Harvard experience.

Ultimately, the very process of designing the Carpenter Center—and the client-architect relationship from which it developed—may have had a more important impact on Harvard’s visual arts program than the completed structure itself. Indeed, a historical monograph published by the University to commemorate the building’s completion—Le Corbusier at Work, edited by Professor Emeritus and first director of the Carpenter Center, Eduard F. Sekler—places importance not to the building’s original forms, but on the process of the Center’s conception. It is from this document that Huyghe has cleverly derived the storyboard for his own project. As his film further solidifies the Carpenter Center’s dual role as a protagonist for art as well as a place for its making, the building provides a hinge upon which Huyghe can collapse 40 years of Harvard’s tenuous history with the visual arts.

LOOP FEEDBACK LOOP

In the Carpenter Center’s basement theater hangs a tapestry designed by Le Corbusier for the building. A little red bird sits at the bottom, its head perpetually tilted towards the theater screen. The bird is one of what Huyghe calls the “missing pieces of the original design.” Along with the ramp connecting the old and new ends of campus, a system of bells embedded in the building that would mark the movement of students between classes and through an enamel door of Corbusier’s design, was the architect’s desire for natural landscaping “brought by the birds.”

Along with a nearly inaccessible sunken courtyard adjacent to the Fogg Museum, these unrealized elements are Corbusier’s innovative failures: interstitial spaces that have been, for the most part, either forgotten or disused. It is here that Hughe’s work thrives, arresting and revealing the gaps in communication and visualization that come with the designing and realization of a commission—architectural and artistic. These are the disparities between what is and what might have been, the result of difficulties that arose out of even the most basic translations during construction between Corbusier’s use of metric measurements and their American equivalents.

In addition to Huyghe’s archaeology of these “missing pieces” is an “architectural extension” of the existing building to provide a new, if temporary social space. Emerging from the building’s unused courtyard is, a glowing, moss-covered polycarbonate theatre designed by a professor at the Graduate School of Design. It is, in itself, a powerful and sculptural meditation on the architectural innovations the Carpenter Center has witnessed over the previous 40 years. Perhaps the result of a seed brought by the little bird at Corbusier’s request or an element of the original design incubated beneath the building for the last 40 years, the plastic “egg” is trapped between the machine and the human: designed and output on sophisticated digital fabrication technologies, but painstakingly assembled by hand.

Coupled with the hand-crafted marionettes, the blobular form is a poignant analogue to Corbusier’s earlier fusion of organic forms and Modernist rigor in the Carpenter Center’s design—the result of the University’s mid-century hope that an increased presence of the arts would counter the increasingly mechanistic tenor of society.

At the premiere of the film this evening in the Carpenter Center’s theater, the project’s two curators, artist Pierre Huyghe, along with Corbusier’s little bird will all watch the screen as their marionette representations, now enlarged into life-size projections, move across the screen. Behind the puppets sits a scale model of the Carpenter Center—a set-piece and puppet at once—the whole event having been filmed within the building in which it is being screened.

“The work is incredibly reflexive,” says Norden. “The idea of the project is like a regression in the mirror, infinitely. The movie becomes a vehicle of that.”

While the layered references of scale in Huyghe’s film are at times dizzying (at one point even the puppets are wielding their own marionette puppets), Huyghe’s meta-narratives of realization may be the most compelling aspect of the project. In previous works—including his most famous, Third Memory, based on the 1975 Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon—Huyghe has utilized the cinematic device of the jump cut to fold into a linear whole quite disparate points in time and space.

Here at Harvard, Huyghe links contemporary events with those nearly half a century ago, filling gaps in the storyline by collapsing them onto and into themselves. While on the surface a puppet show, the film becomes a nuanced investigation into the artistic process, an intriguing consideration of Corbusier’s own thinking about how the building’s forms have evolved and mutated.

Huyghe succeeds in this undertaking thanks to his abilities as a skillful bricoleur and director, assembling and refashioning the forms, talents, and histories of others into his own vision. In the Carpenter Center project he adopts the techniques of commercial filmmaking, refocusing its purpose of creating desire in the viewer. Huyghe recognizes his role as an artist brought to the University to provide cultural prestige. As a result, he brings this “culture” very close to entertainment—perhaps too close for some at Harvard.

Given the medium (marionettes) and the class transgressions present Huyghe’s previous projects—employing forms that include adult Japanese graphic novels, fireworks, Walt Disney characters and figure skating in the service of high art—it is inevitable that snide references will be made to the other puppet-movie now playing in Harvard Square, the satirical Team America: World Police. Because Huyghe’s context is not just the academy, but no less Harvard, his challenge may be greater: as Princeton Professor Cornel R. West ’74 and University President Lawrence H. Summers well know, the clash of the low and high is particularly jarring when the worlds of mass-media and academia collide.

MR. HARVARD, DEAN OF DEANS

If anniversary celebrations mark the passage of time, Huyghe’s project provides the opportunity to look anew at the Carpenter Center’s position in the university—especially in terms of its role as the focus and birthplace for the instruction of the visual arts. In his filmed puppet show, Huyghe makes what may be one of the strongest statements in his presentation of a modern allegory of the artist and his institutional patron, bound by the strings of inflexible bureaucracy.

The artist’s frustrations may be the result not of the difficulties of patronage, but with Harvard’s long uneasiness with contemporary art. The University, Norden points out, is willing to consider in an historical context “works that were, in their own time, considered avant garde art.” At the same time, however, “Harvard has a tremendous discomfort with live art—work that has not already received critical approval and can be studied and considered in their periods.”

Again, the parallels between Huyghe’s project and Corbusier’s experience at Harvard are germane. The result of a good deal of friction between architect and institution, the Carpenter Center, along with several of Sert’s own projects such as the Science Center and Peabody Terrace, ruffled enough conservative feathers that the University has since become less willing to engage in high-profile commissions involving cutting-edge architecture. In Huyghe’s film, playing opposite to the cherubic features of and jointed arms of Corbusier and Huyghe’s marionette likenesses is a scaly, black foam apparition referred to as “Mr. Harvard, Dean of Deans,” who floats through a misty Harvard Yard. He—or it—is a representation of institutional bureaucracy, a collision between a praying mantis and Darth Vader.

While the artistic accomplishment of Huyghe’s work may become apparent when the film is premiered this evening, the narrative of its commission may constitute the project’s greatest success. Like Le Corbusier, Huyghe has succeeded in turning the University’s rigidity into creative impetus. For the sake of future generations of Harvard students, one hopes that it doesn’t take another 40 years before Harvard is bold enough to once again play the role of patron.