Pierre Huyghe - "Touching the Elusive" Retrospective

Venue: Centre Pompidou, South Gallery. Dates: September 25, 2013 – January 6, 2014. Text and images by Chen Chi-Hsiang. Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) is one of France’s most international and experimental new media artists of his generation. Living and working between Paris and New York, his work has always been elusive, constantly seeking to create genuine life situations, break traditional exhibition conventions, and offer random, infinite narrative possibilities. He aims to lead audiences into strange, paradoxical perceptual states, blending video, film, sound, music, theater, architecture, design, objects, and various media to examine film structures, mix fact and fiction, and construct complex, unfamiliar relationships within daily reality from potential new realities. Through video, he explores uncertainty and investigates how narrative modes affect our sense of reality. Via large-scale spatial and environmental installations, he re-establishes the conventions of works and the form of exhibitions, creating extraordinary fields through creative domains. Under a unique atmosphere, he elucidates complex social issues and intangible situations.

Huyghe’s retrospective resembles a grand theatrical stage play, where each field features dramatic plots intended for the audience. Viewers enter his untouchable world, participating in the organic dimensions of the works at their own pace. This comprehensive twenty-year survey is bewitching, featuring living bees (Untitled-Liegender Frauenakt, 2012), sea spiders and hermit crabs (Zoodram aquarium series, 2010–2011), a white dog with pink legs (Human, 2011–2013, occasionally accompanied by the artist walking his dog), ants, spiders, and masked figures wandering the gallery. Additionally, films, videos, aquariums, ice rinks, readymades, object installations, and site-specific landscapes create extraordinary atmospheres and scenarios within pre-established patterns, resembling a dramatic, living human theater of reality.

Through exhibitions, films, and public activity programs, Huyghe explores the boundaries between fiction and reality. Existing artistic concepts and forms are blurred; the gallery space becomes closer to everyday life domains and existential consciousness. The uncertainty of the works, presented in a diary-like format, is seen as an adventure or perception, requiring no explanation and incapable of being explained. Highly philosophical, his art employs labyrinthine narratives, literary and conceptual elements, natural ecology, and social-environmental spaces, exploring and celebrating from puppet theaters to small-town parades, from model amusement parks to expeditions to Antarctica. By reshooting scenes, he attempts to use the power of cinema to re-inscribe visual memory, digging deep into the subjectivity of film.

Huyghe’s indefinable works are vibrant and full of life; he desires them to exist with physical intensity. His most representative work is Plow (2012), a park environment installation featured in Documenta 13 in Germany. It depicts a traditional reclining nude figure with a beehive covered in bees on its head, situated next to a park compost area. Within this natural floral ecosystem, insects chirp, birds sing, and creatures like ants, earthworms, and spiders thrive. A white dog with pink legs guarding the garden and a gardener complete the scene. The rhythms of natural ecology and human activity, day and night and across climates, serve as a natural script, acting like life enzymes that stimulate the work’s rich nutrients and effects. Composting serves as a fitting metaphor for Huyghe’s creation: “I am interested in how to quantify different variations of living... how to strengthen the existence of things. I watch how things change, transform, or metabolize” (Note 1).

Of course, within the concrete walls of the Centre Pompidou, Plow was specially installed outside the gallery. Amidst a construction-site-like setting, it lost its natural elements, becoming something to be intuited rather than imagined, shifting from Plow to Not Plowing. Viewers could understand the living Plow from Documenta via the video A Way In Untitled (2013), which elaborates on the decomposition and regeneration of organic matter in nature, highlighting the unpredictability of the environment as the core of the work’s creation—bridging nature and humanity, existence and time-space, environment and consciousness, scenario and field, ecology and imagination.

In this retrospective, Huyghe specifically appropriated an old stone public sculpture from his primary school alma mater, Parvine Curie. Mere Anatolica 1 (1975), as a mark of emotional, conscious, and conceptual life existence, recording the trajectory of the artist’s growth in time and space. He also appropriated an ice rink from New York’s Central Park, or the ice rink placed annually in front of the Paris City Hall in winter, Expedition Scientillante (2002) Act-3 Untitled-Black Ice Stage (2002). An empty ice rink invites the imagination of Arctic exploration; let the eyes take an inconsequential adventure. Similarly, Expedition Scientillante (2002) Act-1 Untitled-Weather Score belongs to the ice-and-snow series, referencing polar climates and special icy scenarios through snowplows falling from the sky and ice forming on the ground. The innovative light show Expedition Scientillante (2002) Act-3 Untitled-Light Box resembles the colorful scenarios and fields of a pop musical. A pile of beautiful, elegant purple sand, Made Ecosystem (2013), suggests that future biotechnology will become the maker of environmental systems, changing human perspectives and imagination, value and meaning, serving as a sustainable project for Earth’s existence.

The natural landscape of the exhibition space, Shore (2013), was a random spatial installation left over from schedule changes. Utilizing the site, it captured the scenery of irregular green underlayers left on white walls, with traces of footprints on the white sand floor and a single stone, randomly becoming natural creation. It evokes present existential consciousness. Huyghe said, “In a certain sense, I create a theatrical code. But I do not want to express tangible things for people to see. Instead, what I want to do is... what I unintentionally express. It is this randomness... Generally, I don’t even know what will happen” (Note 2).

Huyghe’s striking aquarium series includes Zoodram-2 (2010) with sea spiders, a surreal aquarium floating with a huge stone, housing a sea spider and a starfish. The elements are concise and powerful, full of imaginative space, quantifying the different variations of living aquatic organisms. Zoodram-4 (2011) references Brancusi’s 1910 sleeping muse statue, housing hermit crabs and sea spiders. Within the stone scenery of the tank, one gold and two silver sleeping muses move leisurely as hermit crabs crawl, pointing to a kind of living existential consciousness in an elusive, surreal scenario.

Appropriating readymades became Huyghe’s earliest literary exploration. A pair of golden flat shoes displayed on a white pedestal, Singing in the Rain (1996), manifests the dramatic fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. Crystal Cave (2009) features several round stones and triangular diagonal forms in the series, hinting at the structural mathematical consciousness of geometric crystals and narrating the discovery accidents of crystals in caves by a wizard, mathematician, and geologist expert. A neon lamp with a white floral pattern hangs from the ceiling, RSI Un Bout de Réel (2006).

Starting with experimental film, Huyghe uses video and sound to explore the narrative structures of popular culture, the relationship between reality and fiction, memory and history, and examines the relationship between film and its own problems regarding the structural nature of reality, deeply studying the personal lives of actors in film. Most representative is the reconstruction of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1975 film Hot Afternoon (1999). In the same year, Huyghe co-purchased the character rights for the computer-animated cartoon No Ghost Just a Shell - Ann Lee with Philippe Parreno, sharing this cartoon character with peer artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, indicating that similar characters are not necessarily identical.[8]. Indefinable works include No Ghost Just a Shell (1999–2003), the birth commemoration of a new village Streamside (2003), the puppet play This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), the Antarctic expedition dancing with penguins A Journey That Wasn’t (2005), the soul-stirring Mainframe and Cloud (2010), children’s seasonal holiday celebration La Saison des Fêtes (2010), avoiding narrative to elaborate on natural ecology and environmental awareness A Way In Untitled (2012), etc. These reflect his constant desire to introduce speculative spaces into art and consciously consider art as a landscape, in an obvious way where people can indeed react to the homogeneity of consumer culture, attempting to reconstruct the dynamics of their daily lives through inspiration (Note 3).

Note 1: Pierre Huyghe created a fashionable [space/exhibition] in Paris, the first major retrospective of a French artist at the Centre Pompidou. Julia Michalska, Issue 249, September 2013. Online publication date: September 23, 2013. Note 2: Ibid. Note 3: Ibid.

Postscript: The theme of the retrospective "Touching the Elusive" was proposed by the author. Hereby declared—it is not the official name of the retrospective.