One of the more arresting and memorable exhibits at Bilbao’s glorious Guggenheim for me was Pierre Huyghe’s ‘One Million Landscapes’ from 2001, the somewhat retro-futurist CGI reminiscent of Shynola and Alex Rutterford‘s work for Radiohead, enough for my tiny mind to find compelling on it’s own.
But what does it meeeean? Having initially missed the brief introduction to the piece in the form of explanatory narrative with diagrams and thus been intrigued by the ghostly parade of lunar-waveforms and trudging forlorn girl hologram slowly mouthing a Neil Armstrong monologue, I was a little disappointed upon viewing that beginning part afterwards. It seems to balance ideas of both despair and hope, fact and fiction – but with not quite enough strength to provide a truly profound or moving experience. For me the pull was in it’s aesthetic concept and execution alone – something about just walking in on this looping presentation a third of the way through provided much of the appeal – not knowing the intentions behind it or even when it dates from but becoming instantly drawn into the alternative world presented to you, something that relates to my fascination with short pieces as reliant on audio as they are on video, exploring the relationship between the two both literally and non-literally, juxtaposed or synchronous. Meaning and intentions can blur and drown easily when the combination of sound and pictures strike a resonant chord with the viewer, as they seemed to on this occasion.
Other higlights included the permanent Pop Art collection, the temporary but seemingly quite comprehensive De Buffet range, Miquel Navarro’s Wall City and Sam Taylor-Wood’s people-focussed and often rather rude staged photographs. Another obvious but amusing DYS moment arose from Douglas Gordon’s ‘through a looking glass . . ‘ video piece which runs two copies of THAT scene from Taxi Driver, facing each other on giant screens.