Name Announcer: Art that Travels World and Time as an Idea

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a long tradition as one of the world’s most distinguished comprehensive art museums. Within recent years, the museum has made a commitment to shine a brighter light on contemporary art — both in what we show and in what we collect.

Name Announcer by French artist Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) is one of the CMA’s latest acquisitions and its first work of performance art. When the work is activated, visitors will encounter a tuxedoed performer greeting guests at the entrance to one of the museum’s galleries. He or she will politely request their name, and once they step past the greeter into the gallery, their name will be announced to everyone within earshot.

Name Announcer takes the collection another step forward while shedding light on what came before it. The work seems contemporary yet relates to the very long history and tradition of royal protocol, and upends its hierarchies by announcing with equal prominence anyone who enters the space. This performative work marks a significant step in the development of the CMA’s growing collection of contemporary art.

“I consider Pierre Huyghe to be one of the most important and influential artists of the past decades and I wanted his work to be part of the CMA’s collection,” says Reto Thüring, chair of modern, contemporary, and decorative art, and performing arts, and curator of contemporary art.

“He already has had a tremendous influence on younger generations of artists,” he continues. This includes Anicka Yi (Washing Away of Wrongs), an American-Korean artist whose work is currently on view in the contemporary galleries. Huyghe’s works have been important to her evolution as an artist and to many other artists.

Performance art plays a crucial role within contemporary discourse. But it is important to note that Huyghe isn’t known as a performance artist per se, says Thüring. Much of his work lives within what can be described from a scholarly perspective as relational aesthetics, a term coined by Nicholas Bourriaud, a French art historian, to characterize a body of work that emerged in the early 1990s.

“In the perspective of relational aesthetics, certain works of art don’t just exist as clearly circumscribable entities. Rather, they take on meaning when they are shared, activated, or consumed, with the viewer or the audience as an integral part of the work,” Thüring explains.

“Name Announcer is representative of new artistic tendencies that emerged in the 1980s and ’90s in which the interaction between a work of art and the viewer became more reciprocal and therefore more complex. This is also true for Name Announcer in the way that the work doesn’t exist without you, or without the audience partaking in the work,” says Thüring. “Isn’t that a beautiful thought?”

The Cleveland Museum of Art has other works that, like Name Announcer, only exist as a set of instructions up until the moment they are being installed — for example Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Photographs and Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. In other words, the works exist in an immaterial way, which makes them very adept for our times.

“The work isn’t defined by its material sedimentation, its form, but it travels the world and time purely as an idea. I personally find that very compelling,” Thüring says.

With Name Announcer, visitors to the Cleveland Museum of Art will experience art in a different way. It creates an interesting “rupture” in the museum visit. People going through a museum spend little time on average looking at individual works of art due to the sheer amount of works they encounter — paintings, sculptures, prints, photography, and decorative arts.

“Name Announcer is different from anything else you are going to encounter at the CMA,” Thüring explains. “Because of that, it might make some people think a little harder about what art can be and one’s own relationship to the world around us. These can be very precious moments.”

Name Announcer will be performed on Saturdays and Sundays, 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. and 2:00–5:00 p.m. through September 2018 at the entrance to gallery 224A.