Pierre Huyghe
The Third Memory Two-channel
video installation, Digital Beta, transferred to DVD, 9:46min., 1999
Coproduktion: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musee National d’art Moderne,
Service Nouveaux Medias/The Renaissance Society at the University of
Chicago. with support by Marian Goodman Gallery/Myriam und Jacques
Salomon/Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.
Pierre Huyghe’s video installation
The Third Memory
is based on a legendary bank robbery, which took place on the 22nd
August 1972 in Brooklyn, New York. To finance his friend’s sex-change
surgery, John Woytowiczs robbed a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank,
took several people as hostages, and in the end was caught. This bank
robbery was one of the first criminal acts to be broadcast live on
television, and was seen by millions of people.
Three years later, in 1975, Sidney Lumet’s classic movie Dog Day
Afternoon, in which Al Pacino plays the bank robber Woytowiczs, was
based on this event. For The Third Memory, Huyghe asked the aging John
Woytowiczs, if he would be prepared to talk about the event that had
had such drastic effects on his life.
On a simple set, a
counter hall similar to the scene in the film, Woytowiczs re-enacts the
event with a group of actors; he is as self-confident as the director
of a detective film. The two-channel video installation connects this
re-enactment to the original recordings by the television channels and
scenes taken from the Hollywood film version. Today, the circumstances
of the bank robbery in August 1972 are known to many people mainly
through the movie starring Al Pacino.
When Woytowiczs now
re-enacts these events, the intention is not to correct a version
falsified by the media, and finally to tell the “true story”. Instead,
with The Third Memory Huyghe shows the interplay between how history
and recollection are determined by media and fictional images on the
one side, and on the other how real life is influenced by fiction. In
actual fact Woytowiczs modelled his behaviour during the bank robbery
on Al Pacino’s role in The Godfather.
Katharina Fichtner
... back
