Pierre Huyghe
Third Memory
O c t o b e r 2 1 –N ove m b e r 3 0, 2003

I n 2002 French artist Pierre Huyghe received the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial international award administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In announcing the honor Guggenheim director Thomas Krens said, “In Huyghe’s remarkable work, which involves film, photography, video, sound, computer animation, sculpture, design, and architecture, Huyghe examines the narrative structures of popular culture, investigating the relationships between fiction and reality and memory and history.”

The Museum is honored to present Huyghe’s installation Third Memory, 1999, which takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972; three years later the crime became the subject of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell the story. Using a two-channel video projection, a television interview, and posters, Huyghe builds from a “first memory” of the original crime to a “second memory” with the film’s recreation of that crime, to arrive at a “third memory,” a rich blurring of the documented and the imagined.

Third Memory is presented courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, which represents the artist, and we are grateful to Jeanne Freilich for her invaluable assistance. The exhibition is supported by Arts Endowment Funds, co-sponsored by the Virginia Film Festival and serves as a focal point of its 2003 theme “$.”